About 2 years ago the Portland Indymedia video collective made a really cool and funny little video about dumpster-diving. The group has made a lot of cool videos, but right now the only way to get them online is using bit torrent and other peer-to-peer technology, and though I have always liked these methods in principle and in theory, sometimes it's a pain. The good thing about them is that you can save on bandwidth, and users get a fast download, because the download gets split up amongst a bunch of people who have the file.

The bad news is that as time passes, less people are sharing the file, until there might be zero peers that have it, or maybe just 1, if you have a reliable tracker/seeder that keeps offering the file. So then you have real slow downloads. There ought to be alternatives. We should be making better use of resources like archive.org, and we should, after an initial wave of popularity for new stuff, be offering stuff as regular http downloads.

Right now on my hosting service I have more drive space and bandwidth than I know what to do with, so as an experiment I'm going to offer DIY Dumpstering 101 right now as a good ol' http download. We'll see how my bandwidth usage goes up and if it's not crazygonuts then maybe I'll procede with more of the old pdx stuff. I also want to gather and upload a bunch of my older stuff too.

note that the file is huge (about 100 megs) and it's in DIVX format. For more information about how to play such files, see the page on portland indymedia about that. Also see more about the video on the portland indymedia site.

Finally, Bechtel drops its suit against the Bolivian government for not letting them charge insanely high prices for water to poor people in Cochabamba. They go out swinging, though, their PR department trying to spin things and not getting very far. Jim Schultz of the Democracy Center counters with some free PR advice for them.

About a week ago I read a piece on Rhino Records' site that I found via Philo's blog. The piece is about MySpace and how addictive it is, and its title is "Confessions of a Validation Junkie." The author doesn't go far toward explaining the title explicitly. He mostly just talks about the ridiculous time sink that MySpace is, and proving he's hip and knows lots of current youth slang, he's not about explaining why people do it; but they obviously do it for validation, if not for the slim chance that they'll hook up with their next significant other or favorite band, I guess. (my favorite part of the article is when he mentions the bands that have hundreds of "friends" on myspace, but no one comes to their shows because they're all... on myspace! heh.) It seems people relish keeping score, having an actual numerical measurement of their supposed social worth they can look up any time and work on, relatively risk-free.

Anyway, I have realized that there's another extreme example of validation addiction on Flickr. More and more I've been noticing people who post a photo (or all their photos) to literally dozens of pools. It's insane. Why do they do this? Obviously to get as much notice as possible. Flickr has become an eyeball market of high intensity.

It's weird, because for me, Flickr is just an easy place to upload photos and share them with friends and family, and maybe interact with a few select other people who share some narrowly focused interest that I have. I belong to about 12 groups, like "Indymedia" and "Talking Back to Ads" and "Public Space and Its Discontents." But some people post to more groups than I've ever even looked at, much less joined. And it takes TIME to post to that many groups!

It's remarkable to me that so many people crave the attention of strangers so badly - and for so little. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd love for every single human on the earth to see my film about Juarez, but I really don't see the worth of posting a photo of your cat, or yet another sunset, to 39 Flickr groups, other than to stroke your own ego.

There are some damaged, needy people out there. Is the Internet helping?

Better wait to buy those new Intel-based hotrod Macs. Apple has bilked the world again. I just read that ALL software has to be rewritten to run on the new Intel CPUs. Apple has created a new "translator" layer of software called Rosetta that allows you to run the old programs, but it doesn't work on everything, and it slows stuff down. The review I read said that this slowing seems to have pretty much cancelled out the speed gains due to the new processor. In about a year they'll have most everything rewritten, but right now it seems a waste to buy one of these new machines. Makes me mad that this was not more clear sooner, but I'm not surprised.

The second novel by Leslie Marmon Silko, published in 1991, Almanac of the Dead has become one of my favorite fiction books ever. It's similar, in a general way, to The Fountain at the Center of the World, which I read and mentioned almost 2 years ago, in that both are touching personal stories set against a backdrop of sweeping historical and geopolitical forces and changes.

This is a book that's been sort of circulating and getting recommended amongst friends of mine here in Tucson, and everyone that's read it loves it. One reason for this is that much of the book takes place in Tucson and the surrounding area and has lots of local lore, but it also is chock-full of ideas that my progressive friends and I are already aware of and really interested in. These include such diverse issues as environmental destruction, water scarcity, sprawl, war profiteering, the homeless, indigenous land rights, racism, the border, corruption, colonialism, and just the general spiritual bankruptcy of european/western culture.

The novel is a big sprawling read (740 pages) that contains many different characters, plot threads, and places. Some of the threads intersect directly, some only refer to each other, and some never come together, or are just historical background. Some major characters/situations are: Lecha and Zeta, 2 Yaqui Indian twin sisters who live on a ranch on the outskirts of Tucson. In their youth Lecha was given by her grandmother a bundle of ancient notebooks called The Almanac of the Dead that have been handed down through many generations of indigenous people in Mexico. The Almanac tells the story of these people, who fled from the south of mexico centuries ago to escape "the destroyers," sorcerers who practiced blood sacrifice and became the Aztec rulers. The Almanac is also a history of the arrival of the europeans in the new world and a prophecy foretelling their departure from it, and the events of the prophecy seem to be starting to play out.

Lecha hires another main character, Seese, a coke addict from San Diego, to help her transcribe the Almanac into a computer, because Lecha is getting old. Seese has come to Tucson to find Lecha, because Lecha has psychic powers that allow her to find murder victims, and Seese wants to find out if her kidnapped baby has died. Meanwhile Zeta and Farro, Lecha's son, are arms and drug smugglers along with some other local Yaquis.

Down in Chiapas another subplot involves a corrupt general and his business partner who are getting guns from the U.S. They are worried about a recent upsurge of indigenous restlessness in the region. La Escapia is a Mayan woman who is part of a secret army of poor villagers all over Chiapas preparing for an armed rebellion. (remember, this was written at least 3 years before the Zapatista uprising!) She goes to Mexico City to attend a secret Cuban "freedom school" that teaches about Marxism in exchange for providing arms and weapons for insurgents around Latin America. The mayans don't care about Cuba or Marx, but they pretend they do just to get weapons. All they care about is taking back their land. The ideology is just bullshit to them.

Meanwhile back in Tucson an East Coast mafia family is starting to move in on Zeta's smuggling operation. They work with a corrupt senator and a clandestine agent from the CIA to smuggle arms into southern Mexico and Central America in exchange for cocaine. They're also involved in shady real estate development and building huge water-sucking suburbs, buying off judges to head off the environmental lawsuits filed against them. A lover of the wife has a "biomaterial" business that secretly harvests organs and plasma from homeless people and Indians, but 2 of his employees are organizing a Homeless Army in Tucson and around the country, waiting for the right time to rise up.

Yet another meanwhile, Seese's ex-boyfriend, an artist named David, is in with some rich racist drug and porn dealers from Argentina and Columbia named Beaufrey and Serlo. David kidnaps his and Seese's baby and heads down to Serlo's ranch in Columbia with Beaufrey, but Beaufrey gets jealous and has the baby kidnapped from David and makes it look like Seese did it. During all this Serlo is working on a crazy post-apocalypse eugenics scheme to preserve the "sangre pura" master race in sealed biospheres at his ranch.

You start to see how complex the web that Silko weaves is. It's really addictive reading, infused with a dark ambiance, great historical anecdotes and references to the injustices of the past, as well as tons of moral ambiguity - virtually every major character, with maybe 2 or 3 exceptions, is either a loser, a depraved asshole, or some kind of greedy conartist or corrupt official. The narrative hops around the Western hemisphere and over the last 500 years, and my one big criticism is that it doesn't seem to tie stuff together quite well enough at the end - it could have gone on for another 200 pages and I would have been even happier.

At any rate, I highly recommend this book to anybody who is interested in sort of a people's history of Tucson, interested in any of the issues I've mentioned, or if you just want a rollicking adventure story full of drugs, guns, sex, blood, and politics. I guess you could say it's sort of a hybrid of William S. Burroughs or Pynchon, and Howard Zinn or Eduardo Galleano, with a touch of DeLillo and a dash of Edward Abbey. What more could one ask for?

My housemate just brought up the point that the Iraq War has now used up more money than the value of all the oil in Iraq, even if you don't count the cost of extracting the oil. He had his numbers off a little way off, but the point is still interesting to think about.

Let's see, under the sands of Iraq there's about $5.6 trillion worth of oil (figuring about $50/barrel). And the Cost of the Iraq War so far: $234 billion. How much more will the U.S. spend? How expensive will the oil be to extract? What will the price of oil do, and whose oil is it? These are all things that will effect the final result of the equation, but it's looking like even from just a business perspective, the "Blood for Oil" may not end up being is still well worth it. (In other words, my housemate was totally wrong. I did the math wrong at first so i thought he was only wrong by about a factor of 2, but he's actually wrong by a factor of 20, hence the crossed-out sections.)

But one final thing to point out: you could buy about 11 million Toyota Prius hybrid cars with the money the Iraq War has cost us. Not quite enough for every car-driving Unitedstatesian, as my housemate claimed, but maybe the government could get a bulk discount....

(and isn't it amazing that in about 5 minutes I can go to the web and check a statistical factoid that someone tells me and come up with how true or false it really is? Things haven't always been this way...)

I just went to get groceries. Recently whenever I go food shopping I'm just filled with dread and despair, because I'm sort of caught in a dilemma: On one hand, I'm not much of a cook. I've never been really into food, or cooking food (at least not in commparison to a lot of friends of mine) though it can be fun to cook with and for others. On the other hand, although that lack of interest in cooking leads me toward easy-to-prepare "instant" sort of meals, it lately has just disgusted me on so many levels that so much food is so processed. Even something as benign as tofu or rice milk is an incredible manufactured result of industrial society. A lot of it has to do with my travelling in the developing world and seeing people eat really simple food that they've prepared themselves. Like limonada homemade from real limes right in the kitchen instead of buying some can of frozen concentrate or whatever.

Ideally I should just get more into cooking and gardening and permaculture and stuff, and prepare more of my own food and eat less frozen/instant junk. It's pretty hard though. It's just one of many lifestyle things that's really difficult to change. In some ways I can look at how I live and feel good, like that I don't own and drive a car. But there's still so much improvement to do, and so much juggling of priorities. Like, how can one spend 6 hours a day editing progressive advocacy videos, and also have time to grow one's own soybeans and make one's own tofu from it?

This Volkswagon commercial is really fucked up - making light of terrorist suicide bombing to sell cars is just not acceptable, in my opinion.

The ad looks like it's intended for European audiences, given that I don't think the specific model (the Polo) is available in the U.S., and that the setting is obviously a European city. I wonder what reactions to it have been, and I wonder how they would differ in the States.

This also brings up a shortcoming with Google video. The interface is confusing, and there's very little information about where this thing came from. Who uploaded it? There's a "more from this user" link, but who's the user? How can we contact him? Why can't I leave comments? I'd prefer it be more like Flickr with tags, comments, messages, etc., rather than just some totally anonymous and under-described repository of media.

http://steev.hise.org/vids/GermanengineeringvAr.avi

But note that it's a DIVX file so you may have to install that codec if you don't have it already. Though I find that VLC plays it fine.

I love this image that I found on the "site not here yet" page of some webhosting ISP when I was looking for someone's new website:

The picture envisions a limitless bland cyberspace filled with frustration, isolated inhabitants and floating symbols. So great.

A lot of the first half of this week I spent in the county and federal courthouses, for work. I'm going to be subsituting for a friend who writes for Courthouse News Service. They have correspondents all over the country writing up little summaries of every case that might be interesting to subscribers. What's supposed to be "interesting" is defined basically as follows: if it involves lots of money, someone famous, and/or a corporation, cover it. hmm. Well, that will only be for about 10 days, so, whatever.

Yesterday I spent all day working on a video about the sandhill crane hunt and the Earth First! campaign to stop it here in southern arizona. I have a rough cut done, and the plan was that that would get taken to Wings Over Wilcox this weekend. Wings Over Wilcox is a big annual event for birdwatchers that takes place in the nearby town of Wilcox. Lots of birders come from all over to see sandhill cranes here, and many don't know they're being hunted for sport, so the Chuk'shon EF! plan is to go to the event and try to educate people about this. The only thing is, after doing that last year the organizers have barred "political" groups from the event. I guess it's supposed to be for guides and equipment makers to sell tours and binoculars to birders, not to actually inform anyone about the truth.

Last night Walt, Jeff, Jessica and I had an Indymedia meeting and we talked about what we're going to do at Local To Global, an annual gathering of activists in Tempe with workshops and tabling and speakers and stuff. We're going to do a few indymedia workshops. I want to do one about videoactivism or video advocacy.

To round out a busy week, today I'm going to help Christian author a DVD of a film about Venezuelan oil called "Nuestra Petroleo y Otras Cuentas." It's a film made by a team of Italians and Germans this year, and he and Sonya have translated and subtitled it in English. They want to take the DVD to Caracas for the World Social Forum. Then tonight I will be heading out to the Dry River Collective retreat, which will be all weekend at the home of one of our members who lives out on the western outskirts of town. Should be fun and productive for the group, I think. We're going to have concensus and facilitation training and talk about the goals and vision for the collective, and stuff like that.