Politics: Michael Kirschbaum - Justice Accomplished

This is Michael Korschbaum's first post on YouTube under the account name Whitehousedotgov and it has alread hit 21,247 views in 2 months. I can't find much else about him but the video speaks for itself. This is YouTube and free speech in action. It's shocking and some might even say offensive but I think it makes a point that needs to be slapped upside some people's heads. What is being done by our leadership in this country today is just as perverse and offensive as what it is being represented by in this video.

Music Video: Second Life - Virtual U2 Concert

A group of U2 fans, who are also fans of the online 3D environment Second Life, have formed a group called U2 in SL which amounts to the worlds first virtual "tribute band" . . . or at least the first one I have heard of (details here and here). These folks have created online "avatars" who look just like the members of U2. They built a stage, complete with instruments, lighting, and pyrotechnics, they created elaborate animated "scripts" that the stage effects and characters perform for each song and they streamed audio from an actual live performance from a Boston U2 concert as the sound track. Add to this the trimmings of a concert setting such as T-shirt stands and merchandise and about 50 fans who showed up for the event (can't have to many people in one area yet or things slow down) and you have one of the more unique online experiences I have seen so far: an authentic life performance, of sorts, for live people participating in a virtual event. It also looks like they also had some people acting as the "camera crew" who each took video of different members and angles so that they could cut it all together into a concert highlights video which they have posted on YouTube.

Pretty Unique to say the least. They have no affiliation with the real U2. They make no money at all off these events and they have tried several times to contact U2 and their management to legitimize their efforts. The primary goal seems to be to draw awareness to various Bono charities.

What makes this special to me is that it is a creative labor of love that was put together by ordinary people who wanted to push the boundaries of traditional thinking. Because Second Life is a completely open environment that allows members to create and own anything they want (as long as they have the skills or the money to pay someone with skills) it is the perfect platform for these kinds of experiments.

Comedy: Jon Ligon - Ha Ha Ha America

I haven't found much out so far about the creator of this video beyond his name but the video itself has been a viral hit and it has recently been featured in the Sundance film festival. It is an in your face, sarcastic satire that depicts China bragging, quite obnoxiously and with witty translation "errors" about how America is now number 2 next to China as a dominant world power.

An interesting side note: Sundance was hosting the video on their website for a while and nearly every search engine hit for the video links to the Sundance page but now they all lead to a page that has the movie thumbnail, but tells you the festival is over and "come back next year." I'm sure they were coordinating the online part with the real festival and there may be some licensing issues but it just seems counter productive to me on all counts, both for filmmakers and Sundance alike, to shut the online part down when the real festival ends rather than keeping it as an archive of Sundance films. Have these people been paying attention to the YouTube phenomenon at all? What filmmaker wouldn't want his video featured as part of the Sundance archives? What organization wouldn't want people perpetually visiting them from links all over the web and then staying to watch more?

You can also see a higher quality version as one full length video at the Atom Films Page where the producer will get paid if you watch it (because it has a commercial at the start). I would have posted that version here but their embeddable videos are basically just a trailer that forces you to go to their site if you want the whole thing. I would rather leave that decision up to you like everyone else in the web video world does.

Comedy: Ask a Ninja - Ninja Movie Pitch

Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine together make up Beat Box Giant Productions, a web production company that has created this very successful podcast: Ask a Ninja. They do not identify who the ninja actually is because, well, he's a ninja! BBG has also produced the podcast: Hope is Emo, a comedy which chronicles the misadventures of a sad and whiny girl.

The above episode of Ask a Ninja is Ninja Movie Pitch, where he is asked what kind of a movie he would make. He then pitches his script that has references to just about every movie you can think of. See how many you can pick out!

Food and Drink: Tiki Bar TV - Bunnies

Tiki Bar TV shows us a new drinking game.

Politics: Max Blumenthal - Generation Chickenhawk

Max Blumenthal is a writer who's articles regularly appear in The Nation and on The Huffington Post. He also does videos now and then and he recently posted this video as a blog entry on the Huffington Post. It makes a very important point about who fights wars and who sits at home advocating them. The Republicans are building a culture, and a whole new generation for that matter, around supporting military actions that they don't want to fight themselves. This is a very dangerous standard to set. Having a voluntary army for defending against attacks is one thing but a country cannot maintain it's liberty in the long term if they allow a situation where one class of people is advocating an aggressive war and another class is fighting and dying in it.

What gets me about these kinds of occasions, that the Blumenthal video represents, where someone is walking around asking people to justify their philosophy, is that suddenly the alarm goes out: "Hey! There's a LIBERAL walking around with a camera asking questions!" and the thought police show up to escort them out. It's standard procedure in this day of people who feel they have a God given right to live in political bubbles. You can't go off the script at these events. Their philosophy cannot be challenged by anyone trying to put them on the record. Never you mind that these people are the future politicians and activists that will be shaping the destiny of our country. . . this is all a private event on private property and no uncomfortable challenges can persist because the owners can eject anyone at anytime. Wouldn't a real free country with real free speech force anyone hosting political events to allow this sort of thing in the room? Aren't political events, by definition, part of the public trust and, therefore, public property? I guess not in this free country.

I think I would be doing a rebellious interpretive dance myself when faced with that mentality (see the video). Notice how that moment is then parlayed into a "disturbance" by the teamwork of the woman who was offended by Blumenthal's hand getting too close while he danced and shouting "excuuuuse me" which is then just what security needed as a physical "disturbance" that justified physical restraint and ejection. . . .


There is a very good Flash Video called The Philosophy of Liberty that everybody simply MUST SEE after watching the Blumenthal video above. It addresses this same issue of people who want surrogates to defend their liberty for them:

The Link Is Here

WATCH IT. It is based on part of a very influential book by Ken Schooland named The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible. It examines what liberty really is and how society must protect it. They also have a website based the book.

Documentary: Chat The Planet - Hometown Baghdad

TV Veterans Laurie Meadoff and Kate Hills are the brains behind Next Next Entertainment, a TV and multimedia production house in NYC specializing in reality and documentary programming for major networks on both cable and broadcast television. Together they head up another, more personal project of theirs called Chat The Planet. They describe their mission like this:

"Chat the Planet is a global dialogue company. We connect young people from around the world to talk about everything from politics, prejudices and war to sex, music and life in general.

Chat the Planet is uncensored, unscripted and unlike anything else in the mainstream media."

The first major project that they took on at Chat The Planet was an online episodic reality series called Hometown Baghdad which consists of 38 short 5-10 minute videos about 3 young men trying to cope with ordinary life in one of the most violent places on the earth today. It was shot and produced entirely by a small Iraqi crew. The above episode titled, jimi hendrix, is typical of the series. The guys must break into a house to dodge a gunfight on their way to the basketball court to shoot some hoops. While there they talk about how their friends are all moving away and one of them expresses their personal philosophy of living.

I love this series because it really makes the Iraq conflict real. These young men are very empathetic characters coping with all the things that ordinary American's like them do every day. It's just that these guys are trying to do it in the middle of carnage and violance. It really cuts right to the heart of it all and makes it very real in a way that our traditional media would never dare to bring it.

Documentary: Mr. New York - De La Vega, NY Artist

The combined talents of Keith Winsted as producer and host, John Roegner as Director of Photography and Laura Bermudez as editor make up the web production team known as Mr. New York.

This is a profile that they did of a very well known artist in the NYC neighborhood known as Spanish Harlem. They have a Current TV account and they have submitted a couple of their videos, including this one, for TV. It looks like it might make it too because it is in the top 5 member picks as of this writing.

I'm also happy to see that Current finally cleaned up the mess that was their embeddable video look. All that clutter of buttons and logos before always bothered me.

Saturday Feature: Zeitgeist, The Movie

This is a very powerful movie designed to help bring awareness to the ways that the people in power manipulate the masses to their own ends. It begins by examining the mythology around Christianity, then moves on to the 9/11 conspiracy questions and then ends with the Federal Reserve system and the ways that the international bankers control whole economies. I have reservations about the part about Christianity. It's not that I think anything they say is wrong, I just think there is a whole lot that they leave out which makes the question of Jesus as a historical person a lot more open than they would suggest.

Anyway, enjoy.

Public Speech: Michael Papantonio - The Mainstream Media is Dead

GoLeft Tv describe themselves like this:

GoLeft.tv is an innovative, web-based television and multimedia center featuring political, social and entertainment news and commentary from a Progressive angle, advocating a more enlightened, intelligent view of America and the world.

Michael Papantonio is one of the founders of GoLeft TV. He is a public advocate and a talk show host on Air America Radio. The above video is from their archives and it is a public speech that Michael gave to Canadians about their media. He goes over the failings of the American media over the last 29 years and warns Canadians that it is time to draw a line in the sand.

I think this is a very powerful video because it explains exactly what motivates me and the other contributors to this blog. Our American news is dead. It has been killed by various deregulations and the eliminations of standards of fairness. What we have today is a dog and pony show pretending to be the news. With some exception, one is lucky these days if you get 5 minutes worth of good information out of a 1 hour broadcast.