jwsound.net • the blog

The Who in 2006   Watch a preview of The Who who will be performing at half-time, Superbowl 2010

(sorry about the ads on the video … still worth a look)

We pay tribute to the late historian, writer and activist Howard Zinn, who died suddenly on Wednesday of a heart attack at the age of eighty-seven. Howard Zinn’s classic work A People’s History of the United States changed the way we look at history in America. It has sold over a million copies and was recently made into a television special called The People Speak. We remember Howard Zinn in his own words, and we speak with those who knew him best: Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein and Anthony Arnove.

Several prominent directors speak about the destructive nature of working long hours and the threat to our health and safety.

We live in the era of hype. The word, which bounces and bounds throughout the matrices of our information age, refers to a cultural product that has been so juiced up with marketing that its popularity takes off independently and regardless of its quality. It is the wrapping that matters: the advertisement is louder, more important and more real than what is advertised.

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In 1992, Neal Stephenson popularized the concept of a metaphorical avatar with his cyberpunk novel “Snow Crash.” In Stephenson’s world, an avatar is a digital image that stands in for a real person in virtual domains, such as the Internet, video games or role-playing games. To this list of irreal dimensions, we can add the world of American politics. During the first year of the Obama administration, it has become apparent that it wasn’t actually Barack Obama himself that participated in the elections: it was, rather, his avatar out there on the campaign trail.

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Avatar Obama is an immense hype, the product of a tremendous marketing campaign that has turned a real person into a symbolic shell. Avatar Obama is billboard and wrapping: pure brand name.

Angel Luis Lara | La Jornada (Mexico) - Translation: Ryan Croken

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Just Another Bailout for the Financial Sector?

from truthout

Thursday 24 December 2009

by: Ellen Hodgson Brown J.D., t r u t h o u t

Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, is quoted as warning two centuries ago:

“Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an underground dictatorship. . . . The Constitution of this republic should make special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom.”

That time seems to have come, but the dictatorship we are facing is not the sort that Dr. Rush was apparently envisioning. It is not a dictatorship by medical doctors, many of whom are as distressed by the proposed legislation as the squeezed middle class is. The new dictatorship is not by doctors but by Wall Street – the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector that now claims 40 percent of corporate profits. Continue reading »

“I believe that Ghandi’s views were most enlightened of all the political minds in our time.  We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.”
- Albert Einstein