“And during the few moments that we have left, we want to talk right down to
earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand.”
~Malcolm “X” El Hajj Malik El Shabazz
dETROITfunk has reeled out a kickin post: Cult of Personality. I think you should check it out.
Video extra: Cult of Personality from Living Colour. I can’t embed that one, so here’s another:
I was emailing someone to tell them not to worry when a big site like Flickr or YouTube loses a bunch of media, that despite the fact that those sites are massive and complex systems, there’s a lot of smart people there who spend all their time figuring out how the systems work and how to improve and fix them.
Then it struck me that 200 years ago, those very same “best & brightest” were working to discover the undiscovered and better understand the immensity of Creation.
Suddenly the comforting thought wasn’t all that comforting.
Time to get busy folks.
One of Michigan’s famous rabble-rousers, Michael Moore, says My Vote’s for Obama (if I could vote). He calls on Pennsylvanians to cast a vote on his behalf of a Michiganian who has been disenfranchised by the miscalculation of our state Democratic party and the intractability of the national party.
There are those who say Obama isn’t ready, or he’s voted wrong on this or that. But that’s looking at the trees and not the forest. What we are witnessing is not just a candidate but a profound, massive public movement for change. My endorsement is more for Obama The Movement than it is for Obama the candidate.
That is not to take anything away from this exceptional man. But what’s going on is bigger than him at this point, and that’s a good thing for the country. Because, when he wins in November, that Obama Movement is going to have to stay alert and active. Corporate America is not going to give up their hold on our government just because we say so. President Obama is going to need a nation of millions to stand behind him.
Michael’s words really echo my feelings about the whole process. Obama (like everyone) is far from perfect. I believe that he will, however, bring a change to the way Americans think about government and help us begin that long and difficult process of taking responsibility for the governance and future of our nation.
So please, Pennsylvania, cast a vote for Obama for me if you’re undecided … and while you’re at it, could you tell your 76ers to lighten up on my Pistons? 
About the Photo: The photo is Barack Obama - Santa Fe Art District by seetwist. It’s part of his Free Art set and he seems to have made a vocation of documenting and preserving graffiti.
It’s with a (somewhat) heavy heart that NBA Comix mourns the departure of one of its patron saints, Isiah Thomas from the hardwood.
Whether he was trading draft picks for Larry Brown or just for comic relief, replacing one of the greatest basketball minds with himself, matching wits with a puppy or attempting to singlehandedly bring one of the NBA’s storied franchises to its knees, you could count on Isiah to give 110%, and look sharp while doing it.
“Listless, tawdry and dreadful” says Sports Illustrated, to which we here at NBA Comix have to add a tearful “There will never be another.”
This morning on NPR I heard Brian Turner discussing and reading from his book Here Bullet. Boinging Boing-Boing:
Here, Bullet
If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.
You can read more and hear author Brian Turner read over at NPR.
About the Photo: It was taken by Zoriah. Be sure to view it bigger. Zoriah works in humanitarian photojournalism. Zoriah’s war slideshow is a powerful place to start.
Please check out some of these links and consider the fact that we’ve been at war in Iraq for longer than World War II (and WW I) and the Civil War. Longer in fact than any war save the Revolutionary War and Vietnam.
In Google Takes to The Cloud With App Hosting Platform, internetnews.com reports on The Google’s latest party favor: Google App Engine.
“With Google App Engine, developers can write Web applications based on the same building blocks that Google uses,” Kevin Gibbs, Google’s technical lead for the project, wrote in a company blog (link). “Google App Engine packages those building blocks and provides access to scalable infrastructure that we hope will make it easier for developers to scale their applications automatically as they grow.
Translation: Use our blocks, kids. They’re the bestest.
This photo is titled MT Cloudy and it’s part of GoDa;s picks. On the photo post he wrote:
From my balcony the other day,
A mountain of floating skyscrapers appeared,
Imagination took over…
I have no idea if ‘ll ever see the day when imagination takes over, but somedays I think I will…
A headline like Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More is a pretty sure bet for a click-through from me. CERN thought Large Hadron Collider was worth $8 billion to study the energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang and then try to work out what happened.
But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.
About all I can say about this is that I’m not happy with humanity’s ethical and impulse controls as we move deeper into the Age of Mad Science. If you’d like a double helping of science and geek humor with your Doomsday Scenario, I suggest this post on Slashdot. And you have to click this link to xkcd. I command it.
About the photo: Black Hole by Director X was taken at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. If I hadn’t already used my compulsory click, I’d be tempted to add one for the museum.
This blog is called farlane.blog, but it relies a lot on shadowy figures, especially the one who passed me a link to VBS.tv, specifically their series on North Korea. You can start at Episode 1: The South’s DMZ. The link to #2 sent me to a video of Manila’s mega-dump and the people who live there , so click around if you go to the wrong one of their many shows. They say:
VBS is an online broadcast network. We stream original content, free of charge and 24 hours a day. We carry a mix of domestic and international news, pop and underground culture coverage, and the best music in the world. People have used words like eclectic, smart, funny, shocking, and revolutionary to describe VBS, but we kind of just snapped our fingers in their faces and went, “Whatever. Tell us something we don’t know.”
With Academy Award-nominated director Spike Jonze (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) as our creative director, original content from a veritable United Nations of contributors, and bureaus in 20 countries, VBS has hit the planet in a manner not unlike a massive global plague. Streaming on VBS’s signature “in-room” widescreen and remote, content will be available all the time, on-demand.
Basically, VBS will exploit every utopian vision the internet has thus far failed to live up to.
For more of an an idea of who they are and where they plan to go, watch their video mission statement. (the web designer in me is also wowed by their interface)
About the Photo: It’s titled Laughing North Korean soldiers and it’s part of a very cool photo set A glimpse of North Korea (slideshow) by photojournalist Natalie Behring. Natalie is based in China and has photos from all over that you should check out through chinapix at Flickr or www.nataliebehring.com.
Today’s New York Times relates the happy little tale of Bear Stearns, a company that you and I saved from going belly up last week. It’s an interesting article that I encourage you to read to understand more about the financial woods we appear to be headed into.
“For the government to print money at the expense of taxpayers as opposed to requiring or going about a receivership and wind-down of any insolvent institutions should be troubling to taxpayers and regulators alike,” said Josh Rosner, an analyst at Graham Fisher & Company and an expert on mortgage securities. “The Fed has now crossed the line in a very clear way on ‘moral hazard,’ because they have opened the door to the view that they are required to save almost any institution through non-recourse loans — except the government doesn’t have the money and it destroys the U.S.’s reputation as the broadest, deepest, most transparent and properly regulated capital market in the world.”
Like the story, the picture doesn’t make much sense either. It’s titled It’s wrong and danger and was taken by Wm Jas, who seems to have a knack for finding incomprehensible signage.
 | farlane on NBA Comix: Larry Brown Opens P… |
 | Seetwist on Cast my vote |
 | Bob on Obama |
 | Jenny on Bullet Train |
 | ercy on in the google cloud |
