When Sesame Street first started back in 1970, it featured a lot of characters that have since disappeared from the show. One of those original characters was a hipster by the name of "Roosevelt Franklin". Roosevelt Franklin (the name was obviously a play on Franklin Roosevelt) attended Roosevelt Franklin Elementary School, where he taught concepts like family, pride, respect, geography and not drinking poison. Roosevelt was a cool kid who loved to scat, rhyme and sing the blues. Matt Robinson, who played Gordon during the first three seasons, created the character and performed Roosevelt's voice. Despite significant popularity, he was dropped from the cast following letters of complaint. The complaints ranged from that he was too black to that he was not black enough to his rowdy elementary school not setting a good example for children. However, before the public naysayers had their way, Roosevelt Franklin did gain a following and even issued an album entitled, "The Year of Roosevelt Franklin". It holds its place in history as the first Sesame Street album to focus on one character. The songs deal with many different subjects, from learning letters and numbers, to traffic safety, sharing, and getting along with other people. The album was so successful that it was reissued three years later as "My Name Is Roosevelt Franklin." The reissue is the record that I own. The album is a work of pure genius and one wonders if maybe it isn't time to bring back that rhyming and scatting school teacher as he would definitely fit into today's world. You be the judge when you listen to "My Name is Roosevelt Franklin". Enjoy!
My Name is Roosevelt Franklin
@'Dartman's World of Wonder'
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Saturday 5 February 2011
HA!
jeremyscahill jeremy scahill
If I ever start a war contracting company, I will name it "Arrested Development"
Egypt's military-industrial complex
A riot policeman fires tear gas at protesters in front of the al-Istiqama Mosque on 28 January, in Cairo, Egypt. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
Maybe America gains a lot when it exports to us arms and cars or planes, but it loses more when it does not export the best that its civilisation has produced, which is freedom and democracy and human rights. The value of America is that it should defend this product, not only in its country but throughout the world! It may harm some of its interests, but it will make gains that will live hundreds of years, for the friendship of peoples live forever, because the peoples do not die, but governments change like the winter weather.
Pratap Chatterjee @'The Guardian'
Maybe America gains a lot when it exports to us arms and cars or planes, but it loses more when it does not export the best that its civilisation has produced, which is freedom and democracy and human rights. The value of America is that it should defend this product, not only in its country but throughout the world! It may harm some of its interests, but it will make gains that will live hundreds of years, for the friendship of peoples live forever, because the peoples do not die, but governments change like the winter weather.
Pratap Chatterjee @'The Guardian'
11 Women Found Murdered in Albuquerque Desert -- Why Was This Not Treated As a National Tragedy?
Two years ago today, in a story that shook me to my core, a woman walking her dog found a femur in the desert. She alerted the police, who began a three-month dig, covering a vast area of the mesa near my home. The police found the bodies of 11 women, one of whom was four months pregnant. Many of the women were close to my age and grew up here like me. Were brown like me. Had struggled here, like me.
But when these women were found dead, President Obama did not come to town. There was no jam-packed memorial to mourn their lives cut short. What we had instead were devastated families whose greatest fear had been realized when their daughter’s remains were discovered on the mesa.
As the story unfolded, terrible sounds echoed in my ears. Not the sounds of the shovels in the desert, but the sound of these lives being erased. Not only through death, but through the official description of the events. The women were not brave heroes who faced histories of poverty, abuse and trauma with the best tools they could find. They were “addicts.” And because they used drugs, many earned money the best way they could—by selling sex. And so they were “prostitutes.” The authorities thought the story could begin and end there: bodies found, case closed. 11 more prostitutes dead. Done.
The $100,000 reward for information leading to the killers was rarely advertised, and by most accounts from the families of the missing and dead, the police have been less than enthusiastic about pursuing the case. When challenged on their lack of results they said, “The only suspects we have are dead.”
I often found myself wondering if that would fly if these were 11 white college students found buried under a football field...
But when these women were found dead, President Obama did not come to town. There was no jam-packed memorial to mourn their lives cut short. What we had instead were devastated families whose greatest fear had been realized when their daughter’s remains were discovered on the mesa.
As the story unfolded, terrible sounds echoed in my ears. Not the sounds of the shovels in the desert, but the sound of these lives being erased. Not only through death, but through the official description of the events. The women were not brave heroes who faced histories of poverty, abuse and trauma with the best tools they could find. They were “addicts.” And because they used drugs, many earned money the best way they could—by selling sex. And so they were “prostitutes.” The authorities thought the story could begin and end there: bodies found, case closed. 11 more prostitutes dead. Done.
The $100,000 reward for information leading to the killers was rarely advertised, and by most accounts from the families of the missing and dead, the police have been less than enthusiastic about pursuing the case. When challenged on their lack of results they said, “The only suspects we have are dead.”
I often found myself wondering if that would fly if these were 11 white college students found buried under a football field...
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Adriann Barboa @'Alternet'
WikiLeaks has created a new media landscape
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: an early and brilliant executor of what is being revealed as a more general pattern. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images
WikiLeaks affects one of the key tensions in democracies: the government needs to be able to keep secrets, but citizens need to know what is being done in our name. These requirements are fundamental and incompatible; like the trade-offs between privacy and security, or liberty and equality, different countries in different eras find different ways to negotiate those competing needs.
In the case of state secrets v citizen oversight, however, there is one constant risk: since deciding what is a secret is itself a secret, there is always a risk that the government will simply hide an increasing amount of material of public concern. One response to this risk is the leaker, someone who believes that key elements of political life are being wrongly kept from public view, and who circulates that material on his or her own.
Because this tension between governments and leakers is so important, and because WikiLeaks so dramatically helps leakers, it isn't just a new entrant in the existing media landscape. Its arrival creates a new landscape.
This transformation is under-appreciated. The press often covers WikiLeaks as a series of unfortunate events, one crisis or scandal after another. And Julian Assange, of course, is catnip – brilliant, opinionated, a monocle and a Persian cat away from looking like a Bond villain. The press has covered him as dutifully as any movie star, while paying too little attention to what his invention means about the wider world.
To understand the system WikiLeaks is disrupting, it helps to focus on a key moment of its formation. In 1946, the English-speaking Allies – the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – decided that the pooling of their intelligence efforts set up during the conflict was too useful to end, even though the war had. The result, the blandly named UKUSA Agreement, was in the main a way for those governments to share foreign intelligence with each other.
The pact, however, did have one important domestic effect. It was illegal for those governments to spy on their own citizens. It was not, however, illegal for them to spy on each others' citizens. The agreement provided means for sharing the resulting observations without violating domestic laws.
For half a century, from 1946 to 2005, this use of transnational networks to get around national controls was asymmetric: governments could use this technique to surveil citizens, but not vice-versa. In 2006, WikiLeaks launched, holding out the possibility of evening up the odds, however slightly, in favour of the citizens. For the first three years of its existence, this change was more potential than actual, but in 2010, with the release of the Collateral Murder video, the Afghan war logs, and, most significantly, the US embassy cables, increased oversight of the state by citizens became real.
Limits on such leaking aren't just about threats to the leaker. There are also threats to the publishers. Sometimes the threats are formal; the UK has an Official Secrets Act. Sometimes they are informal; the US press is held in partial check by their need for long-term co-operation with the government. So long as a leak had to appear in one country's press to affect that country's politics, the relationship between the state and the press was contained by national borders.
Until WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks, as my colleague Jay Rosen points out, is a truly transnational media organisation. We have many international media organisations, of course, Havas and the BBC and al-Jazeera, but all of those are still headquartered in one country. WikiLeaks is headquartered on the web; there is no one set of national laws that can be brought to bear on it, nor is there any one national regime that can shut it down.
WikiLeaks allows leakers transnational escape from national controls. Now, and from now on, a leaker with domestic secrets has no need of the domestic press, and indeed will avoid leaking directly to them if possible, to escape national pressure on national publishers to keep national secrets.
WikiLeaks has not been a series of unfortunate events, and Assange is not a magician – he is simply an early and brilliant executor of what is being revealed as a much more general pattern, now spreading. Al-Jazeera and the Guardian created a transnational network to release the Palestine papers, without using WikiLeaks as an intermediary, and Daniel Domscheit-Berg is in the process of launching OpenLeaks, which will bring WikiLeaks-like capability to any publisher that wants it. It is possible to imagine that secrets from Moscow, Rome or Johannesburg will be routed through Iceland, Costa Rica, or even a transnational network of servers volunteered by private citizens.
The state will fight back, of course. They will improve their controls on secrets, raise surveillance and punishment of possible leakers, try to negotiate multilateral media controls. But even then, the net change is likely to be advantageous to the leakers – less free than today, perhaps, but more free than prior to 2006. Assange has claimed, when the history of statecraft of the era is written, that it will be divided into pre- and post-WikiLeaks periods. This claim is grandiose and premature; it is not, however, obviously wrong.
Clay Shirky @'The Guardian'
The Power Of Nightmares
The Power Of Nightmares
Part one of the series explains the origins of Islamism and Neo-Conservatism. It shows Egyptian civil servant Sayyid Qutb, depicted as the founder of modern Islamist thought, visiting America to learn about the education system, but becoming disgusted with what he saw as a corruption of morals and virtues in western society through individualism. When he returns to Egypt, he is disturbed by westernisation under Gamal Abdel Nasser and becomes convinced that in order to save society it must be completely restructured along the lines of Islamic law while still using western technology. He also becomes convinced that this can only be accomplished through the use of an elite "vanguard" to lead a revolution against the established order. Qutb becomes a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and, after being tortured in one of Nasser's jails, comes to believe that western-influenced leaders can justly be killed for the sake of removing their corruption. Qutb is executed in 1966, but he influences the future mentor of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to start his own secret Islamist group. Inspired by the 1979 Iranian revolution, Zawahiri and his allies assassinate Egyptian president Anwar Al Sadat, in 1981, in hopes of starting their own revolution. The revolution does not materialise, and Zawahiri comes to believe that the majority of Muslims have been corrupted not only by their western-inspired leaders, but Muslims themselves have been affected by jahilliyah and thus both may be legitimate targets of violence if they do not join him. They continued to have the belief that a vanguard was necessary to rise up and overthrow the corrupt regime and replace with a pure Islamist state.
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GregMitch Greg Mitchell
Okay, bookstore activists, time to get busy again and place the new Rumsfeld memoir in the "True Crime" section.
Ex-Taliban base commander collapses in Guantánamo shower, dies
A 48-year-old ex-Taliban commander dropped dead of an apparent heart attack after exercising on an elliptical machine inside Guantánamo's most populous prison camp, the military said Thursday.
The dead man, Awal Gul, had been in U.S. custody since Christmas 2001 and at the prison camps in southeast Cuba for more than eight years. He was designated by the Obama administration as one of 48 ``indefinite detainees,'' meaning the U.S. would neither repatriate him nor put him on trial.
Gul was working out Tuesday night in a collective cellblock at the cement penitentiary-style building called Camp 6, said Navy Cmdr. Tamsen Reese, a prison camps spokeswoman.
``He went to go take a shower and apparently collapsed in the shower,'' Reese said. ``Detainees on the cellblock then assisted him in getting to the guard station.''
From there he was taken to a prison camp clinic, then to the Navy base hospital, some miles away, but could not be saved despite what the commander called ``extensive life saving measures.''
Gul is the seventh war-on-terror detainee to die during the nine years the Pentagon has confined some 800 men and boys to the prisons at Guantánamo.
Gul had never been charged with a crime during his more-than-eight-year detention as a suspected base commander for the Taliban...
The dead man, Awal Gul, had been in U.S. custody since Christmas 2001 and at the prison camps in southeast Cuba for more than eight years. He was designated by the Obama administration as one of 48 ``indefinite detainees,'' meaning the U.S. would neither repatriate him nor put him on trial.
Gul was working out Tuesday night in a collective cellblock at the cement penitentiary-style building called Camp 6, said Navy Cmdr. Tamsen Reese, a prison camps spokeswoman.
``He went to go take a shower and apparently collapsed in the shower,'' Reese said. ``Detainees on the cellblock then assisted him in getting to the guard station.''
From there he was taken to a prison camp clinic, then to the Navy base hospital, some miles away, but could not be saved despite what the commander called ``extensive life saving measures.''
Gul is the seventh war-on-terror detainee to die during the nine years the Pentagon has confined some 800 men and boys to the prisons at Guantánamo.
Gul had never been charged with a crime during his more-than-eight-year detention as a suspected base commander for the Taliban...
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Carol Rosenberg @'Miami Herald'
Read the comments & weep!
Friday 4 February 2011
'The Shirt That Hurts'
Robbie Fowler of the Perth Glory A-League club poses in a Liverpool shirt with “Torres” on the back at AK Reserve on February 4, 2011 in Perth, Australia. Western Australian personalities are being encouraged to wear “The Shirt That Hurts” to help raise money for the Premier’s Disaster Relief Appeal, which will assist the rebuilding of Queensland after the recent floods. (Photo by Paul Kane/Getty Images)
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evgenymorozov Evgeny Morozov
As long as so much of the crucial infrastructure for digital activism is provided by corporations, its full potential will not be realized
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