According to the film summary, the new documentary “depicts the life of American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz. It features interviews with his family and friends as well as the internet luminaries who worked with him. The film tells his story up to his eventual suicide after a legal battle, and explores the questions of access to information and civil liberties that drove his work.”
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Vi Hart is back at it again. Hart has a knack for demystifying complex concepts with her visually-rich mathematical videos. She has previously tackled Stravinsky and Schoenberg’s 12-Tone Compositionsand the Space-Time Continuum. This week, she’s taking on the concept of Net Neutrality. The FCC will soon consider whether it wants to end the era of net neutrality and the open web — something that could have far-reaching consequences for you. The web keeps getting more and more corporatized (even by companies that claim to support net neutrality). And by killing net neutrality, the FCC can officially ensure that big corporations run the show.
In the video above, Hart explains the concept of net neutrality and why it’s important to defend. On her blog, she also includes a lot of additional resources — including more videos that explain net neutrality, plus information on how you can tell your political representatives to keep the web open.
Recently attacked by Cossacks in Sochi and by black-clad men with green antiseptic in Moldova, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina have, since their December release from a two-year prison sentence, remained the very public faces of the punk band/agit-prop collective known as Pussy Riot. The two also continue to raise the band’s profile in the States. Last month alone, they appeared on The Colbert Report and onstage with Madonna at a star-studded Amnesty International event.
Not only prominent activists for prison reform, Nadia and Masha—as they’re called in the HBO documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer—have become celebrities. (So much so that other mostly anonymous members of the group have disowned them, citing among other things issues with “personality cult.”) The HBO doc begins with profiles of the women, as does a new book, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, by Russian journalist Masha Gessen.
In an interview Friday for KQED in San Francisco (above), Gessen—a lesbian mother who recently moved to the United States for fear of persecution—describes how Vladimir Putin, Pussy Riot’s primary target, has regained his popularity with the Russian people after his aggressions at the Ukraine border and Crimea’s Sunday vote for secession. She cites, for example, alarming poll numbers of only 6% of Russians who oppose an invasion of Ukraine. Yet at the time of Pussy Riot’s infamous performance at a Moscow cathedral in February of 2012, which led to Tolokinnikova and Alyokhina’s imprisonment, the anti-Putin protest movement made the autocratic ruler very nervous.
Gessen sketches the history of the movement in her interview (and details it in the book). At first the protests involved the situationist antics of performance art collective Voina—“War”—(see Tolokonnikova, above at far right, with other Voina members in 2008). The feminist punk band has only emerged in the past three years, when Voina’s art-school pranks became Pussy Riot’s provocations days after Putin announced his intent to return to the presidency.
One month before the cathedral performance that sent Nadia and Masha to prison, the band appeared in their trademark fluorescent dresses and balaclavas in Red Square (top). Only three months prior, on October 1, 2011, they released their first song, “Ubey seksista” (“Kill the Sexist”) and—as members of Voina—announced the arrival of Pussy Riot, a radical opposition to the authoritarianism, patriarchy, and crony capitalism they allege characterize Putin’s rule.
In November of 2011, Pussy Riot staged its first public performance (above), scaling atop scaffolding and Moscow trolley and subway cars while scattering feathers and dancing to their song “Osvobodi Bruschatku” (“Release the Cobblestones”). The song recommends that Russians throw cobblestones in street protests because–as Salon quotes from the group’s blog—“ballots will be used as toilet paper” in the approaching elections.
The collective next released the video for “Kropotkin Vodka” (above), featuring a montage of public appearances in fashionable locations around Moscow. The locations were chosen, the band writes, specifically as “forbidden sites in Moscow.” More from their (Google-translated) blog below:
The concerts were held in public places [for] wealthy putinists: boutiques in the capital, at fashion shows, luxury cars and roofs close to Kremlin bars […] Performances included arson and a series of musical occupations [of] glamorous areas of the capital.
The song takes its title and inspiration from Peter Kropotkin, the 19th century Russian aristocrat-turned-anarcho-communist intellectual.
In their open letter publicly releasing their two most prominent members from the group, six members of Pussy Riot write that the “ideals of the group” Nadia and Masha have allegedly abandoned were precisely “the cause for their unjust punishment.” The two have become, they say, “institutionalized advocates of prisoners’ rights.” And yet in mid-December, 2011, the band performed their song “Death to Prison, Freedom to Protests” on the rooftop of a detention center holding opposition leaders and activists. This was at the height of the anti-Putin movement when upwards of 100,000 people took to the streets of Moscow chanting “Russia without Putin” and “Putin is a Thief” and demanding free elections.
While most of us only heard of Pussy Riot after their arrest and trial for the cathedral stunt, their “breakthrough performance,” writes Salon, occurred one month earlier at the Red Square appearance at the top of the post. This was when the band decided to “take revolt to the Kremlin,” and coincided with promises from Putin to reform elections. “The revolution should be done by women,” said one member at the time. “For now, they don’t beat us or jail us as much.” The situation would turn rather quickly only weeks later, and it was with Pussy Riot, says Gessen, that the wave of arrests and beatings of protesters began. The band’s current schism comes just as the anti-Putin movement seems to be fracturing and losing resolve, and the future of democratic opposition in Putin’s increasingly belligerent Russia seems entirely uncertain.
Now we can share an interactive tool that is using some of those Landsat images to stop illegal deforestation.
With help from Google Earth Engine, the World Resources Institute launched Global Forest Watch, an online forest monitoring and alert system that allows individual computer users to watch forests around the world change in an almost real-time stream of imagery.
Whistle blowers are making powerful use of the Global Forest Watch tool. Using spatial data streams available on the site to observe forest changes in southeastern Peru, a number of users submitted alerts about rapidly escalating deforestation near a gold mine and river valley. In another case, observers submitted an alert about illegal logging in the Republic of the Congo.
Five years ago, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey lifted protocols that kept Landsat images proprietary. Now, agencies like the World Resources Institute—and even tiny citizen watchdog groups around the world—have access to incredibly rich tools and data. Some of the imagery is hard to interpret. Global Forest Watch developed a number of different data layers for users to apply, making it possible to monitor forest areas for trends or illegal logging. The video at the top of this page gives a good overview of how the site works. This one gives more detail about how to use the maps on the Global Forest Watch site.
Select an area of the world and then select a data set that interests you. Choose to look at terrain, satellite, road, tree height, or composite images of a particular region. Data layers can be layered on top of one another to show trends in forest management. In Indonesia, for example, you can use the FORMA alerts button to see what has already been reported in that area of the humid tropics.
How can you tell if forest change is due to illegal logging? Turn on the Forest Use filters to see which areas are authorized for logging and mining and which are protected. In Indonesia, many areas are designated for oil palm production, but expansion of those crops are often associated with loss of natural forest.
Do your own sleuthing. The site is designed to harness data from government and academic scientists, along with observation from individuals (us). There is even information about companies that are growing oil palm trees, so it’s possible that a diligent user could catch an over-aggressive grower stepping over the forest boundary.
Why have Ukrainians been protesting since November? It’s a question you might feel strange asking in February. But not to worry, The Washington Post has put together a helpful video that explains the crisis in two minutes (above), along with a related primer: 9 questions about Ukraine you were too embarrassed to ask. A deeper analysis can be found in the pages of The New York Review of Books.
In recent decades, historians have tried to offer a balanced assessment of JFK’s life and legacy, offering clear-eyed accounts of his handling of foreign and domestic policy, and raising questions about his infidelities and health problems, all the while chipping away at the Camelot myth. On Friday, the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, the hagiography returned, and even perennial cads like Rush Limbaugh had little bad to say about America’s 35th president. He simply insisted that JFK would be a conservative, if still alive today.
Perhaps the only notable exception was Noam Chomsky. Never a fan of Kennedy (or probably any other American president for that matter), Chomsky was asked by Truthout, “Do you find it odd that the country is focusing on a 50th anniversary remembrance of the Kennedy assassination?” A leading question, no doubt, to which Chomksy replied, “Worship of leaders is a technique of indoctrination that goes back to the crazed George Washington cult of the 18th century and on to the truly lunatic Reagan cult of today, both of which would impress Kim Il-sung. The JFK cult is similar.” It’s what you get when you live in “a deeply indoctrinated society.” If you’re ready to have Chomsky throw more cold water (or is it combustible gasoline?) on the JFK legacy, head over to Truthout for more.
The first of two videos circulating on the internet, “Girls Who Read” by UK poet and “Rogue Teacher” Mark Grist (above) hits back at the lad culture that objectifies women according to certain “bits” named above in some mildly NSFW language. In his video performance piece above, Grist, asked which bits he prefers by a lad in a pub, and faced with a looming cadre of both male and female peers putting on the pressure, answers haltingly, “I like a girl… who … reads.” Then, his confidence up, he elaborates:
I like a girl who reads,
Who needs the written word
And who uses the added vocabulary
She gleans from novels and poetry
To hold lively conversation
In a range of social situations
The ideal girl close to Grist’s heart “ties back her hair as she’s reading Jane Eyre” and “feeds her addiction for fiction with unusual poems and plays.” In his infectious slam cadences, Grist’s impassioned paean to female readers offers a charming alternative to the ladmag gaze, though one might argue that he still does a little bit of projecting his fantasies onto an unsuspecting lone female at the bar (who turns out to be not so alone). Maybe “Girl Who Reads” is a trope, like “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” an idealization that says more about Grist’s desires than about any particular, actual girl, but it’s still a refreshing challenge to the leering of his pubmates, one that communicates to girls that there are men out there, even in the pubs, who value women for their minds.
The video above, for a new line of toys called GoldiBlox, designed by Stanford-educated engineer Debbie Sterling, upends another adolescent male cultural touchstone—this time a by-now classic American one—the Beastie Boys gleefully misogynistic anthem “Girls.” While the original still likely scores many a frat party, it now must compete with the rewrite performed by “Raven.” The re-appropriated “Girls” plays over video of a trio of young girls, bored to death with stereotypical pink tea sets and the like, who build a complicated Rube Goldberg machine from Goldiblox, which resemble plastic tinker toys. I foresee snippets of the updated lyrics (below) making their way onto playgrounds around the country. Hear the original Beastie Boys song, with lyrics, below.
Girls.
You think you know what we want, girls.
Pink and pretty it’s girls.
Just like the 50’s it’s girls.
You like to buy us pink toys
and everything else is for boys
and you can always get us dolls
and we’ll grow up like them… false.
It’s time to change.
We deserve to see a range.
‘Cause all our toys look just the same
and we would like to use our brains.
We are all more than princess maids.
Girls to build the spaceship, Girls to code the new app, Girls to grow up knowing they can engineer that.
Girls.
That’s all we really need is Girls. To bring us up to speed it’s Girls. Our opportunity is Girls. Don’t underestimate Girls.
As with all kids advertising, this is aimed as much at parents—who remember the Beastie Boys’ song—as their kids, who couldn’t possibly. And unlike Grist’s video, which only sells, perhaps, himself, the Goldiblox video aims to get kids hooked on plastic toys as much as any of the ads for products it displaces. Nonetheless, I’ll play it for my daughter in a few years, because lines like “we are all more than princess maids” constitute the perfect retort to the seemingly endless cultural slotting of girls into ridiculously subservient and fantasy roles.
Missing for almost a month, imprisoned Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has been reported by her husband as recovering in a Siberian hospital from issues related to her hunger strike. As The Guardian reports, Tolokonnikova didn’t only resist by refusing to eat, she also kept up a lively correspondence with Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek while enduring reported abuse at the penal colony in Mordovia where she had been sentenced. It seems from the edited correspondence published by The Guardian that Žižek began the conversation in early January. “All hearts were beating for you” he writes, until “it became clear that you rejected global capitalism.” In a later, April 16 reply, Tolokonnikova explains exactly what Pussy Riot rejects:
As a child I wanted to go into advertising. I had a love affair with the advertising industry. And this is why I am in a position to judge its merits. The anti-hierarchical structures and rhizomes of late capitalism are its successful ad campaign. Modern capitalism has to manifest itself as flexible and even eccentric. Everything is geared towards gripping the emotion of the consumer. Modern capitalism seeks to assure us that it operates according to the principles of free creativity, endless development and diversity. It glosses over its other side in order to hide the reality that millions of people are enslaved by an all-powerful and fantastically stable norm of production. We want to reveal this lie.
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