The National Lawyers Guild has a new report on state-level versions of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act that have been popping up around the country. As I’ve reported here previously, on laws such as the California Animal Enterprise Protection Act, they use sweeping, overly broad definitions of terrorism that are, in some cases, even worse than the federal law. (Here’s one of my all-time favorite blog posts in which a Tennessee lawmaker describes how similar legislation is needed to combat “left-wing eco-greenies.”
Take a look at the full report, and the influence of a corporate front group called the American Legislative Exchange Council: “Beyond the AETA: How Corporate-Crafted Legislation Brands Activists as Terrorists.”
As NLG Executive Director Heidi Boghosian said:
“Although many states considered and outright rejected the ALEC bill soon after its release, there are still signs that parts of the legislation are being incorporated in some states’ laws that equate animal rights activists with domestic terrorism.”
The National Lawyers Guild continues to be out front on these issues, with its publication of a know your rights booklet for activists, and it’s Green Scare hotline, 1-888-NLG-ECOL. And NLG lawyers around the country have been working hard on behalf of animal rights and environmental activists labeled “terrorists.” If you’re a lawyer, please join the Guild. And if you’re not a lawyer, write a check, volunteer, or just drop them a note of support.
Related posts:
- Corporate Front Group Warns PETA’s New Neighbors of “Violence”
- Internal Industry Documents Show Plans for Labeling Activists as “Eco-Terrorists” (Part 1 of 3)
- South Dakota “Eco-terrorism” Law Shot Down as Unnecessary
Tags: ALEC, Animal Enterprise Protection Act, Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act
Mostly for Chillbot75, but this is some of the shit where we're all becoming "terrorists."
I have a doctor's appointment on Dec 22, I plan to tell the internist that the latest medication is having limited effect. I'm feeling pretty decent today, but I had planned to come to the library yesterday and just wasn't up to it. It's very annoying because I went to fencing practice on Thursday night and had a good time, but I feel like I pay for it because I am so tired the next day. *sigh* Quit the endocrinologist a couple weeks ago -- after all this time, I'm convinced that's not the way to get this thing figured out.
Just posted pics from the fencing tournament last month, check 'em out if you're interested!
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=12
- Mood:
disgruntled - Music:Lily Allen - "Alright, Still" album
Beta Update: Linux, Mac, and Windows
Tuesday, December 8, 2009 | 09:05
Labels: Beta updates
We're happy to announce that Google Chrome 4.0.249.30 has been promoted to the Beta channel on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
In addition to introducing our first Beta versions on Mac and Linux, this update introduces Google Chrome extensions on Windows and Linux. Read more about this Beta update on the Google Chrome Blog.
This release is the same as 4.0.249.25 with a fix to make the HTML video tag work.
Users can subscribe to the Beta channel by installing from
- Windows: http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?e
xtra=betachannel - Mac: http://www.google.com/chrome?platform=ma
c - Linux: http://www.google.com/chrome?platform=li
nux
Mac users who previously installed the Dev channel release will automatically be migrated to the Beta channel. If you want to get back on the Google Chrome Mac Dev channel, follow the instructions at http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel.>
(A new Dev channel release is coming soon.)
Mark Larson
Google Chrome Team
Ok folks, it's time to get on Google Chrome, and see why your internet is so slow (hint: you're on an old, slow, bloated browser.)
- Mood:
awake
There have been some good things, I tried to post stuff to Flickr pretty regularly. My dad retired after 38 years in the ministry, he had a nice send-off from Holy Cross back in June. My brother got married in July, he & Jen had a very nice ceremony. Jen is going to school in Missouri, so I haven't had a lot of time to hang out with her, but she seems like a cool person! Also moved the Summit City Fencing Club down to St. Henry Community Center & Catholic Church over the summer, we have practices down there on Paulding Rd nowadays. Pretty nice facility, I'm hoping we'll be able to bring our membership numbers back up in the coming months. Started hosting "game afternoons" a few months back, having people over every few weeks to hang out and play board games. (Once Dad retired, weekends were a lot less stressful since he didn't have to preach and I could more easily accommodate guests!) Had a nice birthday in November, my buddy Andrew came up to visit and we hung out that Sunday. Another big reason I'm trying to get more into LJ again is that, as a joint b-day/Christmas present, my parents paid for the lion's share for a new Dell laptop! I sold my old desktop to my dad, so between that and the gift, it almost totally covered the new computer, which has been very useful.
Anyway, I guess those are the highlights. I still log into MySpace every once in a while, but my big thing lately has been Facebook. It seems like a ton of people I used to know are on there, it's been fun to reconnect a little! Feel free to "friend" me if you're on either or both of those! I've made promises about communication before and haven't followed through, so I'm not going to do that again, but hopefully I can be a little more faithful about this kind of thing in the coming weeks. We shall see. Hope all my LJ friends are happy, healthy, and wise!
- Mood:
geeky
Today marks the fortieth anniversary of the death of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. On December 4th, 1969, Chicago police raided Fred Hampton’s apartment and shot and killed him in his bed. He was just twenty-one years old. Black Panther leader Mark Clark was also killed in the raid. While authorities claimed the Panthers had opened fire on the police who were there to serve a search warrant for weapons, evidence later emerged that told a very different story: that the FBI, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office and the Chicago police conspired to assassinate Fred Hampton.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/4/th
e_assassination_of_fred_hampton_how
MP3:
It really riles me up when I hear about the police, the city, the government abusing their power. It makes me SO FUCKING MAD, and want to hate and kill pigs. I can't believe the world we live in, and how much NOTHING HAS CHANGED. I like how the segment ends with the author, attorney Jeffrey Haas, tying the cover-up to Rumsfield and Cheney. Fuck...Nothing really has changed.
On an interesting note, I saw one of the old street thugs that hang out on our street buy beer for some little middle-school homies - still in their school uniforms.
There's something that's been on my mind of late & I want to start by saying this: I've found the divide. I've walked up to it, looked across to the other side, walked the edge a bit, & I'm curious. This is the divide between my usual approach (unfailing positivity) & the OTHER side, a practical & realistic daily outlook. It's been an argument of mine for...well, MANY years...that people who claim to be realists are actually usually pessimists in disguise. And that's true pretty often, because let's face it, most things in life don't come easy. So, this "walkabout" is pretty uncharacteristic of me, being a Mr.Sunshine-type personality (not in an annoying way (I hope), but more like, hey, a great idea would be if... & in just those three little dots would be a specific way in which the world could be a better place, according to me).
You see, when given the choice to view the world from the perspective of 'What is Possible' Vs the perspective of 'What Is', I don't just prefer the former, I lean on it...I trust in its strength. The issue here is this: Maybe I should be the one GIVING it that strength in the first place. IT should be leaning on ME. Wouldn't that make more sense? Now, I'm not sure how best to make this change. Change is NOT, as it turns out, my forte'. But it occurred to me recently that it could be just as simple as shifting my weight around (the backswing of that thought is that it could be pretty complex & turn parts of my life upside-down...oy vey). I really do need to get good at this making changes thing. I'm a sucker for a routine, for little nuggets of happiness that are easy to find because they've always been there waiting for me to pick up on my well-worn path.
Not so long ago, I was an unstoppable force of creativity...a raging river of ideas, a bouncing electron. I feel like I'm slowly getting back to that of late. I'm older & calmer & slightly more poised now, so I hope this doesn't come in the form of a torrent of big ideas. A manageable meandering stream will do for me now. What I'm looking for is this:
The type of creativity that comes with times of uncertainty
- the times of uncertainty
+ the comfort & grace that come with adulthood
________________________________________
(INSERT ANSWER HERE)
And before we go any further, I do have a few questions.
1. Is that comfort & grace an illusion, or some fuzzy story we tell ourselves when we think of our parents when we were young?
2. Is it something we've culled from the combination of movies & advertisements?
3. Does it come as a sort of packaged deal with great quantities of money?
4. Do Age & Wisdom happen naturally together, or does one really have to work at the latter?
Most of my childhood memories are pretty pleasant, & in them my parents more or less had things figured out pretty well.
5. Does that make me a revisionist historian?
I'm not trying to get all heavy on ya'll or anything. These are just things I wonder as I start to peek around the bend past the old "what happens this weekend" & "what happens this summer" line of thinking into real structural questions. How & where & with what will I build my future?
Time For Musicians To Take Charge: Stop Waiting For Others To Fix The Music Business
from the or-get-out-of-the-way dept
Dave Allen, who is both a successful musician (founding member of Gang of Four) and a successful digital marketer and strategist for music business models, is preparing for next week's SFMusicTech event (reminder: Techdirt readers can get a discount) with a brilliant new manifesto of sorts, pointing out that it's time for musicians to stop blaming others and take charge: Dear Musicians: Please Be Brilliant or Get Out of The Way.
It has been more than a decade since I was last fully immersed in the recorded music business [and then only peripherally as GM of eMusic.com,] and I have long held out hope that musicians would ditch the old media model, both the business and the manufacturing sides, and fully embrace the huge possibilities that the unfettered social web allows them -- asymmetrical distribution as opposed to old media distribution silos, two-way communication with music fans as opposed to old media PR, and marketing tactics and an unparalleled universal sandbox in which to experiment.That sort of "woe is me, I'm a victim" situation is certainly getting tiresome, especially as we see more and more and more bands take charge of their own future and implement smarter and smater business models that are working wonders for those who embrace them. So, Allen points out, it's time to stop waiting for others to solve the business model issue, and take charge yourself (or, at the very least, partner with someone who can take charge for you):I am still waiting. Unfortunately my patience is now wearing thin. And my impatience is no longer with the record labels, it's with the musicians. Despite all the data and untold amounts of writing about the decline in music sales, mainly the fall off of CD sales, musicians appear to be sitting on their hands. The reason I am no longer impatient with record labels is because their business model is transparent -- they exist to make money from musicians. On the other hand, musicians are [or ought to be] immersed in their art; no one guarantees a living from the arts, but talk to the average musician about internet music distribution and you will often hear the same refrain -- "downloading and file-sharing is killing music and denying me a living.."
Now that the internet has provided disrupting producers with all the tools they need to bypass the existing recorded music system, there should be no excuse for musicians to not go it alone. Yet, the producers -- the musicians themselves, remain the problem. I believe that the safety and comfort offered to them in the past -- record label deals, publishing deals, old media distribution, plus MTV and commercial radio for the most successful -- created a diabolical music Nanny state, an addictive teat at which to suck that they are now having trouble weaning themselves off. I know there are many examples of musicians embracing the web but they have taken only baby steps and are in the minority -- the majority are still staring into the headlights. [I purposefully won't discuss Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails here as much has been written about their successful use of the social web and I consider them special cases.]It's a great manifesto (this is only a snippet -- the full thing is worth reading), and it's going to make Dave's session at SFMusicTech next week one not to miss (I just hope he's not on at the same time I am!).The Nanny state reduced risk taking and danger in popular music. The very founding spirit of rock and roll was danger. Danger as perceived by those who didn't understand the outburst of energy and excitement that this early musical form drew out of teenagers. Parents and adults in authority voiced their concerns and this led to ridiculous moments in musical history such as TV cameramen being told to only film Elvis Presley from the waist up.. If we fast forward to 1975 in the UK, we find that rock and roll, a mere 20 or so years later, with only a few exceptions, had become commercial, flabby, conservative and mostly dull. Then along came a new genre of music delivered by bands like the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Siouxie and the Banshees who injected rock with some street smarts and and sprinkled it with just a soupcon of danger. It was known as Punk Rock.
I bring up punk rock here as it defines a moment in rock music history that was as disruptive in 1976 as online music distribution became in the late 1990's. Punk rock challenged people's assumptions that popular music would always be, and could only be, controlled by large, well-capitalized, business organizations. Punk rock drove down production values and just like the Internet, became disruptive and leveled the playing field. Punk bands formed quickly, releasing records as 7" vinyl singles on their own equally quickly formed record labels. A long term career in music was not the point of this enterprise, many bands flamed out within six months of their existence. Small independent labels sprang up to cater to this avalanche of bands, offering more favorable contracts than the majors had in the past. Business is business though, and the small label owners had plans for growth that ultimately led to punk rock's demise. Soon enough punk rock was commoditized and, after a brief fling with Post-Punk, quickly fizzled leaving the stage for the New Romantics and their ilk. It wasn't long until it was business as usual for the record labels -- five years of promise had passed very quickly.
So I have to ask - why is there no online music equivalent of punk rock? Why is there no real and passionate embrace of the new?
Gang of Four is awesome, and it's rad that one of their founding members is pressuring the music industry to break out of their old business model.
Twilight fans can keep their shirts emblazoned with Robert Pattinson's face. The rest of us know that the only Team Edward worth belonging to is Team Edward James Olmos. And now you can wear your affiliation proudly.
Joel Watson drew this strip for HijiNKS Ensue, his thrice weekly webcomic about technology and geek culture:
Naturally, this spurred an immediate demand for an actual Team Edward James Olmos shirt, and Watson has not disappointed. The Team EJO shirt is available for $20 at the HijiNKS Ensue store.
moc.9oi@nerual.
Send an email to Lauren Davis, the author of this post, at ynhera@vb9.pbz
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sarah_mae13- Sarah Mae: Radical, Militant, YA Librarian
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- denzoner : Just listened to Amy Goodman's show on Fred Hampton... [+0]
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