Kariann

“Q: Who is your favorite pony?
A: Thanks for asking, and if you ever run into a Brony, that’s a good conversation starter. Applejack is my favorite. She is kind and honest and has an amazing no-nonsense work ethic. Many episodes with her in it place focus, even peripherally, on the importance of family as her family is one of the most extensive in the land and she lives with her brother, sister, and grandmother.”

-

Grown men who can’t wait to play with My Little Ponies | Marketplace.org

A Brony is pissed about the way Marketplace covered them.

A huge body of scientific evidence has already proven that the recommended vaccination schedule for U.S. kids is perfectly safe. But some pervasive myths about vaccines still persist — partially driven by dangerous right-wing fearmongering on the subject. Hoping to convince parents not to buy into the conspiracy theories, scientists continue to release new studies proving that it’s safe for them to vaccinate their kids on schedule, and reiterating that there’s no discernible link between vaccines and autism.

Some parents wonder if their kids are receiving too many vaccines too soon, and try to space out their children’s vaccinations so there’s more time in between their shots. In fact, up to 40 percent of parents take matters into their own hands and follow their own vaccination schedule rather that the one recommended by the CDC. But experts from the Institute of Medicine — a panel that advises the federal government on health policy — hope to change their minds. A new report from the Institute of Medicine confirms that the current childhood vaccination schedule is nothing to worry about, and it’s not a good idea to refrain from following it:

But delaying shots only prolongs the time that babies and children are vulnerable to “devastating diseases,” says co-author Pauline Thomas, an associate professor of preventive medicine at New Jersey Medical School.

“There is ample evidence that it’s not safe not to follow the schedule,” Thomas says. “It’s well known that in places where vaccines are delayed or missed, that’s where we are beginning to see vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks.”

Although the majority of doctors stand firmly behind vaccination, the issue is hotly debated among parents, particularly those too young to remember scourges like measles, polio and whooping cough. To address parents’ concerns, the Institute of Medicine has conducted more than 60 studies of vaccine safety since the 1970s.

Since children are required to receive the bulk of their vaccination before entering kindergarten, most of their shots are concentrated in their toddler years. Children receive up to 24 vaccines by their second birthday, and end up getting vaccinated against 14 different infectious diseases by the time they’re five. But it’s not randomly assigned. The CDC’s schedule is based on scientific testing that takes into account children’s immune systems, what they’re exposed to at different stages of their lives, and how the antibiotics interact with each other in the human body.

Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher at the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, explained to USA Today that parents’ fears are simply unfounded. “The concept that you are going to overload a child’s immune system by giving too many vaccines at once makes no sense,” Hotez said. “When you play with vaccine schedules, you are playing with fire.”

In the two centuries since vaccines were first developed, they have nearly eradicated over a dozen of what used to be the most common infectious diseases in the U.S. Some vaccines, like the flu shot, aren’t foolproof — but they can still help lower the risk. 90 percent of the U.S. children who died from the flu this past winter didn’t get vaccinated for it.

“The rapid growth of Las Vegas is credited with dooming Galveston, Texas; Hot Springs, Arkansas; and other major gaming centers in the 1950s.”

- Las Vegas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rolling stones StS’s Shreds (by pablo)

“Rodrigues and his record label Mad Decent immediately started promoting the video. Rodrigues, using his stage name “Baauer,” record label owner Thomas Wesley Pentz, and Chicago deejays Josh Young and Curt Cameruci, signed to Mad Decent all posted tweets and messages to send traffic to the Australian video on YouTube. Six Twitter accounts—EDM Snob, Baauer, Diplo, Mad Decent, Major Lazer and Flosstradamus—were the cause of views of “Harlem Shake” on Thursday, Feb. 7 and Friday, Feb. 8. EDM Snob was selling himself. The other five were selling the record. YouTube rewards this kind of behavior. People who post videos make up to $6 per thousand views in return for letting YouTube show ads on their videos. When a new video is uploaded, YouTube automatically checks for matches to copyrighted material. Copyright holders can block videos or share advertising revenue. Maker got paid every time someone watched its video. Mad Decent got paid every time someone viewed any video featuring Baauer’s song.
Feb. 10
The advertisers and agencies who spent the week after the Super Bowl looking for the next big thing in social media spent the weekend after the Super Bowl believing they had found it: because of the tweets by Maker and Mad Decent, they started copying the Florida longboarders, doing a two steps removed imitation of George Miller dancing to “Harlem Shake,” believing it to be a pure product of the YouTube community. On Sunday, Feb. 10, while Wouter “Gotye” De Backer was accepting the “Record of the Year” Grammy for “Somebody That I Used to Know” (a record that was popularized by YouTube imitation videos), these companies started posting and promoting their own “Harlem Shake” videos. They included College Humor, a website owned by IAC, a publicly traded company that also owns Newsweek; Vimeo, a YouTube rival also owned by IAC; and BuzzFeed, a viral content website that promoted its video with a story subtitled “If you haven’t done one yet, you better get on it right away!” (The Huffington Post also syndicated a story from BroBible, “The Harlem Shake: A ‘00s Classic, Having Another Moment”). Thousands of “Harlem Shake” videos were uploaded during the week of Feb. 11, many of them from businesses with something to sell.”

- You didn’t make the Harlem Shake go viral—corporations did – Quartz

“One of the folks we’re talking about just asked me on Twitter, in so many words, What happened to free speech? Now if you don’t agree with gay marriage you’re in trouble? Obviously we all have free speech. But what people usually want with free speech is the ability to speak their mind and not have people think worse of them for it. And on gay rights if not quite yet on full marriage equality, these folks sense they may be losing that right.”

- Whiplash | TPM Editors Blog

“If it’s not white LGBTQs falsely blaming blacks and Latinos and playing Lynch the Coloreds over that Prop 8 fallout, it’s the Straight White Allies who now think they are experts on social justice, homophobia, and Civil Rights in the span of 3 minutes simply because they reposted a meme and changed a Facebook pic. Most of them also fail to realize that the dynamics facing queer POC’s and trans people and the dynamics facing cis white queers is as different as night and day. And yet they feel qualified to whitesplain to me how Gay Marriage is the End All Be All Cure All and that once it passes, all of my issues will be a distant memory.”

- TransGriot: What Gay Marriage WON’T Do

Reuters

Like Western democracy, Socratic philosophy, written histories, epic poetry, and every other foundational pillar of high culture, spring break began in ancient Greece.

Called "Anthestreria" by the local teens, and their parents, it was a festival dedicated to Dionysus, the god of wine and whoopee and just about every excuse to party. For three days, people would dance, singers would perform, women would deck themselves with flowers, and Greek men would compete to see who could be the fastest to drain a cup of red wine.

Two thousand years later, practically nothing has changed except our taste in chugging alcohol. While Anthestreria is immortalized in terracotta wine vessels in world-class museums (below), you might think today's spring break rituals are as easily forgotten by history as they are by memory-blighted college students. But for the American cities that host students, the impact is not so brief, as John Laurie explained in his fascinating economic study Spring Break: The Economic, Socio-Cultural and Public Governance Impacts of College Students on Spring Break Host Locations.

The paper begins, as spring break did, in Greece, before the rise of Christianity put an end to kylix head-stands and other childish things for two thousand years. It wasn't until the mid-twentieth century that modern spring break emerged. In 1934, Sam Ingram, a Colgate College swim coach, was looking for a warm place to keep his swimmers in shape. He chose the small, quiet town of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. More swimming instructors followed. During World War II, rich Ivy League students, who occasionally visited Bermuda during their spring breaks, were suddenly spooked by rumors of German U-Boats roaming the Caribbean. The best intracontinental alternative was to meet up with the swimmer co-eds in Florida. And so, Ft. Lauderdale became the first official home of the American Anthestreria tradition.

The Spring Break Effect
Fast-forward six decades and, by the early 2000s, nearly 40 percent of college students travel en masse for spring break, spending "nearly $1 billion" in Florida and Texas alone, according to Laurie. In addition to the peculiar joy of reading a paper with these sort of topic sentences -- "Spring Break has a temporal as well as descriptive definition" -- it makes a substantive point about the economic benefits of spring break to the cities receiving hoards of boozing college students.

The spring break effect is, in a word, meh.

But how exactly do you measure "the spring break effect"? Laurie graphs sales taxes and hotel development taxes for various undergrad hotspots in Florida, Texas, and Arizona. His overall conclusions are:

(1) Spring break can be great for some small businesses and bars that make their money selling cheap rooms and liquor on volume; BUT ...

(2) It's not a dependable revenue generator for the counties at large, which suggests the economic benefits of the event are overrated, even for the most popular destinations; AND ...

(3) The only local industry that is clearly and consistently stimulated by spring break is law enforcement.

What Hath Spring Break Wrought? The Panama City Story
Just inside the armpit of Florida's panhandle, looking into the Gulf of Mexico, sits Panama City Beach, the "spring break capital of the world." Every year, the area draws up to 500,000 college students -- that's 42 co-eds for every city resident counted in the 2010 Census. For many years, Panama City has been MTV's home base for spring break coverage, and partiers spend $170 million during six-week period, according to a 2004 study.

Sounds like quite the stimulus. But Laurie's research in Bay County (home to Panama City) found that "the sales tax collected in Bay County during the month of March is actually the lowest of any month" before ticking up in April. Here's the chart:

What about hotel taxes (i.e.: tourist development receipts)? It's a similar story. July is the year's clear winner. March and April, while a huge improvement over February, are hardly better than May or September.

How is spring break so economically tame? Here are two conclusions, besides the possibility that Laurie's data simply does not properly reflect the benefits of spring break. First, college students are cheap and poor. They buy bad booze in bulk, they sleep five to a room, they lie out under the sun with nothing but alcohol and tanning lotion, and they hunt around for the best deals for dinner and accommodation, even if it means staying in a different city and driving to the beach every morning.

Second, although the spring break effect is weak, it's still there. March and April are considerably more lucrative for Bay County than January and February. In defense of college students, maybe they don't spend as much money as the four-person families who fill out Florida over summer vacation, but they might pull forward the spring vacation season by a few weeks.

If you're wondering how half a million people leave so little a mark, however, the proper response is that they do leave an unmistakable mark on local crime and non-criminal citations. March is by far the year's worst month for public safety in Panama City Beach.

The Spring Break Legacy
"More crime than tax receipts" would be the five-word summary of the Panama City experience, as painted by Laurie's research. America's most famous spring break city is hardly an outlier. "The overall trend between cities regarding both average business sales tax and average hotel tax is that during Spring Break, [Florida, Arizona, and Texas] counties show low levels of sales tax collected," Laurie concluded. "In fact, the month of March is very poor for all three counties."

It is notable that almost all of the cities in the paper saw extraordinary business and income growth in the mid-2000s. But since these years coincided with the heyday of the housing boom rolling through the sunbelt, it's reasonable to suggest that spring breakers might not have been the first (or 100th) most important factor in Florida's economic development.

Perhaps the only conclusion to draw from the paper is one you could have guessed even if you knew nothing about Anthestreria, Bay County, or MTV. Spring break might be a boon to certain hotels and bars looking for late-winter pick-up. But it's hardly a metropolitan stimulus. It's hot, cheap, mid-semester jaunt for poor indebted college students living off bad beer, cheap grain alcohol, and hormones. These things are timeless. But upon them, great cities are not built.

It’s a great story: the virtually unknown, 15th seeded Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU), has made it to the Sweet 16 in the NCAA tournament. But there’s something you might not know about FGCU: its economics department is, as a consequence of grants from Randian businessman John Allison and the Charles G. Koch Foundation, a haven for Ayn-Rand Style thinking:

At Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, every student who majors in economics and finance gets a copy of Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged…FGCU now has a core group of a half dozen economists whose research supports the ideas of free-market capitalism, still an unpopular subject in most faculty lounges. They teach this material to more than 250 economics and finance students (one class is titled “The Moral Foundations of Capitalism”), organize lectures by leading thinkers, publish their research in well-respected journals and hold influential positions in groups that promote free markets.

The ideological transformation of FGCU economics began in 2009, when Allison, a famous devotee of Ayn Rand’s who was then the president of banking giant BB&T, donated $600,000 to FGCU to create the endowed “BB&T Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise.” Allison now runs the libertarian Cato Institute, a position he gained with the support of Charles and David Koch after some controversy.

The Kochs also supported Allison’s efforts at FGCU, a largely local school with about 11,000 undergradutes. A ThinkProgress review of Charles G. Koch Foundation donations from 2008-2011 found $87,000 in donations to Florida Gulf Coast University. According to an internal BB&T professorship report, the Koch money “provide[s] operational seed funding for the yearly activities and the local BB&T Charitable Foundation sponsors our premier annual event — The BB&T Free Enterprise Lecture Series.” The internal report also included metrics on the program’s operations such as “Atlas Shrugged Distribution — Number of students reached: approximately 120.”

Strange as it may seem that private ideological organizations can support academic departments, it’s not uncommon. A massive Koch donation to Florida State University’s economics program generated significant controversy in 2011 when it came to light that the donation was accompanied by de facto Koch control over some hiring decisions and the ability to review the scholarship generated. As of February 2013, 129 colleges and universities around the country were receiving Koch Family Foundations support.

Whether or not you think these sorts of donations are threats to academic freedom, they do lay bare the somewhat surprising disadvantage progressives face when it comes to getting funding for work on their intellectual traditions. In addition to the Koch direct-donations, organizations like the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute and libertarian Institute for Humane Studies help promote their ideas on campus and connect their students with likeminded colleagues and employers. Progressives conspicuously lack any equivalent organizations that connect students with a broader intellectual network, providing a potentially interesting explanation for why conservative ideas seem to have a direct pipeline to Washington while progressive alternatives stay at the margins of the debate.

Hanaa El Degham, mural on the wall of the Lycée Français, Cairo. Copyright suzeeinthecity.wordpress.com.

Mickey Mouse is pulling apart a bomb: inside is the torso of George W. Bush, and they’re both looking perfectly happy about the whole thing. Soraya Morayef is taking a photo of the wall where these figures are painted, on a busy street in downtown Cairo, when a man walks up to her and asks her what the picture means. 

‘I think that’s Mickey Mouse,’ I say helpfully.

‘Yes but what does it mean? And who is that man next to him?’

He’s bald with a graying walrus moustache, probably in his mid-forties, his full cheeks sweating as he fans at his pin-striped pink shirt.

‘I’m not quite sure,’ I say politely, wishing I could go back to my camera, but he appears adamant for an answer. ‘Maybe it’s a president? It could be George Bush.’

‘Yes but what is George Bush doing with Mickey Mouse? I like this picture, I walk past it every day, but I wish there’d be some writing explaining it so that I could understand.’

She is stuck between the wall and the man, who tells her he was in Tahrir Square (a stone’s throw away from where they are standing) every day of the uprisings, “one of the shabab of the revolution…”. Eventually, after he has given her his number, he leaves, and she recommences her task, cataloguing the street art in Cairo, a city in which graffiti has flourished since 2011, but where the wall may have been white-washed the next morning.

Morayef is a journalist and writer based in Cairo. Since June 2011 she has been blogging at suzeeinthecity.wordpress.com, where she posts images of street art, with captions and analysis. The same urgent questions — of graffiti and gender, intimidation and interpretation — resurface in a recent post, ‘Women in Graffiti: A Tribute to the Women of Egypt’, on the participation of women in making graffiti on the walls of Egyptian streets.

Sit El Banat, stencil tribute to the women who were beaten, dragged and stamped on by military forces in December 2011.          Copyright suzeeinthecity.wordpress.com

The artists mentioned include Aya Tarek (“one of the pioneers of graffiti in Egypt”), Hend Kheera (“the first Egyptian graffiti artist to be profiled by Rolling Stone”), Bahia Shebab (an artist and art historian behind the project, A thousand times no), Mira Shihadeh, Laila Magued (more of her work here), the Nooneswa collective, and Hanna El Degham, whose work on the wall of the Lycee Morayef describes as “one of the most astounding street artworks I have seen in Egypt.” The article also includes images of the tributes — by artists Alaa Awad, Keizer, Zeft and Amr Nazeer, X4SprayCans and Ammar Abo Bakr — to Egyptian women, their role in the protests, works made in outrage at the men who have harrassed and attacked them.

The world has been fascinated by the explosion of graffiti in Egypt, and the walls have become signifiers for revolutionary desires, and the street a place where art makes demands of its public, everyday. The precariousness of this art makes Morayef’s catalogue of images necessary, and it has become the visual archive of an emancipatory politics, expressions of hope for a country in which women are not violated everyday.

The beginning of the project

“The project happened organically,” Morayef says, “I found it impossible to post images without context. I did it once and ended up having to explain it, it became an article. It wasn’t originally a project but a personal hobby of mine. I started taking photographs every day in April, May 2011, in the neighbourhood I lived in, where there was a faculty of fine arts.”

This was Zamalek, “where the art students were, so it made sense this should be the hunting ground. There was always new graffiti popping up and disappearing. I wasn’t aware of other people doing it, other citizen journalists. I thought, ‘ok, I’m the only one doing this. It was for my personal archive, I put it on Facebook and a friend said ‘can I share your album’. I said ‘I’ll put it on a blog and you can share it with your friends.’”

“Then I noticed graffiti appearing in different neighbourhoods. With every post it went from being fun to being an obssession. At some point it felt like a responsibility, but not in a negative sense. I started getting feedback from street artists. I would start to credit the photographs to the separate artists, the artists would start to contact me because they recognised I enjoyed what I was doing, that there was no ulterior motive to my job.”

“What was really great about the process was social media. These artists were uploading or tweeting. By following the top Twitter accounts I would find out about work I hadn’t heard of. All the artists have Twitter accounts, Facebook, so it was easy to access them without invading their privacy.”

Keizer, Fear Me, Government!                                            Copyright suzeeinthecity.wordpress.com

“It reached the point where I could recognise the street, the aesthetic of the artist and figure it out. Ganzeer [who she interviews here] created this interactive Google map, this blog, where he enabled artists to upload images, and their location, so people like me could upload and tag them to the artist. But the artists I follow and I am aware of, I think they are the tip of the iceberg. They are twenty percent of the graffiti crowd.”

“You have activists who use graffiti, artists who use graffiti for a certain phase then stop because it became too trendy, artists who join because it is trendy … it’s hard to keep track … artists who sign their work, others who have no interest. These people, some of them I would only come across because I would drive by or walk by. In one or two cases they would reach out and say this does belong to me but I don’t want anyone to know.”

Sad Panda

“I was included in this crowd, giving me access to their personal lives and their information. Someone like Sad Panda, who has created this anonymous persona for the media so no one knows his real name. I wrote a blog about when he welcomed me to his house. He introduced himself as a friend of the artist. So I walk in and I have no idea who this kid is, cutting up a stencil of a panda, then meeting his mum, watching him as he works, that was a privilege.”

Ganzeer’s tank versus bike (with Sad Panda in melancholy pursuit), under the October 6th Bridge. Copyright suzeeinthecity.wordpress.com.

The origins of graffiti

“The general view is that it [graffiti] started with the revolution. I completely disagree with this. I’ve seen graffiti for as long as I remember liking it. Graffiti on school walls, on mosque walls, whether it’s patriotic or, like, I love my school. There’s an argument that the Muslim Brotherhood started using graffiti, usually in the impoverished neighbourhoods. There’s an argument that it started in Alexandria, and many of the artists who are known as the pioneers of graffiti, were working there as early as 2003/4.”

“One of the images I took [of a fresh work of graffiti next to an older piece] when I posted it on Twitter someone I knew messaged me and said ‘I took a photo of the graffiti next to it in 2005!’ So there’s been a change in attention, attention and participation. And a sudden focus on the international media.”

“It started from an urgent need [during the uprisings] we had no internet, no phone-line. We were cut off from the media, there was no one there … As the intention increased, there was the glamorisation of people in the revolution, especiall the youthful ones, many artists felt the need to participate. And there was suddenly an audience, for something which [before] would have been received negatively.”

The gender of graffiti artists

“The gender is still predominantly male. I have noticed – in the collective, the Mona Lisa Brigade, who are using graffiti for social initiatives – they have thirty percent members who are female. Apart from the female artists I mentioned on my blog there are perhaps a handful more.”

The Mickey Mouse encounter (read about the episode here)

Keizer, Mickey Mouse. Copyright suzeeinthecity.wordpress.com.

“Two years on I have a different perspective on it. It is a good example in Egypt [of the reaction to graffiti], when you are dealing with forty percent of the population being illiterate. It’s an environment to create art that would explain [itself] or be easily interpreted. The man’s conversation was a good example of – and I’m generalising – how we prefer to be told what it is rather than figuring it out.”

“We’ve lived under a dictatorship for so long, and it’s not only Mubarak, but Sadat and Nasser. We haven’t had a free space to come up with our own ideas. We are used to voting yes to everthing, so with every singly referendum people have voted yes. Because we just don’t understand saying no to our leaders.”

“When street artists make work which says no to military leaders, these are the works which are responded to most negatively. It was really interesting, you would have people getting really vocal: ‘you can criticise our leaders but the army is a red line.’ We couldn’t handle seeing our leaders, our heroes, our pharaos, criticised.

“That particular artist [Keizer – who she interviews here] was making graffiti which was really Western-influenced. I personally felt – and what I saw – was a certain confusion behind the messages. I think he received some flak from his peers. [The man on the street] would not recognise why George Bush is holding Mickey Mouse by the paw.”

“When you are dealing with traumatic events there is so much to work with. Why would you mystify the man on the street? The artist has since said that he is using Western graffiti to attack the elites, and that’s his theory. But he has since moved to making graffiti with Arabic language and Egyptian symbols. I have noticed a shift.”

Violence against women

“One artist [Zeft] made a stencil of Nefertiti with a gas mask. He distributed it via social media and said you can reuse this. It appeared on the Facebook page of Op Anti-Sexual Harassment, and you can see it in photographs of protests a few weeks back. This image appeared in Washington, Berlin and Gaza.”

Zeft, Nefertiti mask. Copyright Ahmed Hayman.

“This was an example of one artist showing solidarity with women’s rights and rape. It became a symbol for social awareness campaigns. That’s a great success, but you are still dealing with a small segment of society. These artists, most of them are liberals, most of them are with the revolution. But the fact that women’s rights have been advocated by artists show that there has been a significant shift in awareness.”

The defacement of walls

“There was the Ganzeer tank versus bike grafiti, some of it was defaced. The artists are on the street, during the protest, sometimes the paint during the protest. I interviewed one artist during the protest: he was very upset, he said ‘this is the only thing I can do.’ So [working like this] is taking an artist from a sense of helplessness to a sense of responsibility.”

“This is the same thing the artists, Ammar Abo Bakr and Alaa Awad, who made the painting of the martyrs said. The guy and his friend made a mural on the AUC wall. They each spent two thousand Egyptian pounds, they said this is our way of paying them back. But it was so powerful and popular that alumni and members of the faculty circulated this petition asking the administration to stop the university from allowing government officials to paint over it. The artists came back and did a second paint.”

Painting of the Martyrs at AUC, Port Said. Copyright suzeeinthecity.wordpress.com.

“Then the government workers arrived. The baladiya – they are the bottom of the food chain, assigned to clean up – went down in the middle of the night. They actually had a line of soldiers protecting them as they cleaned off the graffiti. The reaction of the public was so heavy. You had street artists going on TV – who had previously avoided the media – who became very vocal in their criticism of the government. To the point that the prime minister had to release a statement.”

“I’m going to go ahead and say this was probably the most important moment in the history of graffiti. You had the prime minister, the second most important man in Egypt, having to apologise to a group of graffiti artists, who have been repeatedly criminalised.”

Soraya Morayef is currently pursuing a Master’s degree at Kings College London, as well as working with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles on a series of videos documenting the graffiti scene in Cairo, Beirut, Libya and Palestine.

“To be clear, we don’t expect critics that cover American pop to have a strong understanding of the musically complex landscape of the African continent. However, we do take exception at the way the term “African Music” is lumped together as a singular homogenous whole. Just as these pop critics would likely take exception at lumping the various styles that make up “American Music” into a singular group simply because rock, country, and rap share an affinity for 4/4. The descriptions used by these writers are by and large small infractions, and chances are nothing intentionally harmful was meant by them. Unfortunately, though, this incident is still one amongst many that reflects a continued indifference from many western media outlets towards even attempting to move beyond broad generalities when speaking or writing about Africa. We think they can do better, and we don’t think it shouldn’t be such an uphill battle.”

- Justin Timberlake, Music Reviews, and this so-called “African Music” • Afropop Worldwide

Brian Manowitz is a chef who whips up vegan dishes dressed in full metal-style costume on his cooking show, “Vegan Black Metal Chef.” The show is described as “a vegan cooking show like no other,” is set in a dungeon-like kitchen, and features custom heavy metal tracks to “guide you through making high quality, delicious vegan meals.” All of his videos can be found at his YouTube channel.

The Vegan Black Metal Chef cooking show guides you through a variety of easy Asian, Indian, North American, South American, Italian, Middle Eastern, kosher and other global vegan meals.

Packed with humor, music, and visual effects… This is the most fun way to learn vegan vegetarian cooking ever.

“Vegan Lasagna”

“Holiday Hell Roast“

“

OUTREPENT – Saying he’s been burdened with guilt, a Montana man has mailed Washington wildlife officials $6,000 to compensate for deer he said he killed illegally – more than 40 years ago.

The man contacted a Washington Fish and Wildlife Department office a few weeks ago and confessed to an officer that he had killed three whitetail does illegally between 1967 and 1970, officials said Wednesday.

They identified the man only by his first name, Roy.

Capt. Richard Mann in Yakima told Roy that penalties for poaching antlerless deer were around $250 in the late 60s and range up to around $2,000 today.

“But I told him the crimes are well past the statute of limitations and no charges could be filed,” Mann said.

The officer suggested he could sign up with the agency for volunteer jobs at a wildlife area or habitat project to soothe his conscience, but Roy said he lived in Montana.

Last week, Mann got a message from the department’s Olympia headquarters that a $6,000 check had been delivered as a donation to the enforcement division.

“I was amazed,” Mann said. “It’s not uncommon for me to hear from people who are sorry for a wildlife infraction, but usually it’s because the judge stuck them with a big fine.”

“This doesn’t happen,” said Mike Cenci, the agency’s deputy chief of enforcement. “We do get donations, but if any were related to misdeeds or conscience, we’re not aware of it.”

Roy asked that the money be used for wildlife enforcement.

In the letter with the check he wrote: “My conscience has not allowed me to put this sin to rest until now. I know that God has forgiven me and hope that WDFW will as well.”

”

- Out & About: Poacher offers $6K to ease conscience - Spokesman.com - March 24, 2013

The Golden Girls on Marriage Equality (by Permaglo)

“We recognize that, as a reflec­tion of society at large, many students do not agree with the church’s ­position on these issues. However, we ask those who do not agree to be respect­ful of our ­position and circumspect in their private ­affairs.” He also wrote that he hopes the students will “accept our ­offer to meet with administrators and members of the Jesuit community to discuss this issue in a respectful, constructive format.” This is not the first time a ­local Catholic college has tried to prohibit the distribution of birth control on campus. In 2009, the Globe reported that a student at Stonehill College in Easton collected hundreds of free condoms from two family-planning agencies. She and ­approximately 20 classmates placed the boxes of condoms in student dormitories. When college officials learned of the students’ actions, they confiscated the boxes ­because of the school’s ban against distributing birth control. “We’re a private Catholic college,” Stonehill spokesman Martin McGovern told the Globe shortly after the incident. “We make no secret of our religious affiliation, and our belief system is fairly straightforward. We don’t expect everyone on campus to agree with our ­beliefs, but we would ask people, and students in particular, to respect them.” In 2009, students at BC passed a referendum urging the college to offer affordable testing for sexually transmitted ­infections and access to ­contraception. At the time, a college spokesman told a ­Catholic publication that the referendum was nonbinding and the school would not change its policies. Jekanowski said she sees the distribution of contraceptives and information to be in accordance with the Jesuit mission. “We see it as very intrinsic of being a Jesuit that we provide these resources and we affirm the whole person,” she said. “Students shouldn’t have to choose between holistic health care and a world class institution.”

“It was a perspective at the time that was not unusual. “This was a world that was completely foreign to me,” Dean, the former governor, said in a 2011 interview with Vermont Public Television describing his own “casual homophobia” in looking back at the civil unions debate. Enlarge image
Lippert speaks in defense of the civil unions bill on the House floor the March 15, 2000. Toby Talbot/AP
“I was uncomfortable with gay people,” he told interviewer Christopher Graff, “and with gay marriage.” Edwards knew that a yes vote for civil unions would almost certainly doom his re-election chances. But he says any doubts he harbored about the proposed law were banished when he read accounts of the civil rights debates of the 1960s. The language of that time startled him. “Just change the N-word for nigger, for fags or faggots,” Edwards says. “It was nothing new. Just that the object of the bile had been changed.” For Lippert, the opportunity to help change how gay and lesbian people were viewed was one for the ages. “I felt deeply grateful,” he said of his unique role. “I was grateful that I had an opportunity to be the voice or to be the face of all the gay and lesbian people that I knew,” he said. “I got to be here. I got to be in the thick of this. And I got to hold out what was really true about the people that I knew and that I loved.””

- How Vermont’s ‘Civil’ War Fueled The Gay Marriage Movement : NPR

As the Supreme Court takes up two landmark cases for marriage equality this week, the impending decisions have sparked comparisons to another one of the Court’s rulings on a so-called “social issue” — the Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion rights exactly 40 years ago. Since a politically contentious battle over abortion rights has continued throughout the four decades after Roe, some pundits argue the Justices moved too quickly to grant legal rights to reproductive care, and a similar move toward marriage equality before the country is ready could incite the same kind of public backlash.

But the idea that Roe created the Religious Right — fueling public outrage over abortion that spurred religious conservatives to mobilize across the country — is actually a myth. As Sally Steenland, the Director of the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress, explains, religious conservatives actually began organizing to prevent the IRS from revoking tax-exempt status from a Christian college that was practicing racial discrimination. Evangelicals didn’t welcome what they perceived as “government intrusion” into privately funded, faith-based institutions, and a movement began brewing. In fact, abortion wasn’t added to the Religious Right’s agenda until several years after Roe, when the movement’s leaders began seeking to expand their issues.

And it wasn’t necessarily political backlash from the Religious Right that began chipping away at reproductive rights in a post-Roe nation. In many cases, it was actually the Court itself. In 1980, Harris v. McRae upheld the Hyde Amendment, which bars low-income Americans in the Medicaid program from getting abortion services covered by public insurance. In 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey narrowed Roe‘s broad abortion protections to a less rigid standard — specifying that states may restrict abortion as long as they don’t impose an “undue burden” on women seeking to terminate a pregnancy — which paved the way for today’s state-level restrictions, spanning everything from mandatory waiting periods to forced ultrasounds.

Even aside from the unfounded myths about the history of the United States’ abortion rights battles, there’s even more evidence to suggest that Americans won’t revolt if the Justices advance LGBT equality. Although abortion and gay marriage have been the two pillars of the Religious Right’s “values issues” for the past two decades, serving as political wedge issues that go hand-in-hand, that’s not necessarily the case anymore.

“As recently as 2004, we talked about abortion and same sex marriage in the same breath,” Daniel Cox, the Public Religion Research Institute’s research director, told the Washington Post. “They were the values issues. Now, it doesn’t make sense to lump them together anymore. We’ve seen a decoupling.” Cox explained that’s partly because of the increased visibility of LGBT people, and the personal connections with gay and lesbian people that are leading growing numbers of Americans to support pro-equality policies — the kind of public awareness that doesn’t necessarily exist for women who have abortions.

So, although support for legal abortion has remained fairly steady throughout the past three decades, without much of a discernible shift between different age groups, the support for gay marriage has recently soared to historic highs — particularly among young people. The nation didn’t actually erupt into a political firestorm directly as a result of the Court’s decision on abortion rights, and there’s no evidence to suggest that a ruling in favor of marriage equality will spark that response, either.

kgoldschmitt:

Every Woody Allen Stammer From Every Woody Allen Movie (by HuffingtonPost)

You start to really feel for his co-stars within the first 5 minutes.

  Above: domestic workers, or maids, were portrayed in popular Brazilian middle class soap opera, Avenida Brasil.

““He knows when I cheat because it shows up in our ‘recently watched’ list,” said Sara, who shares an apartment and Netflix account with her boyfriend. ”One time he watched How I Met Your Mother without me. I did the thing where I pretended to be pretend-upset, but I was actually upset.” She needed to catch up before he moved further ahead, before the rift became too great to overcome. “So I made him watch it again with me. He did a lot of build-up, ‘This part is so good,’ ‘Something big is going to happen,’ that kind of thing. It annoyed me.” Already the imbalance was too significant; the experience, Sara said, was worse than watching alone. That’s why a dedicated Netflix cheat will cover her tracks, then feign surprise during a re-watch. With a previous boyfriend I embarked on three-part mini-series Carlos, about international terrorist Carlos the Jackal, a man whom I have been led to believe smoldered while murdering innocents. Powerless to resist Carlos’s sexy violence, I binge-watched to completion alone — then clicked back to the spot my ex and I had left off, so the “Resume” button would not betray me. “Resume” returned us to a moment when we were united in knowledge and ignorance. I gasped as Carlos stormed OPEC headquarters in 1975, my boyfriend none the wiser. Then I grew overconfident: I started showing off, predicting what would happen next. “Did you already see this?” he asked, suspicious. “No!” I lied, then to shield myself from further inquiry sunk to a new low: “I mean, it’s history. I think there was an article in The New Yorker about it? You must have read about it, too.” Manipulating loved ones — had I hit rock bottom? As my boyfriend slipped back into the comfortable fugue of Netflix absorption, I realized the saying was true: The best defense is offense.”

- Netflix Adultery: The Smallest, Most Insidious Betrayal - The Cut

By Arturo R. García

(Note: Language NSFW)

Image via GlobalGrind.com

Technically, “Bow Down/I Been On” is a mini-medley of two different upcoming tracks from Beyonce. But the discussion surrounding them picked up steam Sunday afternoon and evening. The latter track has her vocals chopped and screwed, Houston-style. (MTV did provide a link to a “regular B” version)

It’s been interesting to see the early talk regarding the tracks. There’s been some focus on her code-switching (remarks about Beyonce “going hood” and/or defying/betraying her pop-friendly self, depending who you ask) and lashing out at her critics (the lines, “I took some time to live my life/but don’t think I am just his little wife” seem especially pointed, on top of the actual chorus). No release date has been posted (yet) for the full versions of either track, but let’s get your thoughts on what we’ve heard so far.

In The Nation, Aura Bogado offers an open letter actress Michelle Williams, who donned braids, feathers, and face paint on the cover of AnOther magazine, in an apparent effort to appear Native American.

By wearing a braided wig and donning feathers, and calling that “Native American” in a photo shoot, you’re perpetuating the lazy idea that Natives are all one and the same. Because you were born and spent your childhood in Montana, I expected more from you. Montana is home to seven reservations, where Natives from more than a dozen state or federally recognized tribes and nations reside—each with its own history, culture and language.

The United States federally recognizes and has established government-to-government ties with nearly 600 Native nations. And while these nations share in common that they constitute the people who descend from the continent’s original inhabitants, they are otherwise unique (and not one of those nations wears braided wigs and feathers as if to represent their people). By dressing up as an imaginary Native, you’re working to conceal both the history and the presence of real ones.

I suppose that, had you chosen to wear a headdress, it may have been worse—but the critique remains the same. As Adrienne Keene eloquently points out, playing Indian not only promotes stereotypes, but violates profound spiritual significances, is tantamount to wearing blackface and prolongs a violent history of genocide and colonialism. You’ve done all of that with your photo-shoot costume. Read more…

““I’m a strict Originalist, Mr. Cooper, and I’m looking at a 14th Amendment that forbids any state from denying any person equal protection of the law,” Associate Justice Antonin Scalia said. “So, unless we are the most uncivilized society on the face of God’s green earth, I think we can all agree that a gay person is in fact a person. So what I’m saying is, who the fuck are we to tell a person who he or she can get married to? This is dumb. Can we talk about a real case now, please?””

- Supreme Court On Gay Marriage: ‘Sure, Who Cares’ | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source

WASHINGTON, DC — There are probably five justices who object to California’s anti-gay Proposition 8 and who would prefer to see it struck down. Justice Kennedy, the conservative viewed as most likely to provide the fifth vote for equality, openly pondered whether Prop 8 violates the Constitution’s ban on gender discrimination. Kennedy at one point admitted uncertainty about whether there is sufficient evidence examining the effect of marriage equality on society, but he then pivoted to note that the nearly 40,000 children raised by gay parents in California suffer “immediate legal injury” because of Prop 8. His vote is not entirely clear, but Kennedy leaned significantly in the direction of justice.

A weak performance by Charles Cooper, the lawyer defending discrimination, probably went a long way to push Kennedy into the pro-equality camp. When Justice Sotomayor asked Cooper to identify a single example outside of marriage where discrimination against gay couples could be “rational,” Cooper responded “I cannot,” prompting Sotomayor to note that Cooper had more or less conceded that gay people meet the definition of a class entitled to heightened protection under the Constitution. Under longstanding precedent, a group which has experienced a “‘history of purposeful unequal treatment‘ or been subjected to unique disabilities on the basis of stereotyped characteristics not truly indicative of their abilities” enjoys enhanced protection under the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

Similarly, when Cooper argued that same-sex marriages could somehow undermine opposite-sex marriages, Kagan asked him to explain the “cause and effect” behind this point. When Cooper fumbled the question, Kennedy pounced, asking if Cooper was “conceding the point” that same-sex couples are not a threat to other people’s marriages. Cooper was left to meekly assert that it is “impossible for anyone to foresee the future accurately enough to know exactly what those real-world consequences would be.”

Yet the question of whether California’s same-sex couples enjoy the blessings of liberty was rapidly eclipsed by a different, unspoken question — whether gay couples in Alabama also enjoy those rights. Three justices, Roberts, Scalia and Alito asked hostile questions to the attorneys supporting equality and appear very unlikely to vote against Prop 8. Similarly, while Thomas was characteristically silent, no one expects him to break from his past, anti-equality opinions in gay rights cases. Of the remaining five, at least three spent much of the argument grasping for ways to limit the scope of a decision striking down Prop 8.

Sotomayor, at one point, asked pro-equality attorney Ted Olson whether the Court’s decision could be limited to just California. Kennedy worried about the “uncharted waters” facing the Court if it struck down marriage discrimination nationwide. Justice Ginsburg, who famously accused Roe v. Wade of moving “too far, too fast,” alluded to the fact that racial marriage discrimination ended in two stages — first the Court struck down bans on interracial cohabitation, then it struck down bans on interracial marriage. The clear implication was that the Court could be similarly incremental here.

Yet a means of killing Prop 8 without also ordering Alabama to comply with the Constitution escaped the justices. Kennedy was openly dismissive of the Ninth Circuit’s rationale for limiting its decision striking Prop 8 to California. When Solicitor General Don Verrilli called for the Court to upgrade civil union states into full marriage equality states but leave the Alabama question for another day, most of the bench was skeptical. Ginsburg wondered why only states that have made significant progress towards equality are required to go all in. Kagan questioned how the facts supporting marriage discrimination could be different in another state. When Justice Breyer asked Verrilli which arguments could possibly support marriage equality in California but not Alabama, Verrilli was only able to respond “caution.”

By the end of the argument, a majority of the Court seemed to believe that they shouldn’t even be hearing this case in the first place. At least five justices — Roberts, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan — at one point asked skeptical questions about whether the Court has jurisdiction to hear this case, a result that would potentially raise difficult legal questions about whether Prop 8 is still the law in California or not. Justice Kennedy repeatedly asked about another possibility — the Court could dismiss the case as “improvidently granted” — essentially reversing the Court’s prior decision to hear the case and leaving the Ninth Circuit’s decision to strike Prop 8 in effect. Sotomayor asked Cooper “[i]f the issue is letting the States experiment and letting the society have more time to figure out its direction, why is taking a case now the answer?”

In other words, the most likely answer to the question of whether Prop 8 is unconstitutional is that the Supreme Court will not answer this question at all. Too many of the five justices who appeared open to marriage equality posed too many questions about whether now is the time to bring equality to the nation as a whole, and they did not appear satisfied with any of the theories offered to limit their decision to just some of the states.

McDonald’s will make its ‘McWrap’ a permanent menu item with the launch of a big ad campaign starting April 1, and it’s clear the company is working to make sure the new product looks like a ‘healthier option’ on the menu.

On Monday, a leaked internal memo showed that McDonald’s believes it would lose 22 percent of its 18-34 year old customers to what’s perceived as the healthier option, sandwich chain Subway, without adding the wrap onto its menu. McDonald’s is also looking to alter its unhealthy image with its green label. Just last week, researchers at Cornell University released a study showing that consumers view green labeling as a shorthand for healthier food:

People tend to think a candy bar with a green calorie label is healthier than ones with red or white labels, even when the number of calories is the same, a Cornell University researcher found.[...]

“Our research suggests that the color of calorie labels may have an effect on whether people perceive the food as healthy, over and above the actual nutritional information conveyed by the label, such as calorie content,” [a Cornell news release] said.

Of course, Subway uses green packaging, along with the tagline “Think Fresh” to convey nutrition. But its sandwiches are not significantly healthier by any means; they contain an average of 608 calories, and the highest calorie sandwich checks in at 570 calories for a six-inch, translating to about 1,140 for the chain’s signature ‘footlong.’ The sandwich chain does offer lower fat content options, however, and some of its options have “Heart Check” approval from the American Heart Association. That perception is paying off; Subway now has more stores in the U.S. than McDonald’s does.

High-calorie, high-salt, high-fat foods that fast food chains serve pose a huge health risk, causing damage to organs including the heart and liver, and obesity. The perception about fast food might be different when it comes to something like a wrap, but the effect is the same. The McWrap pictured above is 590 calories and contains 44 percent (PDF) of a person’s daily fat intake.

“The family has been through a lot with HeLa: they didn’t learn of the cells until 20 years after Lacks’s death, when scientists began using her children in research without their knowledge. Later their medical records were released to the press and published without consent. Because I wrote a book about Henrietta Lacks and her family, my in-box exploded when news of the genome broke. People wanted to know: did scientists get the family’s permission to publish her genetic information? The answer is no. Imagine if someone secretly sent samples of your DNA to one of many companies that promise to tell you what your genes say about you. That report would list the good news (you’ll probably live to be 100) and the not-so-good news (you’ll most likely develop Alzheimer’s, bipolar disorder and maybe alcoholism). Now imagine they posted your genetic information online, with your name on it. Some people may not mind. But I assure you, many do: genetic information can be stigmatizing, and while it’s illegal for employers or health insurance providers to discriminate based on that information, this is not true for life insurance, disability coverage or long-term care.”

- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the Sequel - NYTimes.com

A volta do vinil e as altas vendas tornaram-se um mito na indústria. Conversando por email sobre o assunto com Rafael Ramos, da Deckdisc e da Polysom, única fábrica de vinis da América Latina, o papo virou uma entrevista sobre o mercado de vinis no Brasil. Ficou faltando a visita a fábrica, mas vamos marcar o passeio (aliás, seria massa levar um leitor). De quebra, Rafael ainda colocou uns vinis na roda pra sortear entre vocês, leitores. URBe – Faça um resumo da situação da Polysom hoje.

Rafael Ramos – A fábrica está funcionando a pleno vapor, passando por sua melhor fase, que tende a melhorar. A cada dia chegam mais clientes e esses cada vez ficam mais satisfeitos. A fábrica evoluiu muito todas as fases do processo (desde o corte de acetato até a prensagem em si) e hoje atinge um nível de excelência altíssimo. A procura é muito grande, o interesse em fazer vinil tem aumentado muito e muitas das solicitações de orçamento têm virado realidade rapidamente. Os clientes estão entendo as facilidades e as vantagens de se prensar no Brasil e isso, junto ao respaldo da qualidade, têm deixado as prensas bem ocupadas. Tanto para vinil de 12″ (140 e 180 gramas) quanto para compactos de 7 polegadas.

URBe – Hoje o mercado está estabelecido? Ou é balela esse papo de mercado do vinil gigante? Quais os números de produção atuais?

RR – Gigante” realmente não é o melhor termo. Os números não são grandes mas são consideráveis para um mercado que ficou parado por uns bons 10 anos e voltou à ativa há menos de 2 anos. Ainda são poucas as lojas que vendem e muitas delas são lojas pequenas e fiéis que, com muita esperteza (preços bons, bom atendimento, não colocando uma margem de lucro excessiva), têm aumentado seus pedidos. Mas com muita insistência algumas barreiras têm sido quebradas e todo novo cliente (loja) que adere ao formato causa um aumento grande nos números. A fábrica hoje produz uma média de 5 mil peças por mês, um crescimento de mais de 200% do ano de 2011 para 2012.

URBe – Qual foi o período mais difícil e as maiores complicações?

RR – O início foi a fase mais complicada. Desconsiderando a fase de reforma da fábrica (todas as prensas foram desmontadas até o último parafuso por uma equipe de altíssimo nível), os impostos, que no Brasil chegam a uma porcentagem absurda, atrapalharam muito no preço de fabricação e a desconfiança da clientela sobre a qualidade do produto final também fez tudo demorar a engrenar. Só depois de um bom tempo com os discos clássicos que a fábrica licenciou na rua é que essa mentalidade foi mudando. A prova da qualidade está na pick-up de grandes colecionadores e adoradores de música com os ótimos resultados atingidos na fabricação de discos como “A Tábua de Esmeraldas” do Jorge Ben e do “Krishnanda” do Pedro Santos.

URBe – Tem o papo dos discos prensados no leste europeu, que são mais baratos. Fale dessa concorrência.

RR – Foi outra complicação desde o começo e que durou até pouco tempo. Como disse, a mentalidade tem mudado muito. Hoje o cliente sabe que pra ficar “super mais barato”, ele tem que trazer uma prensagem inteira ilegalmente dentro da mala, o que não é leve, nem correto. Se você for importar legalmente uma prensagem feita no exterior, o seu preço final será consideravelmente maior do que o que a Polysom oferece hoje. Isso sem contar os que nunca calcularam o valor da passagem pra ir de voltar da Europa. Não vale a pena.

URBe – Quais as perspectivas de mercado? Tem muito mais artista prensando vinis?

RR – A procura cresceu muito no ano passado. Chegou a assustar, pro lado bom da coisa. Cada vez mais o artista (assim como as gravadoras e selos) sabe o quanto agrega a um projeto lançar no formato de vinil. A perspectiva é que ainda melhore e estabilize num ponto mais alto do que nos encontramos agora. A fábrica ainda não chegou na metade de sua capacidade de fabricação. O plano é que estabilize no topo.

URBe – Como você enxerga o papel do vinil na equação da industria fonografica atual? Dá pra desafogar ou as vendas não tem tanto impacto?

RR – Os números não são grandes mas como as vendas de cd também não são mais as mesmas, a equação tem ficado engraçada. Não desafoga as baixas vendas do formato físico, mas tem um impacto gigante no trabalho artístico. Valoriza muito um lançamento. A capa, o som, a atenção que atrai na loja, a posição que ocupa na vida de quem vai a um show e sai com um vinil debaixo do braço. Está mudando a forma como as pessoas enxergam música no Brasil, e isso já vale todo o esforço.

–

SORTEIO:

Pra ganhar, diga nos comentários qual desses discos você gostaria de receber e por quê. O primeiro pedido para cada disco, com uma resposta decente (sim, o critério é subjetivo, portanto esforce-se), leva a bolacha.

Dado a belezura dos presentes, o número mínimo de participantes é 100. Vou deixar os comentários acumularem e só vou publicá-los depois de chegar a 100 comentários. E pra dar mais emoção, um dos discos será ganho pelo participante número 100, que vai ser o primeiro a escolher, Assim ninguém ficar com medo de publicar atrasado e não ganhar.

Adendo (incluído após a publicação do post): cada pessoa só pode concorrer uma vez, não adianta postar várias vezes tentando vários discos.

Muito importante: não tenho a mais vaga ideia de como fazer pra entregar esses discos aos ganhadores, correio seria uma fortuna. O mais provável é que deixe na Tracks para ser buscado pelos ganhadores, mas ainda nem falei com ninguém da loja. Portanto, concorra por sua conta e risco, e saiba que se estiver no Rio aumentam suas chances de fato receber seu disco.

Resumindo: São 14 discos, o centésimo comentarista tem prioridade na escolha do seu disco. Depois disso, a distribuição segue a partir do primeiro comentário, na ordem de chegada e pedidos, até acabarem as peças.

Abaixo, o Rafael descreve cada peça. Boa sorte!

Atualização: PROMO ENCERRADA!

1 Jorge Ben – Tábua de Esmeralda (Vinil Verde, só existe UM, foi um teste feito na fábrica…) – N.E. – esse foi travado, meu disco favorito de todos os tempos
1 Jards Macalé - 1972 – Clássicos em Vinil – 180 gramas
1 Agridoce – vinil 12″ transparente!- foi um teste, tem 20 desses e vou fazer uma venda especial, peguei um e botei no seu pacote! (Exclusivo)
1 Agridoce - compacto Vermelho - “Ne Parle Pas” (lado B remix de Tejo do Instituto para a mesma música)
1 teste de prensagem “Agridoce” vinil laranja!
1 teste de prensagem Los Hermanos “Ventura” (duplo!)
1 teste de prensagem “Los Hermanos Ao Vivo” (duplo!)
1 teste de prensagem Los Hermanos “4″
1 Teste de Prensagem Pedro Santos – “Krishnanda” (!!!!!!!!!!! Item lindo raríssimo)
1 Teste de Prensagem Cícero – “Canções de Apartamento”
1 Teste de Prensagem Black Alien – “Babylon By Gus” que relançamos em vinil agora. – N.E. – por muita sorte de vocês não travei esse também
1 Nação Zumbi – compacto “Fome de Tudo” – Lado A “Onde Tenho que Ir” – Lado B “A Culpa” (são as faixas que não entraram na versão em vinil 12″ do “Fome de Tud”o, pela questao tempo vs. qualidade)
1 “Voyeur” – compacto da banda eletropop de Recife
1 Boss In Drama – “Pure Gold”
1 Panda Bear – “Tomboy” – vinil 12″ (conhece isso? é um dos caras do Animal Collective)

Obs: Um teste de prensagem são de três a cinco cópias que são feitas antes da prensagem oficial começar, com rótulo exclusivo, pra se ouvir e saber se está bom, conferir som, peso, etc. Uma vez  aprovadas, começa a prensagem. São poucas testes e não são descartados porque estão bons, foram aprovados.

* O URBe reserva-se o direito de mudar a regra completamente se der qualquer tipo de confusão ou mesmo cancelar o sorteio. É uma brincadeira, portanto divirtam-se!

Ideology means many things, but one of them is the difference between who gets the maximum benefit of the doubt, and who gets the presumption of guilt. I know what I see, when I see this clip:

I see a law professor shoving a student—shouting “Get away from my space, you prick”—making more threatening movements, attempting to provoke a fight verbally, and grabbing a student’s cell phone out of her hand. I see the student who was pushed and threatened staying calm and passive, even trying to defuse the situation. I see the student whose phone was taken from her hands defending herself verbally and no more. And then the clip ends.

It is clear to me what I see in the video. It is clear to me who, in the video, is turning a political conflict into a physical one, and who it is that is aggressively trespassing into whose space. Mine is an ideological account of what happened, of course. Which is not to say that it’s wrong—yours is ideological too—but simply that any reading of this event, this brief window in time, cannot help but be shaped and contextualized by what you or I expect to see. And it also can’t help but be shaped by the context which we assume into existence, framing the event.

After all: what happened before this video began? What happened after it ended? That context could change how we view what we’ve just seen. In fact, it has to: we’ve already filled in the gaps in our knowledge with assumptions about what we don’t know. One of two things is true: either the law professor was provoked in some way that would justify or mitigate his conduct, or he wasn’t. And before we come to a decision about what we’ve seen, we’ve decided which of those two things are probably true. And how we come to that decision will most likely have everything to do with what our opinions are about Israel/Palestine, border checkpoints, and the meanings of the words Apartheid and Imperialism.

For example, the person who posted the video framed it this way:

“During our solidarity mock check-point/border check point, University of Oregon professor, James Olmsted, physically pushes two students after making very racists remarks to all of us. This was after we had asked him to calm down because he was making us feel intimidated.”

In this video, we see the same confrontation from a different angle, and we see some of what happened after the first video cuts out:

The poster of that video says more or less the same thing as the poster of the first video:

“Seconds before this video was recorded he shoves a student and continues to stir up tension until UOPD arrive on the scene.”

A commenter on the first video asserts:

“there are two sides to everything…people dont just act like this for no reason…I guarantee you the professor was reacting to something that isnt shown in this video”

An a commenter on the second also asserts that they are the aggressors:

“hahaha that girl thinks she’s being harassed. In reality, it’s a group of weirdos surrounding a law professor recording him, and pushing their ideals on him.”

After all: if this confrontation began with the students aggressively encroaching on his space—as he seems to be claiming—thereby impeding his ability to move freely, then our sympathy will naturally gravitate towards his side of the story. If he was simply going about his business, and they provoked him, then at least he isn’t the only asshole in the situation. But if the reverse is the case—if they were simply putting on a campus demonstration, peacefully—then he is obviously the one trying to provoke a confrontation. This is especially the case if, beforehand, he was making racist remarks.

Which is it? Which do you see?

Now, watch this six minute version, which is taken from the phone that he snatches from the students hand and puts in his pocket:

I wouldn’t say I exactly feel sorry for Rush Limbaugh, but it’s pretty embarrassing to comment on something in a way that reveals you literally didn’t consider the material at hand for more than 30 seconds. Or 29, to be exact. Limbaugh went on the air to praise Beyonce Knowles’ latest single “Bow Down / I Been On” for what he thinks is the song’s ode to submitting to your husband. “She got married, she married the rich guy, she now understands — she now understands it’s worth it to bow down,” he says. Listen to the segment here:

But if Limbaugh had listened to the song for fifteen seconds, he’d know that it’s addressed to the women Knowles addresses in the opening lyric, when she sings: ““I know when you were little girls/ You dreamt of being in my world.” and if he’d gotten all the way to the 29-second mark, he’d have heard Beyonce remind listeners, some of whom have been perturbed by her plan to tour as Mrs. Carter—her husband’s legal name—for her next album, “I took some time to live my life / But don’t think I’m just his little wife.” Now, I’m aware that Mr. Limbaugh is a busy man with a lot of time to fill, and that being sexually nasty to women in public life only goes so far, but you’d think that he has enough money to at least pay a staffer to listen to popular music he’s going to natter about on the air.

And part of what’s funniest about this is that if Limbaugh wanted to make a case that Beyonce’s an advocate for women making efforts to please their husbands, it wouldn’t have been too hard—he just needed to pick a different song. In “Countdown,” for example, Beyonce pulls out the Betty Draper drag to tell her listeners that “I’m all up under him like it’s cold, winter time / All up in the kitchen in my heels, dinner time / Do whatever that it takes, he got a winner’s mind / Give it all to him, meet him at the finish line”:

But then, maybe Limbaugh’s not ready to tell his female audience “Ladies, if you love your man show him you the fliest / Grind up on it, girl, show him how you ride it.” Though given the way he’s willing to talk about the sex lives of women he’s never met, and about which he knows precisely nothing, I’d hardly put it past him.