By J. Freedom du Lac
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 26, 2008; Page C01
Max Bernstein Pushes the Margins
CHICAGO — Last year, Max Bernstein’s pop-rock band, the Actual, released an album, joined the Warped Tour and performed with supergroup Velvet Revolver.
Bernstein celebrated his most notable year in the music industry by breaking up the band and stage-diving into the broadside business.
by Ralph Nader
Tuesday, June 3. 2008
You are sixteen. You can legally work, drive a motor vehicle and with parental consent get married in most states. Why can’t you legally vote?
Good question, and one that supporters for dropping the voting age from eighteen to sixteen will be asking politicians more and more. Much has been made of the youth vote this year amid evidence that more young people are turning out to vote in the primaries than ever before. Let’s take it to the next step.
I argued for the voting age drop from twenty one to eighteen back in the Sixties before it finally happened in 1971 with the ratification of the Twenty Sixth Amendment to our Constitution. The absence of a vibrant civic culture inside and outside our schools drained away much of the potential of this electoral liberation for youngsters. Their turnout was lower than older adults.
Sixteen year olds are likely to be more excited. They are studying and learning about the country and the world in high school. They’re still at home and can bring their discussions to their parents, who may turnout at the polls more as a result.
Fifteen year old Danielle Charette, writing last January in the Hartford Courant says: “Consumed in the distraction of their first semester at college, many eligible voters fail to arrange for absentee ballots. Of course, if annual voting became more habitual starting in high school, reading up on the candidates and voting while away from home wouldn’t seem out of the ordinary.”
Moreover, social studies teachers in high school would be keener on non-partisan class analyses of candidates if their students were able to vote.
Ms. Charette made another telling point. Sixteen year olds who also work pay taxes but they have no vote. This is “taxation without representation,” she exclaimed.
Austria lowered its voting age to 16 last year, prompting similar proposals by New Zealand legislators. One Swiss Canton (Glarus) lowered the voting age to participate in local and cantonal elections to 16 in 2007. British member of Parliament, Sarah McCarthy-Fry expects a debate on the 16 year old vote issue soon in the House of Commons.
Austrian Social Democrat Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer said that lowering the voting age was a “challenge to Austria’s school system” in the field of political education. While New Zealand MP, Sue Bradford ties this voting reform in her proposed legislation with making civics education compulsory in high school to enhance students’ understanding of the political system.
Bills in Minnesota and Michigan have been introduced to lower the voting age. Their rationale is to give a “real opportunity for young people to vote on something that affects their daily lives,” according to Sen. Sandy Pappas of St. Paul.
Now it’s time to hear from these young Americans. They can exchange and spread words faster and cheaper than any generation in history – what with YouTube, MySpace and Facebook communications.
Here is some advice to them: First don’t just make it a matter of your voting right as “citizens now,” not citizens in waiting. Recognize your responsibilities and duties of engaged citizenship.
Second, raise some compelling changes and redirections that will improve life in America especially for you and generally for all Americans. You know lots of them. Just ask yourself, as you shop, study, work, play, breathe the air and drink the water, and watch the TV news, what kind of country do you want to see in the coming months and years?
To jumpstart the 16 year old voting movement, youngsters need to start jumping. Needed are rallies, marches, and personal group visits to your members of Congress and state legislatures at their local offices, especially when the lawmakers are not in session and are back in their home communities.
Don’t over rely on the Internet. The impact from showing up in person is far greater.
I’ll be talking up the sixteen year old vote. But it will only become a reality if a teenage political revolution makes it happen.
***
Ralph Nader Fights to Give 16 Year Olds the Vote!
Ralph Nader fought to give 18 year olds the vote in the 1960’s (achieved in 1971). Since many 16 year olds work and pay taxes, shouldn’t they be allowed to have a say how their tax dollars are spent?
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
see
LA political band Max and the Marginalized’s song about Lou Dobbs, and a cartoon where we throw burritos at him and build a border fence around him.
http://www.myspace.com/maxandthemarginalized
http://www.maxandthemarginalized.comAnimation + Recording by Maxwell Waker
http://www.myspace.com/bigloudstudios
bigloudstudios [at] earthlink.net
Myspace confronts a young fellow who may have been cheating on it with other sites. Soon Facebook and others show up for a showdown. Let the social networking wars begin!
posted with permission.
By Jasmin L. Chari
Streetclip.TV
15.05.08
2008
Indie/Nordic-Bollywood-Soul, Power-Pop
Excellent album, huge talent, unique voice and a new era of music is born! Continue reading
Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
by Bartholomew Bean
featured writer
Dandelion Salad
April 23, 2008
Oh “corporate communists”, how can it be, this world of ours
Can it flourish, with the likes, of thee?
Your vast world banks, of ink, paper, and numbers
Ramdon access memory, and wastefull blunders
Life destroyed by your greedy plundering schemes
Added: April 16, 2008
Directed by Clark Deal
Edited by Dustin Haynes
Shot at Chaotic Studios
Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
Note: replaced first video June 22, 2015
British Sea Power: No Lucifer
costas2by4 on Jan 18, 2011
From the new album, “Do You Like Rock Music?”, British Sea Power performed “No Lucifer.” On the Letterman Show 3/13/08.
Floors and Walls – What To Do, new video taken from the acoustic set at the Joogleberry. Added: October 18, 2007
by Nick Juliano
Raw Story
Thursday February 7, 2008
With rapidly advancing technology spreading across the globe, US spies are shifting their focus from surreptitiously photographing secret Soviet documents to trolling the Internet for what could be the next key nugget of foreign intelligence.
Among the most valuable sources, one top spook says, are blogs, MySpace and other Web 2.0 hallmarks.
“We’re looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence,” Doug Naquin, director of the CIA’s Open Source Center said in a recent speech to CIA retirees.
The speech was posted this week on SecrecyNews, the blog of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy.
“I would not have thought of YouTube as an obvious source of intelligence,” Steven Aftergood, the project’s director, told InfromationWeek, “but I think it’s a good sign that the Open Source Center is looking at it, and at other new media.”
Open source intelligence collection focuses on compiling and analyzing unclassified data from publicly available sources for use by the CIA, policy makers and other law enforcement agencies. Formerly known as the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, the Open Source Center’s mission in recent years has shifted from translating newspaper and television reports from abroad to culling the Web for information on foreign targets. The center trains intelligence agents and others in government.
“This training includes everything from media analysis to advanced Internet exploitation, way beyond Googling,” Naquin said.
The goal of open-source collection is to provide information that goes beyond what appears in the morning newspaper, and analysis of Web 2.0 content has become a key part of that, he said.
“A couple years back we identified Iranian blogs as a phenomenon worthy of more attention, about six months ahead of anybody else,” he said.
Now even Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has his own blog.
“We’re looking at chat rooms and things that didn’t even exist five years ago, and trying to stay ahead,” Naquin said. “We have groups looking at what they call ‘Citizens Media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the Internet. Then there’s Social Media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs.”
With the end of the Cold War, Naquin said open source collection became a low priority in the Intelligence Community, causing the FBIS staff to be cut in half during the 90s. The terror attacks aimed at New York and Washington changed all that.
“[Nine-Eleven] was sort of a watershed for us,” Naquin said. “The 9/11 Commission and WMD Commission both said, ‘You know what? There are a lot of open sources out there. We should be putting a lot more attention toward exploiting those sources.”
Naquin’s full speech is available here (.pdf).
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
By Marguerite Reardon
Free Press
CNet
January 17, 2008
A decade after the government said that AT&T and other service providers don’t have to police their networks for pirated content, the telecommunications giant is voluntarily looking for ways to play traffic cop.
For the past several months, AT&T executives have said the company is testing technology to filter traffic on its network to look for copyrighted material that is being illegally distributed. James Cicconi, senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs for AT&T, reiterated the carrier’s plans last week during a panel discussion at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
“We are very interested in a technology-based solution and we think a network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this,” Cicconi said in a New York Times article. “We recognize we are not there yet but there are a lot of promising technologies. But we are having an open discussion with a number of content companies, including NBC Universal, to try to explore various technologies that are out there.”
AT&T’s plans would turn the nation’s largest telephone company into a kind of network cop, a role that some say could turn dangerous for the company. For one, filtering packets to determine whether they contain copyrighted material raises privacy concerns. And AT&T customers who have already been concerned about the company’s alleged role in the National Security Agency’s domestic spy program, could take their broadband, TV and telephony business to a competitor. Also, AT&T could be opening itself up to a mountain of legal troubles.
To read the article, click here.
This article is from CNet. If you found it informative and valuable, we strongly encourage you to visit their Web site and register an account, if necessary, to view all their articles on the Web. Support quality journalism.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Note: replaced video May 31, 2012
On Myspace:
parocks on Oct 30, 2006
The Underwater – September 2, 2006 – Rams Head Live – Baltimore, MD – Song 8 – Render – Alternative Rock Band Live Music Video
http://www.myspace.com/theunderwater
http://www.webmusicvideo.com/bands/theunderwater
http://www.parocks.com
The Underwater Sept 2, 2006 Rams Head Live Balt, MD -8
Lyrics:
i’m choosing my poison
i’m walking the path beneath my feet
in every decision
i’m taking the shape of what’s to betake the time to render
the one that you should be
don’t sell your soul for squalor
don’t sell yourself for cheap
find your greatness
in the place where
all hearts convenefrom all of my failures
to all of the times i get it right
i’m meeting my maker
within the reflections of my mindlet love compel
a greater self
mind body soul
and all they hold
Note: I just voted and had to use IE instead of Firefox. ~ Lo
Dennis Kucinich for President (Official)
Kucinich Campaign Action Alert–Vote! Myspace Poll!
MySpace will be holding an ONLINE PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY this Tuesday and Wednesday, January 1st and 2nd, 2008.
This Virtual Primary will take the Political Pulse of America’s Largest Online Community. We need Dennis to win this Primary! We’ve done it in the past with the PDA and DFA polls and the Independent Primary. We can do it again if we all work together!
Beginning on Tuesday, January 1 at 3:01 AM EST, MySpace will invite it’s community to participate in the first MySpace Presidential Primary at: http://impact.myspace.com. Taking place just prior to the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire Primaries, the largest online community will be the first to choose their candidate for the nation’s highest office. Polls will close Wednesday, January 2 at 11:59 PM EST. The MySpace community will make their voices heard by choosing their preferred candidate for President. Let’s make that candidate Dennis Kucinich! Show your support for Dennis Kucinich and help us spread this poll to as many Kucinich Supporters as possible.
WHEN
Polls open at 3:01am EST, Tuesday, January 1
Polls close at 11:59 pm EST, Wednesday, January 2
WHERE
Vote online on the MySpace Impact Channel at:
Copy and paste this:
http://impact.myspace.com
OR
CLICK HERE!
Please vote for Dennis Kucinich and tell everyone you know to do the same. Thank you.
The Results of the MySpace Presidential Primary will be available on Thursday, January 3 on the MySpace Impact Channel.
Sincerely,
Robert Ruszkowski
National Director of Virtual Outreach
Kucinich for President 2008, Inc.
http://www.Dennis4President.com
Updated: March 21, 2008 added brief video below
Featuring Martin Lewis the Money Saving Expert from MoneySavingExpert.com – this is the music video to the bank charges anthem.
“I fought the Lloyds” is the story of what happened when Dan Oystar tried to get his bank charges back – money which had been unlawfully removed from his account by Lloyds TSB.
If you want the banks to give everyone back their money – help us pile on the pressure by simply texting the word ‘bankers’ to 82822.
With the support of the MoneySaving Expert.com we’ve managed to get thousands of people to join the revolt against the banks. This song is part of an organised campaign to embarrass the banks into treating their customers a bit better.
Since the OFT test case was announced, the banks have notched up another 1 billion pounds worth of illegal charges! It’s time for this to stop…
So please text ‘bankers’ to 82822 now!
(The cost of the single download is 50p. We’re not making any money out of this – so please check out our http://www.myspace.com/oystar page, listen to our other songs, leave some comments and tell your mates…)
Added: 23 November 2007
h/t: Coreluminus
On Myspace:
***
Updated: March 21, 2008
Newsnight – I Fought The Lloyds
I Fought the Lloyds is a protest song about bank charges that charted in January at number 25 in the UK. This video shows the end of the song being played on Newsnight, and introduced by Jeremy Paxman.
Videoclip promocional de Cornelius, extraído do seu primeiro traballo discográfico”Greatest Hits”.
Videoclip promocional de Cornelius, extraído de su primer trabajo discográfico “Greatest hits”. Added: October 15, 2007
On Myspace:
Dandelion Salad 