Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

	Daft Punk - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger .mp3
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Totally Gaga! - Mint Sauce, Mustard or Horseradish?

Lady Gaga wearing a controversial meat dress at a music awards event held in Los Angeles on Sunday night.

The wacky pop diva managed to offend vegetarians, animal rights' campaigners and food safety obsessives.

Lady Gaga's push for world domination is almost complete!

She shocked and amused the fashion world on Sunday night, when she wore an outfit apparently made totally out of cuts of raw meat, to the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) in Los Angeles.

The 24-year-old global pop phenomenon picked up a total of eight gongs on the night, most for her song 'Bad Romance'. The video for 'Bad Romance' has been watched nearly 278 million times to date on ' YouTube ' and music video site ' Vevo.'

The meat dress was just one of three outrageous costumes dreamed up for the evening by Gaga, who has made a name as much for her crazy fashions as for her music.

She arrived in a spectacular outfit by the late Alexander McQueen: a Victorian-inspired gown and a Mohawk feather headdress atop a long white wig, with monstrous stilettos that made her look like she was on stilts.

Later, she changed into a black dress so overflowing she needed help to get onstage.

Gaga was teary-eyed during her victories, and after the show, she told Ellen DeGeneres:
"Well, it is certainly no disrespect to anyone that is vegan or vegetarian, because as you know, I am the most judgment-free human being on the earth. However, it has many interpretations. For me this evening, if we don't stand up for what we believe in and fight for our rights pretty soon, we're going to have as much rights as the meat on our bones. And, I am not a piece of meat."

Earlier this month, Gaga wore a meat bikini (right) for the cover of Vogue Hommes Japan.

Rivals such as Katy Perry and Ke$ha did try to compete for the limelight.
Perry was dolled up liked a 40s pin-up girl and had her nails decorated with portraits of her fiancé Russell Brand, while Ke$ha copied the Gaga book by turning up in a dress made out of black bin-liners.

The only questions remaining after the VMAs are how can the girl born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta top her latest performances, and how far will she go?

Those who have worked with her say she is fiercely intelligent and very driven, with an instinctive gift for creating hook-laden pop songs.
Her rise, after being spotted by Interscope music executive Vincent Herbert, has been spectacular, and she was recently named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Lady Gaga could outdo even the apparently immortal Madonna and become the biggest pop star in history.

May Day Riot in Santa Cruz (Video)

WATCH: "Anarchy Riot Santa Cruz Ca May Day 2010" on YouTube by alansitarbrown & "Violent May Day March in Santa Cruz" on YouTube by ksbwtv

Santa Cruz has suffered an incident of mass vandalism that is being labeled an "anarchist riot" in the news media. Cowardly and misguided individuals appeared at an un-permitted "May Day party" in Downtown Santa Cruz with masks, spray cans, paint bombs and rocks to destroy the message of international workers' rights. Instead they terrorized and destroyed our city, for the name of what exactly I'm not at all clear.

These nut jobs smashed a series of windows and sprayed anarchist graffiti on local businesses after turning a workers' rights rally into a riot. Whatever misguided notions they have about anarchism, or whatever message they were trying to convey, was smashed right along with the glass. Compounded by that only cowards wear masks to get "the word out," for whatever that means to them. If you have a cause that you are passionate enough to protest about, use your face and real name to stand behind this cause and not the cloak of a mask.

These supposed connections between a local "anarchist's cafe" and the madness in Downtown are weak, in my mind. Those groups are usually book clubs, not bomb-throwers and masked vandals like in some common misconceptions. But I do not speak from any personal experience on this specific group.

I've asked around a little and nobody knows who did this. I'm going with the theory it's just some cretins with no message at all beyond destruction and fear-mongering the public.

The real tragedy here is the taint to the righteous cause of workers' rights worldwide that started when the organizing group, who are now under FBI scrutiny, refused to gather the proper permit.

I can report that unnamed local leaders were urging these people to file for the permit, hoping to close the open door to incidents like this one.

I think the poor police response time is the real story here. Reportedly, police were led away from the rally by a pair of false 911 calls designed to distract them from the situation brewing Downtown; however, according to multiple eyewitnesses (of which I am not one) as well as the included YouTube video the police took over an hour to respond.

Merced Sun-Star:

"We don't think this was an unsophisticated group of protesters; we think this is an organized group of anarchists," Santa Cruz Police spokesman Zach Friend said Monday, adding that investigators believe the anarchists had sought to strain city resources.

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In the Political Internet this riot is being framed as having some connection to liberal progressives by the far right-wing. This is entirely untrue and goes to show how little these misguided conservatives understand how liberals feel about might-makes-right kind of messages like terrorizing people with riots and the mass destruction of property.

Unlike the cases of obvious tea party vandalism against pro-health care reform Democrats, there is no resounding vocal effort to excuse the actions of all these possibly politically motivated vandals and domestic terrorists on behalf of liberal progressives as there most certainly was on behalf of the "tea party conservatives."

Whatever Free Speech you want to spread is fine, and odds are we'll disagree about something somewhere, but making threats, inciting violence, destroying property and wearing masks is just the tactics of terrorists and fascists.

YouTube Changes Its Face On Us

This new streamlined YouTube is improved in the sense that we can see a billion & one videos lined up, but somehow it feels like they just made the whole site a video version of Twitter.

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I think it's all a big grand master plan to get everybody on Facebook in the whole universe. We will make you Facebook even if you don't own a computer, all devices must have Facebook Apps to be worthy of creation!

LiberalViewer Tackles "Citizens United v. FEC"

 

LiberalViewer of YouTube attempts to set the record straight on mischaracterizations of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission."

It appears based on watching this video that the ruling is greatly misunderstood by both sides and I myself am inspired to try and read the whole 180+ page Opinion of the Court.

I am in no way advocating the chilling of free speech by value of it simply coming from a corporation or union.

It is a falsehood to state that this ruling allows for "unlimited contributions to political candidates" and also a point that is not within the primary argument against this ruling, as it did not effect those existing limitations.

I believe, personally, that the argument made that this will benefit non-profit advocacy organizations over private sector special interests has some serious flaws in it, while it is not altogether untrue.

It's true that some of the confusing regulations surrounding political advocacy have been discarded in this recent decision, but it is the structure and measure of what they have done that is so reprehensible.

Were it to be the case that a corporation had to declare their logo and "I Support This Ad" with the CEO standing there; then this decision would be far different in implications to our political process.

This logic that major multinational corporations will for some reason "not go there" with political issues is true to a certain extent but it precludes the simple truth that when seeing itself as threatened, as the insurance companies did the early days of the Health Care Debate, they will spend whatever they can as fast as they can to flood us with ... media. Media like television ads.

How quickly we forget as a nation, as a people, that Sen. John Kerry was literally "slimed" out of his equal opportunity at the democratic process in a bid for president no less by what we now call "swing voting" but if you track this story out it was a bunch of frauds who demeaned their personal character in a outright smear campaign. One of them lives right here in Santa Cruz, California and just like the Bush administration itself they are taking no responsibility for this in public.

How easy it will be now for a nameless silent corporate partner to just bankroll a bunch of TV ads either pro or con for a candidate that had policies that just might ask them to give a little back after they take so much from the environment, for instance. If understand that McDonald's is Pro-McCain, just as a random example, then many of my concerns go away. But as it stands the Sierra Club, the NRA and the example of the video clip Microsoft could all wildly flood a campaign with media while grassroots money and dedicated social advocates of any position would be overshadowed.

Also this argument that money doesn't win elections is also partly false. Money is not enough, as the examples of Ross Perot and Mitt Romney illustrate, but the 2008 Campaign for the White House was in part decided on the dollars and cents. Of course you need the solid candidate, as the Democrats held with Obama, to seal the deal but my studies in Political Science completely disagree with the scoffing of this notion of looking at the financial impact and earnings to get the best picture.

As I stated before, I believe I may have to read this entire decision before I am totally satisfied I understand it fully.

For now, I am strongly standing with the words of President Obama in his State of the Union address calling this decision a means by which we will "open the floodgates" to foreign special interests and corporate lobbyist influence over the actual results of our elections themselves.

I feel both the SCOTUS and perhaps LiberalViewer as well have concerned themselves too much with entities that deserve very little concern or express protections of the court while neglecting to see the ramifications of said decision on the people that truly represent democracy at it's core.

To put it plainly: this appears a "open door" policy in terms of slash-and-burn negative political ads at the end of a campaign cycle to force a candidate to lose based on hyperbole, as we have seen before in politics. Slime works, and I as I understand it the SCOTUS just ruled in favor of slime in our elections.

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UPDATE!

Russ Feingold at CounterPunch.org explains what Sam Donaldson was speaking about that I referred to as "inaccurate" in the above piece.

I was under the impression that he was saying that Soft Money limits are now gone under this ruling but in fact it he was speaking to the issue of spending directly out of the treasury without limit.

***Thanks to Paul J. Rourke for bringing this to my attention and providing the link.

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Don't worry if you answer the door in it and your friends start laughing at you, it's all in good fun!

Arthur C. Clarke: A Tribute to Genius

Arthur C. Clarke was a genius science fiction author.

I am in love with a certain short story of his found squeezed next to one I am far less fond of, but is still a good read.

"The City and The Stars" & "The Sands of Mars" are two different short stories contained in one novel.

From FantasicFiction.com:

THE CITY AND THE STARS The 10-billion-year-old metropolis of Diaspar is humanity's last home. Alone among immortals, the only man born in 10 million years desperately wants to find what lies beyond the City. His quest will uncover the destiny of a people...and a galaxy.

"Diaspar" is, in itself, a commentary on all society.

The entire body of this short story is like a large running commentary on the arrogance of humanity, and it's immense value as well.

This place is like a real city in my mind.

One possible outcome of all human civilization. One of many possible worlds.

A place of stagnation via perfection. Tyranny via acceptance.

A world where truly original thoughts and adventuring spirits are not just silenced, but wholly absent.

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For those who dive deeply into his work, there is much to discover.

Not only did he accurately predict advances in science by means of science fiction, but I believe he held an insight to the greater elements at play in our world:

The Human Condition

The Foundations of Society

The Collective Self

Kudos to LiberalViewer of YouTube

Have you ever seen this YouTube Channel called "LiberalViewer"?

I personally would aspire toward having a blog more to the nature of the work of LiberalViewer in days to come.

See for yourself:

George Carlin Was Pure Genius

I was feeling in the the foulest of foul moods, so I decided to watch some comedy clips on everyone's favorite time-suck: YouTube.

 

 

I just recently watched Bill Maher's "Religulous" for the first time. I found the movie very entertaining and very informative.

But I also found it somewhat like watching the internet-sensation "Zeitgeist" more than anything else in terms of the research and review of all perspectives toward biblical history and human history.

But you really got to talk to, or read the books of, people who have studied this to death because (1) I'm not an expert and (2) I don't want to go there.

 

 

In the interest of full disclosure: I am one of those people who doesn't know when or how to shut up.

 

 

 

"Hey! Hey! Hey! Time for a few fart jokes!"

 

 

 

 

 

Triumph the Insult-Comic Dog

"Their heads filled with talking points. Their bellies filled with pure-grain alcohol."

"Can you finish me off now?"

"Your show sucks so hard the sides of my TV caved in."

"It's called 'doggie-style', okay grandma?"

FPSD Kills!

Guantanamo Closure Policy Discussion on World Focus Online