Friday, 7 October 2011

Steve Schapiro: Taxi Driver

As analogue lovers, there’s no telling in how much we adore film photographs. Seeing one’s shots on actual prints and compiled in a book brings visual elation and self-gratification. ‘Photos on Pages’ is a new series that features photo-books by great photographers. In this first volume, the spotlight is on Steve Schapiro and his exclusive photography for Taxi Driver...

A 31-year-old white supremacist once associated with a neo-Nazi gang known as the “Aryan Death Squad” and his female companion are in custody in northern California as suspects in two murders and the disappearance of a disabled veteran.
David Joseph Pedersen, convicted of threatening to murder federal Judge Edward Lodge of Idaho in 2001, was arrested Wednesday near Marysville, Calif., in a stolen car with his companion, 24-year-old Holly Ann Grigsby, of Portland.
They both have been identified by authorities in Washington state as suspects in the brutal Sept. 28 slaying in Everett, Wash., of Pedersen’s stepmother, 69-year-old Leslie Mae Pederson.
A bloody pillow covered her head and her hands were tied with duct tape, according to police who found a sword near the victim. A medical examiner determined she died from “incised wounds of the neck” and ruled her death a homicide.
Her husband, David Jones “Red” Pedersen, a 56-year-old disabled veteran, remains missing from the home, according to authorities who say in court documents they aren’t sure if he is a suspect or another victim. Family friends say he had difficulty traveling in a car because of his medical problems.
David “Joey” Pedersen and Grigsby had been visiting his father and stepmother just prior to the killing and disappearance. Grigsby’s father, Fred Grigsby, of Portland, Ore., told The Associated Press that his daughter has a history of drug addiction and has associated with white supremacists...

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Bill Mortin @'SPLC'

Israeli police arrest 18-year-old Jewish suspect in mosque arson case

Jonas Mekas occupies Wall Street

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Cookin'

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♪♫ The Beatles - Hey Bulldog

Herman Cain Tells Poor And Jobless “Don’t Blame Wall St., Blame Yourself”

#SteveWorkers

Wu_Ming_Foundt Wu Ming Foundation

Steve Workers says: Planet Earth is like one big Foxconn plant. Don't kill yourself, organize! Beat the crap out of your boss! #SteveWorkers

Wu_Ming_Foundt Wu Ming Foundation

Here's a blog devoted to Steve Workers, the guru of the working class steveworkers.tumblr.com #SteveWorkers

Steve Wozniak Remembers Steve Jobs

Help the Next Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs made machines. They’re machines you can type on, or talk on, or listen to music on. He didn’t just tinker with gadgets. He changed what they did. He made machines do what machines had never done before.

But there was one machine he couldn’t fix: his body.

Jobs died yesterday at 56 because of a glitch in his programming. The glitch was cancer. A lot of smart people are trying to fix this glitch in future releases of the human body. But that’s going to take a while. In the meantime, there’s something you can do to help people such as Jobs. You can supply replacement parts for the machines that keep them alive. You can sign up as an organ donor.

Two years ago, Jobs got a liver transplant to prolong his life. Apparently his cancer, which began in his pancreas, had damaged his liver. To get the liver, Jobs went to Tennessee, because the waiting list in Northern California was too long. There weren’t enough livers to go around. Lots of other people in Northern California needed livers but couldn’t get them, because they didn’t have the kind of money or savvy Jobs did. They couldn’t afford to fly around the country, go through extensive evaluations at multiple transplant centers, and guarantee their availability within an hour for the next liver that became available.

Go to the data page of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network and look at the numbers. More than 100,000 people are on waiting lists for organs. Sixteen thousand are waiting for livers. Ninety thousand are waiting for kidneys. Three thousand are waiting for hearts. In the past decade and a half, more than 100,000 people—on average, more than 6,000 per year—were removed from the lists not because they got organs, but because they died. Another 30,000 were removed because they became too ill. Right now, more than 3,000 people are waiting for livers in California. Most of them have been waiting more than two years.

Earlier this year, when Jobs took a leave from Apple because of deteriorating health, I asked whether he should have received his transplant in the first place. As bioethicist Arthur Caplan has noted, almost none of the 1,500 people who received liver transplants in the U.S. when Jobs did, in the first quarter of 2009, had cancer. That’s because there’s no evidence that transplants stop metastatic cancer. The much more likely scenario is that the cancer continues to spread and soon kills the patient, destroying a liver that could have kept someone else alive for many years. Among liver recipients, cancer patients have the worst survival rate. While more than 70 percent of liver recipients in Jobs’ age bracket are still alive and functioning five years later, Jobs lasted only half that long.

Spending that liver on Jobs seems unfair, given the scarcity of organs. But why should we accept scarcity? Jobs didn’t. He used his influence to prod California to enact a new law that requires applicants for a driver's license to be asked whether they'd like to be organ donors. He recognized that the wait for organs doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. If more organs become available, people like Jobs can get transplants, possibly prolonging their lives, without sentencing others on the waiting list to death.

In the hours since the world learned of Jobs’ death, I’ve seen lots of people posting tributes to him online. They say he was one of a kind. They say he did things nobody else could do. But medically, he was one of thousands. And the thing he needed most was something any of us can do. He needed an organ donor. There are 100,000 people behind him—people who didn’t have his wealth or connections—still waiting.

If you want to honor Jobs and his donor, don’t just recycle your computer. Recycle your body. Register as an organ donor, and spread the word. You can help the next Steve Jobs reboot the machine that matters most.
William Saletan @'Salon'

Family donates organs of boy hit by train

Fuck Off!

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Fred Shuttlesworth RIP

A hero died today. The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth was not merely a prominent and important leader of the Civil Rights era. He was a repeated victim of terrible violence who remained dedicated to nonviolence and a symbol of what genuine courage represents-- the refusal to compromise ones principles in the face of fear. His courage in the face of physical danger is an inspiration to all of us. Read his obituary.
I've chosen to use this mugshot of Shuttlesworth because to me it symbolizes how oppression and adversity can reveal strength, and how defiance in and of itself can be a kind of grace. As the Times obituary recounts, Shuttlesworth was arrested dozens of times, brutally assaulted, targeted by politicians and police, and the victim of repeated attempted murder. He neither backed down nor succumbed to cynicism or the use of violence himself.
What's more, Shuttlesworth demonstrates that pacifism is natural partners with radicalism, pugnacity, and a refusal to compromise. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King are such toweringly complex and symbolically rich figures-- and our public consciousness has such little space for history-- that there is an unfortunate tendency to think of the Civil Rights movement as being defined only by the conciliatory message of King and the combative message of Malcolm X. This itself is a reductive reading of history. But Shuttlesworth was at once dedicated to the vehicle of nonviolence that King espoused and yet was fiery and obstinate as well. And he came from the same poor background that defined the lives of many of the black Americans living during the Civil Rights era and continues to define the lives of too many today.
A culture makes choices in the virtues it celebrates. What is celebrated determines what is valued and what is valued determines what endures. It is necessary for us to remember men like Fred Shuttlesworth, and in doing so to remember that what should endure in memory is real heroism, real sacrifice, and real principle.
Freddie @'L'Hôte'