Maybe it's just because they're my friends that I'm convinced of their objective geniuses. Now I'll have to post about my terrific musician friends, too. But first, I offer you two of my favorites, M. Cody White and A. Petersen:
From Cody's blog on his painting, Arrows to the Sun:
See more: http://www.censorship-paradise.com/en/
Reporters Without Borders has begun a strong and creative campaign aimed at tourists to Mexico, Thailand, and Vietnam, three countries with severe human rights violations. The campaign urges consumers of vacation packages that drive these countries' tourism industries to "get the real low-down on your holiday destination."
You can now petition the White House directly:
Any petition successful enough to gather 25,000 signatures merely receives a response from Obama's administration and a promise to hand over the petition to the right folks in either Congress or the Senate.
The idea is cool. And some of the petitions are pretty great, like the most popular with 70,000 signatures to legalize pot. However,
Federated Media has just announced a partnership with WordPress.com. "The deal will include all of the blogs that are hosted under the company which comes to around 25 million." WordPress.com users will now be subjected to a big re-vamp of corporate-sponsored advertizing.
Perhaps it's time you considered taking more control over your blog?
It's very easy, and not expensive, to leave Wordpress.com's (Federated Media's) generally irresponsible Software as a Service practices to instead host your own website. After all, Wordpress is Free Software (unlike Blogger), so you're nearly there already! You just need to follow these steps*:
Published today at the Guardian, Pakistan Bans Encryption Software
There's a lot of myths about gay folks, many of these myths tell us more about straight culture than they do gay culture, however. This recent post from the Daily Yonder tries to explain the phenomenon of the gayest rural town in Minnesota, Pine City. In short, the re-ruralization of queer culture has a lot to do with acceptance:
Hundreds of people in Washington to protect communities and water have been arrested for civil disobedience aimed at highlighting the detrimental impacts of the Keystone XL Tar Sands Oil Pipeline. The demonstration won't end for another week and neither will the repression. This mass-mobilization against the Tar Sands Oil projects comes from intense, international organizing work led by Indigenous groups in North America and supported by the larger environmental movement in the western hemisphere.
From Institute Transformance/ABRA,
On this world day of action against the building of the hydro-electric plant, Belo Monte, on the Xingu River in the Brazilian Amazon (to be the third largest plant in the world), with unpredictable, irreversible sociocultural and environmental damage in the region which will impact on all of our lives, we present two songs...
From a website on Seasteading:
[W]e work to enable seasteading communities -- floating cities -- which will allow the next generation of pioneers to peacefully test new ideas for government.
Make some coffee and watch this with your kids this morning. Hopefully they will get to see beauty like this in an increasingly post-industrial world, which is the backdrop for this film featuring Danny Macaskill and directed by Stu Thomson. Music by Ben Howard.
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