Archive - 2010

Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders

Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders

author: Jason L. Riley

name: Steev

average rating: 3.18

book published: 2008

rating: 4

read at: 2010/06/06

date added: 2010/06/08

shelves: border

interviews from National Day of Action, May 29: part 5

Another of several short interview clips from Pan Left's coverage of the May 29 march against SB1070. In this interview I talked to an entrepreneur with a unique product relevant to this issue.

Cast: steev hise

Numbers

Share photos on twitter with TwitpicI'm thinking a lot about crowd numbers estimating today.  there's a wide range of counts for the march in Phoenix this past Saturday.  Most mainstream media just say "tens of thousands".  The cops refuse to say, but the AZ Republic says they overheard on police scanners officers saying 30,000. As usual, organizers and some partisans are talking way larger numbers than the police; some say 100K or even more (and I count myself as a partisan, I have a definite position and I don't claim to be "neutral" or "objective" - I am definitely anti-sb1070 and pro-migrant - i'm just not one of those partisans). 

I honestly really don't know.  I was there, but i was just one person, situated at one point on the march. Sometimes i stopped and shot video of people passing by, but unless you were there counting in one spot for the entire time, or in a helicopter, i don't know how you can have any degree of certainty about the numbers.  This is how marches and rallies always are, but this one was especially hard to judge because it was stretched out and a thin line over many many blocks. I do know that the end of the march only reached the Capitol building destination at least an hour after the post-march speeches and such had been going on. So that's a lot of people, but I just don't know how you could say for sure it was a certain number.

I think it does the movement involved with an event, and journalism itself, even "citizen journalism", a disservice to throw around big attendance numbers and act like you're sure of them, and not at least provide sources or corroborating claims or explain the methods you used to come up with your numbers - or who was doing the counting and how.  You blow your credibility and create more mistrust and conflict by making such unsupported and casual claims.  C'mon people, progressives are supposed to be on the side of science and truth - the other side is the one that employs fantasy and "makes their own reality". Read more>>>

interviews from National Day of Action, May 29: part 4

Another of several short interview clips from Pan Left's coverage of the May 29 march against SB1070. Here I learn from an inventor about his device for telling who is reasonably suspicious.

for more video news on the struggle for immigrant rights and equality in the borderlands, see panleft.org and newsontheline.tv

Cast: steev hise

interviews from National Day of Action, May 29: part 3

Another of several short interview clips from Pan Left's coverage of the May 29 march against SB1070. Here I spoke with Amie Fishman, who works with the U.S. For All of Us No Room For Racism campaign. She told me about the responsibility of white folks to stand up against racism in solidarity with those oppressed by things like the SB1070 law.

Cast: steev hise

interviews from National Day of Action, May 29: part 2

The second of several short interview clips from Pan Left's coverage of the May 29 march against SB1070. In this one I get some quick thoughts from a fellow Tucsonan named Andrew as he walked with the thousands of others on the streets of Phoenix.

More info and relevant video at panleft.org and newsontheline.tv

Cast: steev hise

interviews from National Day of Action, May 29: part 1

The first of several short interview clips from Pan Left's coverage of the May 29 march in Phoenix against SB1070. Here I speak with Felix Carrion, from the United Church of Christ, the only mainstream national church which has come out publicly against the anti-immigration law that Arizona passed this April 2010.

Cast: steev hise

American Business Adventures

The connection between oil and U.S. foreign policy should be obvious already. This simply hits that nail into the coffin one more time.

Originally produced in 2002, it seems appropriate to re-introduce this piece as Afghanistan continues to once again occupy the attention of the public, the media, and the powers that be.

This audiovisual collage piece was originally a backdrop video for a live electronic music performance of mine in april 2002. The recorded live music was relayered back onto the video and the whole thing tweaked and horked a little more.

The source material used is listed in the credits at the end of the video.

Humanitarian "Litterer" Re-Sentencing

Walt Staton is an activist who volunteers with No More Deaths, a humanitarian group that helps migrants who are in trouble in the desert just north of the U.S./Mexico border. He was cited for littering by the US Fish and Wildlife agency when agents found him placing water jugs for migrants in the desert. He was convicted by a jury in July 2009 and sentenced in August.

13 more volunteers have since been cited with the same charge. Their trial is set for January 2010.
see nomoredeaths.org for more info.

Untenable Environmentalism

In the May 17 issue of The New Yorker there's a great piece profiling a brilliant inventor Saul Griffith.   Griffith is involved with many projects, a large proportion of which have to do with alternative energy technologies or energy conservation devices.  Two excerpts are really worth my time typing in here (the article is only available online to subscribers, though an abstract is here) and well worth your time reading.

The writer, David Owen, explains that limiting global warming to a level of 2 degrees C would mean replacing 13 of the 16 terawatts of total energy use that the human race uses with non-fossil fuel sources. Doing that, according to Griffith's calculations, would require that we build the equivalent of the following every second for the next 25 years: "a hundred square metres of solar cells, fifty square metres of new solar-thermal reflectors, and one Olympic swimming pool's volume of genetically engineered algae (for biofuels)" as well as "one three-hundred-foot diameter wind turbine every five minutes; and one hundred-megawatt nuclear power plant every week."   Theoretically possible but probably politically and financially impossible.

So Griffith understands that a purely high-tech fix to generate the same amount of energy we use now is not the whole solution.  He works on low-tech projects to make our livess more energy efficient, like cheap insulation for homes, but even with these advances we still as a society need to change the way we live and use resources. He describes a problem that I have observed over and over again, on the personal as well as public level:

"environmentalists... are bold-facedly hypocritical, and I don't think the environmentalism movement as we've known it is tenable or will survive. Al Gore has done a huge amount to help this cause, but he is the No. 1 environmental hypocrite. His house alone uses more energy than an average person uses in all aspects of life, and he flies prodigiously. I don't think we can buy the argument anymore that you get special dispensation just because what you're doing is worthwhile." Griffith includes himself in this condemnation. He said "Right now, the main thing I'm working on is trying to invent my way out of my own hypocrisy."

I've seen this hypocrisy many times, with professional enviros jetting around the globe so they can, for instance, hike up a mountain in order to publicise the plight of the Andean glaciers, or go to meetings about climate change. These people somehow think they have a magic pass to spew carbon into the air because their jobs have something to do with saving the world. This is simply not going to fly (pun intended). Read more>>>