LeVar Burton: I put hands outside car when pulled over (by CNN)
Even senators. Even senators must fear to describe America’s laws to America’s citizens. This is, yes, democracy-suppression, but it is a vitally necessary arrangement. It keeps you and your adorable kids and even your cute pet dog alive.
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"I stopped at a little shack where a man sold hot red chili in paper containers; I bought some and ate it, strolling in the dark mysterious streets." - Jack Kerouac, On the Road
The shack is still there and they still sell hot red chili.
If you live in the Bay, and are not choosing to be willfully ignorant, you probably already know that gentrification is a huge problem here. San Francisco’s proximity to Silicon Valley has attracted a lot of techie-type young professionals who are pushing out SF’s previous residents, especially those that are low income people of color. Those displaced are often moving to the East Bay, pushing the East Bay’s low-income residents of color out into far-flung suburbs with little of the resources the “inner-city” provides, such as public transit. Nothing I’ve said so far is anything that hasn’t already been said over and over again.
Resistance to gentrification takes many forms. Some, like Causa Justa and the Right to the City Alliance organize against evictions and foreclosures. Others, like local Barry Jenkins, make thoughtful films like Medicine for Melancholy, a love letter to the city of San Francisco lamenting the fact that many people of color can no longer afford to live there. And then you have Miss Persia and Daddie$ Pla$tik.
When I first saw Miss Persia and Daddie$ Pla$tik perform at Marga Gomez’s Comedy Bodega at Esta Noche in the Mission, I knew immediately I was witnessing something amazing. As someone who wrote my undergraduate thesis on the power of queer and trans people of color’s performance art, I recognized the performance of “Google Apps” as protest art, the likes of which I had never seen before. Even as I watched the performance, I didn’t feel like my mind was open enough to fully comprehend what I was witnessing. Which is why I’m really glad they made a video.
Though the slowly atrophying academic part of my brain is tempted to do a close reading, I will not interpret every line for you. That would be like reading a choose-your-own-adventure book where all your adventures are already chosen for you. I will say that I disagree with the interpretation of the video/song’s message as xenophobic. It’s pretty clear to me that Miss Persia and Daddie$ Pla$tik don’t want to be white, they just want to be able to stay in their homes.
What else can I say about this video? It’s hilarious, it’s obscene, and it’s poignant. Though thousands more words are sure to be spent explaining and opining on the housing crisis in the Bay Area, perhaps none will do so more successfully or succinctly than “Moving to the East Bay/Living life the broke way/SF keep your money/F*** your money!”
I also want to know what are the qualifications that one needs to become a whistleblower because that sounds like a much more interesting job.
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Twitter / AFP: ”Egyptian protestors direct laser lights on a military helicopter flying over the presidential palace in Cairo.”
I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.
Storing and analyzing all global cellphone calls is neither necessary nor sufficient to fight the conflict method of terrorism. Greenwald is right in saying: “It is a globalized system designed to destroy all privacy.” But destroying privacy is not the primary or ultimate purpose of the system. The only plausible purpose of this striving for total information is its use for total control. It is the foundation of a totalitarian state.
Libraries have had a long history of dealing with authoritarian organizations demanding reader records—who’s read what—and this has led to people being rounded up and killed. As a librarian, you take this very, very seriously. So, when you get demands for information about a patron’s activities, there are things that sort of flash before your mind. Where am I? What century is this? What country am I in?
Chicha made with saliva remains an important part of the diet of many South American tribes, and a woman’s ability to make it is important for her husband’s social status. It is rude to refuse it, as this account written up in Salon describes. Given the amount of calories and nutrients such beverages can provide, it amazes me that many ethnographical and anthropological surveys seem to ignore or downplay their presence, as if they were just mere recreation.
To me, each song on “Exile in Guyville” reverberates powerfully, making it patently one of the strongest rock albums ever made.
Few fully understand that the tension between young black men and the police (and by extension, security guards, traffic cops and just about any sort of watchman) is the main thing keeping America from getting past race. If ten years went by without a story like the Martin case we’d be in a very different country.
One evening, I was having trouble with my computer, and I went to Luke’s room to ask him for help. I found him in the midst of shooting imaginary people. After he fixed my computer, he asked me if I wanted to watch him play for a little bit. I said I did not and tried to explain: “You know, I’ve seen the real thing. So I’m not really interested. I’m sorry.”
Don’t forget that the Southern food you have been crowned the queen of was made into an art largely in the hands of enslaved cooks, some like the ones who prepared food on your ancestor’s Georgia plantation.
Imagen If I Did ‘Molly’ and then Imagened an Epsode of Seinfeld Where They Do ‘Molly’
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If Saturn were as close to Earth as the moon.
As the world eagerly watches Snowden’s movements today, the public should put aside the mainstream media frenzy buzzing around Snowden’s personal life, and ask the more important question: in a country with the freedom of speech enshrined in the First Amendment, why does a whistleblower have to seek political asylum elsewhere after exposing government wrongdoing?
My wife Ana Hurtado and I have been eating a paleodiet (by accident because of fieldwork) for more than 30 years, because we grew accustomed to that diet (long before the fad). Meats, and unprocessed plant foods are a simple generalized ancestral diet and appear to produce better health than the current standard modern diet. As anyone who knows us can affirm, Hurtado and I are a lot leaner and fitter than most Americans in our age cohort (near 60). Why?
I believe a world in which everything is recorded and persists forever carries the seeds of something monstrous. It is in the nature of computer systems to remember things indefinitely, but there’s nothing difficult about programming machines to forget. It just requires laws to do it. We can’t treat it as a technical problem. And to get the laws passed, we need to politicize the issue.
Maciej Cegłowski : Persuading David Simon
I’m glad David Simon has caught so many people’s attention with his myopic apologism, because it has led to such fantastic articulation of the dystopia we’re prototyping.
Cost to Store All US Phonecalls Made in a Year so it Could be Datamined
Estimate by Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, who knows something about data storage. If you don’t want to click, it’s about one twenty-five thousandth of the defense budget.
You have to assume everything is being collected.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/secret-prism-success-even-bigger-data-seizure
No less true for being nine days old, folks.
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“Over the course of a year, I researched and created ZXX, a disruptive typeface which takes its name from the Library of Congress’ listing of three-letter codes denoting which language a book is written in. Code “ZXX” is used when there is: “No linguistic content; Not applicable.” The project started with a genuine question: How can we conceal our fundamental thoughts from artificial intelligences and those who deploy them? I decided to create a typeface that would be unreadable by text scanning software (whether used by a government agency or a lone hacker) — misdirecting information or sometimes not giving any at all. It can be applied to huge amounts of data, or to personal correspondence. I drew six different cuts (Sans, Bold, Camo, False, Noise and Xed) to generate endless permutations, each font designed to thwart machine intelligences in a different way. I offered the typeface as a free download in hopes that as many people as possible would use it.”
Making Democracy Legible: A Defiant Typeface — The Gradient — Walker Art Center
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92y:
You heard her, sloppy joints. Of course.
Watch the excerpt of Martha telling this story to Bravo’s Andy Cohen, plus who she would “shag marry kill” and - sincerity face - her thoughts on elder care from her new book, Living the Good Long Life: A Practical Guide to Caring for Yourself and Others.
The first time I ever played in a long term D&D campaign I made a half-elf—bi-racial, like me. I’m putting this out there because it’s hilarious and says basically everything you need to know about 18 year old Austin Walker: his name was Xanatos Woodshymn, he was a bard who was raised by orcs and who saw himself as the ‘by any means necessary’ advocate for the kobolds who were being used as slave labor in the nearby mines. He was the reincarnation of the Elven god Corellon—it was one of those D&D games—and at the final moment of the first “season” of our campaign, he sided with the orcs, resurrecting their ancient ‘evil’ god and becoming public enemy number one for all of elf-kind. It was a weird year. I had dreadlocks.
We are not just ourselves anymore. Each one of us has a new, statistical self living in databases around the world. It’s those selves, uniquely identified bundles of behavior, that marketers target and companies try to reach. These are remarkable, distributed portraits of what we read, what we eat, and where we sleep. When it comes to our statistical selves, the difference between the NSA and private companies such as Facebook or Google or Amazon.com lies in what the government can do with the data it collects. It’s building that giant index so that, if it needs to, it can actively cross the line between your statistical self and your real, physical self. It’s the difference between “would you like to receive local coupons for businesses you love?” and “why is there a van in front of our house?”