Waiting for the Moon

"Anyone can make the simple complicated, creativity is making the complicated simple." -- Charlie Mingus
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My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-7-5) 

Ferry to Whidbey
We are heading out to Whidbey Island for the Fourth. Mutiny Bay has the craziest fireworks display. It is a rich area and all the gentry spend a bundle on fireworks. The local Indian Reservations sell fireworks unavailable through normal channels; they are awesome.

This is a photo from last year (Thats Ruby my youngest daughter). Check 52Locations for photos after the fourth.

faboomama:

Power & Equality http://vi.sualize.us/view/379d7b150f1b49653c42dbce26b1131c/

Strength and Beauty, this is powerful!

"The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online" 

danah boyd
Personal Democracy Forum (PDF)
New York, NY
30 June 2009

[This is a rough unedited crib of the actual talk]

This talk was written for a specific audience - the attendees of the Personal Democracy Forum. This audience is primarily American, primarily liberal-leaning, primarily white, and primarily involved professionally in politics in one way or another. Keep this audience in mind when I’m talking about “we” here.

Good morning!
Many of us in this room have had our lives transformed by technology. Some of us have grown up with tech while others have embraced it as adults. Many of us have become enamored with tech and its transformative potential. And because of this, many of us have become technology advocates. We’ve worked our way into different institutions, preaching about new opportunities introduced because of the internet. Furthermore, many in this room have been active in transforming politics through technology. We’ve leveraged technology for fundraising and getting out the vote. We could go on and on about political events that have been shaped by technology, from the Obama Campaign to the post-election Iranian protests.
Read entire talk
This is excellent analysis of Myspace and Facebook based on class. No mention of Tumblr but worth your time if you want to lift the curtain and examine the class/technology issue.

Amnesty details Gaza 'war crimes'  

BBC News:
Israel committed war crimes and carried out reckless attacks and acts of wanton destruction in its Gaza offensive, an independent human rights report says.

Via: Dean Whitbread
This is Godfrey Daniels, he lives two doors down the street and performs around the world in the New Vaudeville Movement, of course this is a Simulacrum.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
15 Plays
Almost 1:00 A.M. time for a little electro funk before bed.

Artist Name : Dinamoe
Track Title : Maceo / Silently
Album Title : Fabric 46 - Claude VonStroke
Date : 2009

Debt is capitalism’s dirty little secret 

FT.Com
By Ben Funnell
Published: June 30 2009

Just why is there so much debt in the Anglo-Saxon world? Bankers and regulators know well that it is in nobody’s long-term interests to have allowed borrowing to escalate to a position where the US now owes far more, as a multiple of the economy, than at the start of the Great Depression.

The answer is capitalism’s dirty little secret: excessive lending was the only way to maintain the living standards of the vast bulk of the population at a time when wealth was being concentrated in the hands of an elite. The amount by which the elite has benefited is startling, and illustrates the problem with lightly regulated free markets: the rich get much richer while the rest do not get richer at all. According to Société Générale economists, the inflation-adjusted income of the highest-paid fifth of US earners has risen by 60 per cent since 1970, while it has fallen by more than 10 per cent for the rest. As was recently pointed out in the New York Review of Books, the Walton family, of Wal-Mart fame, is wealthier than the bottom third of the US population put together – about 100m people.
This comes from the worlds most respected financial journal, not a leftest rag.
Read entire article —- Via: Global Guerrillas
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