Global warming emails are examined

Fox News: "We distort reality, YOU get a preconceived narrative."

As usual, Fox and conservative groups are busted taking complex concepts out of context and making them mean something completely different. . in order to advance their agenda.

If the video doesn't play it can be found here at The Real News Network

The Brazen Heads - Curse Of The Hag

Regarding Torture

I figured I would add my own take on this situation.

Uncensored Interview: Sway Dasafo - Art Imitating Life

Uncensored Interview:

UI is a free video destination site for indie bands. We find talent in the underground indie world and interview them for current fans to enjoy and for new music aficionados to discover. On top of it, we encourage users to talk to the bands by uploading v-sponses and share your thoughts and ideas with them.

This is a great statement posted by Uncensored Interview. UK Hip Hop artist Sway Dasafo offers his take on the vicious circle he sees in the art of Hip Hop as it first imitates life. . . and then itself.

The Easter Bunny Hates You

Happy Easter!

Music: The Brazen Heads - One Eyed Reilly

Click to play

The Brazen Heads are a Phoenix based Celtic rock band with a surprisingly hard driving sound for a band with no electric guitar in 99% of their work. This is primarily because of the amazing drum and vocal stylings of Roy Plisko (who also writes the blog descriptions) The other guys do stuff too though: Liam Mackey sits in front with a guitar, tells dirty jokes and sings most of the songs, Tim Sadow has this long, hairy, stick thing that he strokes a little instrument with, Mark Lanus plays with just about anything he gets his hands on and bass player James Cowley has really cool hair.

This is the first music video released from their new album Who's Yer Paddy.

For more information go to www.thebrazenheads.com and feel free to drop us a message on our band forums too.

Video Activism: Mark Fiore - The Spies Who Love You

Sometimes you need to talk to people like they are idiots before they finally get it. Hopefully this will do it. Mark Fiore does lots of animation work which can be found at his website. In this video he explains the absurdity of the FISA law, AKA "The Protect America Act" that is being rammed through congress with absolutely no public support. In fact, much public sentiment has been "are you F'n kidding me??" The Senate has already passed the bill giving Telecoms immunity for past lawbreaking. The US Supreme court has recently refused to hear a case challenging the legality of the issue. All that is left now is the house of representatives. They have stood up to Bush a little at this point by refusing to pass the law immediately as he demanded. It looks pretty likely, however, that they will eventually pass it.

Welcome to America where our government teams up with mega corporations to break the law and then passes a new law to let them all get away with it retroactively.

Politics - Andy Cobb - john.he.is

This is a halarious spoof of the Obama "Yes We Can" video that uses a similar treatment of John McCain's Words.

Sunday Inspiration - Ted Talks: Bill Strickland

This video is from a site known as Ted Talks TED Stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design and it is an organization dedicated to bringing together the great thinkers and doers in the world who are challenged to give the best public talk of their lives, in 18 minutes or so. They make videos of these speaking engagements available to the public for free under a collective commons license.

Bill Strickland is a man who had a vision to build a training center for poor and underprivileged people in a rough neighborhood in Pittsburgh. His approach is different from many such attempts however. He believes that the tone you set about how much you value people in these schools is something that needs to be established right away before you start giving them speeches. As a result he has insisted that his center have things like fountains, flowers, fine art, hand crafted furniture and gourmet meals in the cafeteria at tables that look more like a high profile business dinner. He believes that these things have a psychological impact on the students that breeds much more success in the program. The video above is a very famous slide show that he has taken around the country to raise money and awareness about his dream. He is accompanied by Herbie Hancock on piano as he speaks. It is an incredibly moving and inspirational story he tells about his accomplishments and goals. Everyone who has ever been involved in education really needs to see this.

Examining the FISA Bill

The Real News Network presents this analysis by Republican constitutional lawyer, Bruce Fein of the proposed modifications to the FISA bill (AKA "The Protect America Act") and the resulting controversy, as it has been going through congress. Anybody that has been following Glenn Greenwald's excellent coverage of this issue knows how corrupt the situation has become. Bruce Fein does an excellent job of explaining this and also pointing out the failures, if not outright compliance, by people like speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi to stop the administration's lawless posture.

The "short" version:

The Bush Administration asked companies like AT&T and Verizon to open up their access to American electronic communications of all kinds, with people outside the country, without warrants. Millions of calls and emails and internet hits were tapped by the government over a 2 or 3 year period with no oversight. If you spoke with or emailed someone outside America, it might have been you.

Some companies, such as Quest, refused because their team of lawyers told them it was grossly illegal. This cost them millions in government contracts. This wiretapping without warrants is a violation of our right to privacy and the companies are now being sued for breaking the law, which is very clear about what is required in these situations. Meanwhile, the law of the land which has protected us from both terrorists AND government abuses is up for "modification" in congress. Dick Cheney has pulled some allies together in congress to get a provision put into that new law that these telecommunication companies should be immune from any legal action as a result of their wiretapping on behalf of the government.

This immunity would serve two purposes: It protects AT&T and others from millions, maybe billions, worth of lawsuits by citizens who'se rights were violated. It also prevents any investigation at all into exactly what was going on during all that wiretapping and who actually got tapped. If the government was good and appropriate with it's power, we will never know. If the government grossly abused it's power, we will never know. The whole thing would be completely sealed.

The administration and it's allies claim is that these lawsuits would expose national security secrets to our enemies in the public record and that it would discourage companies from cooperating with the government in the future, which would, in turn, help the terrorists win. Both of these claims are false. The existing law that has been on the books all these years allowed trials with sensitive evidence to be tried in special courts that were designed specifically to protect that evidence. Companies like AT&T are also not in a position to refuse a legal request by the government for wiretaps with a warrant. THAT would be break the law. These warrants could also be obtained within 72 hours AFTER the tap took place, so there is no concern about expediency which is another administration claim. We have always been able to spy on terrorists overseas talking to people in America. The modifications needed because of technology were very minor and, like a corrupt auto mechanic, the administration made a bunch of bogus claims and jacked up the price, in liberty, that we must now all pay.

This is called "Trust Me Government." The exact kind of thing that every Republican I know has been against for as long as I have known them. Yet there they are, the people who came into power promising that scariest thing they could ever here was "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" telling us to trust the government, it's here to help. This time, though, it isn't a social worker or a welfare check. It is guys with headphones, laptops and digital recorders sitting in an AT&T hub in San Fransisco.

Music: Preston Reed - Life

I found Preston Reed while browsing around at the Broadjam Website. It's pretty cool solo guitar riffing. Broadjam is also a cool independent music site where you can upload your songs and get reviewed by the community. They also do videos and let you sell your songs as downloads for 99 cents. One of the downsides is that you can only acess the content on the broadjam website. There doesn't seem to be any way to embed their content into blogs so I can share a direct link to the material. I had to find the YouTube version to share it here. Looks like YouTube gets the clicks this time until Broadjam can work it out.

People at Current TV

[UPDATED BELOW and the body has been edited for more clarity]

"Well, as you know, viewer-contributed content is essential to our mission, which is about democratizing television. We're about telling stories that aren't being told right now. We're about giving the audience a complete voice and a complete role in what we're doing. Our mission statement begins with working with the audience, to create a new category of content.

So I don't think you're ever going to see us increasing the amount of professionally produced content we offer. But I think what you are going to see is that the quality level of viewer contributions is going to get better and better."


-David Neuman, President of programming, Current TV

As some of you may know all of us here at Media Crashers are citizen video producers who have been past supporters and contributors to Current TV , Al Gore's cable network. Over the past few months, many of us have been very troubled by the changes at Current which seem to be taking away the essential genius that the network represented: putting citizens in control of what they see on TV.

Originally, members of the Current website had two options: those who had production skills could submit "citizen journalism" videos for consideration as TV content and those who didn't could still participate, in a very real way, by becoming "citizen programmers." Any member could contribute their vote to "greenlight" submissions and this would push the videos they liked up the ranks. The heart of this voting system was was called "the leaderboard" which was like a top 1000 list of the videos as ranked by the voters. There was a unique, dramatic, thrill to watching your video, or a video you voted for enter at about 200 or 300 and slowly rise and fall through the ranks, depending on how well it did. To win the number one spot was the ultimate rush and the greatest validation a producer could receive. The process was also very open. Just like a democracy where citizens can watch the votes being counted, the web interface displayed the greenlight voters, the scores, and the value of each person's vote so that it was possible to go back and do the math if someone wanted to.

Unfortunately, this whole system of bringing the people directly into the programming choices was done away with as the final stage of what appears like a slow takeover by the Current staff. Ironically, this was right about the time Al Gore won an emmy for "interactive television"

The "redesigned" website has no leaderboard and it looks more like a social networking meets DIGG/Delicious page where staff and members blog their thoughts. People can still upload videos but they are all buried in the mechanics of things like collecting each other's profiles, sharing links with each other, answering staff questions with webcam videos, following staff "assignment desk" projects rather than making up their own, and collecting links to viral videos they like. These things in themselves are not necessarily bad additions to the website. The problem is that all of this stuff goes into a giant blob of "content" which also includes in house staff videos mixed in, with no separation or distinction. The "leaders" in the community seem to me much more staff centered than member centered. As a citizen producer, you can't even find a list of your own videos in your profile.

So how has this all worked out?

Someone just sent me some interesting research they did about Current TV.

Here is a screenshot they took of the "People" page at Current.com. It is the front page of this section where the most popular and most active people can be found.

Here it is:

Click on it for a larger image:


This next picture shows the exact same screen shot but the researcher went through the profiles of each person and anyone who is on the Current Staff has been marked:


Click for Larger Image:




I'll let the images speak for themselves.

UPDATE:

Apparently some in the comments believe that it is the ability to pitch stuff to Current that makes it democratic. I would submit that every network in the world accepts pitches from people, even ordinary people which is what all feelance TV producers start out as. Listening to anybody who wants to talk is not what makes something democratic. It is the process people can use to put their voices forward that defines "democratizing the media." I don't believe that a cable network staff is an underrepresented minority when it comes to deciding TV content. I also don't believe an "assignment desk" where staff tell the people what kinds of productions they want submitted is a brave new approach to making television. Democritizing the media means that people can start the conversation, submit their ideas and then look at everyone's ideas and vote, in an open and verifiable way, for the ones that should go on TV. The Current staff have always made their own content along side and they have also made their own choices from the submissions. I don't have a problem with that. The difference today is that the audience is no longer bypassing staff and choosing content independently as a way of balancing out staff picks (or vise versa). That is the heart of the problem for me. The voting today has no transparency and it is a "recommendation" not a final decision.


UPDATE II:

I my recent contacts with Current I have been informed that they understand the problems with their website and have changes coming including a "bigger and better" leaderboard. I'm not sure what this means. It was the "improvements" they made to the old leaderboard that led to it's dysfunction and eventual termination in the first place. Despite my lack of confidence, I will remain hopeful. The community that they inspired is still there trying to make a difference.

Video Activism: Brave New Films take on Bill Oreilly and Michael Savage

Fox Attacks "Non Existant" Veterans:



Michael Savage hates Muslims:




Robert Greenwald is at it again with his fantastic work over at Brave New Films. This time he takes on Bill Oreilly who claimed there were no homless veterans sleeping under bridges and made fun of John Edwards for pointing out that there are. They did something Oreilly apparently never thought of doing. They took a camera to a homeless shelter and asked if there were any veterans who wanted to comment.

In the next video they are trying to expose the bile that is being spewed on the national airwaves by the radio talk show host, Michael Savage. They have created a companion website where you can contact his sponsors and donate money toward The Interfaith Alliance who Savage is suing because they used his attacks against them on their website while also asking for donations. I'm not sure exactly when such behavior could actually be considered inciting violence or unrest over the public airwaves but this certainly seems like a candidate to me.

Politics: Mike Gravel - Bomb Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib

Mike Gravel really cracks me up. What he is saying here is so gutsy that it is appealing in a blockbuster movie climax sort of way. I don't know that it would ever happen but wow:

1) Clear everybody out of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and bomb them both to dust to show the world we are serious about our regrets.

2) Get all the prisoners lawyers and give them due process to determine their guilt or innocence.

3) Turn the justice department loose on all the government contractors and think tanks in the military/intelligence industrial complex so that they are so busy covering their own asses that they don't have a chance to attack him.

Unfortunately I probably have a better chance of doing it than he does. Although I would probably do it without the cheap, amateur special effects slapped on my videos.

Politics: Trust Your Heart

It's Time To Stand Up For Your Man

Michael Moore sent me a letter just before the NH primary where he went over the positives and negatives about the leading democratic candidates. He said that he wasn't officially endorsing anyone and then went on to list mostly negatives about the others and mostly positives about John Edwards. . . not that it was an endorsement.

I was listening to Air America the other day and Mike Malloy was saying how the field looks good and the show is not endorsing anyone but they are leaning towards John Edwards. A Huffington post article I read recently Said very much the same. I could go on. It seems like lots of people aren't really endorsing anyone. . . but they want to point out some good things about John Edwards.

Well you know what? There's this little thing called "the establishment" and they most definitely DON'T like John Edwards. Keep playing footsie with his candidacy and you will "not endorse but like" John Edwards right out of the Primary.

This is not a time to be some kind of "neutralbot" public Democrat who doesn't want to tarnish the primaries by actually making a decision about someone. This is not the time to drop hints about who you like while the other candidates clearly have an advantage. This is the time to take action and stand behind your man! This is the narrow window where your opinions and your influence actually mean something to the election. Don't wait till Hillary's democratic machine and Obama's Martin Luther King road show tips the scales completely.

If you like John Edwards then stand up and say so! The last thing he needs right now is a bunch of public figures who secretly like him but don't want to show "bias" in the election by actually standing up and saying so. This is not the time to play that game! This is the time to make change happen by getting in there and fighting for it!

So. If you are a blogger, or a radio/TV personality, or a documentary film maker who has the ear of Democrats around the country and you actually like John Edwards then now is the time to actually stand behind him rather that talk about him!

Please stop fiddling around while the real candidate of change (or the at least the closest to that of the 3) gets beaten because everyone's talking about Obama's speeches and Hillary's tears!

Stand up and be counted!

Politics - Mike Gravel Raps

Self Explanatory

Politics: NetCenter08 - GOP YouTube Debate

I have been very caught up in things lately so I apologize for the lapse in posting.

I think this video is an excellent representation of the possible future of media. Dubbed "NetCenter08," It is 2 new media personalities: Dan Manatt from Politics TV.com, and David All from TechRepublican.com to discuss the latest CNN Republican Presidential debate which used YouTube questions.

It looks to me like they are talking on webcams much like the old media talks through satellite links. These two webcam videos are then composited together with some graphics and footage from the debates. It is a really good use of widely available, relatively low cost, technology to create the look and feel of your typical news debate. Because it is coming from the netroots rather than TV producers, this conversation feels more authentic to me. I hope we see more of this format. Todays TV media feels more like a pro wrestling circus among elite media pundits and hosts. That is what the old media thinks is good television but it has been done to death. This new media technology can bring more diversity to the national conversation. That is what this site is created to celebrate.

As for this CNN YouTube Debate, I like the national town hall format that it represents. The problem for me is in the details, however. Stalin once said that it's not who votes, it's who counts the votes. In this case it's not who asks the questions, it's who chooses the questions that make it in. There were 5000 submissions for this debate. CNN chose somewhere around 34 questions without any input from anyone but CNN. Now, do you think if CNN had a list of questions they wanted to ask ahead of time that they couldn't find one of the 5000 that asked it for them? What's to stop them? In that sense this whole thing feels more like an exploitation of the new media as a pool for low cost content ideas and as a marketing gimmick rather than an authentic tool of democracy. In that measure, it troubles me.

I have the same issue with Current TV. They talk about democratizing the media by letting anyone submit things but that is useless if some group of staff TV producers then gets to choose from those submissions and sit down with editors and change the perspective, or cut stuff out and put on their own graphics to "punch it up". How is this any different from approaching any producer anywhere to pitch our work? The democracy is in letting the people decide what goes on the air and putting it on as chosen. It is not bestowing people with the privilege of pitching your video to a media person. In this area both CNN and Current TV are failing the democratic potential of the web media. When these old media and new media representatives decide they will have the guts to put real democracy into the process, then they can talk about how great and innovative their ideas are. Until then they are just selling used cars with a new paint job.

If you want to see real political democracy in action go to 10questions.com THAT is a YouTube town hall forum worth praising. Both PoliticsTV and TechRepublican and tons of other netroots organizations are sponsors. On that site you submit YouTube videos and then vote for the ones you want and the top 10 are presented to the candidates to make their own response videos. The submission and voting phase is over but the questions chosen are all good and it will be nice to hear some answers. You also get to vote on how well each candidate's answers to the questions are. So far Mike Huckabee, Rona Paul and John Edwards have agreed to participate. Barack Obama also answered 1 question by putting in a clip from one of his speeches as an answer. You can send a mass email to every candidate from their website. Please do so if you want to support real democracy in the new media.

Politics: Davis Fleetwood - Las Vegas Democratic Debate - CNN Stacks The Cards

My thoughts exactly. This Nevada debate looked like a scripted sham to me. The audience was stacked. Dennis Kucinich got 5 minutes worth of time while others got three times that much. Who the hell boos when candidates try to point out the differences between them and others? Who the hell thinks that pointing out that a candidate is a corporate democrat with huge ties to insiders and lobbyists is "mud slinging?" That is a very important distinction to make about a candidate and any audience that boos and hisses when that is pointed out is a fake audience that is stacked with supporters. CNN also stacked the questions. They bullied a teenager into asking a stupid diamonds or pearls question when she wanted to ask a serious one.

Our elections have become a crock and I really hope we somehow manage to get it back from these entrenched insiders who are blatantly gaming the system.

Philosophy: Eight Year Old Cracks The Code To Happy Thought

Is it really this easy? Isn't the bowl still part of your thoughts? lol

Music: Tommy Emmanuel - Classical Gas

This is some mindblowingly good guitar playing.