How to Access Blocked Web Content

Lifehacker.com recently posted a very useful guide to circumventing pesky restrictions imposed by Big Brother on the Internet. Check it out: http://lifehacker.com/5516305/top-10-ways-to-access-blocked-stuff-on-the-web

ADBUSTERS" TACTICAL BRIEFING #1

Are you familiar with AdBusters magazine?

To me, the Adbusters Foundation is what would happen if Andy Warhol and Saul Alinsky gave birth to a revolutionary love-child. Here's a transcript of the most recent screed I received from AdBusters.org via email:

Between November 22-28 the whole world will light up with seven days of Carnivalesque Rebellion!

Think of it as an adventure, as therapy, as Buy Nothing Day times a hundred … think of it as the World Cup of global activism – a week of postering and pranks, of talking back at your profs and speaking truth to power. Some of us will poster our schools and neighborhoods and just break our daily routines for a week. Others will chant, cut up their credit cards in big box stores and and pull off theatrical stunts that provoke mass cognitive dissonance. Others still will drop stink bombs in strategic locations and engage in the most visceral kind of civil disobedience.

In all, millions of people around the world will walk out of their schools, offices and factories for a week and live!

To pull this off, we need to learn from the failures of the recent G8/G20 protests. A few sensational and spectacular acts of violence (police cars on fire, window smashing) will not provoke the kind of global mindshift that our world so desperately needs. And neither will sitting at home yelling at our screens. If our Seven Days of Carnivalesque Rebellion are to succeed we'll need a plethora of actions that cannot be dismissed as petty acts of vandalism, that genuinely challenge the power of megacorporations, that make people think about the climate tipping points now descending upon us and that highlight the perversity of a system that has brought us to the zero point of systemic collapse.

What would you do if you could mobilize thousands of connected protesters in cities all over the world? Send your best ideas for coordinated acts of civil disobedience to memewarriors@adbusters.org and we'll share the most compelling ones in subsequent briefs.

To get the ball rolling here's a personal plunge you may want to take right away: Vow never to walk into a Starbucks ever again. Instead, search out the most interesting indie coffee shop around where you live and work … get to know the people who own and run the place and get your friends and co-workers to join you there. Individually this may feel like a drop in the bucket, but if all the 86,000 of us in this network do it collectively, then we can begin to shift power from megacorporations to our friends and neighbors.

This little shift in our lives is a good way to get in the mood … and during the week of rebellion in November, these indie coffeehouses will become our meeting places and bases.

Why Hippies Trip in the Woods

MAESTRO PERFORMS SUPER MARIO

JUST SAY NO TO VUVUZELAS!!!

I'm loving the World Cup so far... but damn those vuvuzelas are annoying!

NOEL KERN'S NIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

I love this guy's work. Check it out for yourself at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nkerns/sets/72157602298380803/

Proof Robert Kennedy Was Awesome

SpillBabySpill.com

Track the latest news about the apocalyptic oil gusher ruining the Gulf of Mexico at SpillBabySpill.com (Thank you ProgressFlorida.org for creating the website.)

DRUMMER WITH DOPE MOVES

It's not often ya see a drummer who should be front & center:

I'm Starting to Release Demos, Folks

Falling in love naturally has a knack of sorting a man's life out lickety-split.

Of the dozens of songs I've written over the years, I've yet to release any due to a nagging fear that my attempts at recording them have been ambitious overwrought affairs that sound quite shitty. The simple courage to record one-off acoustic demos of my songs immediately after writing them - not only to remember them, but to not risk allowing them to de-evolve it an over-edited fragments of their former selves, has somehow always eluded me.

. . . until now?

http://www.myspace.com/hijackalfuerte

.

San Francisco Toothpick Artist

YIKE BIKE

This zippy new electric folding bike is scheduled for mass production in 2010 and seems much groovier than a lame Segway: http://www.yikebike.com/

boingboing: babies with laser eyes

from boingboing

BLACK DYNAMITE: Is it too early to declare this the funniest movie of the decade?

I have seen this movie so many times in the last two months I've already memorized it. It only played in select markets before being released on DVD this week. I'm sure the director and cast would appreciate it if you bought it today (since it didn't enjoy the wide release it deserves.) Check out the trailer:

Interview with star & writer Michael Jai White & Arsenio Hall: Bonus (Fight Smack in the Orphanage ad):

Joe Stack: Failed Independent Contractor, or, Jilted Employee?

The New York Times reported today (article here) that under the Obama Administration the IRS is cracking down on employers who wrongfully classify their workers as independent contractors. The article claims that an average of 30% of companies misclassify employees. The Obama Administration - which is dealing with a record deficit in the Federal budget - hopes to raise nearly ten billion dollars over the next decade by cracking down on companies who are milking the system.

As somebody who has nearly always been classified as an independent contractor at the jobs I have worked in my life - most of which have been low income - I have experienced firsthand how such a tax loophole allows companies to pad their profit margins at my expense, since doing so means they do not have to pay for health benefits or unemployment insurance.

The New York Times article failed to mention, however, that the plight of independent contractors who are in actuality regular employees (because they do not have much independence regarding their activities at work nor do they seek their own customers) is one of the primary complaints at the crux of the suicidal diatribe that was released yesterday by the Austin IRS kamikaze. I understand that the two stories are not part and parcel, but given the immediacy of both of them, I could not help but highlight it.

If I remain a low-income worker for the rest of my life, am I expected to never build up my Social Security nor have medical benefits for me nor the family I hope to one day start because I am legally an "independent contractor"? Often the only solution for workers in such a situation is to unionize, but I don't have much faith that unions encourage innovation nor efficiency, and so that only seems to me to be the lesser of two evils.

We need to reform our nation's laws that grant more "rights" to employers than employees. Our capitalism must be forcibly injected with a healthy dose of humanity. And if the US Government refuses to impose such standards upon its corporate puppetmasters, then we should all be prepared for more Joe Stacks to emerge from the woodwork and commit wanton atrocities as their parting salvos to a Darwinian economic system that, in the pursuit of happiness, catalyzed their sociopathic behavior by the inherent hypocrisy of it being a corporacracy rather than a democracy.

We are living in hard times. It is time that the social safety net that the wealthy enjoy be extended to the middle class and the poor.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS & TERRORISM

Why is it widely recognized as terrorism when an Islamo-Fascist bombs and kills civilians, but when an Anglo-American does the exact same it is called by countless names - except terrorism?

TO THE AMERICAN ZOMBIE:

If we, the American Zombies, were to unite instead of breaking up into factions of leftwing vs rightwing grassroots activism mayhaps we could take the power back from politicians who support corporacracy over democracy.

A Graph Worth a Thousand Words?

(graph from Huffington Post)

Did You Read the Austin IRS Kamikaze Guy's Suicide Note Yet?

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2010/0218102stack1.html

HOMELESS WORLD CUP

Did you know that there is a homeless World Cup?

Watch the documentary "Kicking It" at Hulu.com: http://www.hulu.com/watch/62688/kicking-it#s-p1-so-i1

AMERICA'S 7 CULTURAL REGIONS (According to Facebook Data)

According to PeteSearch blog, which has analyzed the data of 210 million public Facebook profiles, the Unites States can be divided into seven distinct regions based on whom is friends with whom.

I live in DIXIE, so I'll post that explanation. (You'll have to read the rest on PeteSearch.)

Dixie

Probably the least surprising of the groupings, the Old South is known for its strong and shared culture, and the pattern of ties I see backs that up. Like Stayathomia, Dixie towns tend to have links mostly to other nearby cities rather than spanning the country. Atlanta is definitely the hub of the network, showing up in the top 5 list of almost every town in the region. Southern Florida is an exception to the cluster, with a lot of connections to the East Coast, presumably sun-seeking refugees.

God is almost always in the top spot on the fan pages, and for some reason Ashley shows up as a popular name here, but almost nowhere else in the country.

Read the rest of 'em here.

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NEW BOOK - The Watchers: Rise of America's Surveillance State

(This synopsis is exactly as it appears on the Penguin website)

Using exclusive access to key insiders, Shane Harris charts the rise of America's surveillance state over the past twenty-five years and highlights a dangerous paradox: Our government's strategy has made it harder to catch terrorists and easier to spy on the rest of us.

Our surveillance state was born in the brain of Admiral John Poindexter in 1983. Poindexter, Reagan's National Security Advisor, realized that the United States might have prevented the terrorist massacre of 241 Marines in Beirut if only intelligence agencies had been able to analyze in real time data they had on the attackers. Poindexter poured government know-how and funds into his dream-a system that would sift reams of data for signs of terrorist activity. Decades later, that elusive dream still captivates Washington. After the 2001 attacks, Poindexter returned to government with a controversial program, called Total Information Awareness, to detect the next attack. Today it is a secretly funded operation that can gather personal information on every American and millions of others worldwide...

But Poindexter's dream has also become America's nightmare. Despite billions of dollars spent on this digital quest since the Reagan era, we still can't discern future threats in the vast data cloud that surrounds us all. But the government can now spy on its citizens with an ease that was impossible-and illegal-just a few years ago. Drawing on unprecedented access to the people who pioneered this high-tech spycraft, Harris shows how it has shifted from the province of right- wing technocrats to a cornerstone of the Obama administration's war on terror.

Harris puts us behind the scenes and in front of the screens where twenty-first-century spycraft was born. We witness Poindexter quietly working from the private sector to get government to buy in to his programs in the early nineties. We see an army major agonize as he carries out an order to delete the vast database he's gathered on possible terror cells-and on thousands of innocent Americans-months before 9/11. We follow General Mike Hayden as he persuades the Bush administration to secretly monitor Americans based on a flawed interpretation of the law. After Congress publicly bans the Total Information Awareness program in 2003, we watch as it is covertly shifted to a "black op," which protects it from public scrutiny. When the next crisis comes, our government will inevitably crack down on civil liberties, but it will be no better able to identify new dangers. This is the outcome of a dream first hatched almost three decades ago, and The Watchers is an engrossing, unnerving wake-up call.

BUY THE BOOK HERE

Hardcover | 432 pages | ISBN 9781594202452 | 18 Feb 2010 | The Penguin Press

(This synopsis is exactly as it appears on the Penguin website)

Orlando Chosen to Test New Nissan Leaf

Congratulations Orlando! The Orlando Utilities Commission (OUC) has announced that it will build two electric vehicle charging stations, and the city has committed to buying 10 all-electric zero-emissions (ZEV) Nissan Leafs for the city's vehicle fleet as a result of Nissan designating the city a test market for the new vehicle.

The Nissan Leaf will become widely available in 2012, but expect to see it soon in select test markets. I applaud the partnership between Nissan and Orlando. Orlando's infrastructure is a haphazardly sprawling traffic nightmare. But there is still an opportunity to plan future expansion more wisely so that O-town doesn't end up like the "original" Orange County, aka Los Angeles.

Commuter and high-speed rail lines are a crucial part of the agenda...

A Corporation Runs for Congress, Finally!

Anti Financial Reform Talking Points

Click this link to read "The Language of Financial Reform" by Dr. Frank Luntz. It is a blueprint for engineering opposition to financial reform. Enjoy!

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/document-preview.aspx?doc_id=23808095
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Louis CK on Conan 11 months ago skewering modern convenience culture - hilarious!

"Everything is amazing and nobody is happy"

Obama Put Politics First on Afghanistan

By RAY McGOVERN (counterpunch.org)

Nothing highlights President Obama’s abject surrender to Gen. David Petraeus on the “way forward” in Afghanistan than two cables U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry sent to Washington on Nov. 6 and 9, 2009, the texts of which were released Tuesday by the New York Times...

(read the rest here)

WE DON'T HAVE TO AGREE...

IT'S OK USA!

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GREENPEACE Green Tech Guide

For Everyone that Believes that Everything Under the Sun has been Done:

all you gotta do

is find a forgotten

gem from the past

for inspiration

& then make it yours

by doing it differently

than anybody else

of course

such an artistic

strategy (in which it's

fashionable to resurrect

another bygone era

every new season)

is merely a scheme for profiting

by manufacturing products

that are meant to capitalize

upon peoples' desire to be "hip"

by quickly becoming obsolete

---------------------------

i am very optimistic

that digital technology

will help emancipate us

from such tunnel vision

caused by “pop culture”

by enabling anybody to share

their own (semi)unique perspective

with anyone else anywhere

on Earth

for the first time ever

we can broadcast ourselves

(& build a base of fans

anywhere on the planet)

without having to be

one of the people lucky

enough to “make it” on

tv, radio, or in print

so:

quit acting as if

you have seen it all

(& done it all)

because you haven't

consuming stuff

from the same sources

all the time

is limiting

your

wor

-ld

why not try exploring

something old...

that is new to you?

.

THEIR MOTHERS MUST BE SO PROUD

SOLAR PANEL LEASING

A company called SolarCity - which has offices in Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon & DC - is offering residential solar energy solutions via 5-year leases. The company claims to be able to lease solar technology at a price below the cost of purchasing electricity through a traditional power company. And they offer financing (if you have excellent credit.) I don't know if other companies are offering this service yet (& as usual it seems like Florida is behind-the-curve when it comes to green technology) but it appears that this may be an affordable way to power your home with clean solar energy without having to make a huge initial investment. Check out SolarCity's website for more info:

http://www.solarcity.com/residential/solar-lease.aspx

ACLU files FOIA request on Predator program

From Long War Journal by Bill Roggio 1/13/10

This is sure to make many people in Washington uncomfortable:

In a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed today, the American Civil Liberties Union asked the government to disclose the legal basis for its use of predator drones to conduct "targeted killings" overseas. In particular, the ACLU seeks to find out when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and how the United States ensures compliance with international laws relating to extrajudicial killings.

"The American public has a right to know..."

Read the rest here: http://www.longwarjournal.org/threat-matrix/archives/2010/01/aclu_files_fioa_request_on_pre.php