About this Video
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Druplicon is rockin' to the beat! And then comes Lisa Rex who was so kind as to give us an update on the Drupal.org redesign. I am thankful because I had no clue what was going on with it, I had heard it was going to happen and then nothing happened and I know many other people are wondering the same thing. Her update is pretty exciting and in conjunction with it
Dries Buytaert said in his keynote at Do It With Drupal 2009 in New Orleans that he hopes for the redesign to be done in early 2010.
Technical Details
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In this video I grabbed a custom track from Sonic Fire Pro called "Juggernaut" and made my first real attempt at syncing keyframes with the wave form of the music in Final Cut Pro. I think it turned out pretty good considering it was my first attempt. In addition to the rapid keyframing I used the "Motion Blur" effect in the "motion" tab of the layer.
Irrelevant Details
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This is one of my first real YouTube videos of many more to come. Over the next year or so I will be producing some music videos for the amazing musical artist Sonya Leigh and I also have a ton of footage of the Ron Paul Blimp that I will be releasing (creative commons). I just have to get it all transferred onto disk and that entails me getting another DV camera that has a working firewire port. I prefer to get the same model it was shot on, a Sony TRV-27, so I have the best chance of zero dropouts (so, if anyone has a TRV-27 then hit me up!). I have some awesome blimp footage and although I haven't watched any of it since it happened it is sure to be some good content for the movement. The whole election fraud of Ron Paul kind of pissed me off a bit. I think I am finally recovered from that hugely stressful event and I now feel that it is time to get active again. Although, I am now moving more in the direction of The Venus Project as I think that is the best plan for a sustainable, peaceful and pleasurable planet for us all to enjoy for eons to come!
I have been thinking about this for quite a while now and just came across this video.
While I am glad we are doing away with mechanical assemblies I think we have much more work to do as far as synchronizing traffic lights. I envision the future to have a more open system where people can participate in the timing of the traffic lights. A system that minimizes waiting time. If Google were in charge it would turn green as soon as the last perpendicular car crossed. It would have GPS, motion sensing, and infrared technology all perfectly coordinated so we would have a traffic light system that was as efficient as our computers.
Welcome the traffic light 2.0 system as it makes its grand entrance over the next 10 years! I can't wait!
At least that is what this commercial is encouraging you do if you live in Brazil.
I think bottled water companies have got to go! We need to start creating systems that take the water we have locally and make it gold. We have the technology. This video shows how marketing campaigns can sell you something that is free, they remind me of pharmaceutical companies.
Very funny video though, just for the wrong purpose.
Facts about bottled water: http://www.onlineeducation.net/bottled_water/
It would be cool if Google's Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt had a serious look at "The Venus Project" and had a meeting with Jacque Fresco, now, soon!
P.S. I like this song too.
That is so cool that Alanis talked about the social pressures for women in this country. Even though I am a man, lately I have started to realize how much pressure women feel to look or act a certain way. Men have pressures to perform certain duties or be bulkier as well but I think women have it a bit tougher. That is great Alanis put it in perspective at 2:51 "Alanis: I started with eating disorders since I was real young and almost every woman I know has been influenced by society's standards of what is sexual and powerful and aesthetically perfect and it can really kill your self-esteem and completely ruin your relationship with your body which is for me becoming a more profound relationship the older I get.
There was a Swine Flu previously, in the 70's. One woman featured in the video above got Giambre disease right after her shot.
My personal opinion is that this flu is just like every other flu, people die every year from the flu. However, I do think that the companies that makes these vaccines are "in need of an epidemic". There is much money to be made if there is an epidemic, remember that.
Even if you are pro vaccination you should at least watch this video so you can be educated as to what other people may be thinking about. You should always see all sides of the story, right?
This is a great video. You should watch it. It is similar to a vision board. One thing that I found fascinating is that he hung out with Richard Branson on his private island because he had it on his bucket list.
One thing on my vision board is to play tennis against Richard Branson on his private island with Dr. Fuhrman. Abbie Jaye gave me his book, "Losing my virginity" this past summer (2009) when I was in LA. I read the book and it is one of my favorite books ever now! If you haven't read it you should. That book is so amazing!
I can't wait to meet Sean Stephenson too! What a guy!
Talk about a full body work out! This would be fun to learn someday soon! I can see a mixture of this and hiphop, popping and breakdancing forming soon!
A journalist arrested in Sudan for wearing trousers has become a symbol for women's rights across Africa.
After Professor Gates, Why Pretend?
NEW YORK--The current national conversation about race and the police reminded me about an incident that occurred when I was in Uzbekistan. As I walked into an apartment complex for an appointment I noticed the decomposing body of a man lying on the side of the road.
"How long as he been there?" I asked my host.
"Three, maybe four days," he said.
"What happened to him?"
"Shot, maybe," he shrugged. "Or maybe hit by a car. Something."
I didn't bother to ask why no one had called the police. I knew. Calling the Uzbek militsia amounts to a request to be beaten, robbed or worse. So desperate to avoid interaction with the police was another man I met that, when his mother died of old age at their home in Tashkent, he drove her body to the outskirts of town and deposited her in a field.
With the exception of New Orleans after Katrina, it's not that bad here in the United States. Consider Professor Henry Louis Gates: he shouldn't have been arrested by that Cambridge, Massachusetts police officer, but he came out of the experience physically unscathed.
Nevertheless, the Gates incident has illuminated some basic, strange assumptions about our society. Cops think they have a constitutional right to be treated deferentially. And black people think cops are nice to white people.
Yeah, well, take it from a white guy: we don't like cops either.
Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. references "the African immigrant killed while reaching for his wallet, the Maryland man beaten senseless as he lay in bed, the Miami man beaten to death for speeding, the dozens of men jailed on manufactured evidence in Los Angeles and manufactured police testimony in Tulia, Texas, the man sodomized with a broomstick in New York. Are we supposed to believe it coincidence that the men this happens to always happen to be black?"
Of course not. Blacks are 30 to 50 percent more likely to be arrested than whites for the same crime. Their prison sentences are longer. In the notorious "driving while black" New Jersey trooper case, African-Americans made up 70 percent of those randomly pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike--but fewer than 17 percent of motorists. Blacks are more likely to be stopped, frisked, arrested, beaten and murdered by the police than members of all other ethnic groups. American racism against blacks remains systematic, pervasive, and murderous. When there's a policeman in the picture, it's best to be white.
Still, whites and blacks have more in common than they think when it comes to their feelings about the fuzz. When those flashing lights appear in the rearview mirror, even the biggest right-winger's day is ruined.
No one should be less scared of cops than me. I'm white, clean-cut, middle-aged, invariably polite: "Hello, sir. Is there a problem, officer?" Yet I can't point to a single positive experience I've ever had with a cop. Neutral ones, sure--basic, cold, bureaucratic interactions. But no great ones.
And lots and lots of negative ones.
Where to begin?
I'll never forget the New York traffic cop who stepped off the curb in front of my car on Madison Avenue and ordered me to turn right. He wrote me up for illegal right turn. "But you told me to," I protested. "Wrong place, wrong time," he smirked. $165 plus three points on my license. I appealed. The cop lied under oath. The court believed him.
Or the Nevada highway patrolman who pulled me over. I was doing 80 in a 70. He wrote me up at 100 mph. My brother-in-law, never the suck-up, confirmed I was going 80. I was so furious--the fine would have been $400--that I spent double that to fly back and challenge the ticket in court. I won.
When my 20-year-old self forgot to turn on my headlights as we pulled out of a parking lot while on a road trip with my druggie roommate, a Massachusetts cop pulled us over. I couldn't begrudge him probable cause; pot smoke billowed out the window, "Cheech and Chong"-style, when I opened it. Still, what came next was unforgivable: he handcuffed my arms so tight that the metal cut to the wrist bone. (The scar lasted ten years.) When we got out of the town lock-up the next morning, $400 was missing from my wallet. (A judge, examining my wrist a few months later, dropped the charges. My $400, of course, was gone forever.)
An LAPD cop--it bears mentioning that he was black--arrested me for jaywalking on Melrose Avenue. I wasn't. I didn't resist, but he roughed me up. Upon releasing me, he chucked my wallet into the sewer, laughed and zoomed off on his motorcycle. I filed a complaint, which the LAPD ignored.
And so on.
I admit it: I don't like cops. I like the idea of cops. The specific people who actually are cops are the problem. My theory is that cops should be drafted, not recruited. After all, the kind of person who would want to become a police officer is precisely the kind of person who should not be allowed to work as one. But I didn't start out harboring this prejudice. It resulted from dozens of unpleasant interactions with law enforcement.
Race has long been a classic predictor of attitudes toward the police. But high-profile cases of police brutality, coupled with over-the-top security measures taken since 9/11 that targeted whites as well as blacks, have helped bring the races together in their contempt for the police. In 1969, the Harris poll found that only 19 percent of whites thought cops discriminated against African-Americans. Now 54 percent of whites think so.
Don't worry, Professor Gates. We don't care what you said about the cop's mama. A lot of white guys see this thing your way.
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Ted Rall Online: www.rall.com
COMING OCTOBER '09: New graphic novel "The Year of Loving Dangerously"
About author
Ted Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.
The city has made a rapid transition: It draws 90% of its energy from renewables, has a booming bicycle culture and a very popular progressive mayor.
Mute this if you are at work. What do you think you would say if this happened to you!
World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
After being kidnapped at the age of 16 by a group of thugs and enduring a year of rapes and beatings, Assiya Rafiq was delivered to the police and thought her problems were over.
Then, she said, four police officers took turns raping her.
The next step for Assiya was obvious: She should commit suicide. That’s the customary escape in rural Pakistan for a raped woman, as the only way to cleanse the disgrace to her entire family.
Instead, Assiya summoned the unimaginable courage to go public and fight back. She is seeking to prosecute both her kidnappers and the police, despite threats against her and her younger sisters. This is a kid who left me awed and biting my lip; this isn’t a tale of victimization but of valor, empowerment and uncommon heroism.
“I decided to prosecute because I don’t want the same thing to happen to anybody else,” she said firmly.
Assiya’s case offers a window into the quotidian corruption and injustice endured by impoverished Pakistanis — leading some to turn to militant Islam.
“When I treat a rape victim, I always advise her not to go to the police,” said Dr. Shershah Syed, the president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Pakistan. “Because if she does, the police might just rape her again.”
Yet Assiya is also a sign that change is coming. She says she was inspired by Mukhtar Mai, a young woman from this remote village of Meerwala who was gang raped in 2002 on the orders of a village council. Mukhtar prosecuted her attackers and used the compensation money to start a school.
Mukhtar is my hero. Many Times readers who followed her story in past columns of mine have sent her donations through a fund at Mercy Corps, at www.mercycorps.org, and Mukhtar has used the money to open schools, a legal aid program, an ambulance service, a women’s shelter, a telephone hotline — and to help Assiya fight her legal case.
The United States has stood aloof from the ubiquitous injustices in Pakistan, and that’s one reason for cynicism about America here. I’m hoping the Obama administration will make clear that Americans stand shoulder to shoulder with heroines like Mukhtar and Assiya, and with an emerging civil society struggling for law and social justice.
Assiya’s saga began a year ago when a woman who was a family friend sold her to two criminals who had family ties to prominent politicians. Assiya said the two men spent the next year beating and raping her.
The men were implicated in a gold robbery, so they negotiated a deal with the police in the town of Kabirwala, near Khanewal: They handed over Assiya, along with a $625 bribe, in exchange for the police pinning the robbery on the girl.
By Assiya’s account, which I found completely credible, four police officers, including a police chief, took turns beating and raping her — sometimes while she was tied up — over the next two weeks. A female constable obligingly stepped out whenever the men wanted access to Assiya.
Assiya’s family members heard that she was in the police station, and a court granted their petition for her release and sent a bailiff to get her out. The police hid Assiya, she said, and briefly locked up her 10-year-old brother to bully the family into backing off.
The bailiff accepted bribes from both the family and the police, but in the end he freed the girl. Assiya, driven by fury that overcame her shame, told her full story to the magistrate, who ordered a medical exam and an investigation. The medical report confirms that Assiya’s hymen had been broken and that she had abrasions all over her body.
The morning I met Assiya, she said she had just received the latest in a series of threats from the police: Unless she withdraws her charges, they will arrest, rape or kill her — and her two beloved younger sisters.
The family is in hiding. It has lost its livelihood and accumulated $2,500 in debts. Assiya’s two sisters and three brothers have had to drop out of school, and they will find it harder to marry because Assiya is considered “dishonored.” Most of her relatives tell Assiya that she must give in. But she tosses her head and insists that she will prosecute her attackers to spare other girls what she endured.
(For readers who want to help, more information is available on my blog at:www.nytimes.com/ontheground.)
Assiya’s mother, Iqbal Mai, told me that in her despair, she at first had prayed that God should never give daughters to poor families. “But then I changed my mind,” she added, with a hint of pride challenging her fears. “God should give poor people daughters like Assiya who will fight.”
Amen.
If you have some good headphones that can pump out some bass then put them on! This song is by Trifonic and is called Lies. This song reminds me a lot of Stabbing Westward, which was one of my favorite bands when I was a teen!
The robots are coming! We must embrace the technology and not resist it. People fought computers once to you know. Now we all use them because they do many of the mundane tasks so much better. Jacque Fresco talks alot about how we will use new technologies to make this world a better place and explains why their isn't logical basis for fearing robots and new tech. His book is called "The best that money can't buy" and is amazing!