Muy interesante. I just found out tonight about a movement or group of communities in Oaxaca called Consejo Indigena Popular de Oaxaca "Ricardo Flores Magon". They're similar to the Zapatistas, I'm told, except they never took up arms, but apparently they've been organizing autonomous communities and using non-violent resistance to the military and the government. El Sup just met with them last week as part of the Other Campaign tour.

A woman here in Tucson who I know is working on doing english subtitles for 3 films about this group. She wants to have a fundraising screening in early March. We're helping her with this stuff at Pan Left. The longest of these films is called Sembrando Esperanzas - "Sowing Hope."

It's exciting to learn about other popular rebellions going on in Mexico, influenced by the EZLN but also doing things their own way. CIPO, or the Magonistas, seem to be more overtly anarchist than the Zapatistas, and less interested in being part of a Mexican nation-state.

Vic Divecha's blog brings us a video demonstrating some cool new touchscreen interface technololgy.

I had trouble deciding to blog about this or not, because it's so geeky. But I started sending it as an email to my geeky or designer friends and then just thot, hell with it, blog it. it's geewhiz cool. (thanx, Ryn.)

Apropo of nothing, while i type this i'm listening to an interview on a German radio station with a Swiss musician/DJ sort of like Peaches, named Kate Wax. She's actually half Tibetan, she reveals at the end of the interview. Her stuff sounds pretty cool, and I like listening to her and the interviewer with their germanic accents as they (sometimes awkwardly) talk to each other in english. I guess she might be from the Italian part of Switzerland and hence they might not have German in common, but she doesn't sound like it, so it's interesting that they're talking in English. I feel guilty to be so lucky and so unlucky as to be a near-monolingual native speaker of the language that everyone speaks worldwide.
suspira...

James Petras write for Counterpunch about Bolivia's Evo Morales and some decisions he's taken already that seem to go against the interests of the nation's people. Mainly this is evident through the cabinet appointments he's made, many of whom are conservative politicians or business leaders. In summary:

Sooner rather than later, polarized differences of interest between Morales' foreign and local business allies and oligarchs and the masses who struggled and sacrificed to elect him to power will lead to a new round of confrontations and conflicts. Morales is riding two horses going in opposite directions. The photogenic traditional Andean rituals, the color and pageantry of the electoral inauguration will quickly fade in the face of the continuing poverty, inequality and gross concentrations of wealth. Over time a profound disenchantment will spread with a President who spoke to the people but works for the rich, including the foreign rich.

The Washington Post ran a nice little op-ed piece that is a good summary of the connection between illegal immigration and NAFTA. A connection our legislators are refusing to make.

(via Jos

Tonight was a big event for Arizona Earth First!, just a few blocks from where I live. At the UA Law College there was a talk by Rod Coronado planned, about his recent conviction for interfering with a mountain lion hunt, and other information about other hunts that Earth First! is campaigning against. A rough cut of a video I've been working on about the Sandhill Crane hunt was also shown.

It turned out that Rod couldn't speak, because of the conditions of his pre-sentencing agreement, and because it would possibly result in a longer sentence for him. But that's not all, there was further controversy. Apparently the International Safari Club called the law school and objected to the event and the idea that EF! would be asking for donations to help with Rod's legal defense. They also said they would have people present there, but nobody showed up. Typical of cowardly hunters (the Safari Club says it's a conservation organization but they are basically just a trophy hunters lobbying group, and a powerful one, based in Tucson).

Furthermore, another bombshell was dropped; Rod is being re-charged in state court for the Sabino canyon mountain lion incident, charges that were dropped last year, for a crime that is basically the same as what he's already been convicted of in federal court. There's actually a warrant for his arrest starting at midnight tonight (half an hour ago now). He's planning to sleep somewhere secret tonite and go to the courthouse in the morning first thing with his lawyer and sort all this out.

The other crazy bullshit is this: tommorrow is the annual public commentary hearing about various wild game hunts that Arizona Game and Fish Department is required to have. One reason for the EF! event tonight was to urge people to go to the hearing and give comments. Well, it came out during the event that Game and Fish has actually moved the hearing to the International Wildlife Museum, which is the headquarters of the International Safari Club (and some call it the International Wildlife Mausoleum, since it's nothing but dead stuffed animals). This is so patently ludricious as to defy belief. It would be like if there was a presidential debate at the headquarters of the Republican Party. Or an organic food conference at Monsanto. It's just ridiculous.

Anyway, I'll be there with indymedia press pass and video camera to get it on tape.

If you've known me more than 6 months you've probably noticed I used to have random quotations at the bottom of my emails. Like, for 10 years. Then when I switched to using apple Mail, I couldnt have that anymore, because it depended on the old unix .signature files and a cool perl script i wrote (why the hell isn't Mail compatible with the old .signature files? that's something I thought Apple would be cool enough to do). So I had over 300 quotes in my quote file and they were just languishing since August. Finally on Saturday I figured out how to do it. After looking for someone else's solution and not finding one for the last few months, then trying to write my own software that would generate an apple signature file (which involved generating XML, RTF, and MIME-base64 encoded data in just the right way, which proved insanely challenging), then failing, then looking one more time, and I found it! something called Mailtunes, a little shareware thingie that lets you insert the output of applescripts or perl or shell scripts into your email signatures (It's called Mailtunes because the default behavior is to put the artist and title of the current song you're listening to on iTunes.) So that allowed me to use my good old perl script i've been using for 10 years. I've been so happy with it that i just paid them the $10 shareware fee.

And the nice thing is that the random number generator on my powerbook seems a little more random, or at least skewed in a different way, than my old linux server, because i'm getting a pleasantly different than before array of random sig quotes now. yay.

i love quotes. here's a random sampling:

"An entrepreneur is a person whose profession is to respond to market forces."
- Paul Treanor

"Business is amassing great sums by charging admission to the ritual
simulation of its own lynching."
-Thomas Frank, 'Alternative to What?'

"Not even Adam Smith thought the market could do everything."
-Benjamin Barber, 'Jihad vs. McWorld'

interesting. everything in this sample is business-oriented. well, critique of business. but there's other stuff too. like:

"It's still shocking, but smoothly so."
-Jon Leidecker, on the new version of 'Plexure'

now there's a non-sequitur for you...

It's gratifying to see so many people I know around me (figuratively, not physically) working on cool projects. And it's nice to be able to help them.

For instance, on Saturday I spent 3 hours on a Skype call with José, who lives in Madrid, discussing, with many tangents along the way, a project he's been working on for 2 years (or more, in a way) that will someday become, I suppose, an animated web-based graphic novel. Or maybe even a movie? It should be a movie. Anyway, I won't link to the site for it because I don't know if he wants the in-progress work to be public, but it's pretty cool. A sort of science-fiction allegory set in a dystopian near-future.

Another example is more disappointing. Petr just reported that he is cancelling a film project he's been working on for several months. Doesn't really give a reason. This is one of 3 or 4 films he's in the middle of and on his blog he reports every day on progress he is making on one or more of them, in addition to other artistic pursuits. It's exciting but then I remember he has yet to finish a film. Even one of the many short projects I've seen him start over the years, to my knowledge has never been pronounced "done" and made available to the world. And I've collaborated and helped out (as crewperson, sound designer, etc) on several of these projects. I wish I could break into his house and make copies of a bunch of his raw footage and then edit it into something and release it.

See, I know how to polish a turd. José and I were talking about this during our long skypecall. I told him the story I heard long ago about Stanley Kubrick, who told a fellow director that, yes, you can polish a turd - if it's frozen.

The point in this case is, life doesn't usually give you jewels. You get rough stones, or even turds, and you have to figure out how to make them shiny and nice, or at least passable. But Petr seems, sometimes, to be unwilling to accept anything but jewels, which he will then polish into superjewels, he thinks.
sigh. No! take the crap and run with it, Petr!

Ok, this totally rocks. a talk show in a car. The latest one is about "belt-sander races."

I'm against driving, but if you have to commute in a car, at least doing something creative like this mitigates things somewhat. Plus, hey, it's car-pooling.

This is already one of my favorite vlogs. not just because of the gimmick, but the guy is really charismatic, and a good interviewer. And a good driver, too, I guess.

(via We Are The Media)

I just remembered something that happened yesterday that annoyed me slightly. I stopped by the Dry River space to see if the internet connection was up, because it had been out all the day before. I'm one of the 2-3 people who set up the computer lab and sort of maintain it. So I come in and boot up one of machines, it's just opening time so nobody else has tried them yet, and I'm waiting for it to boot and this guy that hangs out there, one of the many eccentric street characters that hangs out there, asks me "So what's the scoop, Perfessor? Is there internet?"

This is the equivalent of being called "4-eyes" or whatever back in grade school. It was said semi-jokingly, or maybe the intent was to be completely humorous. But I was irritated. And to some extent "perfessor" is an honoriffic, so it's complicated. It's a bit like beefy jock types that call people who are less beefy "big guy." (this has happened quite a bit in my past). Obviously it's an insult, it's sarcasm, but it may be unconcious, or if not it's easily deniable that it was intentional.

I'll qualify these gripes by saying that as I'm a privileged white middle-class straight male I actually have no real idea what I'm talking about, but in no way am I comparing it to the daily abuse that women and people of color and other opressed peoples are subjected to. However it's interesting to notice through that lens, so to speak. For instance how often are women annoyed when they're called "girls"? How often in general are people mean to each other, especially to those different from them, without even noticing?

At first I was confused, but I guess that a new anti-coke consumer boycott campaign is somewhat in response to a Coca-Cola ad campagn to sell their "Coke Zero" sugar-free product. The boycott actually goes further and mentions that you should stop drinking all soft drinks, drink water instead and send the money you would spend to fund efforts to get clean water to those who don't have it.

This is good advice. I don't drink soft drinks, or packaged beverages at all, except the occasional bottle of juice. Coffee is my guilty disposable-income vice, but I only have about 1 latte or whatever a day, so I don't think I'm that bad.

This seems like a silly thing to even be blogging about. but I saw that page and then thought of some people I know who are drinking cans of soda all the time. Plus we just had a big discussion on a mailing list I'm on about fatness in the U.S. and high-fructose corn syrup. bleah.