WORD VIRUS

Exclusive: Homeland Security Kept Tabs on Occupy Wall Street | Michael Hastings | Rolling Stone

2012-02-28T21:57:00.001-08:00

Exclusive: Homeland Security Kept Tabs on Occupy Wall Street

POSTED: February 28, 6:55 PM ET | By Michael Hastings

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Occupy protestors during a demonstration at the UC Davis campus in November.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

As Occupy Wall Street spread across the nation last fall, sparking protests in more than 70 cities, the Department of Homeland Security began keeping tabs on the movement. An internal DHS report entitled “SPECIAL COVERAGE: Occupy Wall Street," dated October of last year, opens with the observation that "mass gatherings associated with public protest movements can have disruptive effects on transportation, commercial, and government services, especially when staged in major metropolitan areas." While acknowledging the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of OWS, the report notes darkly that "large scale demonstrations also carry the potential for violence, presenting a significant challenge for law enforcement."

The five-page report – contained in 5 million newly leaked documents examined by Rolling Stone in an investigative partnership with WikiLeaks – goes on to sum up the history of Occupy Wall Street and assess its "impact" on everything from financial services to government facilities. Many of the observations are benign, and appear to have been culled from publicly available sources. The report notes, for instance, that in Chicago "five women were arrested after dumping garbage taken from a foreclosed home owned by Bank of America in the lobby one of the bank's branches," and that "OWS in New York staged a 'Millionaires March,' from Zucotti Park to demonstrate outside the homes of some of the city’s richest residents."

But the DHS also appears to have scoured OWS-related Twitter feeds for much of their information. The report includes a special feature on what it calls Occupy's "social media and IT usage," and provides an interactive map of protests and gatherings nationwide – borrowed, improbably enough, from the lefty blog Daily Kos. "Social media and the organic emergence of online communities," the report notes, "have driven the rapid expansion of the OWS movement."
The most ominous aspect of the report, however, comes in its final paragraph:
"The growing support for the OWS movement has expanded the protests’ impact and increased the potential for violence. While the peaceful nature of the protests has served so far to mitigate their impact, larger numbers and support from groups such as Anonymous substantially increase the risk for potential incidents and enhance the potential security risk to critical infrastructure (CI). The continued expansion of these protests also places an increasingly heavy burden on law enforcement and movement organizers to control protesters. As the primary target of the demonstrations, financial services stands the sector most impacted by the OWS protests. Due to the location of the protests in major metropolitan areas, heightened and continuous situational awareness for security personnel across all CI sectors is encouraged."
It’s never a good thing to see a government agency talk in secret about the need to “control protestors” – especially when that agency is charged with protecting the homeland against terrorists, not nonviolent demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights to peaceable dissent. From the notorious Cointelpro operations of the 1960s to the NYPD’s recent surveillance of Muslim Americans, the government has a long and disturbing history of justifying the curtailing of civil liberties under the cover of perceived, and often manufactured, threats ("the potential security risk to critical infrastructure). What’s more, there have been reports that Homeland Security played an active role in coordinating the nationwide crackdown on the Occupy movement last November – putting the federal government in the position of targeting its own citizens in the name of national security. There is not much of a bureaucratic leap, if history is any guide, between a seemingly benign call for "continuous situational awareness" and the onset of a covert and illegal campaign of domestic surveillance.

via rollingstone.com

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2012-02-28T21:06:00.001-08:00

via farm3.static.flickr.com

In Attack on Vatican Website, a Glimpse of Hackers’ Tactics

2012-02-28T17:36:00.001-08:00

In Attack on Vatican Website, a Glimpse of Hackers’ Tactics

The New York Times | February 27, 2012 | 10:43 AM EST

The elusive hacker movement known as Anonymous has carried out Internet attacks on well-known organizations like Sony and PBS. In August, the group went after its most prominent target yet: the Vatican.

The campaign against the Vatican, which did not receive wide attention at the time, involved hundreds of people, some with hacking skills and some without. A core group of participants openly drummed up support for the attack using YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Others searched for vulnerabilities on a Vatican website and, when that failed, enlisted amateur recruits to flood the site with traffic, hoping it would crash, according to a computer security firm’s report to be released this week.

The attack, albeit an unsuccessful one, provides a rare glimpse into the recruiting, reconnaissance, and warfare tactics used by the shadowy hacking collective.

Anonymous, which first gained widespread notice with an attack on the Church of Scientology in 2008, has since carried out hundreds of increasingly bold strikes, taking aim at perceived enemies, including law enforcement agencies, Internet security companies, and opponents of the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks.

The group’s attack on the Vatican was confirmed by the hackers and is detailed in a report that Imperva , a computer security company based in Redwood City, Calif., plans to release ahead of a computer security conference here this week. It may be the first end-to-end record of a full Anonymous attack.

Though Imperva declined to identify the target of the attack and kept any mention of the Vatican out of its report, two people briefed on the investigation confirmed that it had been the target. Imperva had a unique window into the situation because it had been hired by the Vatican’s security team as a subcontractor to block and record the assault.

“We have seen the tools and the techniques that were used in this attack used by other criminal groups on the web,” said Amichai Shulman, Imperva’s chief technology officer. “What set this attack apart from others is it had a clear timeline and evolution, starting from an announcement and recruitment phase that was very public.”

The Vatican declined to comment on the attack. In an email intended for a colleague, but accidentally sent to a reporter, a church official wrote: “I do not think it is convenient to respond to journalists on real or potential attacks,” adding, “the more we are silent in this area the better.”

The attack was called Operation Pharisee in a reference to the sect that Jesus called hypocrites. It was initially organized by hackers in South America and Mexico before spreading to other countries, and it was timed to coincide with Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Madrid in August 2011 for World Youth Day, an international event held every other year that regularly attracts more than a million Catholic youths.

Hackers initially tried to take down a website set up by the church to promote the event, handle registrations and sell merchandise. Their goal — according to YouTube messages delivered by an Anonymous figure in a Guy Fawkes mask — was to disrupt the event and draw attention to child sexual abuse by priests, among other issues.

The videos, which have been viewed more than 77,000 times, include a verbal attack on the Pope and the young people who “have forgotten the abominations of the Catholic Church.” One calls on volunteers to “prepare your weapons, my dear brother, for this August 17th to Sunday August 21st, we will drop anger over the Vatican.”

Much as in a grass-roots lobbying campaign, the hackers spent weeks spreading their message through their own website and social sites like Twitter and Flickr. Their Facebook page called on volunteers to download free attack software and implored them to “stop child abuse” by joining the cause. It featured split-screen images of the Pope seated on a gilded throne on one side and starving African children on the other. And it linked to articles about sexual abuse cases and blog posts itemizing the church’s assets.

It took the hackers 18 days to recruit enough people, the report says. Then the reconnaissance began. A core group of roughly a dozen skilled hackers spent three days poking around the church’s World Youth Day site looking for common security holes that could let them inside, the report says. Probing for such loopholes used to be tedious and slow, but the advent of automated tools made it possible for hackers to do this while they slept.

In this case, the scanning software failed to turn up any gaps. So the hackers turned to a brute-force approach — a so-called distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack that involves clogging a site with data requests until it crashes. Even unskilled supporters could take part in this from their computers or smartphones.

“Anonymous is a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots,” said Cole Stryker, an author who has researched the movement. “You have four or five guys who really know what they’re doing and are able to pull off some of the more serious hacks, and then thousands of people spreading the word, or turning their computers over to participate in a DDoS attack.”

Over the course of the campaign’s final two days, Anonymous enlisted as many as a thousand people to download attack software, or directed them to custom-built websites that let them participate using their cellphones. Visiting a particular web address caused the phones to instantly start flooding the target website with hundreds of data requests each second, with no special software required, the report says.

On the first day, the denial-of-service attack resulted in 28 times the normal traffic to the church site, rising to 34 times the next day. Hackers involved in the attack, who did not identify themselves, said through a Twitter account associated with the campaign that the two-day effort succeeded in slowing the site’s performance and making the page unavailable “in several countries.” Imperva disputed that the site’s performance was affected and said its technologies had successfully siphoned the excess data away from the site.

Anonymous moved on to other targets, including an unofficial site about the Pope, which the hackers were briefly able to deface.

Imperva executives say the Vatican’s defenses held up because, unlike Sony and other hacker targets, it invested in the infrastructure needed to repel both break-ins and full-scale assaults.

Researchers who have followed Anonymous say that despite its lack of success in this and other campaigns, recent attacks show the movement is still evolving and, if anything, emboldened. Threatened attacks on the New York Stock Exchange and Facebook last autumn apparently fizzled. But the hackers appeared to regain momentum in January after federal authorities shut down Megaupload, a popular file-sharing site.

In retaliation, hackers affiliated with Anonymous briefly knocked dozens of websites offline, including those of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the White House, and the Justice Department. At one point, they were able to eavesdrop on a conference call between the F.B.I. and Scotland Yard.

“Part of the reason ‘Op Megaupload’ was so successful is that they’ve learned from their past mistakes,” said Gabriella Coleman, an associate professor at McGill University who has studied Anonymous. Professor Coleman said the hackers had been using a new tool to better protect their anonymity. “Finally people felt safe using it,” she said. “That could explain why it was so big.”

In recent weeks, Anonymous has made increasingly bold threats, at one point promising to “shut the Internet down on March 31” by attacking servers that perform switchboard functions for the Internet.

Security experts now say that a sort of open season has begun. “Who is Anonymous?” asked Rob Rachwald, Imperva’s director of security. “Anyone can use the Anonymous umbrella to hack anyone at anytime.”

Indeed, in the last six months, hackers have attacked everything from pornography sites to the web portals of Brazilian airlines. And some hackers have been accused of trying to extort money from corporations — all under the banner of Anonymous.

“Anonymous is an idea, a global protest movement, by activists on the streets and by hackers in the network,” the hackers said through the Twitter account. “Anyone can be Anonymous, because we are an idea without leaders who defend freedom and promote free knowledge.”

Yoga and Sex Scandals: No Surprise Here

2012-02-28T17:24:00.001-08:00

Yoga and Sex Scandals: No Surprise Here

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Published: February 27, 2012

The wholesome image of yoga took a hit in the past few weeks as a rising star of the discipline came tumbling back to earth. After accusations of sexual impropriety with female students, John Friend, the founder of Anusara, one of the world’s fastest-growing styles, told followers that he was stepping down for an indefinite period of “self-reflection, therapy and personal retreat.”

George Rose/Getty Images

CELEBRITY GURU Swami Muktananda had many thousands of devotees, including celebrities. A senior aide charged that he was a serial philanderer and sexual hypocrite.

John Friend's sexual indiscretions upset many devotees of Anusara yoga, which he founded.

Mr. Friend preached a gospel of gentle poses mixed with openness aimed at fostering love and happiness. But Elena Brower, a former confidante, has said that insiders knew of his “penchant for women” and his love of “partying and fun.”

Few had any idea about his sexual indiscretions, she added. The apparent hypocrisy has upset many followers.

“Those folks are devastated,” Ms. Brower wrote in The Huffington Post. “They’re understandably disappointed to hear that he cheated on his girlfriends repeatedly” and “lied to so many.”

But this is hardly the first time that yoga’s enlightened facade has been cracked by sexual scandal. Why does yoga produce so many philanderers? And why do the resulting uproars leave so many people shocked and distraught?

One factor is ignorance. Yoga teachers and how-to books seldom mention that the discipline began as a sex cult — an omission that leaves many practitioners open to libidinal surprise.

Hatha yoga — the parent of the styles now practiced around the globe — began as a branch of Tantra. In medieval India, Tantra devotees sought to fuse the male and female aspects of the cosmos into a blissful state of consciousness.

The rites of Tantric cults, while often steeped in symbolism, could also include group and individual sex. One text advised devotees to revere the female sex organ and enjoy vigorous intercourse. Candidates for worship included actresses and prostitutes, as well as the sisters of practitioners.

Hatha originated as a way to speed the Tantric agenda. It used poses, deep breathing and stimulating acts — including intercourse — to hasten rapturous bliss. In time, Tantra and Hatha developed bad reputations. The main charge was that practitioners indulged in sexual debauchery under the pretext of spirituality.

Early in the 20th century, the founders of modern yoga worked hard to remove the Tantric stain. They devised a sanitized discipline that played down the old eroticism for a new emphasis on health and fitness.

B. K. S. Iyengar, the author of “Light on Yoga,” published in 1965, exemplified the change. His book made no mention of Hatha’s Tantric roots and praised the discipline as a panacea that could cure nearly 100 ailments and diseases. And so modern practitioners have embraced a whitewashed simulacrum of Hatha.

But over the decades, many have discovered from personal experience that the practice can fan the sexual flames. Pelvic regions can feel more sensitive and orgasms more intense.

Science has begun to clarify the inner mechanisms. In Russia and India, scientists have measured sharp rises in testosterone — a main hormone of sexual arousal in both men and women. Czech scientists working with electroencephalographs have shown how poses can result in bursts of brainwaves indistinguishable from those of lovers. More recently, scientists at the University of British Columbia have documented how fast breathing — done in many yoga classes — can increase blood flow through the genitals. The effect was found to be strong enough to promote sexual arousal not only in healthy individuals but among those with diminished libidos.

In India, recent clinical studies have shown that men and women who take up yoga report wide improvements in their sex lives, including enhanced feelings of pleasure and satisfaction as well as emotional closeness with partners.

At Rutgers University, scientists are investigating how yoga and related practices can foster autoerotic bliss. It turns out that some individuals can think themselves into states of sexual ecstasy — a phenomenon known clinically as spontaneous orgasm and popularly as “thinking off.”

The Rutgers scientists use brain scanners to measure the levels of excitement in women and compare their responses with readings from manual stimulation of the genitals. The results demonstrate that both practices light up the brain in characteristic ways and produce significant rises in blood pressure, heart rate and tolerance for pain — what turns out to be a signature of orgasm.

Since the baby boomers discovered yoga, the arousal, sweating, heavy breathing and states of undress that characterize yoga classes have led to predictable results. In 1995, sex between students and teachers became so prevalent that the California Yoga Teachers Association deplored it as immoral and called for high standards.

“We wrote the code,” Judith Lasater, the group’s president, told a reporter, “because there were so many violations going on.”

If yoga can arouse everyday practitioners, it apparently has similar, if not greater, effects on gurus — often charming extroverts in excellent physical condition, some enthusiastic for veneration.

The misanthropes among them offer a bittersweet tribute to yoga’s revitalizing powers. A surprising number, it turns out, were in their 60s and 70s.

Swami Muktananda (1908-82) was an Indian man of great charisma who favored dark glasses and gaudy robes.

At the height of his fame, around 1980, he attracted many thousands of devotees — including movie stars and political celebrities — and succeeded in setting up a network of hundreds of ashrams and meditation centers around the globe. He kept his main shrines in California and New York.

ACCUSED GURU Swami Satchidananda was a superstar of yoga who gave the invocation at Woodstock.

Barry Z Levine/Getty Images

In late 1981, when a senior aide charged that the venerated yogi was in fact a serial philanderer and sexual hypocrite who used threats of violence to hide his duplicity, Mr. Muktananda defended himself as a persecuted saint, and soon died of heart failure.

Joan Bridges was one of his lovers. At the time, she was 26 and he was 73. Like many other devotees, Ms. Bridges had a difficult time finding fault with a man she regarded as a virtual god beyond law and morality.

“I was both thrilled and confused,” she said of their first intimacy in a Web posting. “He told us to be celibate, so how could this be sexual? I had no answers.”

To denounce the philanderers would be to admit years of empty study and devotion. So many women ended up blaming themselves. Sorting out the realities took years and sometimes decades of pain and reflection, counseling and psychotherapy. In time, the victims began to fight back.

Swami Satchidananda (1914-2002) was a superstar of yoga who gave the invocation at Woodstock. In 1991, protesters waving placards (“Stop the Abuse,” “End the Cover Up”) marched outside a Virginia hotel where he was addressing a symposium.

“How can you call yourself a spiritual instructor,” a former devotee shouted from the audience, “when you have molested me and other women?”

Another case involved Swami Rama (1925-96), a tall man with a strikingly handsome face. In 1994, one of his victims filed a lawsuit charging that he had initiated abuse at his Pennsylvania ashram when she was 19. In 1997, shortly after his death, a jury awarded the woman nearly $2 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

So, too, former devotees at Kripalu, a Berkshires ashram, won more than $2.5 million after its longtime guru — a man who gave impassioned talks on the spiritual value of chastity — confessed to multiple affairs.

The drama with Mr. Friend is still unfolding. So far, at least 50 Anusara teachers have resigned, and the fate of his enterprise remains unclear. In his letter to followers, he promised to make “a full public statement that will transparently address the entirety of this situation.”

The angst of former Anusara teachers is palpable. “I can no longer support a teacher whose actions have caused irreparable damage to our beloved community,” Sarah Faircloth, a North Carolina instructor, wrote on her Web site.

But perhaps — if students and teachers knew more about what Hatha can do, and what it was designed to do — they would find themselves less prone to surprise and unyogalike distress.

William J. Broad is the author of “The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards,” published this month by Simon & Schuster.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 28, 2012, on page D

of the New York edition with the headline: Yoga and Sex Scandals: No Surprise Here.

Inside a failed Anonymous attack: report

2012-02-28T00:53:00.001-08:00

Inside a failed Anonymous attack: report

Data-protection firm Imperva has undertaken an analysis of an Anonymous attack, claiming that it was able to witness a failed 25-day assault by the group and use its surveillance to map out Anonymous' attack methods.

The report (PDF) covers the three phases that it believes Anonymous uses over its 25-day hacking period, as well as the expected structure of the group, the tools that Anonymous members are suspected of using and the techniques used in the attack.

According to Imperva, the first phase of this attack was to begin recruitment and communications. In the attack, Anonymous uploaded a video to YouTube and used Facebook and Twitter to further promote it.

"This is really the essence of all hacktivism campaigns," the report said. "The raison d'être of hacktivism is to attract attention to a cause, so this phase is critical."

Imperva said that Twitter and Facebook were used to bring attention to the cause, and the video was used to rationalise the attack. Promotional material was also used to set the date and convey target details for a future distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. This communication phase lasted about 18 days.

(Credit: Imperva)

The second phase of the operation was a quick reconnaissance and application attack, aimed at surveying the target's state of security and identifying any vulnerabilities ahead of the scheduled attack that might aid in increasing the effectiveness of an attack.

Imperva's analysis of the attackers indicates that Anonymous had knowledge of hacking tools, used anonymity services to hide its members' tracks and kept a low profile to avoid being detected. According to Imperva's report, a small group of attackers of no more than 10 to 15 individuals scanned the target for web-application vulnerabilities, such as cross-site scripting, SQL injection and directory-traversal vulnerabilities, but they were unable to identify any opportunities for a more effective attack.

By examining the victim's firewall logs, Imperva identified that the attackers used at least three off-the-shelf products rather than software specifically created for the attack. These products were Havij, an automated SQL-injection tool; Acunetix Scanner, an automated scanner that was used to look for remote file-inclusion vulnerabilities; and Nikto Scanner, which looks for outdated server software and tests for dangerous scripts.

"Only when failing to find such vulnerabilities, the attackers resorted to searching a resource suitable for DDoS. Such resources involve actions which are time and resource consuming, and might lead to exhaustion of the server resources. Eventually, attackers spotted a specific URL that was later used in the attack itself," the report said.

This URL resulted in the server fetching data from a database, which takes up more resources than a regular web-page request and could potentially be used to deny services. By this stage, over 72,000 hits had been registered on the promotional video released as part of the communications phase.

In the final phase of the operation — the scheduled attack — those participating in the attack visited a website created by Anonymous, which contained JavaScript code intended to loop for as long as the page was open in the user's browser. Within the looping code was a request to the victim's site, pre-crafted to attack the specific URL that Anonymous had identified previously.

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Imperva said that since the code was written in JavaScript, any device with a browser could be used to launch the attack. This included mobile devices, of which Imperva saw evidence. Imperva estimated that a regular computer would be capable of achieving 200 requests for information per second.

Although the core team behind the attack was relatively careful in hiding its tracks, Imperva noted that a majority of the actual attackers didn't bother or didn't know how to disguise their identities.

Although these combined efforts was not enough to bring down the victim, Imperva offered advice for anyone who thinks that they might be a target. It recommends monitoring social media, due to the fact that groups like Anonymous often announce their targets before attacking. It also believes that a DDoS attack actually represents the hacker's last resort when they're unable to identify vulnerabilities during the reconnaissance phase.

via zdnet.com.au

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2012-02-27T22:08:00.001-08:00

Upper classes 'more likely to lie and cheat'

2012-02-27T22:06:00.001-08:00

Upper classes 'more likely to lie and cheat'
Members of the upper classes are more likely to lie, cheat and even break the law than people from less privileged backgrounds, a study has found.
Psychologists suggested that the findings could help explain the origins of the banking crisis - with self-confident, wealthy bankers more likely to indulge in reckless behaviour

Photo: REUTERS
By John Bingham,
Social Affairs Editor
11:20PM GMT 27 Feb 2012
In contrast, members of the "lower" classes appeared more likely to display the traditional attributes of a gentleman.
It suggests that the traditional notion of the upper class “cad” or “bounder” could have a scientific basis.
But psychologists at the University of California in Berkeley, who carried out the study, also suggested that the findings could help explain the origins of the banking crisis – with self-confident, wealthy bankers more likely to indulge in reckless behaviour.
The team lead by Dr Paul Piff, asked several groups of people from different social backgrounds to perform a series of tasks designed to identify different traits such as honesty and consideration for others.

Each person was asked a series of questions about their wealth, schooling, social background, religious persuasions and attitudes to money in an attempt to put them into different classes.
The tasks included asking participants to pretend to be an employers conducting a job interview to test whether they would lie or sidestep awkward facts in pay negotiation.
They were told that the job might become redundant within six months but were encouraged conceal this from the interview candidate.
There was also an online game involving rolling dice in which participants they were asked to report their own score, thinking they would be in line for a cash prize for a higher score – and that no one was checking.
Members of another group were given a series of made-up scenarios in which people spoke about doing something unethical at work to benefit themselves and then questioned to assess how likely they were to do likewise.
The scientists also carried out a series of observations at a traffic junction in San Francisco.
Different drivers’ social status was assessed on the basis of what car they were driving as well as visible details such as their age.
Those deemed to be better off appeared more likely to cut up other drivers and less likely to stop for pedestrians.
Overall the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that those from richer or powerful backgrounds appeared greedier, more likely to lie in negotiation and more likely to cheat.
Being in a higher social class – either by birth or attainment – had a “causal relationship to unethical decision-making and behaviour”, they concluded.
Dr Piff concluded that having an elevated social rank were more likely to display “self focused” behaviour patterns than those from more modest backgrounds, were less aware of others, and were less good at identifying the emotions of others.
He said that the findings appeared to bear out the teachings of Aristotle, Plato and Jesus that greed is at the root unethical behaviour.
"On the one hand, lower-class individuals live in environments defined by fewer resources, greater threat and more uncertainty," he said.
"It stands to reason, therefore, that lower-class individuals may be more motivated to behave unethically to increase their resources or overcome their disadvantage.
"A second line of reasoning, however, suggests the opposite prediction: namely, that the upper class may be more disposed to the unethical.
"Greater resources, freedom, and independence from others among the upper class give rise to self-focused social cognitive tendencies, which we predict will facilitate unethical behaviour.
"Historical observation lends credence to this idea. For example, the recent economic crisis has been attributed in part to the unethical actions of the wealthy.
"Religious teachings extol the poor and admonish the rich with claims like, 'It will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven'."

Get A Free Coffee on Jonathan Stark

2012-02-27T21:56:00.001-08:00

This is a wild but very cool social experiment.

You download his card and you can buy a coffee with his card, so it’s free.

By downloading Jonathan’s Card to your smartphone and using it for free coffee, you’re taking part in one heck of a caffeinated social experiment.

Stark is a computer programmer in Rhode Island interested in how technology intersects with societal advancement. He’s inviting people to use the money on his card to buy coffee, then asking them to tweet about the project.

And it they want, they can put some money back on the card. He has a twitter account that updates the current amount on the card.

When I last checked, there was $54.90 for free coffee. About 40 minutes ago, it was empty. And even earlier in the day, there was $130.69.

Stark says it’s a modern-day take on the “take a penny, leave a penny” jars you see at markets and convenience stores. The idea is that the generosity of strangers will offset all those free lattes.

“Jonathan’s Card is an experiment in social sharing of physical goods using digital currency on mobile phones,” Stark writes on his website.

As seen on seattle pi

The Evolution of the Geek

2012-02-27T21:20:00.001-08:00

via flowtown.com

7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable

2012-02-27T21:17:00.001-08:00

7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable

By: David Wong September 09, 2007 1,870,992 views

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Scientists call it the Naked Photo Test, and it works like this: say a photo turns up of you nakedly doing something that would shame you and your family for generations. Bestiality, perhaps. Ask yourself how many people in your life you would trust with that photo. If you're like the rest of us, you probably have at most two.

Even more depressing, studies show that about one out of four people have no one they can confide in.

The Sad Bear 1, by Nedroid

The average number of close friends we say we have is dropping fast, down dramatically in just the last 20 years. Why?

#1. We don't have enough annoying strangers in our lives.

That's not sarcasm. Annoyance is something you build up a tolerance to, like alcohol or a bad smell. The more we're able to edit the annoyance out of our lives, the less we're able to handle it.

The problem is we've built an awesome, sprawling web of technology meant purely to let us avoid annoying people. Do all your Christmas shopping online and avoid the fat lady ramming her cart into you at Target. Spend $5,000 on a home theater system so you can see movies on a big screen without a toddler kicking the back of your seat. Hell, rent the DVD's from Netflix and you don't even have to spend the 30 seconds with the confused kid working the register at Blockbuster.

Get stuck in the waiting room at the doctor? No way we're striking up a conversation with the smelly old man in the next seat. We'll plug the iPod into our ears and have a text conversation with a friend or play our DS. Filter that annoyance right out of our world.

From outofbalance.org
Now that would be awesome if it were actually possible to keep all of the irritating shit out of your life. But, it's not. It never will be. As long as you have needs, you'll have to deal with people you can't stand from time to time. We're losing that skill, the one that lets us deal with strangers and tolerate their shrill voices and clunky senses of humor and body odor and squeaky shoes. So, what encounters you do have with the outside world, the world you can't control, make you want to go on a screaming crotch-punching spree.

Oh, yeah. Right in the crotch, buddy.

#2. We don't have enough annoying friends, either.

Lots of us were born into towns full of people we couldn't stand. As a kid, maybe you found yourself in an elementary school classroom, packed in with two dozen kids you did not choose and who shared none of your tastes or interests. Maybe you got beat up a lot.

But, you've grown up. And if you're, say, a huge DragonForce fan, you can go find their forum and meet a dozen people just like you. Or even better, start a private room with your favorite few and lock everybody else out. Say goodbye to the tedious, awkward, painful process of dealing with somebody who's truly different. That's another Old World inconvenience, like having to wash your clothes in a creek or wait for a raccoon to wander by the outhouse so you can wipe your ass with it.

The problem is that peacefully dealing with incompatible people is crucial to living in a society. In fact, if you think about it, peacefully dealing with people you can't stand is society. Just people with opposite tastes and conflicting personalities sharing space and cooperating, often through gritted teeth.

Fifty years ago, you had to sit in a crowded room to see a movie. You didn't get to choose; you either did that or you missed the movie. When you got a new car, everyone on the block came and stood in your yard to look it over. You can bet that some of those people were assholes.

Your parents, circa 1982
Yet, on the whole, people back then were apparently happier in their jobs and more satisfied with their lives. And get this: They had more friends.
That's right. Even though they had almost no ability to filter their peers according to common interests (hell, often you were just friends with the guy who happened to live next door), they still came up with more close friends than we have now-people they could trust.

It turns out, apparently, that after you get over that first irritation, after you shed your shell of "they listen to different music because they wouldn't understand mine" superiority, there's a sort of comfort in needing other people and being needed on a level beyond common interests. It turns out humans are social animals after all. And that ability to suffer fools, to tolerate annoyance, that's literally the one single thing that allows you to function in a world populated by other people who aren't you. Otherwise, you turn emo. Science has proven it.

#3. Texting is a shitty way to communicate.

I have this friend who uses the expression "No, thank you," in a sarcastic way. It means, "I'd rather be shot in the face." He puts a little ironic lilt on the last two words that lets you know. You ask, "Want to go see that new Rob Schneider movie?" And, he'll say, "No, thank you."

So one day we had this exchange via text:

Me: "Hey, do you want me to bring over that leftover chili I made?"
Him: "No, thank you"

That pissed me off. I'm proud of my chili. It takes four days to make it. I grind up the dried peppers myself; the meat is expensive, hand-tortured veal. And, now my offer to give him some is dismissed with his bitchy catchphrase?

I didn't speak to him for six months. He sent me a letter, I mailed it back, unread, with a dead rat packed inside.

It was my wife who finally ran into him and realized that the "No, thank you" he replied with was not meant to be sarcastic, but was a literal, "No, but thank you for offering." He had no room in his freezer, it turns out.

The Sad Bear #2, by Nedroid

So did we really need a study to tell us that more than 40 percent of what you say in an e-mail is misunderstood? Well, they did one anyway.

How many of your friends have you only spoken with online? If 40 percent of your personality has gotten lost in the text transition, do these people even really know you? The people who dislike you via text, on message boards or chatrooms or whatever, is it because you're really incompatible? Or, is it because of the misunderstood 40 percent? And, what about the ones who like you?

Many of us try to make up that difference in sheer numbers, piling up six dozen friends on MySpace. But here's the problem ...

#4. Online company only makes us lonelier.

When someone speaks to you face-to-face, what percentage of the meaning is actually in the words, as opposed to the body language and tone of voice? Take a guess.

It's 7 percent. The other 93 percent is nonverbal, according to studies. No, I don't know how they arrived at that exact number. They have a machine or something. But we didn't need it. I mean, come on. Most of our humor is sarcasm, and sarcasm is just mismatching the words with the tone. Like my friend's "No, thank you."

You don't wait for a girl to verbally tell you she likes you. It's the sparkle in her eyes, her posture, the way she grabs your head and shoves your face into her boobs.

That's the crux of the problem. That human ability to absorb the moods of others through that kind of subconscious osmosis is crucial. Kids born without it are considered mentally handicapped. People who have lots of it are called "charismatic" and become movie stars and politicians. It's not what they say; it's this energy they put off that makes us feel good about ourselves.

When we're living in Text World, all that is stripped away. There's a weird side effect to it, too: absent a sense of the other person's mood, every line we read gets filtered through our own mood instead. The reason I read my friend's chili message as sarcastic was because I was in an irritable mood. In that state of mind, I was eager to be offended.
And worse, if I do enough of my communicating this way, my mood never changes. After all, people keep saying nasty things to me! Of course I'm depressed! It's me against the world!
No, what I need is somebody to shake me by the shoulders and snap me out of it. Which leads us to No. 5 ...

#5. We don't get criticized enough.

Most of what sucks about not having close friends isn't the missed birthday parties or the sad, single-player games of ping pong with the wall. No, what sucks is the lack of real criticism.

In my time online I've been called "fag" approximately 104,165 times. I keep an Excel spreadsheet. I've also been called "asshole" and "cockweasel" and "fuckcamel" and "cuntwaffle" and "shitglutton" and "porksword" and "wangbasket" and "shitwhistle" and "thundercunt" and "fartminge" and "shitflannel" and "knobgoblin" and "boring."

And none of it mattered, because none of those people knew me well enough to really hit the target. I've been insulted lots, but I've been criticized very little. And don't ever confuse the two. An insult is just someone who hates you making a noise to indicate their hatred. A barking dog. Criticism is someone trying to help you, by telling you something about yourself that you were a little too comfortable not knowing.

Above: A flamboyant transvestite with about
five times as many friends as the average person

Tragically, there are now a whole lot of people who never have those conversations. The interventions, the brutal honesty, the, "you know, everybody's pissed off because of what you said last night, but nobody wants to say anything because they're afraid of you," sort of conversations. Those horrible, awkward, wrenchingly uncomfortable sessions that you can only have with someone who sees right to the center of you.

E-mail and texting are awesome tools for avoiding that level of honesty. With text, you can respond when you feel like it. You can measure your words. You can pick and choose which questions to answer. The person on the other end can't see your face, can't see you get nervous, can't detect when you're lying. You have almost total control and as a result that other person never sees past your armor, never sees you at your worst, never knows the embarrassing little things about yourself that you can't control. Gone are the common quirks, humiliations and vulnerabilities that real friendships are built on.

Browse around people's MySpace pages, look at the characters they create for themselves. If you've built a pool of friends via a blog, building yourself up as a misunderstood, mysterious Master of the Night, it's kind of hard to log on and talk about how you went to prom and got diarrhea out on the dance floor. You never get to really be yourself, and that's a very lonely feeling.

And, on top of all that ...

#6. We're victims of the Outrage Machine.

A whole lot of the people still reading this are saying, "Of course I'm depressed! People are starving! America has turned into Nazi Germany! My parents watch retarded television shows and talk about them for hours afterward! People are dying in meaningless wars all over the world!"

But how did we wind up with a more negative view of the world than our parents? Or grandparents? Back then, people didn't live as long and babies died more often. Diseases were more common. In those days, if your buddy moved away the only way to communicate was with pen and paper and a stamp. We have Iraq, but our parents had Vietnam (which killed 50 times more people) and their parents had World War 2 (which killed 1,000 times as many). Some of your grandparents grew up at a time when nobody had air conditioning. All of their parents grew up without it.

We are physically better off today in every possible way in which such things can be measured ... but you sure as hell wouldn't know that if you're getting your news online. Why?

Well, ask yourself: If some music site posts an article called, "Fall Out Boy is a Fine Band" and on the same day posts another one called, "Fall Out Boy is the Shittiest Fucking Band of the Last 100 Years, Say Experts," which do you think will get the most traffic? The second one wins in a blowout. Outrage manufactures word-of-mouth.

The news blogs many of you read? The people running them know the same thing. Every site is in a dogfight for traffic (even if they don't run ads, they still measure their success by the size of their audience) and so they carefully pick through the wires for the most inflammatory story possible. The other blogs start echoing the same story from the same point of view. If you want, you can surf all day and never swim out of the warm, stagnant waters of the "aren't those bastards evil" pool.

Actually, if you count the guy holding the camera, this man
statistically has more friends than most of us do.

Only in that climate could those silly 9/11 conspiracy theories come about (saying the Bush administration and the FDNY blew up the towers, and that the planes were holograms). To hear these people talk, every opposing politician is Hitler, and every election is the freaking apocalypse. All because it keeps you reading.

9/11 photos. Circled: Conspiracy

This wasn't as much a problem in the old days, of course. Some of us remember having only three channels on TV. That's right. Three. We're talking about the '80s here. So there was something unifying in the way we all sat down to watch the same news, all of it coming from the same point of view. Even if the point of view was retarded and wrong, even if some stories went criminally unreported, we at least all shared it.

That's over. There effectively is no "mass media" any more so, where before we disagreed because we saw the same news and interpreted it differently, now we disagree because we're seeing completely different freaking news. When we can't even agree on the basic facts, the differences become irreconcilable. That constant feeling of being at bitter odds with the rest of the world brings with it a tension that just builds and builds.

We humans used to have lots of natural ways to release that kind of angst. But these days...

#7. We feel worthless, because we actually are worth less.

There's one advantage to having mostly online friends, and it's one that nobody ever talks about:

They demand less from you.

Sure, you emotionally support them, comfort them after a breakup, maybe even talk them out of a suicide. But knowing someone in meatspace adds a whole, long list of annoying demands. Wasting your whole afternoon helping them fix their computer. Going to funerals with them. Toting them around in your car every day after theirs gets repossessed by the bank. Having them show up unannounced when you were just settling in to watch the Dirty Jobs marathon on the Discovery channel, then mentioning how hungry they are until you finally give them half your sandwich.

You have so much more control in Instant Messenger, or on a forum, or in World of Warcraft.

The problem is you are hard-wired by evolution to need to do things for people. Everybody for the last five thousand years seemed to realize this and then we suddenly forgot it in the last few decades. We get suicidal teens and scramble to teach them self-esteem. Well, unfortunately, self-esteem and the ability to like yourself only come after you've done something that makes you likable. You can't bullshit yourself. If I think Todd over here is worthless for sitting in his room all day, drinking Pabst and playing video games one-handed because he's masturbating with the other one, what will I think of myself if I do the same thing?

The Sad Bear #3, by Nedroid

You want to break out of that black tar pit of self-hatred? Brush the black hair out of your eyes, step away from the computer and buy a nice gift for someone you loathe. Send a card to your worst enemy. Make dinner for your mom and dad. Or just do something simple, with an tangible result. Go clean the leaves out of the gutter. Grow a damn plant.

It ain't rocket science; you are a social animal and thus you are born with little happiness hormones that are released into your bloodstream when you see a physical benefit to your actions. Think about all those teenagers in their dark rooms, glued to their PC's, turning every life problem into ridiculous melodrama. Why do they make those cuts on their arms? It's because making the pain-and subsequent healing-tangible releases endorphins they don't get otherwise. It's pain, but at least it's real.

That form of stress relief via mild discomfort used to be part of our daily lives, via our routine of hunting gazelles and gathering berries and climbing rocks and fighting bears. No more. This is why office jobs make so many of us miserable; we don't get any physical, tangible result from our work. But do construction out in the hot sun for two months, and for the rest of your life you can drive past a certain house and say, "Holy shit, I built that." Maybe that's why mass shootings are more common in offices than construction sites.

It's the kind of physical, dirt-under-your-nails satisfaction that you can only get by turning off the computer, going outdoors and re-connecting with the real world. That feeling, that "I built that" or "I grew that" or "I fed that guy" or "I made these pants" feeling, can't be matched by anything the internet has to offer.

Except, you know, this website.

David Wong is the Senior Editor of Cracked.com and the author of the dongtacular horror novel John Dies at the End, available wherever books are sold or by clicking those words.

via cracked.com

NO INDOORS OR OUTDOORS

2012-02-27T19:31:00.001-08:00

Corporate Front Group Buys Attack On Humane Society During Oscar Broadcast

2012-02-27T19:16:00.001-08:00

Corporate Front Group Buys Attack On Humane Society During Oscar Broadcast

By Ian Millhiser on Feb 27, 2012 at 11:30 am

During last night’s Oscar broadcast, a corporate front group ran an attack ad claiming that only a small percentage of the Humane Society of the United States’ donations fund animal shelters. Watch it:

This ad was surprising because it seemed to come out of nowhere. Who, exactly, has such a beef with the Humane Society that they would buy ad during a broadcast where a 30 second segment costs an average of $1.7 million? As it turns out, the food industry.

It is indeed true that much of the Humane Society’s money goes to programs other than animal shelters for stray cats and dogs — much of the Society’s resources go to fighting animal cruelty in the courts and in legislatures. In court, the Humane Society defends laws prohibiting horse slaughter, it fights to protect dolphins from aggressive tuna fishing techniques, and it supports regulations governing the treatment of “downed” cattle. In Congress and state legislatures, the Humane Society backs many anti-cruelty bills, including the Egg Products Inspection Act Amendments of 2012, which would prevent egg-laying hens from being packed into tiny cages that leaves them with virtually no room to move around.

Corporate PR Flack Rick Berman
The anti-Humane Society ad was paid for by the Center for Consumer Freedom, a corporate front group run by right-wing PR flack Rick Berman that is closely tied to the food industry. Berman’s Center accuses the Humane Society of engaging in “a slow but steady push to take away consumer choices by forcing meat, eggs, and dairy foods out of more Americans’ reach,” and he has a long history of similarly hyperbolic claims paid for by corporations looking to misrepresent the safety of their food products.

Sweet Scam: Berman is behind a campaign called “Sweet Scam” which attempts to debunk “myths” such as “sugary sweeteners are bad for your teeth” or “significantly reducing sugar intake leads to healthy weight loss.”

Trans-Fats: Another Berman campaign, whose website has since been pulled down, claimed that trans-fats have “may possess health benefits, including fighting some cancers, enhancing immunity, and counteracting artery clogging fats—the primary cause of cardiovascular disease.”

The Steak Diet: Another Berman website touts how one can shed unwanted pounds by eating beef.

Soft Drinks For Athletes: Berman also claims that high-sugar soft drinks “actually improved physical performance among elite athletes.”

Fast Food Marathon: Berman also touts a marathon runner who proclaims “I love running and I love [fast-food]–might as well combine the two.”

Global Warming Denial: And, of course, no right-wing anti-science campaign would be complete without some kind of attempt to deny global warming. Berman’s effort is an attack on former President-elect Al Gore’s statement that a high meat diet fosters global warming because meat requires forests to be cleared and more energy consumption to produce than other foods.

So the anti-Humane Society ad appears to be the latest in a long line of Berman’s attempts to pad the food industry’s bottom line at the expense of ordinary Americans’ health. Nevertheless, this particular attack is disturbing even by Berman’s standards. It’s one thing to advance arguments — even false arguments — intended to rebut the policy arguments of your opponents. It is another thing altogether, however, to attack a charity by targeting their donors. Berman’s latest effort is nothing less than an intimidation campaign designed to send a clear message to charities that if they work against a wealthy corporation’s interests, they will find themselves on the receiving end of a hit job led by deep pocketed industries capable of throwing away more than a million dollars on a single ad.

via thinkprogress.org

The Coolest Cosplay from GenCon 2011!

2012-02-27T18:51:00.001-08:00

Chainmail Bikinis and Warhammer 40K Inquisitors: The Coolest Cosplay from GenCon 2011!

GenCon 2011 was a mass of costumes from every area of pop culture. Video games, movies, anime, RPGs, and comic characters brushed shoulders with tens of thousands of attendees.

While there were a few definite trends (Steampunk, Homestuck, schoolgirls, kilts), it was impossible to capture more than a fraction of the awesome cosplayers. Here are some of our favorite costumes from this year.

Chainmail bikini, fantastic for protection!

Check out this the incredible Old Man Link.

There was actually a guy in this Dalek.

Don't blink...

Steampunk was just about everywhere this year!

Some Warhammer 40k players, I believe.

Auron from Final Fantasy X

Sith cheerleaders

The Homestuck trolls

David Bowie goblin king

A Master Chief takes a break

A sandperson

A pair of Pyramid Heads

The host of the Glitter Guild burlesque, MsPixy as Slave Leia. This entire show — burlesque, boylesque, comediennes and a magician — were uproariously funny, and the crowd adored them.

Lola Getz does a Highlander burlesque, of the Glitter Guild.

A Firefly burlesque, though I feel horrible for not remembering this performer's stage name.

Lion-O, as performed by Bazuka Joe. He was popular with the ladies.

Yes, that is Viva La Muerte as Cthulhu!

Katie Angel as a Klingon.

There were random encounters!

Lula Houp-Garou did an incredible hoop dance tribute to Birds

A member of Angel Burlesque

Morpheus and Lion-O were very popular.

Make mine Marvel!

A Star Wars pack.

Old Man Logan and Spider-Girl

Zatanna

This zombie was working the D&D booth, and looked incredible.

More Homestuck trolls (and the world's creepiest mannequin)

War is hell.

Black Widow.

Solid Snake, and I have no idea which anime character the pouty lady on the left is. Anyone from the audience? UPDATE: Sarah from FFXIII! Thanks for the info, folks!

Plague doctors.

Honestly, I have no idea. UPDATE: The Red Robot/Kanti from FLCL

via io9.com

MANNING NOMINATED FOR NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

2012-02-27T18:45:00.001-08:00

Movement "I DON'T PAY" is spreading across Europe (english subs)

2012-02-27T17:09:00.001-08:00

via youtube.com

Instead of begging their governments for non-existent mercy, activists in major centres across Europe are taking their public services into their own hands. They are engaging in creative resistance, one that initiates instead of making demands. Transit, healthcare, utilities, you name it, nothing is out of reach. Watch and be inspired by this growing culture jam. See people living what Franco Berardi Bifo calls our new cultural task:
“To live the inevitable with a relaxed soul. To call forth a big wave of withdrawal, of massive dissociation, of desertion from the scene of the economy, of non-participation in the fake show of politics. The crucial focus of social transformation is creative singularity. The existence of singularities is not to be conceived as a personal way to salvation, they may become a contagious force.”

Anonymous - Operation V

2012-02-27T16:57:00.001-08:00

via youtube.com

Declaration of War on the United States Government.
TRANSCRIPT
____________
To the Citizens of the United States and the United States Government.
We are Anonymous.
In the past few months, our collective has been organizing the operation known as Operation Blackout. Part of the operation’s purpose was to alert the people of the coming bill that was to be called the Stop Online Piracy Act.
This Act would give Congress the power to censor any internet website they wish without consent from the Citizens of the United States. This act would’ve also had the power to jail any person who infringed on its new copyright law for an equivalence of five years. This copyright law would’ve had the power to destroy social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube. Video gameplay and free movies would cease to exist.
However, Operation Blackout was a success. As a collective, we’ve managed to spread the word and alert the masses. Internet giants such as Google, Wikipedia, and Reddit became hand-in-hand with us as we all managed to make an impact on the decisions of our, “free government”. But as we’ve seen with Megaupload, the government may not need a bill to be passed to get their way. Other operations we’ve conducted over this time period have awaken the people to the nightmare that is the United States Government. Sections 1031 and 1032 of the National Defense Authorization Act have been ratified. Yet we face new threats.
The United States Government is seeking to pass the Cyber Security Act of 2012. This act is as Orwellian as it sounds; it will endanger our collective and we will not stand by and watch while this government of lies prepares to take away our freedoms. The National Security Agency insists on labeling us as a leaderless, terrorist organization. The question is, “who do we terrorize?”. Can it possibly be that the United States government is truly scared of us? Nevertheless, The time for action is now.
Our collective has realized, along with many United States citizens, that the current government is no longer functional. Our economy is unstable, our representatives uncooperative, and our system, destroyed.
We are not calling upon the collective to deface or use a distributed denial of service attack on a United States government agency website or affiliate. We are not calling upon the people to occupy a city or protest in front of a local building. This has not brought on us any legislative change or alternate law. It has only brought us bloodshed and false criticism. For the last 12 years, voting was useless. Corporations and lobbyists are the true leaders of this country and are the ones with the power to control our lives. To rebuild our government, we must first destroy it.
Our time for democracy is here.
Our time for real change is here.
This is America’s time, to have its own revolution.
Therefore, Anonymous has decided to openly declare war on the United States government. This is a call to arms. We call upon the Citizens of the United States to stand beside us in overthrowing this corrupted body and call upon a new era. Our allegiance is to the American people, because they are us, and we are them.
Operation V, engaged.
We are Anonymous.
We are Americans.
We never Forgive.
We never Forget.
To the United States government, it’s too late to expect us.
FIRST THEY IGNORE YOU, THEN THEY LAUGH AT YOU, THEN THEY FIGHT YOU, THEN YOU WIN.

The Cathedral

2012-02-27T16:51:00.001-08:00

via vimeo.com

Polish science fiction author Jacek Dukaj wrote a short story, Katedra, in 2000. A mysterious and enigmatic tale, it attracted the attention of Tomasz Bagiński, an artist and animator from the same country. He was intrigued by the prize winning piece of fiction and became determined to bring it to life as an animation.
He did an exemplary job. It is as powerful as the original story. In fact, this piece of work was nominated for the Academy Award for Animated Short Film in 2002. Although it failed to win the Oscar, losing out to Sony Pictures' The Chubbchubbs it did go on to win the San Antonio Best Animated Short prize in the same year.
Like the best science fiction the film refuses to bottle feed its audience and instead relies on individual interpretation of what is happening.
(Spoiler alert if you have not watched the movie).
A man, perhaps some sort of pilgrim, comes to a numinous, mysterious building which to our eyes initially looks like a medieval cathedral. He enters and strikes the ground with his staff which becomes a torch. This illuminates the building and in the pillars we see, what? The faces of saints of centuries gone by, carved in stone and then enveloped some sort of vegetable matter?
The building shows its true nature at dawn when the light blinds and enchants him. He falls to his knees and from him burst, what? Branches? A viral infection or spores? His fate, either way is sealed. He eventually becomes part of the cathedral.
The visual imagery used in the movie is quite breathtaking and although not a word is uttered throughout the seven minutes of its duration we ask the questions that the pilgrim asks. This is wonderfully made (in 3ds Max) science fiction for grownups.

A Too Big to Fail Story

2012-02-27T16:22:00.001-08:00

THIS WEEK
We’re all still feeling, four years later, the 2008 Wall Street crash that tanked the financial industry — and our economy. But an even deadlier 2008 crash in Manhattan has largely faded into obscurity. Last week, in a New York courtroom, memories of that forgotten tragedy edged back onto the public stage.
This particular stage would be the manslaughter trial of multi-millionaire James Lomma, the owner of New York’s largest construction crane company. In May 2008, one of Lomma’s giant cranes crashed down on New York’s Upper East Side, killing two construction workers.
These two men died, an assistant D.A. told a packed courtroom Tuesday, “because a wealthy man” cared about “the bottom line and nothing else.” The crashed crane, the D.A. noted, had suffered damage the year before. Lomma, the prosecutor charged, had refused to wait for a qualified repair firm. He cut corners instead to rush the damaged crane back into service.
Lomma may beat this rap. Cases against big cheeses remain devilishly difficult to bring to trial, let alone win, one reason why no high-finance chief exec has yet gone to jail for the frauds behind Wall Street’s epic 2008 crash. But you don’t have to be a Wall Streeter in America today to dodge accountability. We have more, on that score, in this week’s Too Much.

GREED AT A GLANCE
Cheerleaders for America’s ultra rich finally have a comedian they can call their own. Adam Carolla, a 47-year-old “radio personality,” captured right-wing hearts last fall with a profane rant against Occupy Wall Street. Carolla then burnished his friend-of-fortune credentials in an interview — with conservatism’s most prestigious magazine — where he bemoans “that the rich have to pretend they’re not wealthy.” Next up for the right: a search for a star rocker to offset the likes of Bruce Springsteen. That hunt may intensify next week after Springsteen’s latest album, entitled Wrecking Ball, appears. Rolling Stone is calling the album “a scathing indictment of Wall Street greed.” Springsteen himself is crediting Occupy Wall Street for the album’s inspiration. Before Occupy, he noted earlier this month, “nobody had talked about income inequality in America for decades.”

They don’t make Republicans like Herman Andersen anymore. Andersen, a Minnesota congressman, opposed moves after World War II to cut income taxes by a fixed percent “across the board.” Such cuts, he charged, conceal big giveaways to America’s rich. To save workers $45 off their taxes, Andersen asked, why must we “give our million-dollar-income friend $90,000?” A good question for New Jersey governor Chris Christie. His new proposal to cut state income taxes 10 percent “across the board” will save households making $50,000 just $80. The savings for taxpayers making $1 million: $7,265. Christie's pick in the GOP primaries, Mitt Romney, last weekunveiled a plan to cut 20 percent, across the board, off federalincome taxes. Average savings for taxpayers in the bottom 20 percent: $78. Savings for the top 0.1 percent: $239,000.
Five years ago, France’s rich celebrated royally after conservative Nicolas Sarkozy won the French presidency and moved swiftly to slash inheritance taxes. But Sarkozy later raised taxes on the high-income set, and his main rival in this April’s upcoming French presidential election, Francois Hollande, is vowing to raise them even higher, from 41 to 45 percent on top-bracket income. The top current U.S. rate: 35 percent. French conservatives are predicting a massive rich people exodus to tax havens like Switzerland should Hollande be elected. But Charles-Marie Jottras, a luxury real estate firm CEO, sees “no major groundswell” among the rich for exiting France. One reason: Any massive deep-pocket exodus would flood the luxury home market with mansions up for sale — and depress the price departing mega millionaires could fetch for their properties.

PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK

Billionaire David Koch is standing in the Moorish-tiled entry hall of his Florida manse, dressed in white pants and blue blazer. He’s grousing to a Palm Beach Post reporter. Fumes the 71-year-old: “They make me sound like a bully. Do I look like a bully?” No, David Koch doesn’t look like a bully. He just spends like one. David and his brother Charles, theNew Yorker estimates, have spent over $200 million since 1998 on right-wing causes that range from denying climate science to busting unions. His latest cause: saving Wisconsin governor Scott Walker from recall. A Koch-funded group is currently blitzing Wisconsin with a $700,000 “It’s working” TV ad deluge on behalf of the Walker administration. But Wisconsin isn’t working. Under Walker, new stats show, the state now leads the Midwest in layoffs and jobless claims.

INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS

IN FOCUS
Too Big to Fail: An Executive Suite Story
If a blunder you committed cost your employer $4 million, how long would you stay employed? In America today, a CEO can cost his company $4 billion and still collect both a paycheck and a bonus.
People in America get fired all the time. Break too many plates as a dishwasher, lose too many games as a coach, miss too many deadlines as a reporter, you’re going to be history.
We need this accountability. We couldn’t function, as a healthy society, without it. But accountability has to be universal. To create and sustain excellence, no society can hold only some people accountable — and give others a free pass.
Yet some societies — deeply unequal societies — do give out free passes. All the time. In these unequal societies, grand accumulations of wealth translate into grand accumulations of power. The powerful make their own rules. They rig daily life's games. They come out winners no matter how poorly they play.
Consider Randall Stephenson, the chief exec at telecom giant AT&T. Stephenson had a bad year in 2011. A really bad year. His decisions cost AT&T over $4 billion. What price did Stephenson pay for this debacle? Last week we learned that price — and much more about the dysfunction that defines us.
Our story starts back last March when CEO Stephenson triumphantly announced that AT&T had just closed a deal to buy T-Mobile, the American wireless phone subsidiary of Germany’s Deutsche Telekom.
Stephenson clearly wanted T-Mobile in the worst way. The $39 billion purchase price he agreed to pay for the wireless carrier amounted to almost double the $23.2 billion value that analysts on Wall Street had placed on the company the previous December.
Stephenson also agreed to pay Deutsche Telekom a $4.2 billion “break-up fee” should his deal for T-Mobile fail to gain the necessary antitrust approvals from the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission.
That fee amounted to a substantially greater share of the T-Mobile takeover price than the typical break-up fee in a major acquisition deal. Stephenson must have figured that AT&T couldn't possibly fail to gain a green-light from regulators.
His optimism did make a certain sense. AT&T had been working hard to tip the eventual regulatory decision. With a Capitol Hill lobbying army of over 90 power suits, including former GOP Senate leader Trent Lott, AT&T boasted what theWashington Post called one of the nation’s “most muscular” political operations.
Stephenson had a line into the White House as well. Bill Daley, then White House chief of staff, had been both a top exec at a phone company that merged into AT&T and an executive with JPMorgan Chase, the Wall Street bank that stood to make hundred of millions in fees from brokering the T-Mobile takeover.
That takeover, once approved, would instantly make AT&T by far the nation’s largest wireless carrier — and ensure Stephenson one of the largest payday windfalls in telecom history.
But both the Justice Department and the FCC would balk at the takeover as public — and rival corporate — pressure against it mounted. This past December, Stephenson folded and took the takeover offer off the table. AT&T would swallow hard and pay out to Deutsche Telekom the $4.2 billion break-up charge.
The enormity of “billions” can be difficult to comprehend. How much in real assets did Stephenson's T-Mobile fiasco cost AT&T? Try this analogy.
Imagine a terribly disgruntled AT&T employee out to inflict as much damage on the company as he possible could.
This troubled employee picks up a sledgehammer and walks up and down the aisles of an AT&T mobile phone warehouse, smashing one $100 phone box after another. He can smash 10 boxes a minute, 600 an hour. After an eight-hour day, he has inflicted $480,000 worth of destruction.
How long would this destructive demon have to keep that sledgehammer swinging to do as much damage to AT&T's bottom line as CEO Randall Stephenson's $4.2 billion T-Mobile merger break-up? Another 8,749 days.
The disgruntled employee in this parable, needless to say, would be fired — and spend no small amount of time in prison. The actual penalty on Stephenson? Did he lose his job for costing AT&T all those billions?
Not even close. Stephenson, AT&T corporate filings revealed Tuesday, didn’t even lose his bonus. AT&T paid the CEO, for his 2011 executive labors, $1.6 million in base salary, $3.8 billion in cash bonus “incentive award,” $12.7 million in stock compensation, and enough other goodies to value his total pay at $22 million.
“AT&T is committed to paying for performance and the compensation reflects that,” the telecom’s McCall Butler told reporters last week after the release of Stephenson’s pay figures.
How could a $22 million take-home reflect an appropriate reward for a “performance” that cost AT&T $4.2 billion? The AT&T board, company flacks explained, did absolutely penalize Stephenson for his performance. The boardreduced his bonus $2.08 million from what the top exec could have received.
Interesting penalty. Stephenson saw his pay drop less than 9 percent for an executive performance that dropped AT&T annual earnings by 52 percent.
AT&T shareholders can’t be too happy about that. But other stakeholders in AT&T also have reason these days to feel a bit out of joint. Customers, for instance.
In Connecticut last year, the state Department of Public Utility Control levied a $1.1 million fine against AT&T for poor customer service. Last fall, AT&T customers in Connecticut went up to six days without phone service after a “Nor'easter” blew through the state. Why the delay? Telephone workers had to be called up from the South to make the necessary repairs.
AT&T in Connecticut, notes local AT&T union president Bill Henderson, has cut more than 2,500 positions over the last four years.
AT&T layoffs have spread beyond Connecticut. In Georgia earlier this month, phone workers and Occupy Atlanta activists joined to stage a sit-in to protest 740 layoffs AT&T’s Atlanta office had announced in December.
AT&T officials say the layoffs in Georgia — and elsewhere — simply reflect the falling market share of landline phones. CEO Stephenson had one of his vice presidents tell protesting Atlanta workers that “like any responsible business, we must work consistently to match our workforce to the needs of the business.”
Workers, in short, must be accountable to the marketplace. The way of an unequal world. Somebody has to be accountable.

IN REVIEW
Our Class War's New Defense Establishment
Jeffrey Winters, Oligarchy in the U.S.A. In These Times, March 2012.

A half-century ago, President Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against a “military-industrial complex” he saw dominating and distorting the national political scene.
Northwestern University political scientist Jeffrey Winters sees a broader threat to our American democracy. We have, Winters argues in the cover story of the latest In These Times magazine, become an oligarchy.
U.S. political analysts do from time to time write about oligarchs. But these oligarchs always seem to reside somewhere else — most notably in post-Soviet Russia. Winters turns the mirror back on ourselves.
Down through history, Winters reminds us, oligarchs have been people “who command massive concentrations” of wealth they can deploy “to defend or enhance their own property and interests.” In medieval Europe, oligarchs “built castles and raised private armies.”
Our contemporary American oligarchs — the ultra rich who rank in the top one-tenth of our richest 1 percent — have mercenaries, too. They hire, notes Winters, “skilled professionals, middle- and upper-class worker bees, to labor year-round as salaried, full-time political advocates and defenders of the oligarchy.”
These well-paid “worker bees” make up what Winters calls our national “wealth defense industry,” a sort of super-sized military-industrial complex.
“Oligarchic theory requires no conspiracies or backroom deals,” Winters takes pains to point out. “It is the minions oligarchs hire who provide structure and continuity in America’s civil oligarchy.”
Oligarchic theory, Winters adds, doesn’t require us to dismiss American democracy as a total sham. We do at times operate democratically. On many matters, as Winters explains, “oligarchs have no shared interests.” They either cancel each other out on these issues or have no real impact.
But on those issues where the richest of our rich do share common interests, the oligarchs dominate through “the unique power that comes with enormous wealth.”
The antidote to oligarchy? In the past, Winters observes, “wars and revolutions have destroyed oligarchies by forcibly dispersing their wealth.” Can we do that dispersing today without social cataclysm? Winters ventures no ultimate answer. Democracy, he does suggest, can certainly “tame” oligarchy.
To have any shot at doing that taming, Winters helps us understand, we first need to ask some “fundamental questions about how the oligarchic power of wealth distorts and outflanks the democratic power of participation.”
This new work from Winters offers a good place to start that questioning process.

Quote of the Week
"Who do we want to be? Will we be a country where success is limited to a few at the top? This country is strongest when we are all better off.”
Michelle Obama, Michelle Obama's Pitch to The Rich, Cincinnati, Ohio, February 23, 2012
Stat of the Week
Super PACs are just getting started. How far can they go? One sign of our times: The $2.6 million PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel has so far invested in GOP White House hopeful Ron Paulequals just 0.2 percent of the value of Thiel’s stake in Facebook.
New Wisdom
on Wealth
Malte Luebker, A Tide of Inequality: What can Taxes and Transfers achieve? Social Europe Journal, February 16, 2012. Why globalization and technology do not doom nations to greater internal economic inequality.
Bruce Bartlett, What Is the Revenue-Maximizing Tax Rate? Tax Notes, February 20, 2012. The tax rate on America's top income bracket can safely double from its current 35 percent, latest research suggests.
Brian Miller, Uprooting Inequality and Its Ideological Underpinnings, Common Dreams, February 22, 2012. The story behind the forthcoming book, The Self-Made Myth.
Thomas Schaller, An American recipe for class immobility, Bradenton Herald, February 24, 2012.
A political scientist traces how the United States has become starkly more unequal and class-bound.
John Lanchester, Why the super-rich love the UK,Guardian, February 24, 2012. A UK novelist muses on the societal impact of a super rich presence.
Bill Boyarsky, Income Inequality Goes to School,TruthDig, February 24, 2012. An economic system tilted toward the rich creates pedagogical, not just pocketbook issues.
Jonathan Baird, Income inequality deserves our attention, Concord Monitor, February 26, 2012. A jurist explains why shrinking the gap between the rich and everyone else would benefit all society.

Salvation Mountain is missing its guiding spirit

2012-02-27T15:58:00.001-08:00

Salvation Mountain is missing its guiding spirit

Leonard Knight, who spent most of three decades painting the adobe-clad monument in the desert, is now 80 and in a convalescent home. The challenge of rescuing the landmark has fallen to his friends and supporters.

A family visits colorful Salvation Mountain in Niland. (Irfan Khan, Los Angeles Times
/ February
25, 2012)

By Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times
February 26, 2012

Reporting from Niland, Calif.—
Under the warm winter sun, tourists and pilgrims and the just plain curious marvel at the candy-colored pastoral scenes on a painted mound in the desert called Salvation Mountain.
Some of the visitors climb the winding yellow path to the top of the three-story mound to pose for pictures beside a tall cross. Others inspect the flowers, waterfalls and rivers that adorn the mountain's 150-foot-wide face.
And everywhere are biblical citations and admonitions: "Jesus Is The Way." "God Never Fails." "God Forgives Sinners."
Cats, paintbrushes, wheelbarrows and donated vehicles remain in the gravel-strewn area at the base of the mountain.
But the key element of Salvation Mountain is missing: Leonard Knight, who spent most of three decades painting this adobe-clad monument between the Salton Sea and the squatter community known as Slab City.
Knight, 80, no longer greets the steady stream of visitors, strumming his guitar, relating his message of universal goodwill and joyfully leading tours of his mountain.
His eyesight and hearing failing, his memory no longer reliable, Knight is at a convalescent home outside San Diego. Except possibly for a visit arranged by friends, he will not be returning to the spot where he once lived year-round in the back of a broken-down truck and, in heat, rain or wind, spread a simple message: "God Is Love."
Salvation Mountain, the name Knight gave the site, now needs its own salvation from the desert's blistering heat and fearsome windstorms. The challenge has fallen to an ad hoc group of Knight's friends and supporters.
Knight has been gone about six months. Already Salvation Mountain is showing signs of aging: Paint is fading, cracking and peeling.
Dan Westfall, a San Diego massage therapist, is confident that with enough volunteers, Knight's creation can be rescued. He has set up an email address, salvationmountaininc@gmail.com, and phone number, (760) 332-8016. A nonprofit board is being established.
"I've seen that mountain touch and inspire people from all over the world," Westfall said. "Maybe we can't have Leonard out there, but we can keep his message there."
Others share his passion, if not his optimism.
"The mountain needs a lot of work," said Jo Farb Hernandez, a professor of art at San Jose State University. "It can't just be anyone with a paintbrush. Even with Leonard, it was a full-time job keeping it repaired and beautiful."
To Hernandez, Knight's mountain is a marvelous example of "outsider" art that follows no particular school, only the dictates of an idiosyncratic vision. "The world has a duty to preserve Leonard's mountain," she said.
A New Englander who spent most of his years doing odd jobs in the Midwest, Knight arrived in this hardscrabble spot in the Imperial Valley in the mid-1980s, on a day trip while visiting his sister in San Diego.
One story, which he encouraged in numerous interviews, was that he arrived in a hot-air balloon. Soon he heard a message and began erecting a cross. Mixing water and hay, he put a facade on the mountain, then painted it with religious messages and motifs.
Knight was a local celebrity, particularly among the residents of Slab City, a patch of gravel and weeds that hosts thousands of snow-birding campers and other tight-money folks.
Many Slab City regulars would bring cans of paint for Knight, and Caltrans workers would bootleg him a few buckets of yellow paint used for road stripes.
Inside a kind of annex to Salvation Mountain, a structure art scholars liken to an Indian hogan, are trophies and citations from those early days: for participating in the Brawley Cattle Call Parade and for being "Senior King" of the Niland Tomato and Sportsmen Festival. Also on display is the 2001 certificate from the Folk Art Society of America, declaring Salvation Mountain a national treasure "worthy of protection and preservation."
By then, the outside world had discovered Salvation Mountain. Visitors began coming from around the globe. Knight gave away postcards and cheerfully greeted all. The BBC, Japanese magazine reporters and a German film crew visited. A museum in Baltimore arranged to have one of Knight's trucks — he had several vehicles donated by followers — hauled across the country and put on display.
Books and videos told Knight's story. Museums in Santa Barbara and Palm Springs staged Salvation Mountain photo exhibits. U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) had the mountain declared a "national treasure" in the Congressional Record.
In 2007, Salvation Mountain had a small part in the movie "Into the Wild," directed by Sean Penn. The feature film, about a top student and athlete who abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska to live in the wilderness, brought a new group of admirers to the mountain.
On a recent morning there were cars from Alberta, Canada; Utah, Montana and Arizona, and a few from California. Some of the visitors were drawn by the religious message; others, such as a backpacking young couple from Idaho, by the story of an iconoclast who lived by his own rules and vision.
"Leonard was free, man; he lived to spread the gospel of love," said Fred Riggs, 22. "That's why he painted this mountain."
Knight still marvels at his journey from obscurity to fame. "It's amazing how little me got so famous outside California," he said from his convalescent home earlier this month. "All I did was put 'God Is Love' on the side of a mountain and people started loving me."
Alas, love alone will not save Salvation Mountain.
"It's going to be a tough road," said Salvation Mountain supporter Bob Sims, a high school computer teacher in the Riverside County community of Beaumont. "Most of these 'outsider' art sites, without protection, just fade away."
Several Slab City residents have agreed to watch over Salvation Mountain and scare off vandals. Hernandez, who directs a group called SPACES, which tries to preserve "outsider" art sites, said her fantasy is that enough money will be raised to hire someone to live at Salvation Mountain.
The question of who owns the property beneath the mountain is complicating preservation efforts.
For years it was presumed that the property was owned by the state, returned by the military after World War II, when the adjacent area was used for a Marine artillery training base.
But as supporters began their preservation efforts, state officials said the property may still belong to the federal government. Neither government, however, appears eager to determine which of them is legally responsible for Salvation Mountain and the desert around it.
Visitors, disappointed that Knight is no longer at the mountain, leave notes of condolence. Some peer inside the 1951 truck that was his home for decades.
Near the truck is the patio-style swing where Knight rested during the day and chatted with visitors. On the swing is an open Bible, pages flapping in the hot desert wind.
tony.perry@latimes.com

Banker’s Insulting Waitress Tip

2012-02-27T15:44:00.001-08:00

Banker’s Insulting Waitress Tip Incites Class Warfare Between the 1% and the 99%
By
Melissa Knowles
|
Trending Now
– 6 hrs ago
Just when you may have thought the ongoing battle between the 99% and the 1% was dying down, it may have been reignited. A wealthy banker left a $1.33 tip on a $133 lunch at the True Food Kitchen restaurant in Newport Beach, California.
To add insult to injury the word "tip" was circled on the receipt, and the banker wrote "get a real job" on the bill. The picture of the receipt was taken and uploaded to the blog Future Ex-Banker by a person who was dining with the anonymous banker. As expected, the blog received a lot of attention and has now been taken down. The author of the blog wrote, "mention the 99% in my boss' presence and feel his wrath. So proudly does he wear his 1% badge of honor that he tips exactly 1% every time he feels the server doesn't sufficiently bow down to his holiness."
People online who had a chance to see the blog post before it went offline and those who have been made aware of it on social media outlets are outraged. One person called the tip a "tale of greed and contempt," and another referred to it as "arrogance personified." The Web's general reaction to this story is eerily similar to an almost identical 1% vs. 99% scenario that took place last fall. In Washington state, a waitress received a tip of no money and advice scrawled on the receipt that told her she could "stand to lose a few pounds."
Our next story is more of a battle between environmentalists and big oil companies.
Lucy Lawless, most famous for her leading role in "Xena: Warrior Princess" in the '90s fantasy adventure series, was arrested over the weekend. Lawless had spent four days protesting on board a Shell oil ship with a group of six other environmental activists. The protest, organized by Greenpeace, was staged to raise awareness of oil drilling in the arctic. The global environmental organization opposes the drilling in New Zealand.
During the protest, Lawless live-tweeted what she was experiencing including, for example, "Seven of us came up the tower on Shell's drillship, but 4 days later 130,000 will come down. In solidarity we can #savethearctic." The protesters had to deal with the elements while atop the ship. The wind gusts proved difficult to withstand, but the activists held their ground. Chairman for Shell New Zealand, Rob Jager, said the protest had put people in danger. Jager also said he was disappointed that Greenpeace had not joined his company in a "productive conversation" about the drilling issue instead of protesting.
Lawless told the Associated Press that she got involved because she felt compelled to take a stand against oil drilling in the Arctic and global warming. However, the protest was brought to a halt when all of the activists were arrested and charged with burglary. Since then, more than 100,000 messages have been sent to Shell opposing its upcoming Arctic drilling plans. One supporter tweeted, "She may not be Xena in real life, but she is fighting for what she believes in." Another person tweeted that Lawless is a "true warrior princess."

Green Laser Aircraft Tracker

2012-02-26T23:13:00.001-08:00

Gadgets > Electronic Gadgets > SkyTagÂ™ - Green Laser Aircraft Tracker

Send us action
shots of this item!

For The Serious Aircraft Enthusiast

Bored using your advanced green laser for traditional spreadsheet pointing techniques? Why not kick up your skills a notch and start using green lasers to track aircraft? With beams visible in daylight that extend for miles, green lasers are ideally suited to track objects in the sky. Stop worrying about things like mandatory jail time and social isolation and play the intriguing game of SkyTagÂ™ today.

Simply connect your SkyTagÂ™ via the included USB 2.0 cable into your computer and install the software. Your SkyTagÂ™ comes equipped with a GPS unit in the base so it will immediately identify its own location. The SkyTagÂ™ software will then, via the use of several available online tracking services, begin to search for aircraft approaching your coordinates that are at the appropriate altitude for your green laser. When you find the aircraft you would like to SkyTagÂ™, simply select it. Then quickly look outside to make sure no black helicopters are approaching. If they are, quickly hide your SkyTagÂ™ and proceed to watch TV or something. If all is clear, then proceed...

All the flight path data should now be downloaded into your portable SkyTagÂ™ unit. Just unplug the USB cable, and hurry on outside where you should set your SkyTagÂ™ device on a flat surface that has a good view of the visible horizons. Then just let SkyTagÂ™ re-orient using the included motorized, rotating base until it successfully tracks (and tags) your selected aircraft. A successful tag is indicated by the onboard LCD display and by a high-pitched ringtone. Congratulations! Successful back-to-back tags might even earn you a complimentary visit from your local FBI office!

Features and Specifications:

Powerful 12mw green laser pointer included. Beam visible to the naked eye up to 22 miles even in daylight conditions!

Motorized base orients your laser anywhere in the visible sky according to coordinates you set up using included software.

GPS mounted internally in base, configurable through included software via USB 2.0 cable (included).

Included software allows you to configure your SkyTag'sÂ™ GPS unit as well as to set up aircraft to play SkyTagÂ™ with.

Software requirements: Linux (kernel version 2.4 and greater), or Windows XP/2000 or Plan 9.

Arrives with a voucher you can redeem to get 5% off your first fine of $25,000 or greater!

Dimensions: 6" high, 4" wide

Ships from the Netherlands

NOTE: Is this product legal? If you are concerned about the legality of this product, represent a government agency, or are just a curious clicker, CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO!

Price: $149.99

Availability: In Stock [ Info ]

Quantity:

via thinkgeek.com

RANT

2012-02-26T21:08:00.001-08:00

via robertmontgomery.org

OK

Yugoslavia’s Scifi War Memorials

2012-02-26T21:06:00.001-08:00

Yugoslavia’s Scifi War Memorials

Bizarre, beautiful and forgotten monuments to the WWII dead.

Images via American Society of Cinematographers magazine. Thanks to Chris Morris for the link.

Categories: Cool Tags: ArtMonumentsYugoslavia

About the Author: A ten year veteran of writing for the web, Devin has built a reputation as a loud, uncompromising and honest voice – sometimes to the chagrin of his readers, but usually to their delight.

via badassdigest.com

Millican Dalton -- Dropout

2012-02-26T20:49:00.001-08:00

Forsaking his job as a London insurance clerk, Millican Dalton dropped out long before it became fashionable or even acceptable.
He lived under canvas, in a cave or in his woodland hut for the most part of his life. He styled himself ‘Professor of Adventure’ and offered ‘Camping Holidays, Mountain rapid shooting, Rafting and Hair's breadth escapes.’
Primarily remembered for his eccentric asceticism, Millican Dalton was a man who had the courage to follow his dreams and to live by his convictions. Dissatisfied with the life dealt him, he created his own.
He had a disdain for modern urban materialism, rejecting it in favour of a life of stoic simplicity. Millican Dalton lived a life at one with nature - growing his own food and sewing his own clothes. He was a teetotaler, a vegetarian, a socialist and a staunch pacifist.
Many people have considered walking out of the office and chucking it all in for a life of simplicity. Millican Dalton lived that dream.
“Don't waste words
Jump to conclusions”

“You can't feel lonely
with nature as your companion”

Millican Dalton neither wrote books nor painted pictures. His legacy can be difficult to asses and easy to dismiss. Having lived a life outwith contemporary norms, it is easy to mistake his eccentricity for affectation. Indeed he is often defined by his odd habits, his homemade clothes, his cave dwelling or his mountain guiding. All these things were true, but they were merely consequeces of his quest.

Millican Dalton was many things, but first and foremost he was a man in search of a simple life.

Millican Dalton lead a very conventional existence, when, at the age of 36, he broke with irksome conformity and shallow materialism in favour of a nobler existence. He cast off all that weighed him down and rejoiced in what remained.

Millican Dalton was unmoved by the whirlpool of ego, aspiration, envy and material acquisition that keep the rest of us in our place.

He was an ascetic for our modern age - a man who will be remembered by many and emulated by few.

Counting the Cost: has capitalism gone bankrupt? | Reflections on a Revolution ROAR

2012-02-26T18:14:00.001-08:00

Counting the Cost: has capitalism gone bankrupt?
by Jerome Roos on February 27, 2012

With a worldwide financial crisis and an outraged 99 percent taking to the streets, Al Jazeera asks whether the free market is free enough.
Al Jazeera introduces the following documentary:
The world is a largely capitalistic economy – one that even communist China is embracing. But with a worldwide financial crisis, towering government debt and the public outrage of the 99 per cent, perhaps the free market is not free enough.
The world’s largest economy, the US, has a $15.2tn debt. According to Tea Partiers, that is because government spending and central bank meddling has distorted the market. Occupy campaigners, however, argue that capitalism brings excessive wealth to the few.
To even the most fiscally unlearned, the disparity is obvious.
The Economic Policy Institute has found that 1 per cent of US households control 42.7 per cent of the country’s assets.
And with wealth, comes influence – 24.3 per cent of all political donations in the 2010 election cycle were made by 0.01 per cent of Americans.
Sadly, the developing world gets left behind as well. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund, the richest 20 per cent of the world’s population control 82.8 per cent of its income, while the poorest 20 per cent control just 1 per cent.
Capitalism is often celebrated as the panacea for the world’s financial problems, but in this episode, Counting the Cost looks at how the system is open to abuse, corruption and could benefit from taking a page out of the experiences of emerging economies.
Kamahl Santamaria speaks to Mark Weisbrot from the Centre for Economic and Policy Research; Bryan Caplan, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute in Fairfax; and Loretta Napoleoni, the author of Maonimcs: Why Chinese Communists Make Better Capitalists Than We Do.

via roarmag.org

Untitled

2012-02-26T18:08:00.001-08:00

mobiledevicesdestroyingyou

2012-02-26T17:33:00.001-08:00

via dailyinfographic.com

Perfect iTunes Setting

2012-02-26T17:13:00.001-08:00

via flickr.com

Alcoholic Vervet Monkeys!

2012-02-26T17:06:00.001-08:00

via youtube.com

In the Caribbean, Vervet Monkeys have developed a taste for alcohol and can regularly be spotted stealing cocktails from humans on the beach.

Kim Yong Soo

2012-02-26T16:51:00.001-08:00

Kim Yong Soo

I was delighted to stumble onto the work of Korean artist Kim Yong Soo whose artwork, at first glance, takes on the somewhat familiar appearance of traditional Japanese paintings of cherry tree bossoms. Closer inspection reveals a textured assemblage of semi-conductors, speaker wires, and acrylic cement, used to form the delicate tree branches, flowers, and ominous humanoid figures that bring an unexpectedly dark presence to these otherwise serene paintings.

via thisiscolossal.com

BEING GAY

2012-02-26T16:29:00.001-08:00

via blushandmumble.com

Photos: Sixteen Sweet S.F. Garage Doors

2012-02-26T01:48:00.001-08:00

Photos: Sixteen Sweet S.F. Garage Doors

Joseph Schell
The first of many eye-catching garage doors on Lilac Alley.
San Francisco is full of graffiti, so when I received the assignment to photograph artsy garage doors around town, I didn't really bat an eye. But as I soon found out, it took a bit of searching (I won't lie, I actually had to zig-zag through several neighborhoods, combing the streets for graffiti), digging online and turning an attentive eye on my daily city travels. I also found there is an extensive little-seen community that keeps tabs on walls, alleys and buildings all around the city -- and they know exactly what's going on where in the street art world. This is a somewhat closed community that guards their privacy and don't like people asking questions. After dealing with an unwilling few, several talked.

For wall murals and alley art, S.F.'s Mission District really is the central hub of activity. One could put together a very interesting art walk centralized around the massive amount of color, expression and creativity found in the Mission alone.

Enjoy.

Lilac Alley
Just a half block east of Mission on 24th, Lilac Alley is right behind McDonald's. Don't stop gazing where the first alley ends, the art continues for three blocks in this ongoing project. Much more of a smorgasbord of art and style, Lilac gives you a full range of Mission alley art:

Joseph Schell

Joseph Schell

Joseph Schell

Joseph Schell

1 | 2 | 3 | Next Page >>

via blogs.sfweekly.com

The Velvet Underground - Sweet Jane

2012-02-25T21:46:00.001-08:00

via youtube.com

Untitled

2012-02-25T19:44:00.001-08:00

Court Says Cops Can’t Make You Decrypt Your Secure Hard Drives

2012-02-25T17:37:00.001-08:00

crime

Adrian Covert

Court Says Cops Can’t Make You Decrypt Your Secure Hard Drives

Remember the defendant in that fraud case who was prepared to claim she forgot the password to her laptop if ordered to decrypt it? Adding some more intrigue to the matter is the fact that the 11th Circuit Court says defendants won't have to decrypt drives if the contents are unknown. Huh?

The Fifth Amendment, of course, prevents any citizen from having to incriminate themselves, and in the case of Ramona Fricosu and her computer, her appeal was shot down by the 10th Circuit court. But in the latest ruling, The Verge says that the court contends that handing over the drive is fine, but the decrypting aspect counts as testimony. And testimony falls under the umbrella of the Fifth. But Fricosu's case might be a bit different since the court already had testimony about the computer's contents, and thus had some idea what was on there. So the two rulings might not be as at odds as they seem. [US Courts via Wired via Slashdot via The Verge]

Glove, Actually - An Ode to Cinema's Greatest Slaps on Vimeo

2012-02-25T17:30:00.001-08:00

via vimeo.com

Flavorwire » The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World

2012-02-24T22:17:00.001-08:00

The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World
by Emily Temple. Posted on 2:00 pm Tuesday Jan 31, 2012

266

With Amazon slowly taking over the publishing world and bookstores closing left and right, things can sometimes seem a little grim for the brick and mortar booksellers of the world. After all, why would anyone leave the comfort of their couch to buy a book when with just a click of a button, they could have it delivered to their door? Well, here’s why: bookstores so beautiful they’re worth getting out of the house (or the country) to visit whether you need a new hardcover or not. We can’t overestimate the importance of bookstores — they’re community centers, places to browse and discover, and monuments to literature all at once — so we’ve put together a list of the most beautiful bookstores in the world, from Belgium to Japan to Slovakia. Just so you know now, all you bookstore fiends: neither the Strand nor Powell’s is on this list. They’re both great bookstores, of course, but not particularly pretty (at least in our minds), and thus disqualified. Click through to see our picks for the most beautiful bookstores in the world, and as always, if we’ve left off your favorite, be sure to add to the collection in the comments!

A gorgeous converted Dominican church gives the power of reading its due diligence. Selexyz Bookstore, Maastricht, Holland

Modern design at its finest in a store full of art books. The Bookàbar Bookshop, Rome, Italy

We love the stairs as reading and display area, the wall-to-wall bookshelves, and the simple, clean design. Plural Bookshop, Bratislava, Slovakia

This divine neo-gothic bookstore, opened in 1906, contains what we consider to be the ultimate definition of a stairway to heaven. Livraria Lello, Porto, Portugal

Somehow, this bookstore manages to be both whimsical and slightly macabre all at once. Cook & Book, Brussels, Belgium

There’s magic in the air at this English-language bookstore in Beijing. Bookworm, Beijing, China

This majestic converted 1920s movie palace uses theatre boxes for reading rooms and draws thousands of tourists every year. Librería El Ateneo Grand Splendid, Buenos Aires, Argentina [images via and via]

How could any kid (or adult, for that matter) resist those delicious reading nooks? Poplar Kid’s Republic, Beijing, China

This is a bookstore that seems to be made almost entirely out of books — down to its dramatic front doors. Livraria da Vila, Sao Paulo, Brazil [photos via]

For those who like their green spaces (and coffee shops) to invade their bookstores. Cafebreria El Pendulo, Mexico City, Mexico [photos via]

For those browsers not as impressed by architecture as they are by the beauty of books upon books upon books in narrow hallways — not to mention a place to nap. Shakespeare & Company, Paris, France [photo via]

The huge space, high ceilings and stately pillars make for a lovely reading experience. The Last Bookstore, Los Angeles, CA

For sailors and beach readers alike, this sun-kissed bookstore is a little less ostentatious than some of the others on this list, but no less lovely. Atlantis Books, Santorini, Greece

The biggest outdoor bookstore in the world, this photo doesn’t really do the place justice — it’s all about the view. Bart’s Books, Ojai, California [photo via]

via flavorwire.com

▶ Death By Dubstep Mix #01 (FREE DOWNLOAD) by Uncle Matty

2012-02-24T22:11:00.001-08:00

A Mix Of Dubstep So Nasty It's Bad For Your Health!
Part 2: Death By Dubstep Mix #02 (FREE DL) by Uncle Matty
Photography & Make-Up By Dead Beautiful: http://preview.deadbeautiful.vpweb.co.uk/default.html
Hit The 'Follow' Button To Get The Next 'Death By Dubstep' Mix When I Upload It!
Tracklist:
01) Excision & Downlink - Existence VIP (Intro)..............................................http://www.beatport.com/track/existence-vip-original-mix/1929089
02) Flux Pavilion - Bass Cannon (Zomboy Remix)........................................http://www.beatport.com/track/bass-cannon-original-mix/1811911
03) Giant - Party Starter.......................................................................................http://www.beatport.com/track/party-starter-original-mix/2450000
04) Chase & Status - Blind Faith (Trolley Snatcha Remix)..........................http://www.beatport.com/track/blind-faith-trolley-snatcha-remix/2008344
05) 501 - White Lies............................................................................................http://www.beatport.com/track/white-lies-original-mix/1748386
06) The Streets - In The Middle (Nero Remix)................................................http://www.amazon.co.uk/In-The-Middle-Nero-Remix/dp/B002H69X26
07) Benny Benassi feat. Gary Go - Cinema (Skrillex Remix).......................http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/cinema-skrillex-remixes-feat./id439277669
08) Dirt Monkey - Imperial March.......................................................................Dirt Monkey- Imperial March (PLAY ME FREEBIE) by Play Me Records
09) Tremourz & J. Rabbit - Sexy Party (Terravita Remix)..............................http://www.beatport.com/track/sexy-party-terravita-remix/1779808
10) Nero/ The Jets - Crush On You (Knife Party Remix)...............................http://www.beatport.com/track/crush-on-you-knife-party-remix/3012372
Mixed by me, Uncle Matty using Virtual DJ & the Ion Discover DJ Mixer
I do not own rights to any of the songs in this mix, but if you like any of the tracks herein then help support the artists and go buy it!! Links Above!!
Free Download Link: http://www52.zippyshare.com/v/24138130/file.html
Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

via soundcloud.com

Dark & Entertaining Trailer For “The Suicide Shop”

2012-02-24T21:42:00.001-08:00

Dark & Entertaining Trailer For “The Suicide Shop”

A brilliant looking animation from Patrice Lecont made it’s way online yesterday and I just had to share this, thanks to Twitchfilm for the embed by the way. I do love an alternative looking animation and this looks fantastic, in a non-animation vibe it reminds me of ”Delicatessen” in it’s dark comedy kind of way. It hits some European countries in May but no date for a UK release yet but fingers crossed it will turn up here in some form being it DVD or at the cinema. Definitely watch the trailer below and let us know what you think

Source: Twitchfilm

via downwithfilm.com

Reflections on the Manipulation of Populism

2012-02-24T21:25:00.001-08:00

Two Bubbles That Went Pop: Reflections on the Manipulation of Populism

February 24, 2012

By Paul Street

Long after its leading encampments have been torn down – often with brute force and (educationally enough) predominantly by Democratic mayors and with the approval and involvement of a Democratic White House – the populist Occupy Movement deserves major credit for changing the United States’ political discourse. It helped bring the nation’s savage economic inequalities and the unmatched democracy-, society-, and ecology-destroying power of the wealthy Few (the instantly famous “1%”) into the national political discussion in ways that will give it a deserved place in future American history textbooks. It performed the remarkable service of calling out the name and address of the nation’s true unelected masters: corporate-financial capit! al and Wall Street.

Why did it emerge in the late summer and early fall of 2011? There were precursors and inspirations from recent history that helped spark and explain the timing of the Occupy moment, of course: occupations of public space (Cairo’s Tarhir Square) to protest the rule of a dictator in Egypt and to protest neoliberal austerity measures in Spain and Greece; the December 2008 occupation of the Republic Door and Window plant on Chicago’s North Side; and the mass popular upheaval in Madison, Wisconsin in February and March of 2011 – a remarkable rebellion that included a 16 day people’s occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol. Within New York City, not far from where OWS broke out, activists earlier the same year launched an outdoor encampment (“Bloombe! rgville”) to protest Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to cut social services and jobs – an action that provided an interesting link between the Madison upheaval and Occupy, that utilized many of the same organizational methods that would be employed by Occupy movements across the nation, and that provided some of OWS’ early activists.

Only the 1 Percent Took Your House Away

Beneath and beyond these immediate sparks, however, there lay deeper developments that provided the fuel for Occupy’s sparks to catch fire. Occupy and the broader popular and populist spirit of sympathetic opposition to the rich and corporate few it helped capture arose when it did, I think, because of the bursting of two bubbles: the hyper-collateralized real estate, credit, and finance bubble of 2001-2007; and the electoral-politics Obama hope and change bubble of 2007-2011. The popping of the first bubble – sparked by a wave of foreclosures in poor black and Latino communities that Wall Street had pumped with a wave of super-exploitive sub-prime home loans - laid bare the true elite and its culpability for the decline and indeed the breaking of American life and! society.

As Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich argued in a December 2011 Mother Jones essay titled “The 1% Revealed,” the transparent crashing of the national and global economy by the financial shenanigans of the super-rich undermined the ability of the right-wing to credibly continue its longstanding fake-populist game of blaming the professional and managerial “liberal elite” for everything wrong in America. It exposed the real masters, “the 1 percent who are, for the most part, sealed off in their own bubble of private planes, gated communities, and walled estates.” Compared to the corporate and Wall Street elite, “professionals and managers, no matter how annoying, were [shown to be] pikers. The doctor or school principal might be overbearing, the professor and the social work! er might be condescending, but only the 1 percent took your house away.”

The Class One Serves

The bursting of the second bubble reflected the realization that American

democracy (or what’s left of it) is no less crippled by the dark cloud of big money and the many-sided machinations of capital when Democrats hold nominal power than when Republicans do. Elected in the name of progressive change and a promise to clean up a corrupt Washington, the

Obama administration has been a tutorial on who rules America and the underlying conflict between capitalism and democracy. With its monumental bailout of hyper-opulent financial! overlords, its refusal to nationalize and cut down the parasitic financial institutions that had paralyzed the economy, its passage of a health reform bill that only the big insurance and drug companies could love, its cutting of an auto bailout deal that rewarded capital flight and raided union pension funds, its undermining of desperately needed global carbon emission reduction efforts at Copenhagen (2009) and Durban (2011), its refusal to advance serious public works programs (green or otherwise), its green-lighting of offshore drilling and numerous other environmentally disastrous practices, its roll-over of Bush’s regressive tax cuts for the rich, its freezing of federal wages and salaries, its cutting of a debt ceiling deal (in the summer of 2011) that was all about cutting social programs instead of tax increases on the rich, its disregarding of promises to labor and other popular constituencies, and other betrayals of its “progressive base” (the o! ther side of the coin of promises kept to its Wall Street and corporat e sponsors, who set new campaign finance records in backing Obama in 2008), the “change” and “hope” presidency of Barack Obama brilliantly demonstrated the reach of what Edward S. Herman and David Peterson call “the unelected dictatorship of money,” which vetoes any official who might seek “to change the foreign or domestic priorities of the imperial U.S. regime.” It richly validated radical analysts&r! squo; jaded take on the plutocratic reality behind the heavily personalized, candidate-centered “electoral extravaganzas” (Nom Chomsky) that big money and big media stage for the citizenry every four years, telling us that “that’s politics” – the only politics that matters. In its presidential, as in its other elections, U.S. “democracy” is “at best a guided one; at its worst it is a corrupt farce, amounting to manipulation…It is an illusion,” the left historian Laurence Shoup observed in early 2008, “that real change can ever come from electing a different ruling class-sponsored candidate.”

John Pilger put it well at a socialist conference in San Francisco in July of 2009. “
The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist,” Pilger noted, “partly because it is indeed exciting to see an African American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However, this is the 21st century, and race together with gender and even class can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what is so often overlooked and what matters, I believe, above all, is the class one serves.”
The lesson – driven home by the wildly unpopular elite-manufactured debt-ceiling crisis of July and August 2011 – suggested the wisdom of the late radical historian Howard Zinn’s clever maxim that “the really critical thing isn’t who’s sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in – in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating – those are the things that determine what happens.” As Zinn explain! ed in an essay on the “election madness” he saw “engulfing the entire society, including the left” with special intensity early in the year of Obama’s ascendancy:
“The election frenzy seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us…… Would I support one [presidential] candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes - the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth…But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critica! l mass, would shakewhoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.” (H. Zinn, “Election Madness, The Progressive, March 2008).
The Bubbles Co-Joined (2003-2008)
The two bubbles that burst have a curious linkage that goes back well before the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros., AIG, and Washington Mutual. In an early May 2008 CounterPunch essay titled “The Obama Bubble Agenda,” the Wall Street veteran and left commentator Pam Martens reflected on a curious reason for high finance’s record-setting investment in the Obama campaign:
“The Wall Street plan for the Obama-bubble presidency is that of the cleanup crew for the housing bubble: sweep all the corruption and losses, would-be indictments, perp walks and prosecutions under the rug and get on with an unprecedented taxpayer bailout of Wall Street…..Who better to sell this agenda to the millions of duped mortgage holders and foreclosed homeowners in minority communities across America than our first, beloved, black president of hope and change?”
Obama, it should be remembered, did not step onto the stage of national celebrity and contention without first being carefully vetted by the financial and political investor class beginning in 2003. “On condition of anonymity,” Ken Silverstein reported in the fall of 2006, “one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn’t see him as a ‘player.’ The lobbyist added: ‘What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?’” (K.Silverstein, “Barack Obama, Inc.: The Birth of a Washington Machine,” Harper’s, November 2006)
The favorable political credit rating given to Obama by the investor class reflected among other things his remarkable “yes” vote in the U.S. Senate on the so-called Class Action Fairness Act of 2005. A Republican bill backed and signed with great gusto by President Bush on February 18, 2005, it was a “thinly-veiled ‘special interest extravaganza’ that favored banking, creditors and other corporate interests” (Matt Gonzales) over and against workers, consumers, and the public by making it more difficult for ordinary people to sue corporate abusers. The bill had been long “sought by a coalition of business groups and was lobbied for aggressively by financial firms, which constitute Obama’s second biggest single bloc of donors” (Silverstein). As Martens explained, that vile legislation amounted to “a five-year effort by 475 lobbyists, despite appeals from the NAACP and every other major civil rights group. Thanks to the passage of that legislation, when defrauded homeowners of the housing bubble and defrauded investors of the bundled mortgages try to fight back through the class-action vehicle, they will find a new layer of corporate-friendly hurdles.” (P. Martens, “The Obama Bubble Agenda,” CounterPunch, May 6, 2008,http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/05/06/the-obama-bubble-agenda! /)
The Manipulation of Populism by Elitism
Ironically enough, Obama now gets to channel the populist Occupy spirit in fashioning his campaign for re-election against (in all likelihood) the spectacularly wealthy Mitt Romney. A web blurb from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee says “Stand with President Obama: the top 1% Need to Pay Their Fair Share!” The Democrats are eager to portray Romney as “Mr. 1%” and to identify Congressional Republicans with “those at the very top.” Liberal and Democratic activists, columnists, reporters, and politicians revel in noting that Romney pays less than 14 percent on more than $40 million in mostly investment-based incomeover the previous two years. “He makes more in one day than most Americans make all year,” proclaimed the elite Democrat Gerald McEntee (president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO), on the liberal-Democratic Huffington Post last month. Entitled “Mitt Romney and the 1%,” McEntee’s column described the leading Republican presidential contenders Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum, as “the candidates of the 1%, for the 1% and by the 1%” – as if Obama was not also such a candidate and not flying around the country raising vast sums of political capital from the nation’s financial elite at one push fundraising dinner after another.
The Democrats would certainly be campaigning against the Republicans along these anti-plutocratic lines even if Occupy had never emerged. Knowing well that the majority of the population has for some time been deeply displeased with the wildly disproportionate wealth and power of the corporate and financial Few, they are old hands at what the late and formerly left Christopher Hitchens once described as “the essence of American politics…the manipulation of populism by elitism. That elite is most successful,” Hitchens wrote in a 1999 study of! the Bill Clinton presidency:
“which can claim the heartiest allegiance of the fickle crowd; can present itself as most ‘in touch’ with popular concerns; can anticipate the tides and pulses of public opinion; can, in short, be the least apparently ‘elitist.’ It’s no great distance from Huey Long’s robust cry of ‘Every man a king’ to the insipid ‘inclusiveness’ of [Bill Clinton”s slogan] ‘Putting People First,’ but the smarter elite managers have learned in the interlude that solid, measurable pledges have to be distinguished by a ‘reserve’ tag that earmarks them for the bankrollers and backers.”
Even the Republican candidates have not been able to resist the fake-populist campaign meme encouraged by the actually populist Occupy moment. Smarting over defeats in the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary, conservative Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich went after Romney for eliminating thousands of jobs while amassing millions in personal wealth during his previous career as the CEO of the rapacious equity capital firm Bain Capital Management. “You have to ask the question,” Gingrich told reporters in connection with Romney’s economic record: “is capit! alism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and then walk off with the money?” A Talking Points Memo article on Gingrich’s comment bore an amusing if not wholly accurate title: “Gingrich Goes Full ‘Occupy Wall Street’ on Romney.”
A Rick Perry ad in Iowa said that Romney “made millions buying companies and laying off workers.” Imagine! Perry went after Romney in South Carolina for talking about how he was once worried about receiving a “pink slip” himself. “I have no doubt that Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips, whether he was going to have enough of them to hand out because his company Bain Capital with all the jobs that they killed, I’m sure he was worried that he’d run out of pink slips,” Perry said.
Romney was compelled to release his tax returns – revealing his offshore tax havens and low overall tax rate (reflecting his utilization of a controversial filing method that is available only to wealthy investors) – partly under pressure from his Republican rivals.
But of course neither the Republican candidates nor Obama would ever admit something that I suspect many of the smarter Occupiers are able to acknowledge – that, yes, Newt, capitalism really is pretty much “about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and then walk off with the money.”
But that’s a topic for another essay – one I already wrote: http://www.zcommunications.org/what-s-good-for-capital-by-paul-street
Paul Street (www.paulstreet.org and paulstreet99@yahoo.com)
is the author of numerous books, including Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11(Paradigm, 2004), The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Paradigm, 2010), and (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio) Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Paradigm, 2011).

WHAT CLASS DO YOU SERVE?

2012-02-24T21:21:00.001-08:00

“The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist,” Pilger noted, “partly because it is indeed exciting to see an African American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However, this is the 21st century, and race together with gender and even class can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what is so often overlooked and what matters, I believe, above all, is the class one serves.”

MEASURING BEAUTY IN THE BRAIN

2012-02-24T21:08:00.001-08:00

An area in the brain's pleasure center activates when a person is viewing a piece of art, say, that they find to be beautiful. (Shown here, Van Gogh's "Banks of the Seine," 1887).
CREDIT: Vincent van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

View full size image

When we find something aesthetically pleasing, the sensory areas of the brain light up, and the more beautiful we find, say, a piece of art, the greater the brain activity in certain regions, a new study shows.
By further investigating the connection between humans' subjective preferences and brain activity, scientists will someday be able to pinpoint various characteristics that make a painting, musical number or other sensory experience beautiful, researchers said.
"For the first time, we can ask questions about subjective preferences and relate them to activity in the brain," lead researcher Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at the University College London in the United Kingdom, told LiveScience. "There are some people who would prefer [beauty] to remain a mystery, but that's not how scientists view things."
In a previous study, Zeki found that an area in the pleasure and reward center of the brain is more active when people view a painting or hear a piece of music that they think is beautiful, compared with art they didn't find particularly pleasing. Because the brain activity of study participants rose accordingly with their ratings of beauty, the results suggest that scientists can look at the brain to objectively measure an experience that seems wholly subjective.
"So the question that we asked is: Do beautiful objects have any specific characteristics that render them beautiful?" Zeki said.
Measuring beauty in the brain
If you look at a painting, video or some other piece of visual art, there are many "domains" that could contribute to the perception of its aesthetics, such as color, shape and motion. For the new study, Zeki and his colleague, Jonathan Stutters, zeroed in on motion, which is the simplest visual attribute, Zeki said.
The researchers used a computer program to generate sets of white dots moving on a black background. The eight patterns all had the same number of dots and changes in speed, but differed in the way the particles moved: Some of the patterns involved dots that moved uniformly on a grid, while others had groups of dots that moved in a seemingly random way.
They then had 16 adults view the patterns twice — once while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, and once before going into the machine. With each viewing, the participants had to rate how much they likedeach visual stimulus.
"It turns out that there are certain patterns that are almost universally liked," Zeki said, referring to those preferred by 14 out of the 16 participants.The researchers also found that a certain sensory brain area called V5, which is thought to play a major role in motion perception, activated more strongly when the participants viewed patterns they preferred the most.
By analyzing the participants' preferences and the fMRI data, the researchers were able to pick out certain characteristics — such as the separation between dots — that made some patterns more preferable than others.
In a follow-up experiment, which was not detailed in their study published online today (Feb. 21) in the journal Open Biology, Zeki and Stutters created other patterns that utilized the characteristics they found. Participants overwhelmingly preferred these new patterns to the old ones.
Tip of the iceberg
"It's nice to see that people are breaking down the aesthetic experience to basic processes," said Marcos Nadal Roberts, a psychologist at theUniversity of the Balearic Islands in Spain, who was not involved with the study."If we don't break it down to smaller pieces, it will be very hard to understand the bigger picture."
But, Roberts notes, the research is not saying that beauty can be reduced to a merely objective experience, because the participants in the study had slightly different likes and dislikes. For example, one of the participants in the study didn't strongly prefer any of the patterns, while another participant preferred a pattern that no one else did.
"Beauty is not just about an object and all its features, it's also about the person and all of his or her features," Roberts told LiveScience. "So it's subjective and objective, both happening at the same time."
Roberts said that the study could have been more relatable to the real world if the researchers had used more natural forms of motion, such as the movement of waves in the ocean, the flocking of birds or the rustle of leaves in a tree as the wind blows.
The abstract motion of dots isn't something that people would typically say is "beautiful," Zeki concedes.
Zeki is now looking to tease out preferred characteristics in the other domains, and eventually combine them to get a better picture of the objective qualities of visual beauty. "This is just the tip of the iceberg," he said. "Actually, it's not even the tip, it's just a few micrometers of the tip."

Japan scientist synthesizes meat from human feces

2012-02-24T18:56:00.001-08:00

Japan scientist synthesizes meat from human feces

June 15, 2011 By Jeff Hughes

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It's being called the "poop burger". Japanese scientists have found a way to create artificial meat from sewage containing human feces.
Somehow this feels like a Vonnegut plotline: population boom equals food shortage. Solution? Synthesize food from human waste matter. Absurd yes, but Japanese scientists have actually discovered a way to create edible steaks from human feces.

Mitsuyuki Ikeda, a researcher from the Okayama Laboratory, has developed steaks based on proteins from human excrement. Tokyo Sewage approached the scientist because of an overabundance of sewage mud. They asked him to explore the possible uses of the sewage and Ikeda found that the mud contained a great deal of protein because of all the bacteria.

The researchers then extracted those proteins, combined them with a reaction enhancer and put it in an exploder which created the artificial steak. The “meat” is 63% proteins, 25% carbohydrates, 3% lipids and 9% minerals. The researchers color the poop meat red with food coloring and enhance the flavor with soy protein. Initial tests have people saying it even tastes like beef.

Inhabitat notes that “the meatpacking industry causes 18 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions, mostly due to the release of methane from animals.” Livestock also consume huge amounts of resources and space in efforts to feed ourselves as well as the controversy over cruelty to animals. Ikeda’s recycled poop burger would reduce waste and emissions, not to mention obliterating Dante’s circle for gluttons.

The scientists hope to price it the same as actual meat, but at the moment the excrement steaks are ten to twenty times the price they should be thanks to the cost of research. Professor Ikeda understands the psychological barriers that need to be surmounted knowing that your food is made from human feces. They hope that once the research is complete, people will be able to overlook that ugly detail in favor of perks like environmental responsibility, cost and the fact that the meat will have fewer calories.

Waste not; want not.

In Case You Missed It:

via digitaltrends.com

Dangerous Minds | Electronic revolution: Three hour documentary on Kraftwerk

2012-02-24T18:21:00.001-08:00

Electronic revolution: Three hour documentary on Kraftwerk

If you haven’t reached a saturation point yet with Kraftwerk posts on Dangerous Minds, then this three hour opus will probably satiate you for a while.

For fans of krautrock, drone, ambient, and electronic music, Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution is a fascinating history of how some of the most influential music of our times emerged from the boredom and hopelessness of 1960s Germany. The filmmakers take the subtitle of their movie very seriously, and they want to crawl back to find the Big Bang of cultural influences that would make something as innovative as Kraftwerk possible. It’s not an unimportant question, since the ideas the electronic musical collective would establish in their 1970s output would influence everyone from glam rockers like David Bowie and Brian Eno to early hip-hop pioneers and New Wave bands like Duran Duran, and on into today, where techno and arty experimentalists like Radiohead still borrow from the German group’s bag of tricks. Even wuss-rockers Coldplay lifted the hooks for their song “Talk” from “Computer Love,” somehow achieving the impossible and proving one could actually be bigger nerds than the pasty originals, Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter. And that Kraftwerk core duo likes to dress up as robots, so you know they’re plenty nerdy.

Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution traces the rise of German music back to the influx of British bands that went to the European country to ply their trade in the early 1960s. (The Beatles most famously cut their teeth in Hamburg nightclubs.) At that point, German youth were looking to establish a new identity that embraced the freedom of the West and finally unshackled them from the shame of their country’s past—much in the same way Pete Townshend has argued that British rock stood in direct defiance of an older generation in England who were always rubbing past glories in the faces of their children. Though German musicians initially copied their British idols, who themselves were copying African American blues musicians, eventually they would want something that was more in tune with their own experience. As Karl Bartos, one of two former Kraftwerk members to participate in this unauthorized film, put it, they knew they weren’t from the Mississippi Delta, so why pretend they were?” - James S. Rich

Comprehensive, informative, and occasionally a tad tedious, Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution is a worthwhile addition to the growing appreciation of Kraftwerk and krautrock in general.

via dangerousminds.net

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD?

2012-02-24T17:46:00.001-08:00

We Are Insurgent | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters

2012-02-24T01:33:00.001-08:00

We Are Insurgent

The Rebel Clown Army Manifesto.

0 comments Rebel Clown Army , 22 Feb 2012

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KAREN ELIOT

We are insurgent because we have risen up from nowhere and are everywhere. Because ideas can be ignored but not suppressed and an insurrection of the imagination is irresistible. Because whenever we fall over we rise up again and again and again, knowing that nothing is lost for history, that nothing is final. Because history doesn’t move in straight lines but surges like water, sometimes swirling, sometimes dripping, flowing, flooding–always unknowable, unexpected, uncertain. Because the key to insurgency is brilliant improvisation, not perfect blueprints.

We are rebels because we love life and happiness more than ‘revolution.’ Because no revolution is ever complete and rebellions continues forever. Because we will dismantle the ghost-machine of abstraction with means that are indistinguishable from ends. Because we don’t want to change ‘the’ world, but ‘our’ world. Because we will always desert and disobey those who abuse and accumulate power. Because rebels transform everything–the way they live, create, love, eat, laugh, play, learn, trade, listen, think and most of all the way they rebel.

We are an army because we live on a planet in permanent war–a war of money against life, of profit against dignity, of progress against the future. Because a war that gorges itself on death and blood and shits money and toxins, deserves an obscene body of deviant soldiers. Because only an army can declare absurd war on absurd war. Because combat requires solidarity, discipline and commitment. Because alone clowns are pathetic figures, but in groups and gaggles, brigades and battalions, they are extremely dangerous. We are an army because we are angry and where bombs fail we might succeed with mocking laughter. And laughter needs an echo.

We are approximate and ambivalent, in the most powerful of all places, the place in-between order and chaos.

via adbusters.org

UPDATED: 99 Percent Declaration Working Group announces convention in Philadelphia for July | The Raw Story

2012-02-23T21:05:00.001-08:00

UPDATED: 99 Percent Declaration Working Group announces convention in Philadelphia for July

By Andrew Jones
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 16:39 EST

Topics: Occupy Wall Street PR Working Group ♦ Percent Declaration Working Group ♦ philadelphia

UPDATE (Feb. 23): A statement released from the Occupy Wall Street PR Working Group today clarified that the planned assembly is not an official project generated by the movement.

“The 99% Declaration and its call for a ‘national general assembly’ in Philadelphia in July is not affiliated with or endorsed by Occupy Wall Street, and the organizers’ plans blatantly contradict OWS’ stated principles,” the release said. “The proposal was also rejected by the General Assembly of Occupy Philadelphia, which passed a resolution stating, ‘We do not support the 99% Declaration, its group, its website, its National GA and anything else associated with it.’ ”

–

“Occupy Wall Street” protesters will continue their evolution as a movement this summer, announcing through its working group a “general assembly” convention in Philadelphia for early July.

According the Associated Press, the 99 percent Declaration Working Group said that the convention would elect 876 delegates throughout 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories.

The plan is to select a man and a woman from each of the 435 congressional voting districts to create and ratify a “redress of grievances,” emulating how the Declaration of Independence was formed in 1776 in Philadelphia.

“We feel it’s appropriate to go back to what our founding fathers did and have another petition congress,” said Michael S. Pollock, an attorney who co-founded the working group. “We feel that following the footsteps of our founding fathers is the right way to go.”

Once the bill is competed, protesters will send the bill to the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court, demanding action within the first 100 days of office next year.

Pollock indicated the protesters have already selected a site in Philadelphia for the convention and will pay for it through donations. He added that details for the convention are still being discussed.

via rawstory.com

David Mach Creates “The Devil” Out of Matchsticks. Sets It On Fire

2012-02-23T19:27:00.001-08:00

Posted on February 21, 2012

Sculpture, Wow Art

David Mach Creates “The Devil” Out of Matchsticks. Sets It On Fire

David Mach‘s incredible sculpture called The Devil is made entirely out of matches. The part that is more fascinating is not just the sculpture itself, but watching it burn and then seeing it take a different form – match sculpture to charred sculpture. Be sure to watch the video at the end where you get to see the before and after form of The Devil.

Artwork by David Mach

Watch the video to see The Devil on fire.

Credit: Reddit user scorecardup

via arscentral.com

Stravinsky- Rite of Spring "Opening" - Pina Bausch

2012-02-23T19:21:00.001-08:00

via youtube.com

In homage to the great choreographer Pina Bauch. Wim Wenders 3-D documentary Pina was nominated for the 2012 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

POLICA - Amongster (Official Music Video)

2012-02-23T18:38:00.001-08:00

via youtube.com

Outdoor sex is normally a drunken, 3AM, oh-god-I-can’t-believe-we-did-that scenario, laced with shame and impossible stains. Unless you’re in the middle of a dewy tropical forest, surrounded by worms, snakes, and other phallic organisms that are all watching you make tantric love as the silver morning fog envelops you like a cloud of pure orgasm. Thankfully Poliça picked the latter as the concept for the new music video.
The clip for “Amongster,” from the Minneapolis outfit's debut album Give You The Ghost, is pretty steamy; if the song weren’t so enjoyable, I’d be angry at the band for reminding about my comparitively depressing sex life.

DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS

2012-02-23T18:11:00.001-08:00

Universal Officially Files To Acquire EMI; Antitrust Battle Expected

Last Friday [Feb. 17] Universal Music officially delivered to European competition authorities its submission to acquire EMI's record labels for $1.9 billion, a move that many analysts believe will spark a bitter and bruising regulatory fight both on that continent and in the U.S. Expectations of a tough antitrust review have been heightened by authorities' past roles in shaping the music industry, most notably EMI's attempt to merge with Warner Music in 2000, a move that eventually was abandoned in the face of European Commission opposition. Additionally, the Sony-BMG merger in 2004 was nearly undone when a European court challenged the initial clearance, keeping the deal in limbo for three years. Meanwhile Universal's acquisition of Bertelsmann's former BMG music publishing business was approved only after it divested large catalogs. "In such a highly consolidated and oligopolistic industry, we think that even the combination of the number one player with its number four rival might run into serious antitrust scrutiny," Bernstein Research analysts told the Financial Times. [Full story: Financial Times]
Microsoft Reportedly Is Developing New Digital Music Service

According to an exclusive report from CNET, Microsoft has been speaking with the major record companies about creating a music system to serve the company's Xbox game system as well as an upcoming Windows-based phone. The software maker, which has had a less-than-stellar record in digital music [e.g., Zune], apparently has outlined a service that it hopes could launch sometime this year and include streaming music as well as downloads, sources told CNET's Greg Sandoval. These sources added that the company also has mentioned the possibility of teaming with HTC and Nokia to develop the proposed phones. Label negotiations still are in a preliminary stage and the two sides have yet to identify any specifics of a deal, but Microsoft believes the record companies are eager to have a higher profile on the Xbox, with its 40 million worldwide subscribers, as well as on any new Windows mobile devices. Since Microsoft already operates the Zune Music Pass, the company possesses current music licenses - but whether or not those licenses will extend to the new service depends on what Microsoft plans to do with the music. [Full story: CNET]
FBI Reports 90% Of MegaUpload Users Never Uploaded One File

The Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation this week reported that 90% of all MegaUpload users downloaded content from the site without ever uploading a single file. "Although the [MegaUpload] defendants have claimed more than 180 million registered users, the records on their internal computer systems suggest that they had only 66.6 million registered users as of Jan. 19, 2012," DOJ prosecutors stated. "The records also indicate that only 5.86 million of these users ever uploaded a single file to either Megaupload.com or Megavideo.com, demonstrating that more than 90% of their registered users only used the defendants' systems to download." Additionally, some of the remaining 10% uploaded content exclusively, which means that the percentage of users who actively uploaded and downloaded files was exceptionally low. The upshot of all this: as Digital Music News [no relation to this publication] suggests, if the FBI stats are accurate, MegaUpload functioned more like a candy store than locker service it claimed to be. [Full story: Digital Music News]
U.K. Digital Music Sales Grew Almost 25% In 2011

BPI - formerly known as the British Phonographic Industry - this week reported that the digital income of U.K. record companies grew much faster in 2011 than it did in 2010. Trade income from digital music increased 24.7% to £281.6 million during 2011, with digital growth now offsetting two-thirds of the decline in income from sales of physical music product. Total digital music income - earnings from online downloads, subscriptions, ad-supported services, and mobile - accounted for more than a third [35.4%] of U.K. recorded music turnover last year, up from 27.4% in 2010. Revenue from digital albums grew strongly in 2011 and is now almost at the same level as digital single tracks. Digital albums generated £117.8 million, up 43.2% vs. the £82.2 million recorded in 2010. Earnings from digital single tracks rose 11.3% to £120.5 million in 2011, compared to £108.3 million in 2010. "It is highly encouraging for the long-term prospects of the industry that the pace of digital growth continues to accelerate. British labels are supporting a wide range of innovative music services and music fans are embracing digital like never before," BPI Chief Executive Geoff Taylor commented in a statement. [Full story: M2N]
OK Go: YouTube Money Is Like "Change In The Street"

"Making money from YouTube is like finding change in the street." That's the assessment from alternative rock band OK Go, whose manager Jamie Kitman told attendees at a recent San Francisco Music Tech Summit that generating revenue from the site does not equate to a business model. "I would say that 'trickle' is the operative word, in terms of revenue we receive from places like YouTube and VEVO," he said, adding that nurturing relationships with major advertisers wasn't an option for "developing bands" that don't already have 175 million downloads. "Our old label [EMI] has a deal with VEVO, and perhaps they get paid and then don't pay us," Kitman said. OK Go has received widespread plaudits for the use of music videos, including their 2010 promo for "White Knuckles," which featured the band and a collection of well-trained dogs, and garnered over one million YouTube views in its first 24 hours of being posted online. [Full story: NME]
Grace Digital Finally Releases Mondo WiFi Media Player

It took a little more than a year, but Grace Digital finally has released the Mondo WiFi music player and Internet radio, which was unveiled at CES 2011 in Las Vegas. As reported by Gadget Wiki, the Mondo can access thousands of online radio stations over an 802.11n Wi-Fi connection, and also can stream music stored on a computer or storage device connected to the network. Equipped with a 3.5" LCD screen, the Mondo has 30 settings for backlight brightness, and can display radio station logos as well as Pandora album network images, when available. In addition to pre-set buttons that can access up to ten favorite online stations, users can store up to 100 additional stations in a special folder. The device has a built-in clock that adjusts to the correct time once it knows what time zone it is in, and has five alarm settings and even a dedicated snooze button. Capable of delivering an audio output of 12 watts via the 3" woofer and 1" tweeter, the Mondo is priced at $180 and is available in any color, as long as it's black or white. [Full story: Gadget Wiki]
Al Bell Presents American Soul Music ... And American Soul TV

If you're into classic and contemporary Soul, R&B, Blues, Gospel, Jazz, Hip-Hop Soul, Rap Soul, and Neo-Soul, we invite you to listen to Al Bell Presents American Soul Music. Former Stax Records owner and Motown Records Group President Al Bell personally has programmed this awesome radio station online, presenting your favorites from the 1960s and '70s [and some '80s], a lot of the best new music that's being released today, and some real gems you haven't heard in a long, long time. Come to www.AlBellPresents.Com
and hear it for yourself!

Last chance to tell Google to forget you

2012-02-23T17:56:00.001-08:00

Last chance to tell Google to forget you

By Kevin Fogarty
New privacy policy consolidates all your activity data at google.com unless you erase it first

February 22, 2012, 12:48 PM —

Even if you're one of those luddites who uses Google only for Search – not the increasingly random assemblage of first-generation SaaS apps that make up its unintentionally eclectic portfolio – you're sure to already be sick of the sticky pop-ups Google has been using to warn customers it is unifying all the services under one comprehensive lack-of-privacy policy.

Google announced in January it would unify most of its services under a single privacy policy and a single set of data-gathering tools that will arrange all Google's useful data on each of its customers in an efficient database, from which it is much simpler to sell that customer as a commodity to advertisers looking for specific patterns of behavior.
The change actually goes into effect March 1.
Before it does, if you're cautious at all about the amount of information Google has about you, uncertain at all how little evil Google will do with all the consolidated information or just a little woogy about anyone having big chunks of surveillance on you with a yen to sell it: go erase your Google history now.
Thanks to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for pointing out that having decent security and using it are not the same thing.
After all your odd searches, secret obsessions and kinky lunch reading is ensconced inside a special database, you won't be able to get to the data any more.
You can delete much of the data Google has on you, though. At least as long as you remember to clear your browser history.
Not the one you always clear before leaving your desk and risking having prying co-workers come look at your cache to figure out what the audio-streamed screams coming from your computer earlier in the day were all about.
The history you have to delete is on Google.com. When you're signed in, Google keeps track of where you're going and what you're looking at, and stores that history on its server files.
Until March 1, you can still delete that data, by following the instructions provided by EFF.
Getting Google to forget you:
First, log in to your Google account.
Then go to https://google.com/history.
Click the button marked "Delete all history."
Click OK.
That's it. History is a toggle, so once you turn it off it should stay that way until you reactivate it.
It's not a big procedure, or a complex one. It is one chance more than any other online vendor has offered you lately to restrict your private data a little.
But you have to actually take the trouble.
Do it now, before you forget.
Read more of Kevin Fogarty's CoreIT blog and follow the latest IT news at ITworld. Follow Kevin on Twitter at @KevinFogarty. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-tos, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook.

OCCUPY SAN FRANCISCO ACTION

2012-02-23T17:42:00.001-08:00

Can Computer Games Save Us All?

2012-02-23T17:07:00.001-08:00

Can Computer Games Save Us All? New Research Shows How Gaming Can Help Cure Our Social Ills

Tech futurist and game designer Jane McGonigle on how computer games can help the fight against AIDS, heal disabilities, increase optimism, and make us better people.

February 21, 2012 |

There are 183 million active computer game players in the United States. The average young person will spend 10,000 hours gaming by the age of 21. More than 5 million "extreme" gamers in the U.S. play an average of 45 hours a week. Videogames took in about $15.5 billion last year.
Most of what you hear about this phenomenon is doom and gloom – people becoming addicted, isolated and socially inept. Some worry that gaming is pulling people away from productive work, fulfilling relationships and real life. But game designer Jane McGonigal says the reason for the mass exodus to virtual worlds is that videogames are increasingly fulfilling genuine human needs. In a very popular TED talk -- and in her first book, Reality Is Broken, just out in paperback – she suggests we can use the lessons of game design to fix what is wrong with the real world.
Jane McGonigal is the director of Game R&D at the Institute for the Future and creative director of Social Chocolate. BusinessWeek called her "one of the ten most important innovators to watch." Oprah magazine thinks she's "one of the twenty most inspiring women in the world." And MIT Technology Review named her "one of top 35 innovators changing the world through technology."
Terrence McNally interviewed McGonigal for AlterNet by phone from her home in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Terrence McNally: I see four strands in what I’ve read about you and your work: Buddhism, games, positive psychology, and entrepreneurism. How do you describe your path?
Jane McGonigal: That’s a pretty good breakdown, I like it. I think, first and foremost, I try to help people unleash their real-life superpowers to bring out the best in them so they achieve epic wins lead extraordinary lives, and be of extraordinary service to other people.
I have a background in theater and recreation. I used to work with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Theater is play, and recreation -- where we come together and play in real spaces -- is part of building community in the city. That background has been a big part of why I think that play can serve to bring people together in the real world
TM: You begin the book by defining what a game is. And you weren’t just describing video games, but all kinds of games.
JM: Absolutely. It’s important that we put video games in the context of human history. We’ve been playing games for literally as long as we’ve been human. There’s no civilization we have a record of that doesn’t have games. For folks who feel alienated from the world of video games or from the gamers in their lives, it may help to understand that gaming is fundamentally a part of being human.
This ability to come together and play by artificial rules is something that no other species does. The great philosopher, Johan Huizinger, said we are never more human than when we play. I think it’s important to keep in perspective that video games are part of that tradition and that legacy.
TM: I imagine when a lot of people think of a video game or a computer game or a virtual game, their accent is on the video, the virtual or the computer. You’re saying that, at its root – whatever the medium – there is something common to people playing games.
JM: The medium of computer and video games has taken the fundamental psychology that underlies gaming to a new level, and made possible the network effect of people playing actively multi-player games. For the first time in human history, we can have millions of people playing the same game at the same time.
In the same way that agriculture or the design of roads connecting cities took humanity to newer levels of cooperation, I see networked games as one of those technologies that brings us together in a way that hasn’t happened before.
TM: How do you compare what you’re talking about with what happens in sports, for instance?
JM: In many ways it’s very similar. I think the reason we play sports is to find out what we’re capable of and how we shake out against other people’s best efforts. We go out for a game or a competition to really see what we’re made of that day. Computer and video games tap into that same drive to challenge ourselves, that desire to be engaged in something that’s difficult for us, or that pleasure of mastering a new skill.
TM: I’ve done my little bit of Rock Band and Wii…I’m basically someone who doesn’t play video games. But sports for me were always a source of connection, flow, of being in the moment. As I read your positive descriptions of multi-player games, I recognized many of those experiences from showing up at a basketball court, perhaps in a city I’d never visited before, and within five minutes we’ve all accepted the voluntary goals, rules and teammates -- and may the best players win. In that moment, I’m as alive as I am doing anything.
JM: One of the early bits of research that really inspired my thinking was Csíkszentmihályi’s original work on the theory of flow or peak experience, where you’re engaged with something that’s challenging for yourself. In his first academic study, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, he identified a few activities that seemed to provide it regularly: one was sports; one was dancing; and the other was game play. They all provide a structure for people to come together and immerse themselves in a challenge.
TM: Can you lay out a few principles that define a game?
JM: For me, the basic definition of a game is that it’s a voluntary obstacle, an unnecessary challenge that you are volunteering to engage with. That’s the basic premise, that you’re going to agree to try something that’s hard for you, that you’re not sure if it can be done or how it can be done or how you’re going to try to do it, but you agree to give it your best effort and see what happens as a result.
Let’s break that down: first, you have a goal; the game has to give you a sort of arbitrary thing that you’re going to try to achieve, whether it’s to get the ball in the basket or to make words out of tiles on a Scrabble screen. Then it gives you restrictions on how you can achieve that goal. You can’t run while you’re holding the basketball; you can only have seven letters at a time. By making it harder to achieve this goal than if you were just doing it the most efficient way possible, they unlock creativity or call forth strategy.
TM: Voluntary goals and voluntary obstacles.
JM: Then you have a feedback system. It’s really important that you have an idea whether you’re getting close to achieving your goal or not, whether the strategy you’re trying is better or worse than the last one you tried. That can be a point system in sports, or in the way a digital game synchronously provides feedback for every action you take.
The last condition is simply that it is indeed voluntary, that you can stop at any time, that you’re playing of your own free will. Your self-motivated engagement is key. That’s why we can’t make people play games. If you haven’t volunteered for it, you lose a powerful element of psychology, the positive stress that we get when we choose to tackle a challenge. If you’re playing against your will, you’re going to have all the same resentment that you have towards work or the same anxiety or stress you have about work.
TM: The conditions that promote flow are clear goals, readily available and consistent feedback, and the right stretch between skill and challenge. It seems to me, that’s very much what we’re talking about here as well.
JM: One of the big benefits of games is that they increase your resilience in the face of challenge. Because games push you to the edge of your ability, you’re always working hard, always trying to get peak effort out of yourself. That seems to increase your ability to stay engaged longer with difficult challenges in your real life. You develop resilience in the face of failure or an ability to stay at a high level of concentration and motivation for longer periods of time. Computer and video games in particular excel at keeping you at the edge of your ability, because they constantly adjust and modulate to be just hard enough for you to barely keep going.
TM: When you say that resilience in games helps us to be resilient in other aspects of our lives, you’re not just saying it seems that way. Almost every assertion you make is based on a lot of scientific research....
JM: I think we’re all very fortunate that there are hundreds of laboratories and scientific departments around the world pouring a lot of time and energy into trying to understand exactly how games affect us. You can go everywhere from Stanford to Berkeley to Harvard to NYU and find these research studies looking at long-term impacts of gaming. I’ve had fun over the last two years collecting all this data, doing meta-analysis and looking for patterns. And psychological resilience is one of the things that shows up in study after study.
TM: As far as I know, your book is the first that pulls all this together. This world has grown a great deal in the time you’ve been studying it. When you first started looking at this 10 years ago, were you pretty much alone?
JM: I think it’s fair to say that I was out on a limb. I wasn’t entirely by myself, but there were so few others that I didn’t see any of them. In graduate school at Berkeley, I started submitting scientific and academic papers, got accepted at conferences, and gave talks. Everybody’s reaction was sufficiently curious that it motivated me to keep going. Of course, there was also skepticism. Not to say there isn’t skepticism now, but early on there was a lot of it.
In the science fiction novel, Ender's Game, all these poor gamers are used and abused by the government to wage war, because they can’t tell the difference between games and reality. Everywhere I went, I heard, “So are you talking about building an Ender's Game that’s going to destroy the world? Are we all going to be puppets for the military?”
Now I think people understand a little bit better that the games we play are tools -- not for other agents to use and abuse us -- but for us to develop skills and abilities that really matter to us. Tools for us to build the best versions of ourselves.
TM: When I first interviewed Csíkszentmihályi in 1997, I asked him who was taking advantage of what he’d learned about flow. How can we bring more of the flow that you’ve discovered in rock climbing or sports and games into our real lives? He said that the military was one of the first organizations that saw value in this.
I think it’s fascinating that Csíkszentmihályi published his first work on flow in 1972, nearly 40 years ago. Yet from the research that I’ve done, it seems that the electronic gaming industry is the first to take full advantage.
JM: His book Flow is like the bible of game design, it’s the one thing that everybody has read. People who don’t pay attention to game culture might not be aware of just how seriously game designers take scientific research, particularly around psychology. Game companies have people whose job it is to follow the research and try to implement it. Positive psychology is actually helping players have a more positive experience. I like to say that game designers are essentially happiness engineers. The only thing they really care about is making the player feel these positive emotions, that’s why we play games, it’s the business that we’re in.
TM: And, of course, if the game delivers, it will sell better and be played and recommended to friends more often. If we go back to those three conditions of flow I mentioned -- clear goals, ready consistent feedback and stretch -- very few things in life can apply those criteria as successfully as game design. Could you talk a little bit about that?
JM: When we try to bring game design principles to reality, we struggle to control two aspects of it: first, constantly adjusting the stretch to be more difficult; and second, the sense that it’s a safe place, that the stakes are still low enough that if you fail, nobody’s going to die.
When I talk to people about making games that can save the real world, the first thing a skeptic says to me is, "In games you die and it doesn’t matter; in the real world somebody dies and they’re really dead." That’s the big conceptual leap that people have trouble making, and where the biggest need for creativity and skill design comes in.
I’m really obsessed with Foldit, a game that I did not work on but that I play, and which I write about in the book. The game was created by scientists at the University of Washington, with the help of some programmers from Bungee, a game development company which makes some of the most epic video games in the world. So top-notch scientists and game programmers.
They wanted to make a game where gamers could be taught to do real medical research, so they’ve created a virtual environment where gamers can learn how to manipulate virtual proteins. Everything that happens in the human body happens from proteins that fold and unfold in different configurations, and if they fold up in unfavorable configurations we get diseases like Alzheimer’s or cancer. So scientists have been trying to figure out how to fold proteins in the human body into more stable configurations to prevent disease or how to refold them to stop the unfolding from happening.
They’ve created a world where gamers can manipulate these proteins without needing to understand a lot of the science, taking advantage of gamers’ ability to manipulate objects in 3D space. Foldit is really a lot like Tetrus, although more complicated. Tetrus is four shapes, here you’ve got dozens of shapes. The players have gotten good at it and they’ve been taking on questions or challenges that scientists have been unable to figure out. Players actually solved a longstanding question scientists have been trying to figure out: how would you use protein folding to stop the HIV virus from replicating in the body?
Scientists had been working on it for 10 years, the gamers solved it in 10 days. These are not people with PhDs in microbiology, these are ordinary gamers, and there’s talk they could get a Nobel Prize in medicine just for playing a game.
That example shows you can give a really high-stakes challenge like AIDS or cancer to gamers so that they are mastering a new skill, they’re stretching, they’re collaborating, they’re immersed in the flow -- but also they’re doing something that really matters.
TM: We’ve mentioned stretch a few times. When something is too much of a stretch, you fail too much and you can get frustrated. When something is not enough of a stretch you get bored. There’s a sweet spot that seems to bring out flow in people, and the game industry can program that sweet spot into their games in a way that’s very hard to replicate in reality.
You point out in your TED talk that if we take Malcolm Gladwell’s notion of 10,000 hours to achieve mastery, then there are 500 million people in the world who are virtuosos of something. What is that something they’re virtuosos of?
JM: I came up with four powers or skills that seemed to cut across almost any genre of these computer and video games. One is what we call urgent optimism, having a kind of radar for opportunities to rise to the occasion, constantly scanning for the next quest or the next mission so that you can volunteer and tackle it. That’s a pretty interesting skill, somebody who’s always ready to help if you can just get their attention.
Second, blissful productivity -- that resilience to stay engaged in something for a long time, even if it’s hard for you. Gamers are really good at looking for sources of feedback, so they can feel that they’re making progress, so that they can stay engaged. Many young people who’ve been diagnosed with ADD hyperactivity disorder lose the symptoms when they’re playing one of their favorite video games.
This has led to a lot of controversy. A New York Times editorial about this research said, “It’s not that the symptoms have gone away, it’s just that the real world isn’t as engaging.” That makes me crazy, because I think, well, shouldn’t we fix the real world then? [laughs] Instead of saying that they have a disease. Shouldn’t we just try?
Third, social fabric -- the ability to feel like you’re part of a community where everybody shares certain values, certain goals, and that everybody in the community has a chance to contribute based on their strengths. Online multi-player games are a really great place to see this in action. Your particular avatar, who specializes in a certain skill or a certain power, contributes to the larger group using that skill or power. Everybody gets a chance to add the one thing that they do best.
The last is a sense of epic meaning, being able to see a bigger purpose to your actions, a heroic story, a venture that you’re on or a purpose you’re fulfilling that is bigger than yourself. These kinds of epic narratives keep you working hard, committed to your challenge, and collaborating with others.
TM: You’ve said, if real life is not engaging enough, does not test us enough, does not give us enough feedback, and does not reward us enough with a feeling that we matter – then task one would be to rejigger real life so that it can begin to do those things.
The other side of that coin is the challenge that you lay out: Can we use games to solve real problems? In addition to Foldit, you’ve done some others: Evoke, World Without Oil, and so on….
JM: One of my favorite projects this past year was for the New York Public Library. They were looking for a game that could get young people excited about libraries, specifically the physical space of a library, because young people today do all of their research on the Internet and never come into the actual building.
I thought about, what do young people want, and how can the library help them achieve that? I feel passionately that games should be giving people an opportunity to achieve dreams they already have or goals that already matter to them. I don’t want to tell people what their goal should be.
TM: It’s really a game if it’s voluntary, if we choose it. Positive psychology talks about extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation, extrinsic rewards and intrinsic rewards. Intrinsic rewards are those where the activity is a reward in itself, and that’s going to be much more likely if we choose it.
JM: Exactly. So what do young people want that has anything to do with a library? Well, a lot of young people want to write books, they want to be authors. That’s one of the most common life goals that we hear from people under 35. So I thought, wouldn’t it be great to make a game where at the end of playing the game you had actually written a book? Not learned to write a book, but you have written a book -- and that book could go in the library. You could be a published author with a book in the library. Then you could bring your friends over and say, “Here’s my book,” and come back with your kids and your grandkids and you’d be like, “Here’s the book that I wrote for the New York Public Library.”
So we made a game where that’s exactly what happened. Anyone can play it from anywhere in the world. If you want to write a book and bring it to your library, the game can play anywhere. It’s called Find the Future.
We thought we’d kick it off in a really fun way. We invited 500 people to play the game together for the first time. We locked them into the main branch of the library overnight, in the building where Ghostbusters was filmed -- that’s a good visual for people -- 6pm to 6am, locked the doors, nobody was allowed out. So they wrote a book. And they actually played the game overnight. We had a book binder on the premises, so that as they were completing each writing class, they were printing out the pages, and the pages were getting sewn by hand together into this beautiful classically bound book.
At 6am, they all lined up, hand-signed the book, the New York Public Library put it into its rare books collections, said they would defend this book for as long as New York City is standing -- and now their names are in the card catalogue as public authors at the library.
It’s pretty cool to see how you can take somebody who’s always wanted to write a book and then give them that achievement in one night in a way that is really meaningful. To have a book in the rare books collection that has the Gutenberg Bible and the handwritten Declaration of Independence, that’s a pretty cool epic win. So I like to think that games can take things that are hard for us or goals that we might not be able to achieve on our own, and give us the opportunity to do it.
TM: Their direction wasn’t merely, “Okay, write a book by 6am.” You structured the night with quests and levels, so that it wasn’t one big leap, it was a number of steps, correct?
JM: We had 100 classes, and each class was inspired by an object in the library. So for example, the handwritten Declaration of Independence. You had to go on this hunt to find the object. You find the object and we tell you cool things about it. Then that unlocks a writing quest. The quest unlocked in that case: make your own declaration. What would you want to stand up and declare as passionately as Thomas Jefferson declared all those years ago?
And then you had to get 56 people to sign it, just the way he had to get 56 people to sign the original declaration. That becomes one chapter in the book. When you have all 100 chapters, you’ve written a book. It’s called 100 Ways to Make History. It’s basically your best 100 ideas for what we should be doing to change the world, to make history, to reinvent the future. We help you write the book.
TM: Breaking things down into chunks of quests -- the same way that games do -- releases an enormous amount of creativity. Another real world example is the game you invented to help yourself when you suffered post-concussion syndrome.
JM: That is actually the project I’m spending most of my time on now. It started more than a couple of years ago. I had a concussion that did not heal properly, and I was stuck in this post-concussion state where I couldn’t really read or write, I couldn’t be that physically active. I had horrible headaches and nausea, and was really depressed and anxious. And I was in the middle of writing my book.
I obviously had to stop writing it. I was really immersed in these ideas and I thought to myself, you know, this is probably the lowest I’ve ever been. I should really see if a game can get me out of this state, because everything that I’ve been looking at in my research says that games provoke positive emotions; games connect us with meaning and purpose; games help us be more resilient. I thought, surely if I could turn this into a game, I could survive it.
So I invented this kind of role-playing adventure game for myself. I originally called it Jane the Concussion Flyer, and I invited my friends and family to play with me. This was really important because I was having a hard time explaining to them just how severe the symptoms were, and how it was impacting my life. It was hard to get on the phone with somebody and say, “By the way I’m completely miserable and I want to die, can you help me?”
But I could say, “Hey, I’m going to play a game to heal my brain, and I have a special role for you to play in the game. Will you play with me?” That opened it up.
So this game involved my friends and family giving me quests to go on -- something as simple as, instead of lying in bed all day, why don’t you sit by the window all day and at least enjoy the view?
Any quest or task took me out of where I was, and they started checking in on me every day to see how I was doing with my quests. And this gave me achievements and help me stay positive.
It worked so well for me that I posted the rules online. I started to hear from people all over the world: “I’m playing this because I’m having knee surgery.” “I’m playing this because I’m taking chemotherapy.” “I’m playing this because I want to quit smoking.” You can actually go online and see people playing it on their blogs and on Facebook. I was taken with how much help it seemed to be, and I decided that we should do it for real -- actually make a real online game that would structure this. We help people who might not be creative enough to roll their own version. We make it possible for them to play. We’re going to launch the game the first week of March.
We’ve been doing clinical trials with Ohio State University Medical Research Center. We’ve been doing the closed beta for the last six months, and it’s pretty exciting for me personally. Something that represented maybe the worst thing that ever happened to me, to get to somewhere where it can be one of the best things I’ve ever done.
TM: That’s really a case of 'gamer heal thyself,' isn’t it?
JM: I do think that it is the resilient thinking of a gamer: When all is lost, there must be something, there is some key I haven’t found, some secret door that I just have to keep looking for. That is a very gamer kind of resilience.
TM: As you point out, gamers who play intensely for hours and hours, fail most of the time. And yet something in the nature of gaming keeps them coming back to it.
Years ago, I imagined that in a future of decreasing resources and places to dispose of waste coupled with a rising population, one path that might save us would be to depend more on experiences than stuff. In the book, you ask, “Why not fix reality?” and you lay out 14 ways that reality could stand to be fixed. One is that games are sustainable, reality isn’t. Talk a bit about this future.
JM: You’re speaking to my heart here, because I think this is one of the most underappreciated aspects... I should probably write a whole book about this. Gamers are not by and large acquiring stuff. They have opted out of this materialistic culture because there is no material there. It’s all about skill acquisition, social action, first hand experience, live experience, that does not by-and-large require a great amount of production or resources. And that is pretty interesting.
People look at gamers and say, “They’re wasting their time. Why aren’t they doing something real? That’s not going to help them get a better job or get ahead in life.”
It’s pretty provocative to realize that we can get so many things that we crave: better social relationships, the ability to learn new things and get good at new things, and to experience that state of flow that we crave more than anything else. If we can get that out of games, then maybe we don’t need to get on the hedonic treadmill where we work 60 hour weeks to earn a ton of money to spend on status objects to convince ourselves that we’re happy and successful.
If in games we experience success and happiness and community and meaning in a way that’s so much more sustainable, and that bypasses all the BS we’ve told ourselves is necessary to be happy in America…That’s pretty subversive, and I think that’s what’s happening.
TM: There’s a conversation right now about the 99 percent and the 1 percent. Some among the 99 percent are asking, how do we get our satisfaction opting out of the world of material accumulation and Wall Street? The better the game, the more you play it, the more sustainable.
JM: At a purely economic level, people talk a lot about the value you get, in terms of hours of engagement, out of buying a game versus other things like books or movies or music -- and it’s pretty amazing. Games are designed to be replayable. Now they’re oftentimes designed with creativity tools inside them, so that once you play the game, you can reinvent it. You can make you’re own levels, you can redesign the game for your friends, learn how to create new worlds within the game.
TM: So that once you’ve mastered it, it still has a challenge left.
JM: And the challenge is creation instead of consumption. That’s very different from any other entertainment product that we consume -- that it so instantly shifts you from consumption into the mode of creation.
TM: You point out that many of the most popular games today don’t have a manual that tells you how it works. Very often you have to discover. Portal is that way, right?
JM: One of my favorite games. A lot of these “technically” might have a manual, but the producer knows nobody reads them, so they don’t put a lot of effort into them any more. You get put in this world, and your first job is to figure out: How does the world work? What am I supposed to do here? What’s my goal? And what does it all mean?
This is very different from traditional games, where, if you give me a checkerboard and you want me to play checkers with you, you have to explain to me how it works. We can’t just start playing, and I learn as we go. So this is really a very different sense of self discovery, self exploration. It requires a lot of intelligent attention in those early phases of the game. You almost never work harder than in the first few minutes of the game as you’re trying to figure out what’s going on.
TM: We’ve said that games also build social cohesion. Many people think of a single kid in a room with a computer. Where does all this sociability come out? How does it happen?
JM: I don’t blame people who still have the stereotype of the single person in front of a screen playing alone because it was like that for a while. If you’re talking about gaming in the '80s and '90s, there was a lot of solitary game play. But then games went online, and they became more and more mutli player. Then they became massively multi player, and they became networked and team-based. If you look at the multidimensional social networks now, if you look at the hours spent gaming on the planet, the majority of them right now are spent playing with people we know in real life.
So that’s not even just playing with people on the internet, this is playing with people we have real life face-to-face relationships with. Whether that’s playing a game like Farmville or Words with Friends on our phone, or playing Call of Duty with our friends who are on the same team. We might not be in the same living room, but we’re playing together online. With games like Rock Band and the Wii games, we’re all in the same living room or the same space playing. That’s the majority of game play.
What’s interesting on top of that, is that cooperative game play is now outperforming competitive on a rate of three to one. People are preferring to play games where they’re on the same side as the other player. If you were imagining people playing together, but trying to beat each other and trying to kill each other’s avatars -- what you have now more often than not is, “Let’s work together,” “Let’s achieve this together.” It’s a totally different social interaction than trying to compete with somebody.
That evolution has dramatically changed what’s going on in terms of the social engagement, which helps make it possible now for us to really get more trust when we play with each other, more respect for each other, more bonding. We’re more likely to help each other in real life after we play these games together.
That’s another area of the research that has been fascinating to follow. Playing these cooperative games with friends and family makes us more cooperative in real life.
TM: If I go back to my sports experience, sports are at the same moment about intense competition and intense cooperation. And I think a player who’s at all aware knows that there’s even cooperation between the competing teams. It takes a great opponent to bring out your best.
JM: And you have to agree to trust that the other team is going to stay in it. You have to trust that everybody is going to value and honor the outcome. Even with competitive games, you are building trust if you get to the end of the game successfully together.
TM: I keep thinking of Robert Wright’s book, Non Zero.
JM: Huge influence on me. Big ideas. I read that years before I started graduate school.
TM: In that book, he says, we think that we grow more and more warlike, when in fact, we grow more and more cooperative.
Another one of my old musings: A question I raised myself 40 years ago: Could the creative among us actually save us from our worst impulses? What if we could create a technology or a media or an artistic expression -- or some combination -- that carries a sense of quality no matter the content? That it would be on some level so essentially true and have an essential integrity that you couldn’t commodify or destroy.
And it seems there’s something to that in here. Here the content is the stretch, it’s pursuing goals, it’s finding your best, it’s cooperating. Are we actually, through this process, able to get around the commodification of everything we do?
JM: I love that idea. As with every other art form and medium and given what a big industry gaming is, it would certainly be a challenge to have that pure of an expression. But look at festivals, things like Burning Man, and the new forms of theater in New York City that are heavily influenced by game design. In Punch Drunk’s production of Sweet No More (in New York now) they take over a whole building, every scene is in a different room, and you have to piece together the play by wandering around.
There are lots of interesting ways that games are leaking into festivals and theater that provides a lot of hope. The famous game designer Will Wright said recently that games are undergoing a Cambrian explosion, referencing the time in evolution where suddenly we went from however many strands of life to massively many more species. Huge experimentation, everything evolving so much more quickly. That’s where it feels like we are with games now. Massive experimentation, massively many more forms and genres, and maybe one of those species will come to be what you are describing, if we get lucky.
TM: If you could stand in the future at 2050 and ask yourself, “Did humanity turn things around?” and if your answer is yes, then how did they do it?
JM: I will tell you how they did it. This will seem like an aside, but bear with me. I’m a big believer in the movement to take back our time.
TM: Jon DeGraff and those folks….
JM: We are working too much. The New Economics Foundation just put out this amazing report on the 21-hour work-week. They want to move the whole planet to a 21-hour work-week for more sustainability, more equitable employment, so we have more time to spend with our family and friends, doing things that matter intrinsically to us. And to move to a less materialistic, consumption-oriented society.
I believe that is how we would turn it around, and I think gamers are showing us the way because of how much they value this thing that has no extrinsic value, that doesn’t necessarily help them get ahead in the work place. They spend hours doing this thing that provides all these intrinsic rewards. We can make time for ourselves to play by letting go of our obsession with the formalized 40-hour work-week.
TM: When we look back we’ll say that once that started happening, we had at least come to a fork in the road, and we were headed in the right direction.

Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles and WBA I99.5FM, New York (streaming

Fighting for our lives: why we need a revolution

2012-02-23T16:41:00.001-08:00

Fighting for our lives: why we need a revolution
by Talita Soares on February 22, 2012

We need a revolution because this system is not a system for the people; because even those who are on the favored side are not able to find true fulfillment.
By Talita Soares
We need a revolution.
Not only because we don’t have enough jobs, not only because the public health system is no longer functional. Not only because our politicians are corrupt or because our teachers are not getting paid.
We need a revolution because every single day, every single hour, maybe, a perharps higly-paid, higly-respected office worker blows his brains out with a pistol gun. We need a revolution because of all the rich spoiled teenagers who are right now looking out of their bedroom windows wondering what the hell is the point of it all.
We need a revolution because this system is not a system where people can live the way they are meant to live; because even those who are on the favored side of it are not able to find true fulfillment — this is not a system created by or for the people, but a system created by the untamed power of money alone.
When money loses its human quality, when it no longer serves the people but rather the other way around, we are no longer living in a human reality, but in a distorted one; one that our souls do not recognise and do not know how to cope with.
We need a revolution in order to bring reality back to a level where love and compassion — forces that are naturally inherent to every human being — can regain their original power. In the times we live in, every time a human being speaks from the heart, he or she is making a political statement.
In an interview about the time he spent at the acampada on Plaza Catalunya in Spain, Eduardo Galeano said that the revolutionary quality of the youth riots in Europe came from the enthusiasm they were able to make emerge. Enthusiasm — there is something that mega-corporations will never have any control over.
To hold this enthusiasm through concrete debating and building of new societal structures is what can ultimately be defined as a revolution. When we protest, may it not be the voice of frustration and anger to make our throats vibrate, but the voice of sharp awareness of the pain of the world and the steps we need to take towards its healing — we need to be lucid in our passion, and passionate in our lucidity.
In today’s society, it is safe to say that the feeling of not fitting in has become as universal as human nature itself. There are as many outsiders in this world as there are people, all circling around one empty imaginary “inside”, an absurd fabrication of corporate consumerism.
We are all black sheep trapped in the illusion that everyone else is a white sheep. The new society will be built by no one else but those who simply dare to speak the truth. That is all it takes. Through that we can break out of the imaginary separation we live in. And may it be said again: That is all it takes.
And what’s more, it is also a very good strategy. The system knows how to deal with explosive riots in the streets, terrorist attacks and bank robbings — it is all a part of its dynamics, and it can very easily be turned into marketable, mind-numbing entertainment for the masses.
However, there are moments that retain a certain special quality — a quality that shall be called irreproducibility — that are capable of creating something that is truly unprecedented. Let’s call it something human. This is where we should start working from. Resistance begins in everything that is not appropriate for mass-production — in all authentic, personal experiences.
There are cracks in the system through which light can shine in. Together they form the infinite starry sky. Through connecting those shiny spots, you can form constellations. A group of tiny points of light can be combined to form the picture of a huge mighty lion. Together, they can make one see clearly even in the darkest night.
Every racing heart is a pulsing star! And every time someone looks at the sky with an open heart, a revolutionary is born. It is where it all begins. From the French Revolution to the barricades, a beautiful sky is needed to remind us of where we come from — and where we are going.
Ultimately, that is what brings us to the streets. That is what we are fighting for. A new society is needed in order to give the stars the place that they deserve inside our souls.
When we fight, we are fighting for our lives.
A print version will appear in the Other Reality Magazine.

via roarmag.org

A message from the streets of Athens: “save us no more!” | Reflections on a Revolution ROAR

2012-02-23T16:40:00.001-08:00

A message from the streets of Athens: “save us no more!”
by Leonidas Oikonomakis on February 23, 2012

We don’t want your money. We don’t want your lies. We don’t want your conditions. We just want to live. No sheep was ever saved through bleating.
By Leonidas Oikonomakis
To Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik,
who were murdered in Homs yesterday
Tuesday, 16 February 2012. Brussels.
The bad pupil, once again, is Greece. And so the eurozone Finance Ministers approve a ‘rescue’ package deal (as they prefer to call it) of 130 billion euros to ‘save’ her from her bad self.
I watched them smiling and congratulating each other, jubilant that they had a deal: Luxemburg’s Prime Minister and Eurogroup President Jean-Claude Juncker, Greece’s unelected Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, IMF Chief Christine Lagarde. I also watched Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos and ex-Prime Minister Giorgos Papandreou (both members of the political class that led Greece to this point) hailing the deal and urging for more democracy in Europe [sic], while at the same time apologizing for the misbehaving citizens of their country who “had for years been disillusioned by wealth with feet of clay.”
Wednesday, 17 February 2012. Athens.
The citizens of Athens — pensioners, workers, unemployed and students — are protesting against the new deal and the new austerity measures that accompany it, ahead of the vote for approval of the related emergency bill legislation. They do not share their — unelected — government’s jubilant mood and consider the new austerity measures a stairway to poverty and despair. And they express their sarcasm for the dominant rhetoric:
“Have you heard the news? They have rescued us again!”
They are not being ungrateful; they are right. Because what the new austerity measures will mean for them is:
An additional 15 percent wage cut to their salaries — which have already been reduced by 30 percent since 2009 — to increase ‘competitiveness’, or so they say;
A 22 percent reduction of the minimum wage: 32 percent for people under 25, to tackle youth unemployment [!], or so they say;
Which in turn automatically brings unemployment benefits (for those lucky ones who are eligible for one, for Greece does not have a minimum income scheme) to a level below the poverty threshold;
A 7-20 percent cut in pensions (including those pensions currently as low as 300 euros);
Laying off 15.000 civil servants in 2012, and 150.000 before 2015 (in a country with more than 20 percent unemployment already!);
A 1,1 billion euro reduction in pharmaceutical expenditures;
Just a tiny 0.15% GDP reduction in military expenditure (Greece has been the #6 top-spender on military equipment as a share of GDP in the world in the past 15 years, displaying a major preference to German and French weapons);
At the same time, (profitable!) state owned enterprises and assets (ports, airports, motorways, energy, real estate) will be privatized (“transferred to more productive uses”, as they call it in the neoliberal slang).
A message from the streets of Athens: “no more rescuing!”
What is more, the people of Greece have never been asked whether they wish to be rescued, or at least to be rescued in such a way: in exchange for labor rights; wage and pension cuts to levels of slavery or — at least — poverty; civil sector lay-offs; fire-sale privatization of state assets; the destruction of the welfare state. Instead, an unelected government under the orders of a Troika is taking decisions on their behalf.
And at the end of the day, who is really being rescued? The people of Greece? The eurozone? The banks? The country’s political establishment?
The answer is yours.
“After the uprising of June 17,
the Secretariat of the Writers’ Union
handed out a few leaflets on Stalin Avenue
in which one could read that the people
had lost the government’s trust
and that only with great effort
could they recover it.
Would it not be easier
for the government to dissolve the people
and elect another?”
~ Bertold Brecht
P.S don’t believe what they tell you: this crisis is first and foremost socio-political.
“No sheep was ever rescued through bleating.”

via roarmag.org

The Impossibility of Flying Heavy Aircraft Without Training NILA SAGADEVAN

2012-02-22T21:48:00.001-08:00

The Impossibility of
Flying Heavy Aircraft
Without Training

NILA SAGADEVAN / Earth's Common Sense Think Tank 13jun2006

Nila Sagadevan is an aeronautical engineer and a qualified pilot of heavy aircraft.

[Mindfully.org note: Specifications for Boeing 757 and Cessna 172 are from Wikipedia. See other drawing below]

There are some who maintain that the mythical 9/11 hijackers, although proven to be too incompetent to fly a little Cessna 172, had acquired the impressive skills that enabled them to fly airliners by training in flight simulators.

What follows is an attempt to bury this myth once and for all, because I've heard this ludicrous explanation bandied about, at nauseam, on the Internet and the TV networks" "invariably by people who know nothing substantive about flight simulators, flying, or even airplanes.

A common misconception non-pilots have about simulators is how "easy" it is to operate them. They are indeed relatively easy to operate if the objective is to make a few lazy turns and frolic about in the "open sky". But if the intent is to execute any kind of a maneuver with even the least bit of precision, the task immediately becomes quite daunting. And if the aim is to navigate to a specific geographic location hundreds of miles away while flying at over 500 MPH, 30,000 feet above the ground the challenges become virtually impossible for an untrained pilot.

And this, precisely, is what the four hijacker pilots who could not fly a Cessna around an airport are alleged to have accomplished in multi-ton, high-speed commercial jets on 9/11.

For a person not conversant with the practical complexities of pilotage, a modern flight simulator could present a terribly confusing and disorienting experience. These complex training devices are not even remotely similar to the video games one sees in amusement arcades, or even the software versions available for home computers.

In order to operate a modern flight simulator with any level of skill, one has to not only be a decent pilot to begin with, but also a skilled instrument-rated one to boot and be thoroughly familiar with the actual aircraft type the simulator represents, since the cockpit layouts vary between aircraft.

The only flight domains where an arcade / PC-type game would even begin to approach the degree of visual realism of a modern professional flight simulator would be during the take-off and landing phases. During these phases, of course, one clearly sees the bright runway lights stretched out ahead, and even peripherally sees images of buildings, etc. moving past. Take-offs "even landings, to a certain degree" are relatively "easy" because the pilot has visual reference cues that exist "outside" the cockpit.

But once you've rotated, climbed out, and reached cruising altitude in a simulator (or real airplane), and find yourself en route to some distant destination (using sophisticated electronic navigation techniques), the situation changes drastically: the pilot loses virtually all external visual reference cues. She / he is left entirely at the mercy of an array of complex flight and navigation instruments to provide situational cues (altitude, heading, speed, attitude, etc.)

In the case of a Boeing 757 or 767, the pilot would be faced with an EFIS (Electronic Flight Instrumentation System) panel comprised of six large multi-mode LCDs interspersed with clusters of assorted "hard" instruments. These displays process the raw aircraft system and flight data into an integrated picture of the aircraft situation, position and progress, not only in horizontal and vertical dimensions, but also with regard to time and speed as well. When flying "blind", i.e., with no ground reference cues, it takes a highly skilled pilot to interpret, and then apply, this data intelligently. If one cannot translate this information quickly, precisely and accurately (and it takes an instrument-rated pilot to do so), one would have ZERO SITUATIONAL AWARENESS. I.e., the pilot wouldn't have a clue where she / he was in relation to the earth. Flight under such conditions is referred to as "IFR", or Instrument Flight Rules.

And IFR Rule #1: Never take your eyes off your instruments, because that's all you have!

The corollary to Rule #1: If you can't read the instruments in a quick, smooth, disciplined, scan, you are as good as dead. Accident records from around the world are replete with reports of any number of good pilots "i.e., professional instrument-rated pilots " who ‘bought the farm' because they screwed up while flying in IFR conditions.

Let me place this in the context of the 9/11 hijacker-pilots. These men were repeatedly deemed incompetent to solo a simple “Cessna-172”, an elementary exercise that involves flying this little trainer once around the patch on a sunny day. A student's first solo flight involves a simple circuit: take-off, followed by four gentle left turns ending with a landing back on the runway. This is as basic as flying can possibly get.

Not one of the hijackers was deemed fit to perform this most elementary exercise by himself, in fact, here is what their flight instructors had to say about the aptitude of these budding aviators:

Mohammed Atta: "His attention span was zero."

Khalid Al-Mihdhar: "We didn't kick him out, but he didn't live up to our standards."

Marwan Al-Shehhi: "He was dropped because of his limited English and incompetence at the controls."

Salem Al-Hazmi: "We advised him to quit after two lessons."

Hani Hanjour: "His English was horrible, and his mechanical skills were even worse. It was like he had hardly even ever driven a car. I'm still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon. He could not fly at all."

Now let's take a look at American Airlines Flight 77. Passenger / hijacker Hani Hanjour rises from his seat midway through the flight, viciously fights his way into the cockpit with his cohorts, overpowers Captain Charles F. Burlingame and First Officer David Charlebois, and somehow manages to toss them out of the cockpit (for starters, very difficult to achieve in a cramped environment without inadvertently impacting the yoke and thereby disengaging the autopilot). One would correctly presume that this would present considerable difficulties to a little guy with a “box cutter". Burlingame was a tough, burly, ex-Vietnam F4 fighter jock, who had flown over 100 combat missions. Every pilot who knows him says that rather than politely hand over the controls, Burlingame would have instantly rolled the plane on its back so that Hanjour would have broken his neck when he hit the floor. But let's ignore this almost natural reaction expected of a fighter pilot and proceed with this charade.

Nonetheless, imagine that Hanjour overpowers the flight deck crew, removes them from the cockpit and takes his position in the captain's seat. Although weather reports state this was not the case, let's say Hanjour was lucky enough to experience a perfect CAVU day (Ceiling And Visibility Unlimited). If Hanjour looked straight ahead through the windshield, or off to his left at the ground, at best he would see, 35,000 feet - - 7 miles - - below him, a murky brownish-gray-green landscape, virtually devoid of surface detail, while the aircraft he was now piloting was moving along, almost imperceptibly and in eerie silence, at around 500 MPH (about 750 feet every second).

In a real-world scenario (and given the reported weather conditions that day), he would likely have seen clouds below him completely obscuring the ground he was traversing. With this kind of "situational non-awareness", Hanjour might as well have been flying over Argentina, Russia, or Japan he wouldn't have had a clue as to where, precisely, he was.

After a few seconds (at 750 feet per second), Hanjour would figure out there's little point in looking outside - there is nothing there to give him any real visual cues. For a man who had previously wrestled with little Cessnas, following freeways and railroad tracks (and always in the comforting presence of an instructor), this would have been a strange, eerily unsettling environment indeed.

Seeing nothing outside, Mr. Hanjour would be forced to divert his attention to his instrument panel, where he would be faced with a bewildering array of instruments. He would then have to very quickly interpret his heading, ground track, altitude, and airspeed information on the displays before he could even figure out where in the world he was, much less where the Pentagon was located in relation to his position!

After all, before he can crash into a target, he has to first find the target.

It is very difficult to explain this scenario, of an utter lack of ground reference, to non-pilots; but let it suffice to say that for these incompetent hijacker non-pilots to even consider grappling with such a daunting task would have been utterly overwhelming. They wouldn't have known where to begin.

But, for the sake of discussion let's stretch things beyond all plausibility and say that Hanjour - whose flight instructor claimed "couldn't fly at all" - somehow managed to figure out their exact position on the American landscape in relation to their intended target as they traversed the earth at a speed five times faster than they had ever flown by themselves before.

Once he had determined exactly where he was, he would need to figure out where the Pentagon was located in relation to his rapidly changing position. He would then need to plot a course to his target (one he cannot see with his eyes - remember, our ace is flying solely on instruments).

In order to perform this bit of electronic navigation, he would have to be very familiar with IFR procedures. None of these chaps even knew what a navigational chart looked like, much less how to plug information into flight management computers (FMC) and engage LNAV (lateral navigation automated mode). If one is to believe the official story, all of this was supposedly accomplished by raw student pilots, while flying blind at 500 MPH, (about 750 feet every second) over 30,000 feet high and above the unfamiliar ground, (and practically invisible) terrain, using complex methodologies and employing sophisticated instruments.

To get around this little problem, the official storyline suggests these men manually flew their aircraft to their respective targets (NB: This still wouldn't relieve them of the burden of navigation). But let's assume Hanjour disengaged the autopilot and auto-throttle and hand-flew the aircraft to its intended - and invisible - target on instruments alone until such time as he could get a visual fix. This would have necessitated him to fly back across West Virginia and Virginia to Washington DC. - - This portion of the Flight 77's flight path cannot be corroborated by any radar evidence that exists, because the aircraft is said to have suddenly disappeared from radar screens over Ohio, but let's not mull over that little point. - -

According to FAA radar controllers, "Flight 77" then suddenly pops up over Washington DC and executes an incredibly precise diving turn at a rate of 360 degrees per minute while descending at 3,500 feet per minute, at the end of which "Hanjour" allegedly levels out at ground level. Oh, I almost forgot: He also had the presence of mind to turn off the transponder in the middle of this incredibly difficult maneuver, - - one of his instructors later commented the hapless fellow couldn't have spelt the word if his life depended on it. - -

The maneuver was in fact so precisely executed that the air traffic controllers at Dulles refused to believe the blip on their screen was a commercial airliner. Danielle O'Brian, one of the air traffic controllers at Dulles who reported seeing the aircraft at 9:25 said, "The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane."

And then, all of a sudden we have magic. Voila! Hanjour finds the Pentagon sitting squarely in his sights right before him.

But even that wasn't good enough for this fanatic Muslim kamikaze pilot. You see, he found that his "missile" was heading towards one of the most densely populated wings of the Pentagon - and one occupied by top military brass, including the Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld. Presumably in order to save these men's lives, he then executes a sweeping 270-degree turn and approaches the building from the opposite direction and aligns himself with the only wing of the Pentagon that was virtually uninhabited due to extensive renovations that were underway - -, there were some 120 civilians construction workers in that wing who were killed; their work included blast-proofing the outside wall of that wing. - -

I shan't get into the aerodynamic impossibility of flying a large commercial jetliner 20 feet above the ground at over 400 MPH. A discussion on ground effect energy, tip vortex compression, downwash sheet reaction, wake turbulence, and jetblast effects are beyond the scope of this article (the 100,000-lb jetblast alone would have blown whole semi-trucks off the roads.)

Let it suffice to say that it is physically impossible to fly a 200,000 pounds airliner 20 feet above the ground at 400 MPH.

The author, a pilot and aeronautical engineer, challenges any pilot in the world to do so in any large high-speed aircraft that has a relatively low wing-loading (such as a commercial jets), i.e., to fly the craft at 400 MPH, 20 feet above ground in a flat trajectory over a distance of one mile.

Why the stipulation of 20 feet and a mile? There were several street light poles located up to a mile away from the Pentagon that were snapped-off by the incoming aircraft; this suggests a low, flat trajectory during the final pre-impact approach phase. Further, it is known that the craft impacted the Pentagon's ground floor. For purposes of reference: If a 757 were placed on the ground on its engine nacelles (I.e., gear retracted as in flight profile), its nose would be almost 20 above the ground! Ergo, for the aircraft to impact the ground floor of the Pentagon, Hanjour would have needed to have flown in with the engines buried 10-feet deep in the Pentagon lawn. Some pilot.

At any rate, why is such ultra-low-level flight aerodynamically impossible? Because the reactive force of the hugely powerful downwash sheet, coupled with the compressibility effects of the tip vortices, simply will not allow the aircraft to get any lower to the ground than approximately one half the distance of its wingspan - until speed is drastically reduced, which, of course, is what happens during normal landings.

In other words, if this were a Boeing 757 as reported, the plane could not have been flown below about 60 feet above ground at 400 MPH. (Such a maneuver is entirely within the performance envelope of aircraft with high wing-loadings, such as ground-attack fighters, the B1-B bomber, and Cruise missiles - and the Global Hawk.)

The very same navigational challenges mentioned above would have faced the pilots who flew the two 767s into the Twin Towers, in that they, too, would have had to have first found their targets. Again, these chaps, too, miraculously found themselves spot on course. And again, their "final approach" maneuvers at over 500 MPH are simply far too incredible to have been executed by pilots who could not solo basic training aircraft.

Conclusion
The writers of the official storyline expect us to believe, that once the flight deck crews had been overpowered, using “box cutters" and the hijackers "took control" of the various aircraft, their intended targets suddenly popped up in their windshields as they would have in some arcade game, and all that these fellows would have had to do was simply aim their airplanes at the buildings and fly into them. Most people who have been exposed only to the official storyline have never been on the flight deck of an airliner at altitude and looked at the outside world; if they had, they would realize the absurdity of this kind of reasoning.

In reality, a clueless non-pilot would encounter almost insurmountable difficulties in attempting to navigate and fly a 200,000 pounds airliner into a building located on the ground, 7 miles below and hundreds of miles away and out of sight, and in an unknown direction, while flying at over 500 MPH - and all this under extremely stressful circumstances.

About the Author: Nila Sagadevan was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and educated in Britain. A former commercial pilot, he holds a degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Edinburgh and works as a communications consultant. He lives with his wife and son in Laguna Hills, CA. and may be reached at nila@omnicomltd.com

source: http://www.venusproject.com/ethics_in_action/911_Impossible_Flying_757.html 13jun2006

scaled drawing from Boeing website simplified by Mindfully.org 14jun2006

Interesting. I used to fly and I thought the official backstory was unreasonable.

John Glenn's 1962 Orbital Space Flight

2012-02-22T21:40:00.001-08:00

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FROM RU

2012-02-22T21:10:00.001-08:00

via i2.2photo.ru

San Francisco Street Art / Murals

2012-02-22T19:01:00.001-08:00

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Man with crutches can dance : theCHIVE

2012-02-22T18:26:00.001-08:00

Man with crutches doesn’t let them hinder his dancing (Video)

February 22, 2012 | Author: Bob | In: Art, Awesome, Mind Blowing, Sports, Video

Dergin Tokmak was born December 26, 1973 in Augsburg, Germany. He contracted polio when he was 1 year old. Poliomyelitis is a virus that attacks the nerves that control your muscles. In Dergin’s case, he lost the control of his left leg and some of the control of his right. However, undeterred, Dergin has made it his life’s work to perfect his own dancing style that utilizes his crutches — Amazing….

2012 Dergin Tokmak”Dancing on Crutches”STIX Tanzen auf Kruecken
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via thechive.com