July 28, 2010

You have a choice








Someday you will die.
Your body will rot away.
The things you own will scatter to the wind.
The only thing left of you will be your deeds.

Do you want your legacy to be:
Going along with things you know are wrong? or...
Making your ideals into reality?

This is the choice you face...

(Choose wisely)

Version 2 (with backwards audio)










July 27, 2010

[video] I like Mike! If Mike Gravel Were President (barely political)

Due Process signs Obama's B-Day card



Tsk tsk. Here's the link to sign Obama's B-day card. Send me what you come up with.

Illegal Wiretapping signs Obama's B-Day card!



Oh snap.

Here's the link to sign Obama's B-Day card. Keep me posted if you see anybody else signing.

Single-Payer Healthcare signed Obama's B-Day Card

And it seems they feel little jilted:



Here's the link to sign Obama's B-Day Card.

If you see anybody else signing Obama's b-day card, like War, Wall Street, the Gulf of Mexico, etc be sure to send them to me so I can post them. Or just upload them to flickr and post a link in the response to this blog entry.

Politics and Ethics: What does it mean to be free?







Part 1


Part 2


Part 3






July 26, 2010

FILM- The War on Democracy



If you haven't seen this film, watch it. Now.

RightChange.com -The Ultimate in Right-Wing Greenwashing








Have you seen this load of tripe?

Talking Feds 3 from RightChange on Vimeo.



You would think that a video depicting Obama as being soft on the oil companies would be coming from some progressive leftist organization like GreenChange.org or GreenPeace.

But no. This right-wing PAC called "Right Change" is playing on anger over the oil spill, and placing blame squarely on the shoulders of Obama.

There's one problem: the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico isn't his fault.

Sure, Obama's administration shares some of the blame for continuing the rubber stamp policies for drilling permits at the MMS, and for dragging their feet when it comes to cleaning out the former employees who were literally in bed with the industry, but the disaster does not start with Obama.

What is Right Change's solution? Elect Republicans.

It's the conservative mantra of "Deregulate, Deregulate Deregulate!" that was at the source of the problem. Conservatives wanted less government, and corporate democrats wanted the same thing, with different language (they're pro-business.)

That this organization is riffing on the public's anger over the oil spill, and then offering the election of Republicans to "take back washington" is beyond disingenuous.

This double-think required to NOT see the contradiction here would scare even George Orwell.

Here's something you can do to hold Democrats and Republicans accountable, and prevent future oil spills from happening:

Revoke BP's Corporate Charter






July 25, 2010

Pre-Made T-Shirts in stock- same day shipping!

So if you want to order a shirt, but can't quite make up your mind because of how many different designs I offer, maybe this will help you narrow your choices

Here is a list of t-shirts that I have in stock, pre-made, ready to ship the day you order them:

End War

1 Small (red on grey)
1 Medium (light orange on red)


It's Pickle Time!

1 large


Binary: "I <3 You"

2 Small
2 Medium
2 X-Large


Socialism: Keeping America Safe from Fires

3 Small
3 Medium
3 Large


Giftmas

2 Large


Turn Your Frauen Upsidedown

1 Large
1 X-large


"Floaty"

1 medium
2 large
2 x large


What Part of Forgive Don't you Assholes Understand?

1 Small
1 X Large


Work What Your Mama Gave You

1 Small


JFK

1 small
1 medium
1 large
1 x large


Mortality: We're All Going To Die!

1 small
1 large
1 x large


I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient

1 small (white text on blue)
2 medium (one white txt on pink, the other dark red txt on yellow)
1 x large (white txt on red)


Birds on Wire

1 small


Brand America

1 Medium

July 20, 2010

BP Built its Crisis Response Center in Photoshop

Thanks to So_You_Know on twitter for pointing me to this post by AmericaBlog

Much like the oil that is spewing from the earth and poisoning the sea and land, BP has been spewing lies and poisoning public discourse.
First they lied about being a Green Company, rebranding as "Beyond Petroleum" after an explosion in a Texas Oil Refinery killed 15 employees, injured more than 170, and released.
They faked their blowout preventer tests on the Deepwater Horizon.
They lied about their preparedness to deal with an oil spill resulting from their drilling.
Then when the Deepwater Horizon went down, they lied about the amount of oil that was spilling from the wellhead. First it was 1,000 barrels a day, then 5,000. We know now that it was likely 60,000 barrels a day, and could have been as much as 100,000 barrels a day.
Then they lied to the press about their safety record.
Then they lied about their cleanup efforts, busing in actors to play the part of oil cleanup extras as a backdrop for Obama's visit.
Now as a patina on this veneer of lies, it turns out that their Crisis Command Center was >built in Photoshop.

From AmericaBlog


UPDATE 12:08PM Eastern 7/20/10: BP has faked yet another oil crisis response photo on its Web site.

UPDATE: 11:14PM Eastern: BP has now posted the "original" photo, they claim. Except - surprise - they are refusing to post the high-resolution version of the new "original" photo (update: they've now posted the original photo). They posted the high-res version of the altered photo earlier, and in fact, that version is still live via a link below the new photo. Why not post the high-res version of the new "original" photo? Afraid someone is going to enlarge it and find out it's fake too?

[snip]

Uh, a few questions.

1) Why were the screens in the crisis center blank in the middle of the crisis? Coffee break?
2) The BP spokesman claims that the photographer photoshopped the changes. Really? A professional photographer hired by BP Photoshops so poorly that a 12 year old kid could do a better job. Really? Let me show you what BP said exactly, and then the photo that supposedly this "professional" edited:

Scott Dean, a spokesman for BP, said that there was nothing sinister in the photo alteration and provided the original unaltered version. He said that a photographer working for the company had inserted the three images in spots where the video screens were blank.

Now here is the Photoshop job that the "professional" photographer did - this is just one part of the photo that he screwed up:


Anyone who has ever used Photoshop knows that this is an incredibly amateur job. I can do far better than this, and I tend to play with Photoshop for fun. We're to believe that a professional photographer did this poor a job, for pay, for a huge corporate client? Really? No one would hire this photographer again if this is true. Oh, and the photographer added the fake screens to the photo, what, without BP's permission? That's what they're implying, "the photographer did it."

3) Why does the meta data show that the photo was actually taken on March 6, 2001? Or is BP next going to tell us that their professional photographer has never set the time and date stamp on his multi-thousand dollar camera? Because then all of his photos for all of his clients will be screwed up. Really?
______________________________________

UPDATE: The photo contains data suggesting it was taken in 2001, not July of 2010 as claimed on BP's Web site. That would suggest, at least one possibility is, that BP took an old photo and Photoshopped new pictures of the oil spill over it, to make it look "new." More on this at the end of the post.

I guess if you're doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center. Why do they need a fake photo at all? Don't they have a real crisis response center they could have used?

Original BP Photo that is linked off of this page, with a snippet of the photo:








[snip]

... [A]n astute reader noticed that the meta info for the photo says it was created in 2001, not July 16, 2010 as claimed on BP's site. It looks like BP took a photo from 2001, and in order to make it look like the command center in July of 2010, they pasted pictures of the oil well leaking over the old photo.





Since AmericaBlog posted this article, the Washington Post also picked up on this news nugget, and posted a back and forth analysis between the shitty photoshop job, and what BP claims is the original photo.

In reality, the fact that BP has lied about yet another thing, and an inconsequential one at that, shouldn't be surprising. What's surprising is that even though we keep catching them, even though nobody trusts them anymore, they STILL KEEP LYING.

The fact that they are lying about such inconsequential things makes me think of a dying animal desperately thrashing about. For their own sake, I say it's time for a mercy kill.

Maddow: BP is "contaminating" scientists

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

July 14, 2010

The Peace Movement is Dead












Study Finds Political Bias is a Delusional Behaviour

Alllison Kilkenny and Digby both have already blogged about this, but I think they missed the real story-- Political Bias is DELUSIONAL. By definition.

Here's the original article in the Boston Globe.

The DSM IV defines delusions as false beliefs based on incorrect inference about external reality that persist despite the evidence to the contrary.

And what did this recent University of Michigan Study find about political bias?


In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

[...]

These findings open a long-running argument about the political ignorance of American citizens to broader questions about the interplay between the nature of human intelligence and our democratic ideals. Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information.

[...]

There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This is known as “motivated reasoning.” Whether or not the consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them.

New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.

For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

It’s unclear what is driving the behavior — it could range from simple defensiveness, to people working harder to defend their initial beliefs — but as Nyhan dryly put it, “It’s hard to be optimistic about the effectiveness of fact-checking.”


So to bring the point home, here's the definition of Delusional Disorder from the DSM-IV:
Delusional disorder is an illness characterized by the presence of nonbizarre delusions in the absence of other mood or psychotic symptoms. Delusions are false beliefs based on incorrect inference about external reality that persist despite the evidence to the contrary.

July 8, 2010

1 ton tarball found off the coast of FL



Thanks to GreenChange.org for the link.

PBS's NOW interviews Food Inc's director

Watch the full episode. See more NOW on PBS.

Cenk Uyger of The Young Turks: Obama is MORE CONSERVATIVE than REAGAN

Great Photo of BP's Tony Hayward



Great photo of Tony Hayward. And if you haven't, please take part in our 3 step action today: http://bit.ly/RevokeBP1

If you have, please share the link!

Ken Salazar is an Industry Hack

July 6, 2010

Have Socialists Taken Over?!

This is User supported media. PLease concider donating to keep this going






On in 2001, on 9-11, the WTC was struck by two planes.
Before the buildings came down, the scene was swarming with employed agents of a socialist organization. An organization with their headquarters right in New York City. Was this an international conspiracy by socialists? You’re watching the Punk Patriot.

Are you KIDDING me? Those socialists were all first responders- EMTs, Police, and Fire Fighters. They’re HEROES, remember?
Everybody worshiped and diefed these folks, and I think rightfully so. They were all responding to a higher calling. They were there to save lives.
They get paid the same whether they are pulling injured civilians from the burning rubble of a terrorist attack, or if they are sitting in the station playing cribbage. Why? Because the Fire Department is a socialist organization. YUP! The heroes of 9-11 were all agents of socialism!
It didn’t always used to be this way. Prior to the socialist model for Fire Departments, we used to have private fire companies.
The first Government-Funded Fire department was started in 1898. It was a socialist model that replaced the private fire company model. Under the private model fire companies would compete with one another to be the ones to respond to a fire in order to get payment from fire insurance companies. Now on it’s face, that seems like a good thing, right? They all compete to be first!
That totally ignores human psychology. As so often happens when you start attaching profits to something, these private fire companies became extremely corrupt, and would actively prevent other fire companies from responding to a fire to make sure that their company would be first and only, through activities like sending a person ahead of their pump wagon with a barrel. This "Barrel Sitter" would place his barrel over the fire hydrant, and sit on the barrel to prevent other fire companies from gaining access to it, and thus becoming the first to respond.
While these schmucks fought over profits, fire destroyed homes and took the lives of those trapped by the flames and smoke.
To make matters worse, private fire companies refused to put out fires that affected homes that were too poor to afford fire insurance plaques, despite there being a definite risk to the public safety. Fire has no regard for the income of residents, rich or poor, and will spread from house to house regardless of whether or not the owner has fire insurance.
The socialist model changed all that. Socialism is the model seen in Fire Depts almost everywhere in the United States today.

That's right! Whether they know it or not, your local fire department is filled with Socialists!

Socialism isn’t an international conspiracy-- it’s as American as Apple Pie!

This is User supported media. PLease concider donating to keep this going



July 3, 2010

REVOKE BP'S CHARTER- A walk through

This is User supported media. PLease concider donating to keep this going







So what if I told you that some kid in Maine had in his mind that he was going to start a grass roots campaign to take down the second biggest oil company in the USA?

What if I told you that within a couple weeks he’d recruit thousands of members to the cause?

What if I told you that after organizing the effort of thousands of people, he’d win over a National Political Organization, who would provide the movement with web tools to make it as easy as possible to take action?

What if I told you that eventually the movement would be reported on in CounterPunch, CommonDreams, and the Corporate Crime Reporter?

What if I told you that grassroots democracy works when you have the skills and put enough effort into it?

I’m that Kid in Maine, and you are one of those thousands of supporters, and I couldn’t have gotten this idea off the ground without your help. So THANK YOU. Also to “I’m Just A Girl” and “Davis Fleetwood” who are much better at this youtube thing than I am, I couldn’t have recruited membership like you did. Thank you!

If you don’t know already, the Revoke BP’s Corporate Charter movement was taken up by GreenChange.org, and has been reported on in CommonDreams, CounterPunch, and the Corporate Crime Reporter.

Do you remember the last video I had with all those links you had to sort through? There were a lot of links. Instead of going through that bull***t, now, thanks to GreenChange’s web tools, you can now participate in three simple steps:

Step one: go to http://bit.ly/RevokeBP1 and write a letter to Attorney General Beau Biden.

After you’re done there, it will redirect to the page where you can send a letter to the State Legislature.

Then finally you can write a letter to the editor for your local paper.

Why are these things important?

Step One: Beau Biden can bring a case against BP.

Step Two: Through a simple act of legislation, the Deleware State Legislature can overturn BP’s charter.

Step Three: You need to keep building the movement. Just because you participated doesn’t mean your job is over.

Now I know for a fact that most of the membership of the facebook group has yet to participate in this action. This IS NOT a facebook petition. We’re trying to actually DO something here.

What if I told you that Grassroots Democracy actually worked? All you have to do is put in the effort.