Being without cable, I occasionally miss out on television’s rare quality offerings. Comedy Central’s Key and Peele seem to be one example, but I’ve been able to catch up through YouTube. These are a few of my favorite skits out of the many I’ve seen so far:
Yesterday, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden gave an “Alternative Christmas Message” on Britain’s Channel 4 television. It was short and concise, yet more substantial and important than a typical State of the Union Address. Though he makes the connection to Orwell’s 1984 that many of us have already made, it’s still a message more people need to become aware of or be reminded of. It’s also a call to action that all freedom loving people can rally behind regardless of nationality and political ideology.
This is the full transcript followed by the unedited video:
Hi, and Merry Christmas. I’m honored to have the chance to speak with you and your family this year.
Recently, we learned that our governments, working in concert, have created a system of worldwide mass surveillance, watching everything we do.
Great Britain’s George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information. The types of collection in the book—microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us—are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go.
Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person. A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves—an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem, because privacy matters. Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.
The conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can place both in the technology that surrounds us and the government that regulates it. Together, we can find a better balance. End mass surveillance. And remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel, asking is always cheaper than spying.
For everyone out there listening, thank you, and Merry Christmas.
Alison Nastasi reports on some of the more interesting ways Christmas is observed in cultures around the world at Flavorwire.com: http://flavorwire.com/428646/strange-christmas-traditions-around-the-world/view-all/
At Truth Jihad, host Kevin Barrett interviews Ethan Indigo Smith about the Christmas Conspiracy:
A sampling of Smith’s provocative thoughts on Christmas can be found here: http://news-beacon-ireland.info/?p=15247
Daily Kos recently did a post on the background of one of my favorite Christmas songs, “Christmas in the Trenches“, while a Fanpop.com article from last year delivered a devastating take-down of one of my least favorite Christmas songs, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?“.
Consolidation of media ownership + corporate propaganda = (rather unsettling) comedy gold:
The Onion looks back at It’s a Wonderful Life:
A hilarious but deeply cynical Rankin/Bass-style musical number (NSFW):
Hope you all have a happy Wednesday!
A study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, published last week in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Technology, produced the strongest evidence to date linking mass dolphin deaths in the Gulf of Mexico to petroleum hydrocarbon exposure and toxicity. The focus of the study, 29 dolphins from Barataria Bay (an area heavily oiled during the BP spill), were found to have lung disease, abnormally low levels of adrenal gland hormones, liver problems and other health effects which are rare but consistent with exposure to oil.
A quarter of the dolphin subjects were found to be significantly underweight, 48 percent were given a guarded prognosis, and 17 percent were in poor or grave condition, meaning they were expected to die soon. The study concludes that the health effects seen in the Barataria Bay dolphins are significant and likely will lead to reduced survival and ability to reproduce.
In an earlier NOAA study in 2011, preliminary research findings indicated oil and Corexit physically stressed Gulf dolphins to death by decreasing their immunity and making them more susceptible to diseases such as brucella and morbillivirus. Morbillivirus was found to be the cause of a majority of dolphin deaths in a recent die off pattern along the Eastern Seaboard throughout the year.
According to a New York Times piece from last Sunday, in the past year at least 1,000 bottlenose dolphin carcasses (eight times the historical average) washed up on beaches in New York, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida. In Florida, 80 dolphins who live permanently in the state’s polluted Indian River Lagoon estuary have died while 233 were reported dead in the northern Gulf of Mexico this year.
While effects of the BP oil spill and corexit haven’t been ruled out as a factor in the East Coast dolphin deaths, research on some of the dead dolphins in the Florida estuary found high levels of mercury, fungal diseases, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, oral-genital tumors and emaciation, most likely a result of environmental pollution.
Besides being one of the saddest headlines I’ve seen in awhile, it says a lot about the current state of law enforcement in America. This is the full story behind it as reported by Jean Paul Zodeaux of Collapse.com:
A vigil for the deceased Jesus Huerta yesterday went from peace to pandemonium last night in Durham, North Carolina after police, who showed up in full riot gear tear gassed those at the vigil, including the family of the deceased, and arresting six people.
A month ago, in North Carolina, Jesus Huerta, a teen aged boy living in Durham, North Carolina allegedly committed suicide sitting in the back of a police cruiser, after being searched, with hands cuffed behind his back, shooting himself in the head. It is as implausible a story as one can think of. Of course, a good writer will take the implausible and make it look plausible. Too bad the Chief of Police, Jose Lopez in Durham doesn’t have any writers on hand. Instead, what Chief Lopez did was wait a few weeks, issue a statement that Jesus Huerta was found slumped over and dead in the back of a patrol car after the officer who was driving the vehicle heard what he thought to be a gunshot:
“Our department continues to investigate the origin of the weapon but can confirm that it was not a departmental weapon and no officer fired a weapon during this incident.”
Not only lacking good enough writers to make the implausible seem plausible, Chief Lopez also appears to lack any valid public relations department. At a press conference a week ago, presumably for the purposes of calming the public, Lopez only made matters worse by stating the investigation was seeking to find whether Huerta “shot himself’ on purpose or if it was accidental. Understandably, much of the public was interested in an investigation of the police involved. Instead they got Chief Lopez.
Crazy things can happen, this much is understood, and even if we’re are to accept the story that a teenage boy who was searched by a police officer before handcuffed and placed in the back seat of his patrol car wound up producing a gun missed in the search and shot himself, it would take a person disconnected with reality to think that the reaction to such a story would be one of quiet acceptance. Of course people are going to be suspicious of the story, particularly since Jesus Huerta is not the first person who has died while in the custody of Durham Police in the last five months.
On July 27th of this year, police responding to reports of a stabbing, and surrounding Jose Ocampo who was holding a knife and refused to drop it, shot him four times in the chest. Ocampo did not speak English and did not understand the commands being given him. Of course, no matter what language you speak, it should be common sense that when you are surrounded by police while holding a knife you drop it, but it was once common sense that shooting a man four times in the chest because he’s not relinquishing a knife sounds an awful lot like excessive force.
According to a friend of Ocampo’s who was on the scene, that Ocampo was attempting to give the knife to police:
“You know the part you use to cut? He put his hand on that part and gave the other end to police.”
Still, and in today’s environment, it should be expected that police will find such an thing as an excuse to open fire, but people are getting quite tired of what is to now be expected, and any police officer, and certainly a police chief should understand this, and instead of responding with defiance and more dubious tactics of force such as the full force in riot gear at a vigil for a teenager who was shot in the head while in handcuffs in the back seat of a Durham police patrol car.
Chief Lopez’ strategy of intimidation and his clear lack of compassion for the Huerta family only makes the Durham police come off as more suspicious. That is no way to sell the implausible story they’re attempting to sell the public. What Lopez should have done was accept responsibility for his part in the death of Jesus Huerta, which would be to admit that there is an obvious break down of procedure and put the whole police department on review. This is not what Lopez did, and increasingly, as more police departments expect a suspicious public to buy implausible stories, this is not what is getting done.
Switzerland is one of the world’s wealthiest countries per capita, and also one of the most democratic. It’s the only European country with true direct democracy in which all citizens have to do is gather 100,000 signatures calling for a vote to hold a nationwide referendum with a binding result. Last November, Swiss citizens created the so-called 1:12 referendum, which would limit the wages of top executives so they couldn’t earn more in a month than lower paid employees do in a year. That proposal lost the vote, but early next year they’ll have an opportunity to decide on an equally radical referendum: a $2,800 basic income for every adult, whether employed or unemployed. There is currently no minimum wage in Switzerland, but there will also be a vote on that next year.
Anger about salaries and fairness has surged among Swiss voters because some of their biggest banks including UBS are responsible for speculative investment bubbles and continue to pay top executives huge bonuses while reporting huge losses. According to Bloomberg News, Switzerland is home to at least five of Europe’s top 20 paid executives. The inequality pay ratio in Switzerland is 1:194 (while in the U. S., average CEO to average worker compensation was 1:243 in 2010).
The idea of a Basic Income or Universal Wages are not only supported by Marxists and Communists, but have have been gaining traction among Libertarians as well. A great post at Thought Infection recently made an argument for such proposals from a civil libertarian perspective:
Freedom in the 21st century should mean freedom from having to engage in productive work simply to meet your basic needs for comfort and dignity.
At one time, the ready availability of jobs amply filled the need for a basic access to a comfortable and dignified life, but precipitous technological and economic changes erode this dynamic further each day. The function of the economy has never been to provide gainful employment to people, but simply to provide material goods. As the economy manages to produce more with less human labor, we must create new mechanisms aimed specifically that maintaining and raising the minimum level of comfort and dignity to everyone in a society…
…Worse than just being immoral, the desperate poverty of the lower classes is both immoral and useless. It is not a lack of money that compels the great successes of the modern age, but rather the availability of opportunities. It is because healthy, well-fed people were able to get a good education that allowed us to realize the great miracles of the modern age (eg, the internet, smart phones, Google, etc…).
We must rebalance the right of society to compel people into productive work with the obligation of society to support its citizens. It should be noted that basic income is not aimed at the unrealisitic and undesirable goal of unfettered access for all to every luxury of the world. Freedom from work does not mean the right to luxury; it simply sets a baseline below which no person should fall. Basic income seeks to strike a fair balance between allowing the benefit of work to coexist with a system aimed at delivering dignity and opportunity for all in a society.
Beyond just better enabling access to opportunities, basic income will also allow people the freedom to live as they choose; to explore unpaid work in the form of volunteering, participating in creative projects, or starting new business ventures. Some argue that there would be less incentive for people to start businesses and be productive, but it could just as easily be argued that it would remove the disincentive from the high-risk, high-reward ventures that are so valuable to modern society…
…Requiring people to live so much of their life working simply to earn a basic income is a waste of human potential and bad for progress. By eliminating the obligation to work just for simple survival, basic income would allow a new dynamic expansion of human freedom and human potential.
A society compelled to perfect cohesion and homogeneity lacks the dynamism to compete in the modern world. New ideas can only come into being at the chaotic interface between contrasting worldviews and lifestyles. In a world where progress is completely reliant on our ability to innovate and create new ideas, we should be seeking to maximize the spectrum of lifestyles which can be expressed within the society. By removing the need to work just to live, we will let people explore their true potential, and we will realize the untold benefits of a new dynamism.
And this brings us to the real reason that I think basic income will happen soon, not only because it is morally the right thing to do (which it is), but because it makes good sense economically. Just as slavery ended when factories made the economic model of slavery obsolete, we will move towards basic income because it makes good economic sense for the modern innovation economy.
Dynamic, creative and competitive economies of today must seek to stretch the social fabric to its limits. Basic income will serve to reinforce this fabric and enable the risky ventures that will power us forward in the 21st century.
Read the full article here: http://thoughtinfection.com/2013/12/15/basic-income-means-basic-freedom/
Films and videos don’t always gain a cult following because they’re good. Case in point is the “Star Wars Holiday Special” (1978), the first official spin-off which was only broadcast once and never released on home video. George Lucas was rumored to have been personally involved in keeping it hidden since he considered it such an embarrassment. Because of its rarity and underground status, bootlegs of the original broadcast were long sought after by fans of Star Wars and obscure cinema.
As holiday specials go, it has a fairly standard flimsy narrative that strings together a variety of celebrity cameos, comedic skits and musical numbers. What sets it apart are appearances by all the main characters of the film and the strained attempt to fit them into a 70s holiday variety program. Comedians like Bea Arthur, Art Carny, and Harvey Korman or musicians like Diahann Carroll and Jefferson Starship don’t seem to belong in the same universe of Star Wars much less the same television program. Though much of the comedy and guest appearances fall flat and the production as a whole reeks of crass commercialism and cloying sentimentality, it does have moments of inspired weirdness that might make it worth seeing by hardcore Star Wars fans, paracinephiles, and/or stoners.
This is a 15 minute “fan edit” version of the Star Wars Holiday Special:
In contrast to the Star Wars special, the “Pee Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special” (1988) is an example of how similar holiday tropes can be used more creatively towards an equally bizarre but more satisfying end result. The campy, self-aware and subtly subversive tone of Pee Wee’s Playhouse is better suited for the “pop culture mash-up” aspect of holiday specials than the more self-contained world of Star Wars. It also helps that Pee Wee’s show is written with more humor and wit and features an eclectic mix of guests who all seem to be having fun.
The roster of celebrities include Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon, Grace Jones, K.D. Lang, Little Richard, Cher, Magic Johnson, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, Charo and Laurence Fishburne among others. Like Pee Wee, they’re iconic and have collective appeal that transcends age, race and gender. They’re also perfect guest stars for a throwback to televised holiday events of the past with a postmodern and absurdist sensibility.
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