3) Lancaster County (Nebraska) District Judge Jeffre Cheuvront

For forbidding all witnesses, including the alleged victim, from using the word “rape” and other terms in a trial for first-degree sexual assault, a 2008 Jefferson Muzzle goes to…Lancaster County (Nebraska) District Judge Jeffre Cheuvront.

Full Story: The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Speech.

(Thanks Bill!)

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As Scott Atran points out, these kids dream of fighting for some meaningful cause that will make them heroes in their communities. Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri—and Arab satellite television and in some cases their own experiences—have convinced them that fighting against the most powerful country in the world and its allies is the most heroic thing they can do.

No, “The 99″ comic books are not going to solve that problem. Their circulation is in the tens of thousands at this point, while bin Laden’s violent message gets out to billions. But comic books are “likely to be a lot more helpful than our bullets and bombs in attracting young people away from jihadi cool,” says Atran. They might even help convince Washington that “knowledge is the true base of power.” But maybe that’s hoping for too much.

Full Story: Newsweek.

(via Lupa)

What sort of message does this comic book send?

(Update/clarification The image above is not from The 99, it’s from Chuck Dixon’s aborted American Power series. I presented it along with the question of what message it for sarcastic rather illustrative purposes.)

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Promo copy:

DEA agents put their lives in the hands of a drug and weapons trafficker turned informant as they mount an operation to burrow deep into Detroit’s drug underworld. Each undercover buy and daring raid brings them one step closer to a deadly showdown with a violent drug kingpin.

Radley Balko:

Or with an unarmed mother of six. Or a 92-year-old-woman. Or a meek amateur gardener. Or a middle-aged mother of two who led prayer groups on her lunch breaks. Maybe they’ll show a bunch of DEA agents handcuffing a post-polio medical marijuana patient to her bed while they shove assault weapons in her face. Or storming the home of a paraplegic with multiple sclerosis because he had the audacity to try to treat his own pain.

But hey. It’s all about protecting the kids from drugs, right?

Seriously, what’s the fallout for a show like this? It’s clearly a recruiting video for the DEA. But if the show focuses on door-smashing, head-bashing, and ass-kicking, exactly what kind recruits are they drawing?

Tellingly, the series is doing promo on sites like.…military.com. Remember that the next time someone argues that there’s nothing paramilitary about the drug war.

Full Story: The Agitator.

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This story, from the Mirrorshades anthology, was the first Gibson story I ever read.

Full Story: American Heritage.

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Ehsan Jami is not to release his animation film The Life of Mohammed. After consultations with his advisors, Jami is abandoning the plan to show his film, which was to be released on 20 April.

“Minister Hirsch Ballin (Justice) has stated that he fears the film will drive a wedge through our society. That was never my intention”, said Jami. He added however that he does not believe the Dutch government is capable of protecting him against death threats.

Full Story: NIS.

(via OVO 127)

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“Beyond the pure insanity of a nutty cult leader having the influence that Reverend Moon has, there are so many things so very wrong here I hardly know where to begin. But I’ll force myself to start with what’s been in the news recently. And I’ll do it briefly because, as I’ve said before, this topic has been discussed to death in the corporate media. And now that I think about it, it’s not that it’s been discussed so much, but how it’s been discussed, as an endless 20 second loop, that’s the problem.

If you go back as far as I do, ask yourself when the last time was, or if you don’t go back that far, ask yourself if you’ve ever, heard the Reverend Sun Myung Moon mentioned in the corporate media. I go back far enough to remember the John Belushi skit from the documentary when it first aired on Saturday Night Live. While Reverend Wright sound bites play on and endless loop in the corporate media, a man who has more political influence and is more dangerous than all the religious nut cases you can name combined, and I don’t include Wright in that group, is rarely, if ever brought up. In fact, he’s only been mentioned recently in the blogosphere from what I’ve seen, and I watch a lot of CNN and MSNBC. And while that might not be exhaustive coverage of what the media is reporting, googling his name for news stories on him finds only a handful. One by AlterNet, none by major media outlets.”

(via A Revolution of One)

(direct link to “King of America” on Veoh)

(Related: “Who is Rev. Moon?”)

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Kevin at Grinding looks at the connection between a new study on corporate logos and the connection to sigil magic:

The team conducted an experiment in which 341 university students completed what they believed was a visual acuity task, during which either the Apple or IBM logo was flashed so quickly that they were unaware they had been exposed to the brand logo. The participants then completed a task designed to evaluate how creative they were, listing all of the uses for a brick that they could imagine beyond building a wall.

People who were exposed to the Apple logo generated significantly more unusual uses for the brick compared with those who were primed with the IBM logo, the researchers said. In addition, the unusual uses the Apple-primed participants generated were rated as more creative by independent judges.

“This is the first clear evidence that subliminal brand exposures can cause people to act in very specific ways,” said Gráinne Fitzsimons. “We’ve performed tests where we’ve offered people $100 to tell us what logo was being flashed on screen, and none of them could do it. But even this imperceptible exposure is enough to spark changes in behavior.”

Other than their defined brand personalities, the researchers argue there is not anything unusual about Apple and IBM that causes this effect. The team conducted a follow-up experiment using the Disney and E! Channel brands, and found that participants primed with the Disney Channel logo subsequently behaved much more honestly than those who saw the E! Channel logos.

Full Story: Grinding.

See also:

Marketing Without Tears.

Wikipedia: Priming.

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Update: see comments section for my thoughts on this film

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Fox News. It’s hard to talk about greatest hits without mentioning their war coverage or their coverage of racial issues. As a political and cultural propaganda machine, there’s little outright funny about Fox News’s persistent distortion of reality. Or, if there is, the jokes on the people of the United States and the world.

But occasionally they have a real zinger. Some “hard hitting” piece of “journalism” where the joke really is on them. Here are Fox’s 5 journalistic masterpieces, after the fold.

(more…)

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Many many more: Popped Culture.

(Bill Whitcomb sent me this, watch out for his pop culture tarot essay in Immanion Press’s forthcoming pop culture magic anthology, and the revised and expanded edition of his book The Magician’s Reflection)

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A website that a Dutch right-wing politician was planning to use to release a film expected to be fiercely critical of Islam has been suspended.

The US hosting service, Network Solutions, said it was investigating complaints that it may have breached guidelines on hate language.

Dutch politician Geert Wilders says the 15-minute film describes Islam as “the enemy of freedom”.

Full Story: Religion News Blog.

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“The details listed below are excerpts taken from the Banned Books Resource Guide by the American Library Association, and Ready Reference Censorship, Copyright 1997, Salem Press (ed. Lawrence Amey et al.). In some cases, my own pithy comments have been added.”

Forbidden Library.

(thanks Dug!)

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The New Yorker has a long article about the 1950s comic book crack down, including some interesting information about the man who started it all, Seduction of the Innocent author Fredric Wertham:

He did not want to censor comic books, only to restrict their sale so that kids could not buy them without a parent present. He wanted to give them the equivalent of an R rating. Bart Beaty’s “Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture” ($22, paper; University Press of Mississippi) makes a strong case for the revisionist position. As Beaty points out, Wertham was not a philistine; he was a progressive intellectual. His Harlem clinic was named for Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law. He collected modern art, helped produce an anthology of modernist writers, and opposed censorship. He believed that people’s behavior was partly determined by their environment, in this respect dissenting from orthodox Freudianism, and some of his work, on the psychological effects of segregation on African-Americans, was used in the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education.

Wertham thought that representations make a difference—that how people see themselves and others reflected in the media affects the way they think and behave. As Beaty says, racist (particularly concerning Asians) and sexist images and remarks can be found on almost every page of crime and horror comics. What especially strikes a reader today is the fantastic proliferation of images of violence against women, almost always depicted in highly sexualized forms. If one believes that pervasive negative images of black people are harmful, why would one not believe the same thing about images of men beating, torturing, and killing women?

Full Story: New Yorker.

(via Mind Hacks).

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Okee-dokee, so last night I ran into an old acquaintance of mine whose recently moved back to Edmonton from his time being solitary in Saskatchewan. For anyone who grew up on Whyte Ave, there’s a good chance you know who this someone is.

I’ve been kicking around the idea — as has Klint, I’m sure — of doing some videos and interviews. I happen to know a handful of awfully swell, interesting folk up here in the Great White North, and I figure that since they’re in no way associated to the online occult community I’d maybe put the effort into bringing their insights to light via Technoccult.

And because I’m hardly smrt, I’d like everyone to chip in and throw in any questions you might have. Not just my acquaintance here, but most of the persons I would like to interview are exceptional and each has particular outlooks on the esoteric, life, and magic, all from different schools of thought. In time, I might explore everyone from skinhead magicians to yoga specialists to Reiki masters. Might as well, since I got ’em here in the city.

So post questions, if any. If nothing comes up, I’ll just have to make do talking about hockey and porn.

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Kevin Annett is a former United Church minister in Vancouver, Canada, who was fired without cause in 1995, and then expelled from the same church without due process, after he had unearthed evidence of the theft of native land by church officers, and of the murder of native children at the United Church residential school in Port Alberni, British Columbia, where Kevin ministered.

Since his firing and blacklisting by the United Church, Reverend Annett has worked as an advocate and counsellor in aboriginal healing circles on the west coast. He organized the first international Tribunal into Canadian residential schools in Vancouver in June, 1998, at which a United Nations affiliate, IHRAAM, presided.

Reverend Annett is working with aboriginal and human rights groups around the world in an effort to bring charges of complicity in Genocide against the government of Canada, the Anglican, United and Roman Catholic churches, and the RCMP. He is serving as the secretary of the recently-established Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada, has authored a book about his experiences, “Love and Death in the Valley”, and co-produced the documentary “Unrepentent” about the church’s coverup in the genocide of 50,000 Native Americans.

“John LeKay: When you first arrived at your new parish and were invited to conduct a wedding ceremony at the native reserve; you asked a native man by the name of Danny Gus - why there were no natives showing up for mass on Sunday. He turned around and said “because they killed my friend, he is buried up in the hills behind the church”. What was your initial reaction when you heard this?

Kevin Annett: Disbelief. I wanted proof but didn’t know where to look for it.”

(via Heyoka Magazine)

(Related: the documentary “Unrepentant” via Google video. Hidden From History website. Hidden From History: The Canadian Holocaust)

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“Born without legs, Kevin Connolly snaps photos of people staring at him — turning the watchers into the watched. When Kevin Connolly was ten years old his family took him to Disney World, but for some theme park visitors that day, it was Connolly who quickly became the main attraction.

“I remember distinctly being surrounded by Japanese tourists trying to take my photograph without talking to me or asking me,” he says from his apartment in Bozeman, Montana. “My dad was right behind me, and I remember him getting pretty frustrated with the whole process, because it was something that was happening every single day.” Born without legs, Connolly was already used to the stares of strangers — but that moment would help him start to understand that the lens could work in both directions.

On a solo trip to Europe, more than a decade later, he was riding his skateboard down a Vienna street when he felt a man staring at him. Connolly lifted his camera to his hip, pointed it toward the man and without even looking through the viewfinder, clicked off five or six shots. Connolly would repeat that action 32,000 more times during his travels, creating a diverse portfolio of individuals from a broad assortment of countries. He posted some of these images online, under the title “The Rolling Exhibition.”

(via Yahoo News)

(The Rolling Exhibition)

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For all you aspiring writers out there, there’s a great project going on via LiveJournal with various authors who are posting their plot synopsis that they sent along with their pitches to sell their novels. Via Joshua Palmatier (jpsorrow):

“A few weeks ago, after I posted the question/interview about plot synopsis and my answers, Chaz Brenchley, desperance suggested that perhaps someone should post examples of the plot synopses they used to sell their novels, the ones that were for books already published and out there. I thought this was a great idea and with his permission (and participation) I set up what I’m calling the “Plot Synopsis Project”. Essentially, I gathered together a group of authors who were willing to post an entry about their own plot synopsis writing technique as well as a sample copy of one of their own plot synopses OR post an entry about how they got published without using a plot synopsis, to show everyone how different people write their synopses, and that it isn’t necessarily required to get published. There are other routes. I would say that MOST people have to write a plot synopsis in order to get published though . . . and most of us hate doing it. I personally do.

And just to clarify, by plot synopsis, I mean the (usually) 3-5 page summary of the book that is (usually) included in a submission package to the agent or editor, along with a cover letter or query letter, and sometimes with the first few chapters of the novel. This is not the one paragraph pitch, or even the one line pitch. Some of the other authors will talk about these other things as well in their discussion, but the main thrust of these posts is the 3-5 page synopsis.

So, what you have here is my entry in the Plot Synopsis Project. At the end of every participating post in the project, there will be links to the other authors’ blogs and their posts there. So take a moment to read through what I have to say, and then at the end, click on one of the links to find out what some other authors have to say about the subject. Hopefully, this will help all of the aspiring writers out there.”

Here’s a link of the writers involved separate from any plot synopsis, in case one wants to avoid an accidental spoiler, via Tobias Buckell’s site.

(Related: “Plot Synopsis Project, and the Problem with LiveJournal” via Uncertain Principles)

(Thanks Smoking Pigeon!)

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My latest column at Alterati:

By the end of David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome we find that not only is television a literal part of the body, but that this brain part can spread contagious disease: the brain tumor inducing “Videodrome signal.” This metaphor carries into reality. Television does indeed transmit a particularly destructive disease. Symptoms include: lethargy, apathy, psychosis, and even death.

TV Carnage is an inoculation: the worst of television, cut-up, rearranged, and fed back into itself. Derrick Beckles takes television at its most dehumanizing and packs it into a feature length megadoses that will leave your psychic immune system ready for anything.

Full Story: Alterati.

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More info: Slate.

(via The Agitator).

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“Hundreds of Moroccan heavy metal fans met on Saturday for their biggest festival in the north African country since a group of hard rock enthusiasts was jailed five years ago for “Satanism”. Braving the opprobrium of Islamists and heavy rain, young men in black jeans and jackets, goatee beards and dreadlocks trudged to a cavernous concert hall in Sidi Kacem, a market town in a farming region of northern Morocco.

As the first group Hammerhead began tuning up, a small Fiat drew up outside the hall and two police officers stepped out. “It’s OK,” said organizer Yassine Ould Abbou, 22. “They’re just here to check the security arrangements.” A clang of grinding guitar feedback signaled the start of the concert and prompted startled glances from veiled women and men on mopeds passing by. “Most people in this town have never seen an electric guitar,” said Yassine. “We had 500 people at our last concert in 2005 and this time we’re expecting about 1,000.”

(via Reuters)

(see also “Moroccan Heavy Metal Fans Jailed” via BBC News)

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“Clutching the bars at his prison, Sayed Pervez Kambaksh recalls how his life unravelled. “There was no question of me getting a lawyer to represent me in the case; in fact I was not even able to speak on my own defence.” The 23-year-old student, whose death sentence for downloading a report on women’s rights from the internet has become an international cause célèbre, was speaking to The Independent at his jail in Mazar-i-Sharif – the first time the outside world has heard his own account of his shattering experience. In a voice soft, somewhat hesitant, he said: “The judges had made up their mind about the case without me. The way they talked to me, looked at me, was the way they look at a condemned man. I wanted to say ‘this is wrong, please listen to me’, but I was given no chance to explain.

For Mr Kambaksh the four-minute hearing has led to four months of incarceration, sharing a 10 by 12 metre cell with 34 others — murderers, robbers and terrorists – and having the threat of execution constantly hanging over him. His fate appeared sealed when the Afghan senate passed a motion, proposed by Sibghatullkah Mojeddeid, a key ally of the President Hamid Karzai, confirming the death sentence, although this was later withdrawn after domestic and international protests.”

(via The Independent)

(Petition for Sayed)

(Petition for Saudi woman accused of witchcraft)

(Thanks Kaos829!)

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“I recently mentioned a new book that looked very interesting to me, Sith, Slayers, Stargates and Cyborgs: Modern Mythology and the New Millennium (Peter Lang Publishers, 2007), edited by David Whitt and John Perlich. Dr. David Whitt is Associate Professor of Communication at Nebraska Wesleyan University, and Dr. John Perlich is Associate Professor of Communication at Hastings College in Nebraska. I contacted David and John and they were were all too willing to discuss this fascinating book. After reviewing some of the chapters we had an opportunity to discuss aspects of the book.”

(via TheoFantastique)

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“A rare documentary of science fiction on American television. During half an hour you will watch a synthesis of what was the first forty … all » years of the science fiction production for television. From precursors as “Rocky Jones, Space Ranger”, “Space Patrol” and “Flash Gordon”, to cult series of Irwin Allen (”The Time Tunnel”, “Lost in Space”, “Journey to the Botton of the Sea” and “Land of Giants”). The documentary will glimpse at the best of the genre and bring a surprise that will please very much the fans of “Star Trek”. The phenomenon is remembered through a 14 minutes special tribute with a collection of hilarious out-takes of funny goofs made by the actors that was wonderfully edited and given to the cast members as souvenirs. The scenes had been selected from all the three seasons.”

(via Voodoo Who Do)

(Star Trek Inspirational Poster courtesy of Ecosphere)

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“Internet goliath Google has discontinued listing stories from Inner City Press, a United Nations-focused media organization, through its Google News program. The move comes after an Inner City Press staffer reportedly questioned Google regarding its failure to sign a human rights and anti-censorship agreement. Inner City Press is the most effective and important media organization for UN whistleblowers, according to Bea Edwards, International Program director of the Government Accountability Project.

Inner City Press has been an accredited news organization at the United Nations since December 2005 and has been listed on Google News search results for over two years. It is also accredited, according to its web site, at the U.S. Federal Reserve Board and Federal Communications Commission, among other government agencies. Inner City Press has covered disclosures of whistleblowers in the UNDP office in North Korea, in the UN ‘House’ in Ankara, Turkey, in the group monitoring progress toward the Millennium Development Goals at Headquarters, and in a UNDP climate change project in West Africa, among others. Over the course of the past year, as management at the United Nations has stepped back from providing whistleblowers with protection from retaliation, Inner City Press has reported the arcane tactics of silencing the free speech of employees of conscience in the UN system.”

(via GAP)

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The cover story, penned by Bruce Sterling, is one in a long history of virtual war stories that Wired would publish. It forgoes references to Ender’s Game, but doesn’t leave out video game comparisons. “It’s modern Nintendo training for modern Nintendo war.” Considering that the page directly preceding this is an ad for a new book called The Windows 3.1 Bible, it seems difficult to image how revolutionary these virtual war games could have been.

But what the other features portend has become a Wired hallmark: the clash between culture and technology. John Markoff’s story on cellphone hacking dissects a digital subculture in a way that would be replicated several times in the proceeding decade. Similarly, the Otaku feature was prescient in its analysis of Japanese society before it had become a Western obsession. And an interesting note: the story on Richard Stallman’s obstacles toward free software doesn’t include the phrase “open source” because it had yet to even be popularized.

[…]

In retrospect, it’s unclear which side of this great divide the actual editors themselves fell on. On its maiden voyage, Wired deemed Nintendo a tired entity, while the long-forgotten gaming console 3DO was celebrated as wired. And for mysterious reasons, painting (painting?) crept into wired status, while performance (performance?) was strangely shelved as tired. But the clincher certainly had to be declaring REM (who had just released their best album, Automatic for the People) tired, but passing wired status onto midwest alt-country act The Jayhawks. This is akin to saying that Graham Parsons was a great DJ.

Full Story: fimoculous.com.

(via Robot Wisdom).

With great online content like Danger Room and Sex Drive, Wired itself has gone from being tired to wired.

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