Congrats to Glasstire

. . . for First Prize in the voting for projects entered in the National Summit on Arts Journalism organized by the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism and the National Arts Journalism Program. Presentations on the ten finalists can be seen at najp.org/summit, and a slightly larger version of Glasstire's presentation can be seen on YouTube.

Bloodwork

Last time I checked online for blood cell animations, pickings were slim. Now one need look no further than YouTube. I rec. you get as many onscreen as possible (these are formatted so that, if you have the option of making this window big enough, you can get a nice, tight 3 x 3 array of embeds), play them all simultaneously, here or otherwise, then click replay as needed to keep them all going for a bit (audio desirable). (Happy Halloween.)

UPDATE: I made a vidi of my own results here.

Gene Elder Declares July, 2010 "Political Art Month"

Elder describes himself an "artist, businessman, Texan, American, Defender of the Faith, and Homoiousian." He is also Director of the HAPPY Foundation archives and the suspected founder of the MUD Underground, which he bills as "Artists hell bent on taking over the world" and "Where the demarcation lines between politics, religion, espionage, high finance, art, and nudity begin to dissolve," and which I believe should be credited for the Alamo Cam (below); and he's also founder of the Wedding Cake Liberation Front.

When Elder organized a peace demonstration to take place in front of the Alamo Cam, he claimed to have sent the police a letter:

Dear Chief McManus and Officer Birney,
I am letting you know that there will be a gathering of people on Alamo Plaza . . . to send a message to Congress about our dissatisfaction over Bush's War.

* * * * *
. . . . we would appreciate the presence of police . . . so if anything such as the throwing of water balloons at us or yelling obscene remarks you will be there ready to catch their sorry asses and hog tie them and drag them to jail where they will be held as terrorists under the new and improved Neo-Con Patriot Act where they can not see a lawyer and can be kept in jail indefinitely.

In Peace and Love

Gene Elder

Re- Political Art Month, he writes, "Our goal [among others] is to alert all galleries across America to devote some thought and time to either political, social or religious subject matter for July. . . . Join us now and add your name to the national list and start planning what [your city] will be exhibiting."

[If you'd like to be listed, please let me know in a comment and I'll get your info to Elder.]



Note: The image above usually refreshes every 30 seconds, but you may need to reload this page to get newer images. You're likely to see glare at dawn and dusk and little detail after dark.

UPDATE: Gene reports The Yes Men have said "yes" to PAM!

And b.t.w., if you haven't already, check out Glasstire's Top Ten List: Art Activism.

Amazon Patent$ Method to $ystematically Maim Text$

Per Slashdot, Amazon's method calls for "'programmatically substituting synonyms into . . . books, short stories, . . . reviews, news articles, editorial articles, technical papers, scholastic papers, and so on' in an effort to uniquely identify customers who redistribute material. In its description . . . Amazon also touts the use of 'alternative misspellings for selected words' as a way to provide 'evidence of copyright infringement in a legal action.'"

PAC-WE Performance/Action in Dallas

Dallas arts professionals and supporters gathered yesterday to participate in a performance action organized by Greg Metz in support of health insurance reform.

Participants included Noah Simblist, Dean Terry, Claude Albritton, Sarah Jane Semrad, Nancy Whitenack, Danette Dufilho, Charissa Terranova, Anne Lawrence, Bart Weiss, John Pomara, Raphael Parry, and many more.

Find more visuals here, PAC-WE's website here, and Dean Terry's interview of Metz here.

UPDATE: Here's a series of aerial photos by Harrison Evans showing the formation of the "Pac-We."

Not an Alternative

Not an Alternative Product from Not an Alternative on Vimeo.

More great stuff at The Change You Want to See.

How quickly the search results for the same query change . . .

Last time I checked the internets, "educated populace prerequisite democracy" (w/o quotation marks) turned up Jefferson. (If you can confirm an original source for a succinct statement of this concept, please let me know!)

Jefferson thought we must provide good, public education as a support to democracy.

Tonite, the same search yields a host of hits contending that most voters shouldn't vote. See, e.g., americanthinker, newswithviews, the rationalargumentator ("argumentator"?).

Here's some of what Jefferson wrote:

"I have indeed two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength: 1. That of general education, to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom. 2. To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the children of each will be within reach of a central school in it." --Thomas Jefferson to John Tyler, 1810. ME 12:393

"The less wealthy people,... by the bill for a general education, would be qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government; and all this would be effected without the violation of a single natural right of any one individual citizen." --Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:73

"I think by far the most important bill in our whole code, is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness... The tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance."

"The present consideration of a national establishment for education, particularly, is rendered proper by this circumstance also, that if Congress, approving the proposition, shall yet think it more eligible to found it on a donation of lands, they have it now in their power to endow it with those which will be among the earliest to produce the necessary income. The foundation would have the advantage of being independent on war, which may suspend other improvements by requiring for its own purposes the resources destined for them." --Thomas Jefferson: 6th Annual Message, 1806. ME 3:424

"The reading in the first stage, where [the people] will receive their whole education, is proposed... to be chiefly historical. History by apprising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIV, 1782. ME 2:106

"Education is here placed among the articles of public care, not that it would be proposed to take its ordinary branches out of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal; but a public institution can alone supply those sciences which, though rarely called for, are yet necessary to complete the circle, all the parts of which contribute to the improvement of the country, and some of them to its preservation." --Thomas Jefferson: 6th Annual Message, 1806. ME 3:423

(Emphasis supplied.) Quotations assembled by Eyler Robert Coates, Sr. at the U. of VA.

Plutocracy Reborn: Re-Creating the Gap that Gave Us the Great Depression

The title sums it up pretty well, but The Nation's got lovely charts, plus other details.

The gap's less extreme in Germany; nonetheless, per the BBC, "[a] group of rich Germans has launched a petition calling for the government to make wealthy people pay higher taxes."