Tag Archives: Viral

Nas Daily is Borat for dumb millennials. Israeli Hasbara with pseudo goy knave.

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Mondoweiss has the goods on Nas Daily, but they’re wise enough to let readers connect the dots. Let’s do it shall we? Nas Daily is a viral sensation on Youtube. It presumes to trot the globe presenting a sixty second travelogue for a new location everyday, minus the travel time, location scouting, casting, shooting, editing, seeking permissions, and marketing. Admittedly the inanity of the content must write itself.

At best, Nas segments are compilations of travel agency footage, woven with drone-shot videos of the 25-yr-old “Nas” spazzing out with troops of multiracial peri-pubertals around whatever tourist attraction or cultural distinction Nas thinks will blow your mind. The high production costs, the innocuous feel-good themes, and the obvious PR services, leave no doubt the “viral” load is engineered. But by whom?

Nas, aka Nuseir Yassin, is also dishonest because he’s not globe-hopping with abandon, as the videos suggest. That part is already in the can. While viewers think they’re supporting his search for new exotic destinations, he’s home binging on Taurine and Final Cut Pro.

Nas Daily doesn’t warrant mention, actually, until the interspersed episodes seeking to depoliticize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Then Nuseir’s being a Muslim Palestinian Israeli, happy genocide denier, makes it absolutely clear who is behind these videos. This is Hasbara product focused on legitimizing the Israel colonial project. No wonder Nas doesn’t like BDS.

Borat was Zionist blackface slapstick which smeared Islamic stereotypes with excrement. This collaborator Borat may be an authentic Muslim, promoting tolerance for all cultural differences, but his secular apolitical whitewash is equally vile.

Syria neoliberal invasion ad campaign casts chicks with guns but no helmets

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THAT’S RICH. When they’re not bombarding western viewers with contrived photo-ops of camera-facing toddlers, victimized by Asad’s bombs never ours, the neoliberal propagandists are fishing for left-leaning sympathies with “Freedom Fighters” who Americans could not should not leave behind. Meet the West’s own Femen ForWar, Kurdish anarchist insurgents, one even dubbed “Angelina Jolie”, who are photographed in action, with wide smiles in sniper’s nests, looking like they’re otherwise hanging in homeroom detention. I’m surprised we never see the lighting crews or makeup artists reflected in the shattered glass, but what we don’t see in plain sight are HELMETS. Apparently only real soldiers need those.

There’s even a Chicks-with-Guns meme gone viral of a bareheaded Freedom Fighter breaking into a huge grin after narrowly escaping a sniper’s bullet. One man’s insurgent is another man’s freedom fighter. Western media’s freedom fighters are your Freedom Fries.

March on DC with your own protest message, not one dictated by NGOs. Yes, you’ll need a banner and poles.

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Denver Womens March 2012Organizers of the post-inaugural WOMEN’S MARCH in Washington DC this weekend are telling participants not to bring poles for signs or flags, or even knapsacks. Ha ha ha. As you travel across the country to march, remember who’s making the real sacrifice. The march coordinators are paid. You are spending the time and expense because you have something to express. Bring it. The only reason organizers want you unequipped is so your [rogue] message won’t stray from theirs. Does that sound democratic? They also have a different goal than you. Their mission is to pull off a smooth event. Yours is to make history.

As a veteran of countless protest marches, national, regional and international, I encourage newcomers to stick to their nonconformist inclinations. Independent critical thinking is what led you to take action in the first place.

To begin, THIS IS YOUR MARCH.
Washington DC belongs to you. Inauguration Day and its aftermath belong to you. Just because someone squats a Facebook event on a day conducive to public gathering doesn’t give them dibs to call the shots. A stand-alone call to arms, such as MLK’s Million Man March or CodePink’s A Billion Rising, is another matter. Spontaneous uprisings against historic events are no one organization’s to control or temper. Especially if they begin with capitulations to the state.

Here’s the usual pattern. After a FB event goes viral, nonprofit activist groups jump in to offer their expertise, resources and manpower. The nonprofits thus dominate the details and the event originators have little ground to object. Thrilled to see “their” event succeed, these new-to-the-spotlight activists don’t know that street protest is anathema to nonprofits whose existential foundation is not to disrupt politics as usual. Falling into the trap of coordinating ineffective demonstrations is often blamed on newbie error, but in Washington DC, newbies making the newbie mistakes are employees of nonprofits seeded to pretend the event had a grassroots origin. What the NGOs are really doing is setting a prescribed burn, or backfire.

Backfire: a fire set intentionally to arrest the progress of an approaching fire by creating a burned area in its path, thus depriving the fire of fuel.

Bastards! Fortunately backfire has a further meaning, probably not unrelated to the sketchy forestry strategem.

Backfire: rebound adversely on the originator; have the opposite effect to what was intended.

Just as DC lobbyists monopolize your representatives, professional activists have staked out the capitol and squatted on what is the public’s only access to speak to power. Accept their invitation to come to DC. Thank them for their legal support, their logistics and water bottles, but you’ll handle your messaging thank you.

NOTES FOR NEXT TIME
(If you’d prefer not to dwell on criticism, please skip to the section on RULES. For me, these counterproductive “mistakes” set us back every time we give them a pass.)

1. Telling participants they can’t bring stuff like food or chairs! The event’s duration is being throttled to what can be endured between meals, without a pause for rest. Do you go to meetings without chairs? In the cold outdoors one can’t even sit on the ground.

2. Hiring private security contractors, “some identifiable, some undercover”. WTF? DC’s cops, National Guard, Secret Service, and “Shadow Teams” aren’t enough?

3. Coordinating with police. What? What?! To whom Black Lives Can’t Even Matter? Sorry no.

4. Stifling expression with limits on how to carry signs. Without sticks. “Flags but without poles.” Restricting marchers to signs reinforced with only cardboard tubing. Viewed from a perspective to show the numbers, the march will bear no legible message at all.

5. Telling marchers they must handcarry small bags. You’d think they don’t want marchers’ hands free to carry signs at all.

6. Stooping to a permit, as an excuse to self-police and make participants feel honor bound to unecessary concessions (the permit terms). You don’t need a permit for First Amendment activities. NGOs use permits to effectively reserve public areas and restrict their concurrent use by others. It’s a means to control public space.

7. Scheduling the march on the day after the main event, in time to disrupt nothing. Diluting the inherent outcry, expending from everyone’s discretionary resources to converge on DC. As a result we’ll have two mobilizations. Both massive, hopefully, intead of one which could have TIPPED THE SCALE.

RULES ARE
Meant to be broken. Permit holders can enforce rules within the confines of their event area, with the assistance of authorities if needed, but not outside it. Organizer “rules” can’t be enforced on Metro, or on public streets, or along march route. DC police may pretend they have that authority but they don’t. Cops lie. Know your rights.

To hold a sign where it’s visible in a march, and big enough to where it can be seen among multitudes, you need poles.

BRING POLES.
There is no safety reason whatsoever, in Washington DC, for forbidding the use of sign poles. We’ve seen pole restrictions attempted at national conventions, in close-in urban areas with vulnerable storefront windows, but Washington’s boulevards and setbacked facades evolved with political marches. Demonstrations, parades and motorcades are everyday for DC. Your sign poles pose zero threat and you don’t have to relinquish them. Not Post-911, nor in the Age of Trump. If an NGO-deputized cop won’t allow your entry to their rally, their privatized-park, have someone wait with the contraband outside its bounds. Banners are best seen on the edges of rallies anyway. When attendance numbers reach overload, you’re golden. Move with the numbers. Otherwise wait and join in as the march departs from the rally.

What’s best for poles? Lengths of bamboo from garden nurseries. Bamboo is stiff, light, and utterly non-threatening. Eight footers will hold a banner above marchers’ heads while still allowing you to rest the poles on the ground when the march lags. Six foot lengths give you adequate leverage to keep the banner taut but are more work. Either are cheap and expendable. Bring extra. Bamboo are thin enough to hold reserve pieces bundled. You can grasp a bundle of three as readily as a single pole. Those extra poles can be allocated as you see other marchers in need.

Let’s rule out pipe, lumber and dowels for being too heavy. Broom handles are expensive. Wooden stakes are uncomfortable and too short, and apparently, too “pointy”.

Various widths of PVC are rigid enough to about eight feet. Steel electrical conduit can give you ten feet. Both are cheaply available at neighborhood hardware stores. The baggage holds of charter buses can’t accommodate pieces over eight feet.

Alternatives to fixed lengths poles would be telescoping poles such as hiking sticks or monopods. Usually these do not extend beyond five feet. Longer telescoping tool handles used for painting for example extend but won’t contract to shorter than five feet or so.

Sectional poles such as geodesic tent poles can be folded to different length permutations. Depending on the weight of your banner material, multiple tent poles may be required to provide sufficient stiffness.

The benefit of collapsible poles is that you can conceal them until you are ready. Provided you have a BAG.

BRING A BAG
There are plenty of ordinary reasons to need a bag. Lunch. Extra layers of clothing. Hat, sunglasses, bandana. Extra gloves, hand warmers, snacks, literature to share, stuff handed you at the rally.

As a banner holder you’ll need supplies like duct tape, markers and string to fix signs, and those aforementioned extra tent poles. Maybe a backup banner or gag props for an alternative photo op.

We bring bags to work, school and play. Who expects that a day traversing DC doesn’t call for a bag?

Don’t be fooled into believing that for safety reasons all bags must be clear plastic. DC surveillance can spot the excess heft of dangerous materials such as explosives or weapons, without having to see them. What they’re really looking for are items like ropes, carabiners, harnesses, goggles, which activists can use for nonviolent fun, to mix things up and entertain, provide media moments and get attention.

Besides which, clear bags will make for unsightly messy photos. Neither does your bag need to be restricted in size. Bring a backpack or knapsack. Leave your hands free to carry that sign!

The best reason for you to shoulder an ordinary opaque knapsack is to give cover for others to bring bags with necessities you overlooked. Cameras, accessories, extra socks, bullhorns, batteries, umbrellas etc.

There’s nothing so heartbreaking as a mass of people who’ve come from across the country to participate in a march that goes nowhere. An uneventful demonstration garners no press, wins no recruits, and only burns out those who thought they came to DC to effect change.

I watched half a million hispanic Americans assemble on the National Mall for Immigrant Rights. Many of those half million took a great risk marching in DC. It’s possible many as a result were deported. They could only follow the rules of course, received no media coverage, and accomplished fuck-all.

BRING CHAIRS
Come to DC with a demand, but bring more than the leverage of numbers. Carry with you the potential that you might LINGER. That’s the pressure the media can’t ignore.

Chairs, umbrellas, canopies, tents, enhance your stamina and protect you from the elements. The longer your protest runs, the more time there will be for latecomers to join in. That’s the momentum the state is worried about. Project that.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” – Frederick Douglass

Douglass also said: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Your march organizers have promised their DC colleagues a toothless beast. It’s not what they tell their donors, nor how they phrased their invitation to you. You brought your physical body to DC to support the cause. Is it theirs to squander?

The History of the Denver Police Department

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Before the Denver Police Department began murdering the men, women and children of Denver, they were burglarizing Denver homes and businesses.
 
In 1960, the largest police corruption scandal in the U.S. to date began to unfold. More than 50 area law-enforcement personnel – almost entirely Denver Police Officers were caught in a burglary ring. Cops had stolen over a quarter of a million dollars from businesses they were supposed to be protecting on their beats over a ten-year period. Police cars would close down a few blocks of a major business avenue, such as University or Broadway, then burglarized and stole the safes from the businesses along the closed down portion of the street. Alarms would be going off all up and down the street, they would take their loot, then respond to the alarms and take the reports. It all came to a crashing halt when an officer named Art Winstanley literally had a safe fall out of the back of his police cruiser. He testified against his fellow officers and then by the end of 1961, 47 police officers had lost their badges. The DPD called it “Back Friday”.

Art was sent to the prison in Canon City along with over 40 of his cop buddies. When the prison door swung shut on Art, he complained to the warden that no one liked or respected him, he said the other convicts were being mean to him and spitting on his food tray; these were the convicts that Art had arrested and sent to prison for crimes that he had committed.

Many of these crimes by the Denver Police Department were known and whispered about at the time by other policemen, citizens and politicians, but for fear of retaliation from the cops, they remained silent.

It was only when one rat with his foot in the trap, trying to save himself, exposed the true extent of the crimes of the Denver Police Department. Sixty five years have now passed and the DPD have moved on from burglary to murder.

There are many who speak out for respect for the policeman, they see his blue uniform and badge, read his propaganda of “Protect & Serve” and then slovenly give them a free pass in all matter, they mistakenly think they are incapable of a lie.

These people are the product of police propaganda and a media who quietly sweeps police crimes and brutality under the rug, never to see the eyes of the public.

One of the best examples I can give is of a recent event; A policeman who was called for a disturbance at a Target store, helped a young boy repair his bike.

It seemed the boys bike chain had come off and the policeman helped him put it back on, the incident was reported by another policeman who was also there. It was said the this incident went viral; So what would my complaint be?

Had You or I, ordinary citizens stopped to help this boy, you would never had heard of the incident and it certainly wouldn’t have went viral.

I didn’t see a cop helping the boy, I saw only a man helping the boy. A blue uniform and badge does not make him a saint.
Truth be known; most of the general public have little or no contact with their police department outside of traffic stops. They have little knowledge of how brutal the unchecked police powers have become. And while these brutal crimes go on unchecked by some policemen, the others remain silent; that in itself is a crime. To be a good cop, he must stand up and bear witness to the crimes he has knowledge of, especially when it is wearing a blue uniform and badge. To do less, is to become a partner in crime.

Would that same cop who helped this boy with his bike, if put in the situation where he saw one of his fellow officers commit a crime, speak out and make an arrest of his fellow officer? History has taught us that he would not.
Where the general public see’s a badge, a blue uniform and give’s their respect, I see a human being that is capable of both good and bad deeds, and should be treated as such just as any citizen would be treated.

A question we might ask: How is it that the DA has not filed one criminal case against the police and yet the juries in civil court have awarded million of dollars to victims of police abuse.

Mitchell R. Morrissey was elected District Attorney of Denver in November 2004 and was sworn into office on January 11, 2005. He is responsible for the prosecution of more than 6,000 felony and 18,000 misdemeanor criminal cases every year.

Heads rolled because the McKinney TX pool party had a video. Where is video of DPD murder of Jessica Hernandez?

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The COPS-GONE-WILD video of 14-year-old Dajerria Becton getting manhandled by McKinney Texas police officer Eric Casebolt got him in trouble. It’s even meant trouble for the racist woman who started the fight, for the racist who called the cops, for a school principal who defended the officer and for another teacher who defended the racism. I’d love to see repercussions too for the crackers pictured in the video waddling about with impunity as the black teens are being picked out. All that, not because some racist shit went down in McKinney TX, but because someone videotaped it and it went viral.

NOW IMAGINE if the cop had pumped four bullets into the teenager, killing her!

Imagine if he’d fired a total of eighteen bullets and he kept pulling the trigger even after he’d emptied his magazine!

How upsetting would that be to see?

If you could imagine that girl a Latina, in a car full of Latina teens, one January morning in Denver, you’d be picturing the police murder of Jessica Hernandez on January 26, 2015. Jessica was unarmed, parked in a vehicle purported to be stolen, with four friends.

If you imagined there might be a video of that too, you wouldn’t be imagining things. Someone did make a video, in defiance of police ordering everyone to put down their phones. By a twist of unhappy fate, the Denver police took that video into evidence. They assure us it shows nothing remarkable. I imagine that might be what authorities in McKinney TX would say about their pool party video if it wasn’t in the public’s possession.

Je Suis a Goddamn Neoliberal Meme… Je Suis Charlie, Neda, Kony, Save Dafur

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40 world leaders march for Charlie Hebdo
A million people mobilized in Paris, including 40 WORLD LEADERS!? How long have their limousines been queued? I usually brag that our corporate foes can’t manufacture consent in the streets, except when they do.

I AM NEDA, KONY 2012, SAVE DARFUR, now JE SUIS CHARLIE are purely neoliberal consolidations of public support. They’re televised Nurenburg rallies masked as spontaneous demonstrations. Add “I AM ___” to “______ Spring” and colored revolutions as dead giveaways of psy-op inspired counterrevolution.

With NYPD turning their backs on their mayor and Westboro Baptists making the protest of soldiers look unreasonable, the choices are narrowing for activists who want to define their struggle with tactics not splooged upon by the lumpen knee jerk Fascists.

A woman approached me yesterday at an anti police brutality demonstration in solidarity with Ferguson. She agreed with the cause, but wanted to know why we weren’t also speaking out for abused children, for example those thrown off bridges by deranged parents. While child abuse has its systemic causes, the answer highlights what differentiates insurgent demonstrations from the false. People take to the streets to challenge power, not to gang up with power to further its oppressive agendas.

Duh. Except the lure of popular causes seems to be irresistable to social justice types normally starved for public support. I saw the “Save Darfur” project twist and fracture my local peace community. Obama Lincoln 2008 had the same effect, another socially engineered bandwagon.

I’m not galled by the hypocracy of world leaders “marching” in Paris, pretending to stand for press freedoms. I’m upset my the millions of Frenchmen duped into attending their photo-op. Those millions of Frenchmen in the same street should have trampled the World Bank kapos underfoot, instead of pretending the corporate cabal were people too.


(Remember when I AM NEDA protests failed to tie a viral snuff vid to false accusations of election fraud in Iran?)

TEDx comes to Dumbville, or, Colorado Springs reads Horton Hears a How

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COLO. SPRINGS- TED-TalksTM likes to say it offers “a spa for your brain” and when I saw that an X-variant was coming to Colorado Springs (“TEDx”s are unaffiliated affiliates. Yeah, uh-oh.) I wondered if a spa might only be as good as its mineral water. Or its mud, or masseurs, whatever. Yes, I foresaw the inevitability of Dumbass Springs confirming its nature, but the lure of a train wreck was strong. I confess my expectations were lower still because incessent shared posts on Facebook have inoculated me with an aversion to the TED motivational formula, no matter the click-bait hyperbole they are AHA-moments For Dummies.

Typically a TED theme holds water for about as long as it takes to incubate a viral meme, but I wondered if in unedited presentation form, do they permit the scrutiny of live input from the audience? They are popular after all. A complementary pass offered the chance to see, and our local franchise had sold out. Could I gag the reflex of skepticism about TED’s curated plethora of inspirational vehicles? To my mind they never fail to carry water (Let’s cross the metaphors) for the neoliberal false-Left, its outside-of-the-box thinkers never truly asserting a POV remote from Capital’s doomed ship whose last exertions mimick being radically progressive enough to impersonate credibility, cross fingers spark hope. TED’s appearance of being crowd-sourced has already been eroded by its gatekeeping against populist lay disciplines. Its novelty was its social media distribution model, otherwise TED is merely another consent-manufacturing think tank of unchanged spots for the pedestrian academic. Will a local TEDx event outsource its attractions or will it local-source from luminary wattage? I ask because our backwater tradition is to elevate dimbulbs. When we mob Ticketmaster it’s for star talent of our ilk. Upcoming exhibit A: Dennis Miller. Ok TED, a full report to follow.

Video evidence supports uncompelling theory that ISIS is an army of one

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ISIS beheading videoWestern warmongers have caught on to viral videos for scaring up public support for military airstrikes against Iraq and Syria. So far three videos have emerged appearing to show a Western captive being beheaded by a faceless executioner presumed to represent “the Islamic State”. Though viewers are purported to be screaming for Islamic blood, the evidence at hand doesn’t implicate more than one person, himself faceless and of indeterminate identity, nationality and religious preference. It could be Mr. Califate himself, if the video is genuine –as usual we have only the CIA’s word on that– or it could be a mercenary under anyone’s employ. Apparently experts are convinced this is provocation enough to launch a war. I say, let the US and its military allies show the intellectual honesty to release videos of detainees they’ve tortured or of families they’ve executed with drones. If videotaped atrocities are going to govern international policy, let the global viewership determine whose side of the war they want to be on.

El Paso County Clerk Wayne Williams wants voter registration fraud evidence pulled from net

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Romney supporter, 20-year-old Mormon Victoria Bautista, registering only Republican votersCOLORADO SPRINGS– A young voter registration activist, by admission soliciting only Mitt Romney supporters, was caught on video saying she worked for the El Paso County Clerk, mistakenly as it turns out. Local Dems have run with the story while Clerk & Recorder Wayne Williams and the Colorado Springs Gazette, both notorious GOP bullies, insist the viral video be taken down because it misrepresents the truth, missing the point about WHO was misrepresenting the truth. Whether the young woman spoke in error, she and perhaps others are representing themselves as county representatives, and the clerk’s damage control is revealing. After clarifying that his office does not employ partisan foot soldiers (although examples abound of Democrats being purged from his staff), Williams scolds only the video taker for “spreading disinformation”. He does not warn citizens to question volunteers who pretend official status, nor does he offer evidence of reprimands or special retraining. Of course all sides are protecting the identity of the 20-year-old Victoria Bautista. Why? At 20 she’s not getting any smarter, or educated obviously. I hardly think it serves our society to coddle anyone screwing with civic participation. Many of our current officials are evidence of what happens when you nurture mediocrity in politics. Are we so hard up we want idiots in authority? I think that’s a characteristic best pruned aggressively like you would rot.

Stop Joseph Kony? Who’s going to stop US military from raping all of Africa?

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Wanna know who’s all over Kony, KONY 2012 that is? Denver’s Global Equality collective is on top of that shit like you wouldn’t believe. You may have thought the viral video debunked and that was that, a screening of KONY 2012 was attempted in Uganda and caused a riotous backlash. But offline and getting no mention in the MSM is our military’s propaganda campaign in the public schools. From elementary to high school, American children are being rallied to push for US military intervention in Africa. Fortunately anti-imperialist Global Equality owns that cause and has been sending operatives into as many Denver area schools as they can. They’ve got multitudes of handouts, posters, and stickers to subvert the pro-intervention line. Unadulterated, the official message has American children pumping their fists to support hunting down warlord Kony. It’s not just boosterism, they’re recruiting! Our Hitler Youth are vowing to join up to defeat Joseph Kony, for the crime of abducting children to fight in his army, aptly named “invisible children” because our would-be conscripts forget that’s who they’ll be killing. If you want to save the children in the Denver schools, contact Global Equality about getting their anti-press-kit, otherwise their resources are available online.

Who else indoctrinates children and trains them for warfare? SONY 2012

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No sooner had the KONY 2012 video gone famously viral, with lots of help from the corporate war-loving media, it was debunked for being US Africa interventionism propaganda. But Springs area schools had already booked the tour, and that’s a difficult about face in these military parts. Yesterday Palmer High School hosted Ft Carson spokesmen who rallied the students to help raise money for US Army operations in Uganda, regardless whether USG or public support wanes. Tomorrow the KONY 2012 circus moves to Colorado College, where the pitch looks to be more skeptical, but the speaker lineup is decidedly pro western imperial expansion. Have you heard that both Joseph Kony and his Ugandan Army foes are behind the rapes and child soldiers? Now the official US Army call to arms proclaims it intends to take out Kony AND the Ugandan government. They’re also telling the kids Uganda doesn’t have any resources the US wants, so trust us, we have no ulterior motive.

Smell test shows KONY 2012 viral vid tests positive for military grade virus

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Solidarity with AngolaWas mainstream media endorsing a viral Youtube video your first clue that the Invisible Children campaign bears the suspicious signs of US war-making propaganda?! What “Save Darfur” was to Sudan, the CIA-spelled backward [Africa’s] Invisible Children operation is to Uganda. With its Libyan protector out of the way, Africa and its resources have never been more accessible, so now AFRICOM’s cross-hairs are on regional insurgent defenders. Apparently Joseph Kony is today’s poster villain, and those pitching a US intervention in Central Africa want to convince the public the engagement would have an exit strategy not to exceed 2012. Flowers and candy.

What are we holding against Joseph Kony, indoctrinating child soldiers? What are American recruiters doing in our middle schools but trolling for our Invisible Children who, undereducated, undernourished and unprotected from predatory militarist propaganda, succumb to the economic or criminal justice draft?

If you don’t see Merry Christmas in the window, no, you don’t go in that store! The Star of David used to do that trick.

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This season’s War-On-Christmas email is pushing a holiday ditty whose refrain goes “If you don’t see Merry Christmas in the window, then you don’t go in that store.” Seems like it might be easier to mark those stores with a Star of David on the window, or would that be too obviously Nazi?
On the other hand, it is refreshing to see even Dumbfox recognize the imperative of targeting commerce to make your point heard. So, boycotts do work?

You can see the Christmas-lovers’ point of course. They’d prefer that merchants exploiting the Christmas purchasing season at least be paying lip service to Christmas and not the ever-looming Godless “Holiday” eclipse, supposed.

This song reminds us “it’s all about the little baby Jesus” and goes on to list all the things Christmas wouldn’t be without him. Of course, half the list traces back to pagan tradition, but what to Christian Holiday-goers know of that?

And the latter half goes back as far as they remember, as their grandmother and her grandmother before might remember, but no more. The commercial Christmas charts its provenance to the industrial revolution, the birth of consumer goods and marketing. Santa Claus as we recognize him stepped right off Coca-cola calendars of the last mid-century.

Christmas was the religious Trojan Horse to pitch the shopping holiday to reluctant hedonists. Now the same parishioners who don’t have an needle’s-eye chance to get to Heaven, feel like the can pay their tithes in Christmas presents.

Yes, I do think it’s funny that people who abhor the prospect of disruptive economic boycotts are willing to consider it at the drop of Santa’s cap. Unless of course they’re satisfied that making this video viral is a shot across the bow enough. I doubt their Christmas Spirit has any room for Lenten restraint.

Oddly enough, one of their potential boycott targets, and mine, has hung banners in its outlets to announce they will be open for Christmas, introducing a delectable dilemma. Starbucks says Merry Christmas in the window, so it’s exempt from this singing email picket, yet it disrespects Christmas by working through it. What do you do?

I answer that one unequivocally. Yes, boycott Starbucks. They fund Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. That may be somewhat directly related to their celebrating Hanukkah not Christmas, but that’s NO KIND OF REASON to boycott a business. If you want to boycott a store because it’s not Christian, take it up with the Anti-Defamation League. Leave bigotry to the Zionists.

Help this Settler-Zombie video go viral before totalitarian zombiehood spreads

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Israeli West Bank Settler lunges at Palestinian youthOMGoodness, finally a settler video to go viral. There’s no bashing of Palestinian heads, no brandishing of guns, no drunken West Bank Settler mob on the rampage, nothing Youtube can censor, it’s pure comic theater! Here is a proverbial fat bully lurching as best he can, goading, coaxing, even screaming primordially, itching to pummel the young Palestinian cameraman who stays nimbly out of reach.

The scenario is spelled out in the Youtube comments, the cameraman is trying to document his friends’ efforts to tend their West Bank land, while Israeli Settlers repeatedly force police confrontations which result in the area being declared “militarized” and thence, theirs. While the cameraman observes, an angry settler who is already trying to allocate the land for his vineyard decides to run him off with brute force.

The ZOMBIE characterization describes Deutch’s particular Lurch-like lack of agility, but the relentless advance is a disturbing body language of Israeli Settler aggression. The hopped-up settlers move upon Palestinians with the confidence that their victims are unarmed and dare not strike back, that the Palestinian can presume that their attackers might have guns, and that sympathetic policemen have the the Israelis’ back. So yes, when it’s an able-bodied young settler advancing at a clip, clapping his fist, looking to draw blood, the effect is less comic.

Obviously, most settler videos are violence porn. Not this one — if you ignore what would have happened had Moshe Deutch got his mitts on him. That footage of course would not have survived.


Be sure to watch the follow-up, where a younger settler arrives at a gallup to reinforce Moshe Deutch’s stalled advance. The cameraman is forced to run, then looks on as the settlers slash all four tires of his car. It’s the high price he pays, but he’s got the West Bank’s Funniest Home Video.

West Bank Settlers intimidating unarmed Palestinian farmers

A face to launch a thousand protests. Leak your trophy footage you cowards

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Young Iraqi watching as US soldiers raid her home
This is a still from John Pilger’s THE WAR YOU DON’T SEE, recently blocked from its US debut in Santa Fe. Why? Because such images will stop war. In particular this shows a terrified Iraqi girl held at gunpoint as her home is searched. I wonder how many such scenes have been captured by embed cameras or GI cellphones. Western eyes are being inoculated to violence and gore, our victims dehumanized, foreign civilians reduced to collateral, but it appears our media managers worry Americans cannot yet resist the ordinary tears of children. Imagine such scenes of heartbreak gone viral across the web. Never mind atrocity or war crime, show us emotional responses with which we can identify. The mass of digital records could doubtless overwhelm Wikileaks. These are not top secret, yet nearly any have been leaked. My appeal to the cowardly US soldier, or the damnable media embed, leak the footage which haunts you already, your PTSD may be the contagion to end public support for our state sponsored terrorism.

Which was more awesome: power of nonviolence, or right of self-defense?

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IDF raid on Mavi Marmara, Freedom Flotilla
Give praise to Allah where praise is due

As the Freedom Flotilla made its slow approach last week, a popular Huffpo article pronounced the convoy a testament to the awesome power of nonviolence. That sentiment went about as viral as activist-geeks can get. But the blockade running denouement proved something of the opposite, didn’t it? I hope the sanctimonious pacifist will be brave enough to admit it. The Muslim Brotherhood bravely charging the Israeli navy was surely the definition of martyr, if anyone has ever earned it. Without pushing the IDF to bare its authoritarian fangs, there would have been no story, no outrage, the end. An entirely compliant convoy would have been led by the nose to Ashdod and diplomatic compromise. Neither Gandhi nor King nor Mandela gained without a massacre they didn’t provoke. It’s a slander to their legacy that nonviolent movements have been co-opted by religious purists who subordinate social justice to self-fulfilment, generally in the guise of your post-earthly reward. Labor organizers used to curse the industrialists’ first line of union busters, the churches which practiced appeasement and promised “pie in the sky when you die, by and by.”

We may view and review the IDF night vision tapes which recorded the hardly nonviolent reception given Israel’s would-be swashbuckling commandos. Those convoy defenders delivering the first blows may appear to be having way too much fun for our sense of propriety. But it’s hard to begrudge men who’ve suffered under the Israeli boot, perhaps even Israeli torture, who’ve never gotten closer to their oppressors than an Israeli sniper’s range would allow. Perhaps they have loved ones to avenge, or ideals higher than secular humanists can credit. Whatever hatred or anger, the bravery it took to lift metal pipes against modern firepower is undeniable. And just like the stone-throwers of their youth, this is the indomitable spirit that buoys their survival. Without this fight, their numbers would entropy to servitude and attrition, lifeless bodies suspended on their invader’s web, to feed the occupier’s young until they are gone.

From our church pews and academic perches we can supplicate they heed the road most honorably traveled. What do Westerners know of pragmatics? At best our reality is theoretical. Really, who are we, we are always wrong. We can neither elect presidents who matter, nor pass legislation that does not agree with our corporate landlords. And we presume to advise on struggles that mean life and death.

Am I saying that there is no efficacy to nonviolent action? Not at all. But I do say, give human nature and righteous anger its due. Nonviolent passivity is for sheep. It will lead us all to an unceremonious death. Wolves count on sheep that don’t bite back. If humans can be divided between wolves and sheep, be upfront with the sheep and perhaps you’ll rouse in some of them a wolf’s courage. That is what will lift your collective humanity.

At this moment a second wave of the Freedom Flotilla is poised to make a second go at Gaza. The MV Rachel Corrie waits in mid Mediterranean for reinforcements to join it, whereupon it too will push Israel’s buttons. Rumors are already circulating that a diplomatic compromise may already have been reached to divert the aid supplies through Egypt. Of course that rumor was spread about the recent flotilla. From the horses mouth however, the Rachel Corrie crew are expressing the desire to avoid a similar disaster, they vow to sit peaceably with arms raised lest IDF interlopers mistake resistance.

This may be the false pacifist bluster that led Israel to underestimate the fighting spirit of the Mavi Marmara’s above deck. Or it may be genuine. Which Israeli game theorists will be eager to plug and play. The MV Rachel Corrie wheelhouse will be handed to the IDF just as a harbor pilot boards to guide a ship into port, IDF gunboats serving as tugboats, aid supplies unloaded at Ashdod, then transferred through an approved border crossing with as much fanfare as collaboration with occupiers will garner. Humanitarian relief delivered but no blockade breached. A Pyrrhic victory that means private interests will forever subsidize the bill which Israel owes.

I have more faith than that in the Free Gaza Movement, they’ve played their cards superbly, if of course lacking the visual aids which it would seem would greatly enliven media coverage. But I’m second guessing there too. Perhaps an imagined picture is better than the reality mundane. The public knows enough about what happened on the Mavi Marmara with just a sliver of video coverage. Even with IDF fine-tuned selective snippets, the public imagination can run with the truth. And organizers are not at liberty to praise the Marmara martyrs. So I will.

I was dismayed when heard on the Marmara’s last video stream, someone pleading with the “brotherhood” to cease their resistance because the activists were facing live ammunition. The admonition was in English, meaning most of the brotherhood would not understand it anyway. If you watched the continuous broadcast, it was almost exclusively in Turkish, suited to its main audience in Turkey. When participants wanted to testify in another language, many onscreen slunk their shoulders until the Turkish was back. Bilingual announcers who asked the hosts which language they should speak were always advised against English. So when the final plea was made to the “brotherhood,” the language seemed deliberately aimed at the Western viewer, a telltale conceit that would bolster Israel’s version of events.

For the most part, what Israel says happened is what happened, to the most significant degree. A lot of damning gunfire may have been omitted from the IDF tapes volunteered to skew public perception, but what pretext more did the brotherhood need to defend the ship against the surprise nocturnal invaders? None.

Just as Israel insists on its right to defend itself, it can hardly deny the convoy the same right.

What is utterly clear is that the Muslim brotherhood didn’t raise its arms chanting Kumbaya, neither did they lock arms to be trampled afoot. As the Israeli special-ops came down from the helicopters, the brotherhood gave them their best wallops. They had no guns, nor swords nor explosives nor booby-traps. They showed amazing restraint for the anger they carried. Yet in the face of overwhelming firepower they ran straight forward, some of them armed only with a plastic chair. I had practically to sympathize with the soldiers coming one at a time down the ropes. That brave first one certainly caught the brunt of a violent ride. Only an inhumanly ardent partisan could not feel pain for that solitary first Israeli battered like a rag doll. We are certainly never treated to videos which have shown that IDF soldiers might feel the pangs in the face of what the violence they are committing.

Case of curious cellphone, bandana and Greyson Chance’s perfect microphone

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Oprah Winfrey records own show on cellphonePT Barnum would have been a terror on Youtube –I’m certainly sobered to see what fools America every time. Is sudden-tween-throb Greyson Chance’s talent for real? Too soon to say. But the 6th grade sound man at Cheyenne School of Edmond, Oklahoma has unlikely genius. * What’s hard to believe about doctors bandaging Bret Michaels’ massive brain hemorrhage with his signature headband? * And my favorite, Oprah Winfrey recording a show performance with her cellphone to attest to her surprise at “the coolest thing ever!”

Oprah
It happened ages ago (in blog-years) but television talk shows bind these three example together. Do you remember Oprah’s anniversary whatsit, taped like a big tailgate party in downtown Chicago? Oprah stood there on the outdoor stage beside the Black Eyed Peas and held her cellphone up, aimed at the audience, as if the dozen or more cameras on cranes, wires and rails weren’t going to be enough. And the crowd erupted in spontaneous dance, although it was choreographed, and a concept swiped from a European video. But Oprah’s deal went viral because, OMG would you believe it, and there was Oprah, OMG’ding herself, careful to record it to show her friends in case they wouldn’t have believe her, or watched the show.

Now how many of you believe the media diva even has her own phone, much less carries it or knows how it works?

Watching the video again, an establishing shot before the music begins shows someone in the audience (who later would turn out to be a dancer) aiming their cellphone like a camera, in case the audience at home needed a reminder that’s what normal people do today, and that’s what Oprah would be doing, to confound your awe with hers. Compound.

After the video had done its viral thing, Oprah had all the crowdsourced uploads removed, being unlicensed and all. I think it was really because her feigned incredulity wasn’t going to pass muster. Better a memory gone viral than video evidence of Oprah taking her viewers for fools.

Bret
Bret Michael’s blue bandana as he reclined on the hospital bed on the cover of People Magazine was just too silly for words. No doubt America wouldn’t know him without his bandana wig, so it was definitely an art director’s call.

Alright, it wasn’t a video, but the internet rumors went viral. Fans started to twitter about an oddly fortuitous recovery which put him back on the Celebrity Apprentice season finale, so now poor Bret is back in the hospital to prove it wasn’t a PR stunt, this time for a hole-in-the-heart, probably something to do with a tatoo, in any case nothing to interfere with his headband.

Chance Michael Grayson plays Cheyenne School 6th Grade show at Edmond, OklahomaGreyson
Brand-spanking-fresh-phenom Greyson Michael Chance wowed everyone on Youtube, and Ellen’s people, reportedly before his views had even hit five-digits –are talent scouts that grassroots? He encored with the same brilliant performance on her show, thus certifying his authentic talent, based on the law that lightening can’t be fixed twice. Although the equalizer setting, for lack of a technical term, was remarkably identical, wasn’t it? Same tweaked toning, same very attentive fader, especially if it wasn’t the same microphone.

Seriously, SNL, of the notoriously bad music soundboard, should hire whoever miked that primary school performance.

On the subject of expensive equipment, how often do you see a shiny grand piano at a public school choir concert?

Although the camera work was shaky, the cameraman kept an interesting crop on Greyson, framed by the waiting choir girls. It reminded me of the soldier backdrop they used to give President Bush. Authenticity came of the development that none of the girls were compelled to look too interested, I’m guessing that was sheer fortuity. The result was that Young Mr. Chance was strangely placed off-center, the better to feature the girls. An actual parent would have framed their son to show his feet at the pedals, I guarantee you.

The close crop remained even as Greyson finished and the school emcee offered her remarks, her head off camera. The lens never zoomed, fitting for a digital still camera which cannot zoom in video mode, or because appearances of homemade authenticity be damned, broadcast editors will not abide zoom.

But Greyson gave the game away when he took his bow, aimed not at the audience, but directly at the camera. You’d figure he already had countless home recordings of his Lady Gaga cover, both practice and dinner guest performances. On this stage the camerawork was let to look improvised, like a parent’s afterthought, while Cherub Gaga sang the performance straight ahead, in the same direction to which the emcee addressed the audience. So to whom was Mr. Chance taking his bow?

Americans upset by viral Single Ladies video don’t know their ass from TandA

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Screengrab from Yak Films World of Dance videoYou thought ours was an oversexed culture obsessed with youth, but the recent furor over a viral video shows Americans don’t know their ass from their T & A.

Obviously everyone is aghast about too-young dancers gyrating to Beyonce’s SINGLE LADIES, but I think it says something hilarious about our ineptitude with sexuality. Like the mess of clueless philistines weighing in, I too am inexpert at what titillates about 7-year-olds, and it’s not going to stop me either.

Can we agree the Beyonce hit is lewd? I’m guessing her video was unremarkable, I recall the SNL spoof was camp, but what are Beyonce’s lyrics except deliberately crass? You expect a performance of “Single Ladies” to transcend its theme? You’re going to be offended regardless who is lip-syncing it.

Putting aside whether your daughter belongs onstage participating, where have you been? This is dance. Call it Vulgar Nouveaux or Burlesque Outré, it dates to Madonna’s mother’s virginity. This is dance, all you Kansans, onstage and on screen. Flashdance had nothing on Broadway, American Gigolo hid the sex behind clothes. Beside the point. Young dancers aspiring to tomorrow’s auditions want to learn what their role models are teaching. Children today love Spongebob, but they’re watching South Park and Family Guy too. The only uncomfortable party in the room is you.

I recently attended an elementary school talent show that included some dance-schooled troopers. Some of their precocious moves were admittedly out of place and some even off-putting, but it didn’t stop parents from appreciating the talent and obvious dedicated effort. Our little tarts didn’t come close, by the way, to the spirited Single Ladies performance, clearly well choreographed, taught, and executed.

Was outraged America also so unsophisticated to notice that the now infamous video was a multiple camera production? This wasn’t a family recording leaked by an indignant relative. It was a World of Dance competition where no one watching showed any shock at the performance. While I confess I’m still offended by the Jon-Benet pageant aesthetic, these costumes and the next Britney backup dancers did not surprise.

What entertained me most were the comments threading from the now multiple postings of the video. The original post accumulated over two million views and had to be removed for reasons that are self-explanatory apparently. On account of poorly-spelled death threats, I imagine. Eventually you’ll find observations defending the performance, but for the overwhelming part, everyone wants to weigh their indignation against the next, accuse the dancers’ parents of child abuse and round up a posse to chase the pedophiles they’re sure are lurking.

What I find endearing about their best Sunday earnestness is that these commenters wouldn’t know a stripper’s pole from where they get their haircut. Even as internet porn is so pervasive, and we worry it has saturated our psyche, it turns out the prurient pretenders– as hypocritical we know, as Republican congressmen– know as much about erotica as a prudes.

Even more entertaining is a certain tenor to their comments, part of a trend I’m horrified to recognize has been overtaking blogdom. It began I suppose when the personal computer extended the internet outside the lab. Emails used to abide a scientist’s protocol, then with the world-wide-web came spam. Blogs began with people who had something to say, and when comments deregulated to chat rooms, in came the freaks.

There’s a common tone to compulsive opinion-givers, I recognize it too often as I offer my own. It pervades the blogosphere now almost to have rendered discussion threads unreadable. It’s a tone of tone-deafness, in vocabulary, grammar and attitude. Related to a person not knowing what they’re talking about, the tell-tale ingredient is that they don’t care about the subject either. It’s a characteristic recognized in forced conversations and poor sales pitches, not always obvious when we’re regurgitating differences of opinion or ideology.

If I didn’t always before recognize the ignorance in the insincerity, this Tea Party tinctured pile-on has given me the scent.

The too-cursory indignation Middle America is showing about these 7-year-old dancers strikes a feeble, unfunny note. It’s the puritanical call for women of all ages to reduce themselves behind burqas, coming from voices self-loathing and unworldly.

Bananagrams true lowercase scrabble

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Scrabble competitor letter tile gameSNL’s Weekend Update poked fun at a tragic development in the world of word games. SCRABBLE rescinded its famous prohibition on proper names and places, leaving SNL to suggest that JENGA should let us use glue. Was traditional Scrabble (let’s call it Scrabble Classic) becoming too difficult for today’s wordsmiths? Maybe conjuring anagrams from a modern vocabulary has became too hard a scrabble. The timing of this generous handicap would seem to take aim at viral rival BANANAGRAMS, a faster but no looser crossword game. I think the focus playgroup missed a larger no-child-left-behind incompatibility, math. To square off with Bananagrams, Scrabble needs to dumb down the arithmetic.

Maneuvering the ten-point letter unto the triple-letter square, that’s a challenge best left to our British Commonwealth cousins, our betters at math, science and now, I’m guessing, English as a Second First Language.

Although one could long, with Bananagrams, for a more complicated scoring system than simply who “peels” last. I’d like to see scores for most words formed, or long peel drives, or complexity of words formed. An interesting dilemma develops in Bananagrams between choosing entertaining words versus more interchangeable monosyllabic varieties. But Bananagrams keeps it simple and fast, which I think explains its contemporary appeal.

Which by no means means simple. Newcomers to Bananagrams, as they did for Scrabble, still find themselves well outmatched by players equipped with crossword puzzle vocabularies. Adz, Ait, Axon.. if you’re lacking for despicable examples.

Scrabble had to open the doors to proper nouns probably because today’s television vocabulary consists largely of brand names and trademarks.

The Famous Oprah Video punks who?

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Oprah famous video black eyed peas good day
You find it by searching for FAMOUS + OPRAH + VIDEO. Because hyperbole arcs the hyperlink. Allegedly, the viral clip is being removed as fast as websites are putting it up. I’ll bet the reason would have more to do with James Frey and Augusten Burroughs baldfaced disingenuity than copyright infringement or Oprah being embarrassed by pedestrian plagiarism. The performance by the Black Eyed Peas, taped live in downtown Chicago for the 24th season of Oprah’s talk show, purports to ignite a spontaneous dance, to Oprah’s joyful astonishment. While the video may be a crowd-pleaser, it certifies corporate music’s lack of originality, and the American TV tube’s despicable boobness.

The jubilant TODAY’S GONNA BE A GOOD DAY scenario borrows of course from the T-mobile commercial featuring a dance production taped at a Liverpool train station, set to a medley of powerhouse dance numbers. At first fellow commuters are surprised. By the end we realize the entirety has been choreographed. Youtube viewers would recognize the contrivance from the Belgian train station scene, where ordinary commuters begin dancing to a favorite song from The Sound of Music, until the whole crowd is participating.

Is dance so highly infectious? There’s something people really love about seeing that theme play out. It gives viewers warm fuzzy feelings having to do with belonging to community. There’s nothing wrong with the Black Eyed Peas wanting to reap that same enthusiasm for their pretend live video. Who holds it against pop to imitate from anything?

Their job of commercial entertainment is to popularize, and an Antwerp central station is hardly a setting familiar to Americans. Better a live concert audience, youthful, outside, wearing the usual panoply of Disney colors, living in the moment, attached to no context of exterior lives, a high school musical on a sunny day, reality TV on vivid.

Both predecessors feature onlookers who stare transfixed, some calling friends on their cellphones, others recording what they see. In both sequences, often those standing on the periphery turn out also to be participants, eventually joining in the dance.

In Oprah’s version, she is the lone spectator, watching incredulous from onstage. Like the train station commuters, she holds a cellphone aloft, eager to record the dance epidemic as it spreads throughout her “audience.” Apparently, it’s not enough today to drop your jaw to show surprise, you have to pull out your camera to show how you know when seeing defies believing. What, is Oprah going to Youtube it? Would her television audience worry that the impromptu dance was going to pass without someone recording it for posterity?

Oprah’s spontaneous wonder may have passed for genuine before a television audience who didn’t see the dance coming, but on the instant replay, how will Oprah’s act play? Are we to believe she didn’t know about the Christo scale choreographed event? If the stunt had been planned as a surprise, do you suppose Oprah wouldn’t have noticed her audience was suddenly uniformly younger and more fit, wearing uniformly bright colors evenly distributed across the monitor screens. Failing that, do you imagine someone as skilled as Oprah at communicating with peoples en masse, wouldn’t detect that this audience had something up its sleeve? It’s probably no false flattery to brag that Chicago is not big enough for Oprah and a surprise party of thousands, without invitations coming across her desk.

The Black Eyed Peas dance bomb may have made wonderful television, and it might have been even better if Oprah had winked instead of gasped. Because now the scene is simply contrived. To watch it in hindsight, as has become the norm for television in the Youtube age, there’s Oprah punking us all.

CNN did it with Balloon Boy, FOX does it for politics, and the rest do it for the war: false concern, contrived conclusions. American media nourishes with falsity. Musicians lip-sinc, Yo-Yo Ma faked his performance at the inauguration, as we learned all instrumentalists do in cold weather.

Honeybees were dying because?

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Lollipop by MikaNon-Bing-ers know the net is about the journey, not the destination. My search yesterday became the acquisition: from a Posterous tweet, to revisiting OK Go’s 2006 treadmill video, to their backyard dance gone-viral, to choreographer sister Trish Sie in LOLLIPOP (new tab: Mika’s highschool anthem WE ARE GOLDEN), to Sie’s PSA for Saatchie & Saatchie: HELP THE HONEY BEES. When the worry was climate change or pesticides: poor bees. Then the suspect was GMOs.

Darfur, the Israeli lobby & US Democrats

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hillary-clinton-meets-israelWhat does it mean for Africa when right wing end-of-the- world-is-near evangelical Christians join forces with the Robert F. Kennedy Center For Human Rights? What does it mean for African Americans when Bush, Obama, and nearly all last year’s presidential candidates from both parties encourage the continuation of an African civil war rather than a political settlement between the parties? What does it mean when 21st century PR firms employ FaceBook, slick viral marketing and millions of dollars to create a simple, satisfying, feel-good excuse for military intervention on the African continent? –from Is There a Save Darfur Industrial Complex?

But Save Darfur has gotten into hot water with aid groups helping the refugees of the conflict.

In February it began a high-profile advertising campaign that included full-page newspaper ads, television spots and billboards calling for more aggressive action in Darfur, including the imposition of a no-flight zone over the region.

Aid groups and even some activists say banning flights could do more harm than good, because it could stop aid flights. Many aid groups fly white airplanes and helicopters that may look similar to those used by the Sudanese government, putting their workers at risk in a no-flight zone.

Sam Worthington, the president and chief executive of InterAction, a coalition of aid groups, complained to Mr. Rubenstein by e-mail that Save Darfur’s advertising was confusing the public and damaging the relief effort.

“I am deeply concerned by the inability of Save Darfur to be informed by the realities on the ground and to understand the consequences of your proposed actions,” Mr. Worthington wrote.

He noted that contrary to assertions in its initial ads, Save Darfur did not represent any of the organizations working in Darfur, and he accused it of “misstating facts.” He said its endorsement of plans that included a no-flight zone and the use of multilateral forces “could easily result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of individuals.”

Another aid group, Action Against Hunger, said in a statement last week that a forced intervention by United Nations troops without the approval of the Sudanese government “could have disastrous consequences that risk triggering a further escalation of violence while jeopardizing the provision of vital humanitarian assistance to millions of people.”

Aid groups also complain that Save Darfur, whose budget last year was $15 million, does not spend that money on aid for the long-suffering citizens of the region.

from the New York Times June 2, 2007 Darfur Advocacy Group Undergoes a Shake-Up

‘The “Save Darfur (Coalition) was created in 2005 by two groups concerned about genocide in the African country – the American Jewish World Service and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum…

‘The coalition has a staff of 30 with expertise in policy and public relations. Its budget was about $15 million in the most recent fiscal year…

from The Washington Post at http://www.overbrook.org/newsletter/06_07/pdfs/AJWS_Washington_Post.pdf

Hillary Clinton on Darfur as she calls for more Pentagon intervention and wars abroad. This is a woman that has no problem with genocide when committed by the US and/ or Israel.

Biden calls for military force in Darfur speaks for itself as he directly calls for a US military assault on Sudan See Joe Biden: Darfur as he calls for US troops to attack Sudan

How Stupid do they have to be?

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You remember, if you have been paying attention, that mini-controversy a couple of months ago where all the Corporate Sucks were calling us STUPID and/or CRAZY for daring to suggest that a commercial extolling WalMart and Halls Cough Drops being in collusion to force employees to work even while packing contagious diseases?

The same Corporate Sucks or their demented twins who derided any suggestion that the overcrowded overmedicated animals in the Meat Factories aka Concentrated Animal Feeding Enterprise system could possibly be a huge breeding pool for Viral diseases, such as for instance Influenza and resistant bacterial strains like the MRSA and Tuberculosis SuperBugs which are resistant to every antibiotic known.

Or that feeding them antibiotics, which kill bacteria but not Viral infections, leave the immune systems of the Future Hamburgers and Kentucky Fried weakened, thus more susceptible to, oh, let’s seeeeee…. Bird Flu and Swine Flu.

There was another series of commercials a couple of years ago, where a hideously deformed troll gets on a city bus, hacking and sneezing and wheezing, everybody recoiling in fear….

Then he takes an over the counter Flu remedy and gets “all better”…

Asymptomatic but, still contagious.

Same scenario in a crowded office building and in a crowded school…

But, hey, that’s all just Amusing and Entertaining commercials, right(wing)?

Then there’s the deregulation imposed on first US and now Mexico, forcing all those bad ol’ naughty wicked Socialist State programs like meat inspection, Environmental Protection, Occupational Safety and Health Administrations…

To quit meddling with businesses.

Let the marketplace regulate itself and no harm done…

Oh, yeah, that sounds like a workable plan.

See, this system is So Very Superior that we owe it to the rest of the world to place their economies and ecologies under the Benign Dictatorship of Unbridled Capitalism.

It’s for their own good, dontcha know.

Next thing you know, they’ll be trying to build an economy based on Adjustable Rate Mortgages and selling them off as though they were real cash…

Advice for next DC Madam

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All sex worker administrators working in financial capitals DC or NY or London may want to take note, when affairs go awry, you are entangled with the vice squad, and you are hailed as that episode’s “DC Madam,” consider making your client list known far and wide, instead of hoping to parlay it for reduced charges. Whether convicted or not, you will shortly be found dead, by your hand, without a sign of foul play. A suicide, like journalists, aids, and other compromised folk before you.

Did Deborah Palfrey have any chance, like her colleague Brandy Britton three months before her? Both met with suicide before their tales could really go viral. The Pamela Martin & Associates agency catered to the most powerful mobsters in the world. Including but bigger than US Senators, Vitter or his ilk, including but bigger than government agency or military heads. The now dead girls were in bed with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and USAID. Can you name badder johns? Putin’s KGB gang, serviced by the Russian gymnastics team, comes in a distant minor league.