The Left Forum 2014 (audio)

Amber Larson, Pfc. Sandoval, Pat Macpherson, Wisdom Quarterly; NYC, LeftForum.org

Left Forum 2014 Special Programming (KPFKorg) (ARCHIVE)

Topanga Days Hippie Fest (May 24-26)

Wisdom Quarterly; TopangaDays.com

Once a year, typically Memorial Day weekend in late May, a dance, contemporary crafts, performance art, and music festival is held to support the activities of the... in Hollywood's back yard. More

United We Stand Festival (Occupy.com) FREE!

Pat Macpherson (occupy.com), CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; United We Stand Festival

A series of college campus concerts kicks off today at UCLA with Public Enemy, Wu-Tang Clan, and more independent candidates than the mind can easily contemplate (The Festival)

"One movement" -- 99% against criminal banks, Occupy LA (srilankanguardian.org)

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Tickets, tickets, I need tickets! - It's free now.

NOW FREE OF CHARGE! The Woodstock United We Stand Festival show has neither been rescheduled nor cancelled. It is relocated! Check for new venue. Ticketmaster has issued refunds, and anyone who got tickets through a non-refundable donation to Free & Equal will get priority seating. We'll see everyone today unless the LA Weekly is right.

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United We Stand Music Fest Calls on Youth to Seize Politics – and Power

(Occupy.com, May 8, 2014)

Recognized names in American media, music, politics, and activism will assemble today -- Saturday, May 10th -- for the inaugural United We Stand Festival. Then the show moves to a state near you.

Today's show is at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion -- kicking off a 10-campus bus tour that aims to educate and empower youth to assert a new electoral force in politics.

(N.W.A. the West Coast Public Enemy) "Express Yourself" - I'm expressing with my full capabilities/ And now I'm living in correctional facilities/ Cuz some don't agree with how I do this/ I get straight and meditate like a Buddhist..." Dr. Dre (the First Billionaire of Hip Hop) was going to come, but he is too busy counting Apple, Inc. money.
 

Solutions: Back to the land to garden but this time with organic permaculture (Occupy)

 

"...with liberty and justice for sale."

Organized by Christina Tobin and the Free and Equal Elections Foundation, the festival features TV host Larry King, former U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich, author and congressional candidate Marianne Williamson, David Bronner of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, former Green presidential candidate Jill Stein, and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson.

In Tobin's words, the unique brand of politics, activism, and music coming together into a single festival is "designed to inspire America’s youth to educate themselves and exercise their civil liberties to become true advocates for change.”

Awake the Nation! See all UWS Festival details at Wisdom Quarterly

 

Media makers from RT (Russia Today)'s Abby Martin to Ben Swann, Lee Camp, David Swanson, Amber Lyon, Josh Tolley, Brad Friedman (KPFK 90.7 FM), and Occupy.com's Michael Levitin will also be speaking at the festival.

Music will include performances by Public Enemy, Immortal Technique, Wu-Tang Clan, Playing for Change, Cynic, Rooftop Revolutionaries, Sounds of Solidarity, The Siren, Luminaries, and A-Alikes, among others. More

Pussy Riot's Nadia visits Cecily McMillan after first NYC O.W.S. conviction (Occupy)

I am the 1%. Don't go to UWSF!

We are the 99%. Go to the Fest!

It's Complicated! The Social Lives of Teens

CC Liiu, Dev, Wisdom Quarterly; Dannah Boyd (sciencefriday.com); Elizabeth Blair (NPR)

Mmm, like, excuse me. This conversation is kinda like private. Like you wouldn't understand.

OMG, I can't believe you'd talk to that fart-chicken, she is such a biznatch, like, I don't want you to talk to her anymore, or I will totally go ape$hit, I mean it! - Inhale, girl, inhale.

    

Ahhh, I'm going all crazy! - Me, too!

The practice of hiding in plain sight is not new. When ancient Greeks wanted to send a message over great distances, they could not rely on privacy. Messengers could easily be captured and encoded messages deciphered.

 

The most secure way to send a "private" message was to make sure that no one knew that the message existed in the first place. Historical sources describe the extraordinary lengths to which Greeks went, hiding messages within wax tablets or tattoo­ing them on a slave’s head and allowing the slave’s hair to grow out before sending him or her out to meet the message’s recipient. 

 

When I hold my fingers like this, in one of my mudras, it means Pat likes me!!!

  

It was all snap googly and insta, man. - What?

Although these messages could be easily read by anyone who both­ered to look, they became visible only if the viewer knew to look for them in the first place. Cryptographers describe this practice of hiding messages in plain sight as steganography.

 

Children love to experiment with encoding messages. From pig latin to invisible ink pens, children explore hidden messages when they’re imagining themselves as spies and messengers. 

 

It's like totally complicated (amazon.com)

And as children grow up, they look for more sophisticated means of passing messages that elude the watchful eyes of adults.

 

In watching teens navigate public networks, I became enamored of how they were regularly encoding hidden meaning in publicly available messages. They were engaged in a practice that Alice Marwick and I called “social steg­anography,” or hiding messages in plain sight by leveraging shared knowledge and cues embedded in particular social contexts.

 

This uses countless linguistic and cultural tools -- including lyrics, in-jokes, and culturally specific references to encode messages that are functionally accessible but simultaneously mean­ingless. 

 

Obama and the NSA may spy, but we... XOXO

Some teens use pronouns while others refer to events, use nicknames, and employ predetermined code words to share gossip that lurking adults cannot interpret. Many teens write in ways that will blend in and be invisible to or misinterpreted by adults. Whole con­versations about school gossip, crushes... More + AUDIO

• The Internet's dark side exposed in three new films

Online, researcher says, teens do what they've ALWAYS done

Elizabeth Blair (Morning Edition, NPR.org, Feb. 25, 2014)

Don't call me, just text, 'kay? - O.K.

Researcher Danah Boyd is obsessed with how teenagers use the Internet. For the legions of adults who are worried about them, that's a good thing.
 

With a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, a Masters from MIT, and as a senior researcher at Microsoft, Boyd is something of a star in the world of social media. For her new book, It's Complicated, she spent about eight years studying teenagers and how they interact online.

 

She says she wrote the book in part to help parents, educators, and journalists relax. "The kids are all right," she says.

 

Before Facebook, before Myspace, Boyd (who prefers to use lowercase for her first and last name like e.e. cummings) was an early adopter of the Internet. She got hooked when she was a teenager in the mid-1990s living with her family in a small town in Pennsylvania. It was "inspiring and exciting" to suddenly have access "to people who were more interesting than the people I went to school with," she says.

 

Yay, the kids are all right! (Danah Boyd/CDI)

Today, boyd is one of those people who seems to have memorized several maps of the World Wide Web. She roams like the rest of us, but she also seems to know exactly where to go and what to do when she gets there. She's got a variety of different Twitter accounts. 

"I have both my formal, professional @zephoria account, but then I also have a personal account -- which is me joking around with friends -- and then I have an even sillier account which is me pretending to be my 7-month-old son," says boyd.

"Flickr," she says, "has been a home for a long time to share photos with friends," and LinkedIn is where she spends professional time.

 

On the subject of Facebook, boyd rolls her eyes. Yes, she's there, but she finds it a very hard space to manage. More + LISTEN (5:30)

• Hey, kids, get the shovels! California couple finds 10 million dollars in gold coins in back yard 
• Teen wants to bring light to dark world of the poor
• Three musicians crushed at Bolivian Carnival celebrations
• PHOTOS: Carnival in Brazil: Feathers, Floats, Bodies

Comedy: Monty Python to reunite! (video)

Wisdom Quarterly; Monty Python's Flying Circus ("Life of Brian"); Mox News (MOX News)

Brilliant satirical look at Western Judeo-Christian religio-cultural foundations ("Life of Brian")

The remaining members of the troupe announce a reunion on the GMT (BBC.co.uk), and the legend will continue for world-famous British comedians. Full (Telegraph.co.uk)

Brian is mistaken for a messiah, runs to hide with yogi hermit

 

"Loretta" skit, "Life of Brian" as feminist radicals in-fight

On the extreme edge of satire: Hitler and Nazis in England

"Xmas Without China" (film)

CC Liu, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; Tom Xia (kickstarter); Conscientious Projector

Mary's Christmas Museum for an inclusive Xtmas (Kevin Dooley/flickr.com)

(xmaswithoutchina) "Xmas Without China

Chinese immigrant Tom Xia challenges his American neighbors, the Joneses, to one Christmas season without using anything made in China!

"Xmas Without China" is a feature documentary set around the Christmas holiday in Arcadia, California, a Pasadena-adjacent neighborhood in the San Gabriel Valley that used to be predominantly Anglo, but is now half Asian.

 

Tom Xia, a Chinese-American immigrant, challenges his neighbors, the Jones family, to spend the entire month leading up to the commercial holiday season with no Chinese products in their homes and without purchasing any Chinese products for the holidays.

"Black Friday" is coming. Where will you be?

 

(Kevin Dooley/flickr.com)

Fed up with food and toy recalls, the Joneses take up the challenge. But the tables turn when Tim Jones provokes Tom about who he is and why he's so proud of China. As the Joneses struggle to figure out how to have a simpler Christmas in a time when "We don't make anything anymore." They also begin to think about just how related they are to China. 

 

Fed up with the mudslinging between the two countries, Tom finds himself on an unlikely journey to break down stereotypes between China and America. He find his own place between these worlds.

 

We shot the first half of the film, and in the wonderful way of documentary, we discovered that Tom's challenge brings us a fascinating story of the unusual relationship between two families who are each trying to adapt to the enormous changes that are defining our world today. More