I wasn't going to say anything about George Carlin shuffling off this mortal coil, but when I saw some very topical for our times quotes of his I just had to re-cite them. This is from a bit he was doing in the late 90s:
As far as I’m concerned, all of this airport security – the cameras, the questions, the screening, the searches, is just one more way of reducing your liberty and reminding you they can fuck with you anytime they want, as long as you’re willing to put up with it. Which means, of course, anytime they want. Because that’s the way Americans are now. They’re always willing to trade away a little of their freedom for the feeling – the illusion – of security.You have got to be realistic about terrorism. Ya gotta be a realist: Certain groups of people – Muslim fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists, and just plain guys from Montana – are going to continue to make life in this country very interesting for a long, long time. That’s the reality. Angry men in combat fatigues talking to god on a two-way radio and muttering incoherent slogans about freedom are eventually going to provide us with a great deal of entertainment.
Especially after your stupid fuckin’ economy collapses all around you, and the terrorists come out of the woodwork. And you’ll have anthrax in the water supply and sarin gas in the air conditioners; There’ll be chemical and biological suitcase bombs in every city, and I say, “Relax, enjoy it! Enjoy the show! Take a fuckin’ chance. Put a little fun in your life.”
Happy trails, Mr. Carlin. ( Via North Texas Indymedia)
Yesterday's Twitter tweets:
Via a blog called Feministe I found out about a gaff that Senator McCain committed 16 years ago that should by rights cost him at least all of his female voters, all but his most piggish male voters, and certainly the election. He called his wife a cunt - in front of reporters. Absolutely inexcusable.
It's interesting that one story on the incident concentrates on it as an example of McCain's bad temper - yes, this is a problem, but the way I see it, the bigger problem is that it's a sign of a basic disrespect or even hate for women.
What an asshole. He doesn't deserve to have a wife, much less be president or a senator.
Wonderfully, when you google the word, you get the story as the 3rd entry, right after the wikipedia and wiktionary entries. Let's try and make it the first! Keep linking to the story and any other stories about it.
And now for your further entertainment, here's this humorous little video about the incident by The Public Service Administration, an LA-based comedy group. It had me LOL:
Tonight at about 2am the sun gets as close as it can to us. yay.
Also tonight, we're having a half-birthday party for me... 6 months from monday is my birthday, but it always gets overshadowed by xmas. This is a better time.
Yesterday's Twitter tweets:
Many projects are all happening at once. It's pretty exciting, though a bit stressful, with accompanying deadlines.
I finally got the narration finalized and recorded (with my new large-diaphragm condenser mic - sounds great!) for the Sierra Club border impacts video I'm doing, which means I can finally finish it, probably over the next week. But, I'm also trying to make a trailer for the war tax resistance doc, and this is the time of the month to edit Indymedia Newsreal too. whew. And there's a more banal but well-paying video job I should get to as well that I won't go into.
Yesterday's Twitter tweets:
Yesterday's Twitter tweets:
Actually this is Twitter tweets from last night and today:
This little mashup video celebrating Obama's win is a really great editing job.
And while we're watching that, here's a funny Hillary Clinton mashup based on a YouTube meme:
This is a scary little video by Vishal Agarwala about Facebook and all the private information they collect and who they might be giving it to. There's a text article that cites sources of the information in the video.
Of course, ironically, I'm using YouTube, a company with a lot of the same scariness, to embed the video...
sigh.
Several things to blog about, briefly, from today;
First, a famous stunt climber climbed the New York Times building in New York with a banner that said “Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week.” Story on the Times blog.
Second, in the no-hope-for-the-world department, we have the grisly story of an old man getting hit-and-run by drag-racing motorists in New Haven, and dozens of people see it, cluster around, drive walk and cycle by, and nobody helps him or even calls 911. His head is bleeding all over the sidewalk and nobody does a godamn thing till a police car that's responding to another call happens by. WTF?? How can people be so heartless?
Can we have any hope that we as a society will ever care about any victims of war or human rights abuses or polar bears or... anybody, when people can't even bring themselves to care about an innocent old man lying on the street bleeding to death right in front of them? I hope they catch the drivers that hit him but I also hope they arrest and try all those people who just stood there doing nothing. The heartless assholes should be punished just like it was negligent homicide.
Third and least important, the oddly interesting episode in the annals of the art world where the Getty museum was trying to you-tube-ize their big California Video exhibit in effort to ride the coattails of the internet user-created content boom, and in reply some internet pranksters played a great joke on them. The Getty apparently didn't like that they'd been punked and failed to play by their own rules, deciding not to screen the highest-rated and viewed videos.
That's some of today's highlights. enjoy the rest of your afternoon!
I just discovered a cool site that is all about trying to develop a set of standards for sustainability in the media industry. I often think about how even as i make films about environmental destruction, the very supplies and tools i use to do that involve heavy impacts to the natural world, not to mention probable human rights abuses. So it's cool to see something like Greencode, and media activists should especially get behind it.