"There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie."
-Dr. Cornel West
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Can America's collective economics inform who we are as a people, whereby - through obsessive bean-counting - we sculpt our destiny, tacitly sanctioning the stripping of basic dignity from fellow citizens, the erosion of civil liberties, the evisceration of public education policies, of the arts and humanities, bankrupting entire communities, tarnishing longstanding values of the populace and its self-image, thus ultimately destroying all that was once valuable to society?" more at link.... above..
Sunday, June 5, 2011
January 15, 1996 Church Cancelled Due to Lack of God
"The South—Parishioners of Pastor Theo Leobald’s First Congregational Church of Holy Christ In Heaven will not meet next Sunday morning for a coffee social and morning Bible study as they do every week, gathering in fellowship and offering thanks and praise to God on high. The reason for the cancellation? Simply the fact that, according to Leobald, God does not now, has never, and will never exist.
Enlarge ImageThe Church of Holy Christ In Heaven will soon change its name to the Church of Imaginary Make-Believe Land.
When asked why he is convinced of God’s nonexistence, Leobald became visibly irritated with reporters.
“What’re you, an illiterate peasant? Aren’t you familiar with 20th century thinking at all? Christ, read a book, or maybe just think about the idea for a minute. Pretty ridiculous, huh?” he said.
When pressed, however, he sighed heavily, and explained that thousands of years ago, tribes of nomadic desert peoples made up God because, being incapable of scientific reasoning due to caveman-like existences, they had no other way of making sense of things like sunshine, rocks and pork-transmitted trichinosis.
“They made it all up, and they were ignorant, unwashed, half-naked pre-historic barbarians,” Leobald said. “So who are you gonna believe: Carl Sagan, and the pantheon of the world’s greatest scientific and intellectual minds, or some guy who measured wealth by how many goats he had?” more at link...
Enlarge ImageThe Church of Holy Christ In Heaven will soon change its name to the Church of Imaginary Make-Believe Land.
When asked why he is convinced of God’s nonexistence, Leobald became visibly irritated with reporters.
“What’re you, an illiterate peasant? Aren’t you familiar with 20th century thinking at all? Christ, read a book, or maybe just think about the idea for a minute. Pretty ridiculous, huh?” he said.
When pressed, however, he sighed heavily, and explained that thousands of years ago, tribes of nomadic desert peoples made up God because, being incapable of scientific reasoning due to caveman-like existences, they had no other way of making sense of things like sunshine, rocks and pork-transmitted trichinosis.
“They made it all up, and they were ignorant, unwashed, half-naked pre-historic barbarians,” Leobald said. “So who are you gonna believe: Carl Sagan, and the pantheon of the world’s greatest scientific and intellectual minds, or some guy who measured wealth by how many goats he had?” more at link...
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Monday, May 23, 2011
In Conversation with Julian Assange, Part I
When I first met Julian Assange—thanks to lawyer and Chair of the Contemporary Art Society Mark Stephens and curator/lawyer Daniel McClean, both of the law firm Finers Stephens Innocent—we discussed ideas for various interview formats. Anton Vidokle and I had discussed the idea to conduct an interview with Assange in which questions would be posed not only by me, but also by a number of artists. This seemed only natural considering the extent to which so many artists have been interested in WikiLeaks, and we then invited seven artists and collectives to ask questions over video for the second part of the interview.
My archive now contains over 2000 hours of interviews recorded in many different places, and I am constantly attempting to discover new rules of the game, new approaches to how an interview can work. For an interview with Hans-Peter Feldmann published initially in AnOther Magazine and then in book form, I emailed him one question per day, and each of Feldmann’s responses would take the form of an image. For my interview with Louise Bourgeois, I would send a question and she would email back a drawing. When Julian came to my office with Mark and Daniel for our first meeting, we discussed the idea of a different format with questions from artists, and Julian liked this a lot, suggesting that the artists send the questions as short videos so that he could see them. We set the interview for two weeks later at 10 or 11 p.m., as we discovered that we both work late at night. Traveling more than three hours from London on Sunday, February 27, I arrived at Ellingham Hall, the Georgian mansion near the Eastern coast of England that Vaughan Smith offered Julian to use as his address for bail during his UK extradition hearings. In the living room of the picturesque home he described to me as a “golden cage” we drank many cups of coffee and spoke until 3 a.m. about his life, his nomadism, his early beginnings and the invention of WikiLeaks, his time in Egypt, Kenya, Iceland, and other places, his scientific background, and the theoretical underpinnings of WikiLeaks.
The interview is divided into two parts—in the first, I was interested in tracing his work back to its beginnings. I was not interested in his court case or private life, but in his public work as the voice of WikiLeaks, and the experiences and philosophical background that informs such a monumentally polemical project. In the second part, which will be published in the following issue of e-flux journal, Assange responds to questions posed to him by artists Goldin+Senneby, Paul Chan, Metahaven (Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk), Martha Rosler, Luis Camnitzer, Superflex, Philippe Parreno, and Ai Weiwei.
Many people have contributed to making this interview possible, and I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Julian Assange, to all the artists for their questions, to Joseph Farrell, Laura Barlow, Orit Gat, Joseph Redwood-Martinez, Mariana Silva, Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Daniel McClean, Julia Peyton-Jones, Mark Stephens, Lorraine Two, and all the artists. This first part of the interview is accompanied by graphics from a pro-active series of works designed by Metahaven, an Amsterdam-based studio for design and research, who have been studying an alternative visual identity for WikiLeaks since June 2010.
—Hans Ulrich Obrist
Interview at link http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/232
My archive now contains over 2000 hours of interviews recorded in many different places, and I am constantly attempting to discover new rules of the game, new approaches to how an interview can work. For an interview with Hans-Peter Feldmann published initially in AnOther Magazine and then in book form, I emailed him one question per day, and each of Feldmann’s responses would take the form of an image. For my interview with Louise Bourgeois, I would send a question and she would email back a drawing. When Julian came to my office with Mark and Daniel for our first meeting, we discussed the idea of a different format with questions from artists, and Julian liked this a lot, suggesting that the artists send the questions as short videos so that he could see them. We set the interview for two weeks later at 10 or 11 p.m., as we discovered that we both work late at night. Traveling more than three hours from London on Sunday, February 27, I arrived at Ellingham Hall, the Georgian mansion near the Eastern coast of England that Vaughan Smith offered Julian to use as his address for bail during his UK extradition hearings. In the living room of the picturesque home he described to me as a “golden cage” we drank many cups of coffee and spoke until 3 a.m. about his life, his nomadism, his early beginnings and the invention of WikiLeaks, his time in Egypt, Kenya, Iceland, and other places, his scientific background, and the theoretical underpinnings of WikiLeaks.
The interview is divided into two parts—in the first, I was interested in tracing his work back to its beginnings. I was not interested in his court case or private life, but in his public work as the voice of WikiLeaks, and the experiences and philosophical background that informs such a monumentally polemical project. In the second part, which will be published in the following issue of e-flux journal, Assange responds to questions posed to him by artists Goldin+Senneby, Paul Chan, Metahaven (Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk), Martha Rosler, Luis Camnitzer, Superflex, Philippe Parreno, and Ai Weiwei.
Many people have contributed to making this interview possible, and I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Julian Assange, to all the artists for their questions, to Joseph Farrell, Laura Barlow, Orit Gat, Joseph Redwood-Martinez, Mariana Silva, Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Daniel McClean, Julia Peyton-Jones, Mark Stephens, Lorraine Two, and all the artists. This first part of the interview is accompanied by graphics from a pro-active series of works designed by Metahaven, an Amsterdam-based studio for design and research, who have been studying an alternative visual identity for WikiLeaks since June 2010.
—Hans Ulrich Obrist
Interview at link http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/232
Friday, May 20, 2011
Published on Thursday, May 19, 2011 by CommonDreams.org US Actions, Not Obama's Words Tell Story of US Middle East Policy by Dennis Kucinich
We all want to be supportive of our President as he attempts to broaden America's positive role in the Middle East and North Africa. But it is important to critically analyze what the President does, not what he says, when it comes to U.S. policy abroad. When the President says ‘[i]t will be the policy of the United States to promote reform across the region, and to support transitions to democracy,’ we must look more carefully at how this policy has been implemented as well as the implications of the actions that have already been taken.
President Obama violated the Constitution by pursuing war against Libya without a Constitutionally-required authorization for the use of military force or declaration of war from Congress. His actions, and now his policy recitations, set the stage for more interventions, presumably in Syria and Iran. His recounting of the reasons for U.S. intervention in Libya is at odds with the facts. There was no clear evidence of an impending massacre in Libya. There was menacing rhetoric and a violent government put-down of an armed insurrection which may have been joined by some with legitimate non-violent aspirations. No one can justify the actions of any parties to this conflict. In any case, discretion requires leaders to move with the utmost care in developing military responses to rhetoric and similar care to intervention in a civil war.
More at link....top green announcement is a link....
President Obama violated the Constitution by pursuing war against Libya without a Constitutionally-required authorization for the use of military force or declaration of war from Congress. His actions, and now his policy recitations, set the stage for more interventions, presumably in Syria and Iran. His recounting of the reasons for U.S. intervention in Libya is at odds with the facts. There was no clear evidence of an impending massacre in Libya. There was menacing rhetoric and a violent government put-down of an armed insurrection which may have been joined by some with legitimate non-violent aspirations. No one can justify the actions of any parties to this conflict. In any case, discretion requires leaders to move with the utmost care in developing military responses to rhetoric and similar care to intervention in a civil war.
More at link....top green announcement is a link....
"...only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers" - Jane Mayer | New Yorker
"...only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers" - Jane Mayer | New Yorker
Posted by nashville_brook
Most everyone has heard about Jane Mayer's epic New Yorker article about the NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, who is being prosecuted as an "enemy of the state" via The Espionage Act for the "crime" of publicizing a $1.2 Billion-dollar disaster that has resulted in the permanent loss of privacy of every American who uses any electronic communication device. What's troubling is that no one seems to care.
Only 10 years ago, government agents had to obtain a warrant before mucking around in our personal data; bills, phone calls, email, GPS locations, etc. Remember the outrage at Total Information Awareness -- the DARPA surveillance system proposed by John Poindexter, Iran-Contra CONVICT? Well, this is worse. Much worse. And it's all the more insidious b/c we no longer have a Reagan-era CRIMINAL at the helm. Our own democratic administration now owns this Orwellian nightmare.
from the article “We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state,” Jack Balkin, law professor at Yale, asserts that the increase in leak prosecutions is part of a larger transformation.
Only a decade ago it was considered a GRAVE breach of public trust to gather information on people who weren't accused of a crime. Now, every person in the United States is tracked and according to this article, the NSA "made a CORPORATE DECISION" to use a system that not only revealed the identities of everyone they were tracking, it allows for the NSA to SELECTIVELY track people based on their profile...be it political, religious or even taste in music.
If Obama would like a respite from criticism, he'd be well advised to take measures that lead to praise rather than horror. If this program doesn't horrify you, you're not paying attention. And, Obama would gain beau coup praise for eliminating it and making sure that whistleblowers like Thomas Drake are protected from political prosecution. We either put an end to the "bipartisan normalization" of total surveillance, or we make peace with the reality that the American Legacy will be nothing less than an Orwellian dystopia.
Here's just a smidge of the article -- you owe it yourself to read the whole damn thing -- Brook
Thomas Drake at home
THE SECRET SHARER - Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?
Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency, faces some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen.
by Jane Mayer
(big snip)
The Espionage Act has rarely been used to prosecute leakers and whistle-blowers. Drake’s case is only the fourth in which the act has been used to indict someone for mishandling classified material. “It was meant to deal with classic espionage, not publication,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at American University who is an expert on the statute, says.
The first attempt to apply the law to leakers was the aborted prosecution, in 1973, of Daniel Ellsberg, a researcher at the RAND Corporation who was charged with disclosing the Pentagon Papers—a damning secret history of the Vietnam War. But the case was dropped, owing, in large part, to prosecutorial misconduct. The second such effort was the case of Samuel L. Morison, a naval intelligence officer who, in 1985, was convicted for providing U.S. photographs of a Soviet ship to Jane’s Defence Weekly. Morison was later pardoned by Bill Clinton. The third case was the prosecution, in 2005, of a Defense Department official, Lawrence Franklin, and two lobbyists for the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Franklin pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, and the case against the lobbyists collapsed after the presiding judge insisted that prosecutors establish criminal intent. Unable to prove this, the Justice Department abandoned the case, amid criticism that the government had overreached.
Few people are more disturbed about Drake’s prosecution than the others who spoke out against the N.S.A. surveillance program. In 2008, Thomas Tamm, a Justice Department lawyer, revealed that he was one of the people who leaked to the Times. He says of Obama, “It’s so disappointing from someone who was a constitutional-law professor, and who made all those campaign promises.” ...Tamm questions why the Drake case is proceeding, given that Drake never revealed anything as sensitive as what appeared in the Times. “The program he talked to the Baltimore Sun about was a failure and wasted billions of dollars,” Tamm says. “It’s embarrassing to the N.S.A., but it’s not giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”
Mark Klein, the former A.T. & T. employee who exposed the telecom-company wiretaps, is also dismayed by the Drake case. “I think it’s outrageous,” he says. “The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_...
Posted by nashville_brook
Most everyone has heard about Jane Mayer's epic New Yorker article about the NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, who is being prosecuted as an "enemy of the state" via The Espionage Act for the "crime" of publicizing a $1.2 Billion-dollar disaster that has resulted in the permanent loss of privacy of every American who uses any electronic communication device. What's troubling is that no one seems to care.
Only 10 years ago, government agents had to obtain a warrant before mucking around in our personal data; bills, phone calls, email, GPS locations, etc. Remember the outrage at Total Information Awareness -- the DARPA surveillance system proposed by John Poindexter, Iran-Contra CONVICT? Well, this is worse. Much worse. And it's all the more insidious b/c we no longer have a Reagan-era CRIMINAL at the helm. Our own democratic administration now owns this Orwellian nightmare.
from the article “We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state,” Jack Balkin, law professor at Yale, asserts that the increase in leak prosecutions is part of a larger transformation.
Only a decade ago it was considered a GRAVE breach of public trust to gather information on people who weren't accused of a crime. Now, every person in the United States is tracked and according to this article, the NSA "made a CORPORATE DECISION" to use a system that not only revealed the identities of everyone they were tracking, it allows for the NSA to SELECTIVELY track people based on their profile...be it political, religious or even taste in music.
If Obama would like a respite from criticism, he'd be well advised to take measures that lead to praise rather than horror. If this program doesn't horrify you, you're not paying attention. And, Obama would gain beau coup praise for eliminating it and making sure that whistleblowers like Thomas Drake are protected from political prosecution. We either put an end to the "bipartisan normalization" of total surveillance, or we make peace with the reality that the American Legacy will be nothing less than an Orwellian dystopia.
Here's just a smidge of the article -- you owe it yourself to read the whole damn thing -- Brook
Thomas Drake at home
THE SECRET SHARER - Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?
Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency, faces some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen.
by Jane Mayer
(big snip)
The Espionage Act has rarely been used to prosecute leakers and whistle-blowers. Drake’s case is only the fourth in which the act has been used to indict someone for mishandling classified material. “It was meant to deal with classic espionage, not publication,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at American University who is an expert on the statute, says.
The first attempt to apply the law to leakers was the aborted prosecution, in 1973, of Daniel Ellsberg, a researcher at the RAND Corporation who was charged with disclosing the Pentagon Papers—a damning secret history of the Vietnam War. But the case was dropped, owing, in large part, to prosecutorial misconduct. The second such effort was the case of Samuel L. Morison, a naval intelligence officer who, in 1985, was convicted for providing U.S. photographs of a Soviet ship to Jane’s Defence Weekly. Morison was later pardoned by Bill Clinton. The third case was the prosecution, in 2005, of a Defense Department official, Lawrence Franklin, and two lobbyists for the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Franklin pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, and the case against the lobbyists collapsed after the presiding judge insisted that prosecutors establish criminal intent. Unable to prove this, the Justice Department abandoned the case, amid criticism that the government had overreached.
Few people are more disturbed about Drake’s prosecution than the others who spoke out against the N.S.A. surveillance program. In 2008, Thomas Tamm, a Justice Department lawyer, revealed that he was one of the people who leaked to the Times. He says of Obama, “It’s so disappointing from someone who was a constitutional-law professor, and who made all those campaign promises.” ...Tamm questions why the Drake case is proceeding, given that Drake never revealed anything as sensitive as what appeared in the Times. “The program he talked to the Baltimore Sun about was a failure and wasted billions of dollars,” Tamm says. “It’s embarrassing to the N.S.A., but it’s not giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”
Mark Klein, the former A.T. & T. employee who exposed the telecom-company wiretaps, is also dismayed by the Drake case. “I think it’s outrageous,” he says. “The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_...
Saturday, May 14, 2011
ronpaul-screencap-051311 yemen_march_110513a robotband DemocracyNowTaxHavens maher_christian_hypocrisy wh_common_rap_110511a glennbeck0512 noam_chomsky Bill Maher: If you rejoice in revenge, torture and war …you’re not a Christian
During Friday night’s “New Rules” segment on Real Time, Bill Maher argued that “non-violence was Jesus’ trademark” and that Christians who celebrated the killing of Osama bin Laden are not faithful to the teachings of Christ.
“If you’re a Christian and support killing your enemies and torture, you have to come up with a new name for yourself,” Maher said.
“Capping thine enemy is not exactly what Jesus would do — it’s what Suge Knight would do …Martin Luther King gets to call himself a Christian because he actually practiced loving his enemies, and Gandhi was so fucking Christian he was Hindu”
View the video segment at link
http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/05/maher-bin-laden-gandhi-christian-hypocrisy/
“If you’re a Christian and support killing your enemies and torture, you have to come up with a new name for yourself,” Maher said.
“Capping thine enemy is not exactly what Jesus would do — it’s what Suge Knight would do …Martin Luther King gets to call himself a Christian because he actually practiced loving his enemies, and Gandhi was so fucking Christian he was Hindu”
View the video segment at link
http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/05/maher-bin-laden-gandhi-christian-hypocrisy/
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