Wednesday, December 26, 2018

MacArthur Foundation: WSR is a “visionary strategy… with potential to transform workplace environments across the global supply chain.” Coalition of Immokalee Workers

Coalition of Immokalee Workers<workers@ciw-online.org>
Coalition of Immokalee Workers
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URGENT: Fight back against the Trump administration Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II and Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis

Alfred --
The Trump administration has released yet another craven attack on the poor: A proposed plan to gut the food assistance program millions of Americans rely on to feed themselves—just days before the holidays.
This latest attack would impose draconian work requirements on men and women seeking food assistance that have been proven to have a devastating impact on the working poor. It’s cruel, spineless, and utterly immoral.
Until we have created a nation in which no one has to decide between paying rent, having health insurance or buying food, then the war on poverty continues. Add your name to demand the administration abandon this morally bankrupt plan >>
That the Trump administration is announcing this plan just days before the holiday season, when families are joining together to celebrate, is despicable.
While the Trump administration and extremist politicians argue the nation’s poor aren’t working hard enough or can pull themselves out of poverty, they also refuse to raise wages, deny people access to care, and dismantle safety net programs like food assistance vital to their survival.
There are millions of poor people, largely children, relying on food assistance to meet their basic needs every single day. Yet extremist politicians continue to attack the poorest among us whether they be white, red, black, or brown. Through this policy violence, they are keeping people in poverty while ensuring the wealthy stay rich.
Challenge this last-minute violence toward those in most dire need: Join our call to reject this disgraceful plan by adding your name now >>
Forward together, not one step back,
Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II and Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis
President of Repairers of the Breach & Director of the Kairos Center
Co-Chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival
Sent via ActionNetwork.org. To update your email address, change your name or address, or to stop receiving emails from The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, please click here.

01/23 Technology, Power, and Resistance in the New Gilded Age: from the smartphones to AI

Charlie Welch<cwelch@tecschange.org>
*Technology, Power, and Resistance in the New Gilded Age: from the
smartphones to AI*

Please join Science for the People <https://scienceforthepeople.org/> on
*WednesdayJan 23^rd , 2019**from 7-9pm**at Boston University* for an
exciting discussion on the social implications of technology. We'll be
discussing the political implications on artificial intelligence and new
technology with a politically and technically informed conversation.
Featuring:

*Nicole Aschoff* <https://nicoleaschoff.com/>**- Editor of Jacobin
Magazine <https://jacobinmag.com/>, author of "The New Prophets of
Capital
<https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22551900-the-new-prophets-of-capital>"
(Verso 2015) and author of the forthcoming book "The Smartphone Society"
(Beacon 2019) based on thisarticle
<https://jacobinmag.com/2015/03/smartphone-usage-technology-aschoff>.

*Yardn Katz* <https://yarden.github.io/>- Systems Biology Fellow,
Harvard Medical School, member of Berkman Center, and author of
"Manufacturing the AI revolution"
<https://yarden.github.io/publication/ai_revolution/>

*Ben Tarnoff* <http://www.bentarnoff.com/>- Columnist for Guardian
Newspaper <https://www.theguardian.com/profile/ben-tarnoff>, organizer
with Tech Workers Coalition <https://techworkerscoalition.org/>, founder
and editor ofLogic Magazine <https://logicmag.io/>.

*Sponsored by:*Science for the People
<https://scienceforthepeople.org/>- Boston,Logic Magazine
<https://logicmag.io/>, Hariri Institute of Computing

The event will take place at the Boston University in the Hariri
Institute Seminar Room located on the Cummington Mall
<https://www.google.com/maps/place/BU+Hariri+Institute+for+Computing/@42.3489377,-71.1044839,18z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x89e379f0c4e57a97:0xf082dcc3e210c53c!8m2!3d42.3489357!4d-71.1033896>.

Updated info at https://physics.bu.edu/~pankajm/techpanel.html or
contact: pankajmehta AT protonmail.com <http://protonmail.com/>.
--
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Happy Birthday Keith Richards -The Limits of The Pacifist Message- John Lennon Tribute

DVD REVIEW

Come Together, John Lennon Tribute, Yoko Ono Productions, 2001


I am here to rain on this tribute to the work of John Lennon in New York City in early October 2001 on two counts- musically and politically. As to the music. I make no bones about the fact that, as a product of the Generation of ’68, I grew to adulthood with this music, however, in any choice between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, in my book the Stones win hands down. The same applies to comparisons to Lennon as an individual artist. John Lennon could write lyrics with the best of them, no question, but here is the real question- which song, for example, better expresses the sense of working class alienation and, more importantly, what to do about it- Lennon’s Working Class Hero or The Stones’ Street Fighting Man?

That said, even taking comparisons between artists out of consideration John Lennon’s work, as witnessed here, has not aged well. This, despite the profuse trade puffing by host Kevin Stacey and other narrators to the contrary. Part of this is because his works are so personal that they are not easily covered. Recently listening to some covers of the The White Album leads me to believe that this is true, as well, for most Beatles songs. Thus, the tribute, as a whole came off rather muzak-like, with the partial exception of Sean Lennon’s work with Rufus Wainwright on That Boy and Nancy Marchant’s rendition of Nowhere Man.

Now to the politics. Yes, we know that John Lennon, sincerely I believe, stood for ‘giving peace a chance’ and for ‘power to the people, right on’ but frankly, those slogans today, as we are in another titanic struggle against the imperial monsters over Iraq and Afghanistan just seems like some much children’s talk. What the narrators held to be Lennon’s profound wisdom on the peace question are things that seemed embarrassingly childish to me back even when they were first uttered. No, it is not enough to just think good thoughts about peace or have peace in our hearts for that to occur as if by magic. We have to go out and struggle for it against some people who will see us in our graves before they give ‘peace a chance’.

And here my friends is the kicker. This tribute was performed in New York City on October 3, 2001 a few weeks after the criminal actions of a bunch of Islamic fanatics wrecked havoc on that city. Perhaps I would have been more impressed by the tribute if one person- host, performer or from the audience- in the whole one and one half hour program had mentioned peace and the desire for it, not in the great by and by, but by actually mentioning opposition to the war in Afghanistan that was being prepared even as they sang and was only a few days from starting. Maybe, in the light of circumstances that couldn’t be done in New York City during those weeks but I will be damned if I will listen to people spout forth about peace when they were not out in the streets with the few of us who were protesting the Afghan war then. Hell, I too was afraid to go out in the streets and face the redneck reaction that was stirred up then. But that is where ‘peaceniks’, if you will, had to be. What would Mr. Lennon have had to say about that? Mrs. Lennon didn’t have anything to say at all.

Tuesday, December 25, 2018

When Willie Sutton’s Theory Of Capitalism Ruled The Roost- Woody Allen’s “Take The Money And Run”- A Film Review


[In a recent introduction to this new series, a series based on short film reviews for films that deserve short reviews if not just a thumb’s up or down I noted that Allan Jackson, the deposed previous site manager, required his film reviewers to write endlessly about the film giving the material an almost cinema studies academic journal take on it. That caused a serious decline in the number of reviews over the years which I hope to make up with a flurry of snap reviews for busy people. To see in full why check the archives for November 28, 2018- Not Ready For Prime Time But Ready For Some Freaking Kind Of Review Film Reviews To Keep The Writers Busy And Not Plotting Cabals Against The Site Manager-Introduction To The New Series Greg Green]




DVD Review

Take The Money And Run, Woody Allen, 1969


This is an early film of comedian /actor/director Woody Allen starring himself in the lead as Virgil Starkwell, a bungling wannabe bank robber whose hijinks land him in prisons, in bed with a lovely girl and the halls of academia as an expert on crime. In this film we can see the outlines of Woody’s seemingly endless love affair with early black and white crime and film noir classics. There is a little more use of sight gags here than in his later films but through it all Woody is still the funny bumbling New York Jewish kid that a long series of films will explore in greater detail. The use of an old time newsreel announcer to describe and set the framework of the film and detail the action is an interesting twist. Not the best Woody Allen film but a good look at the niche that he created for himself in American urban comedy/ social commentary cinema.

For Christmas- President Trump Pardon Whistleblower And Veteran Reality Leigh Winner-We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind

Courage to Resist<refuse@couragetoresist.org>
To  
banner image
Pardon Whistleblower Reality Winner
Hi Alfred.
On June 3, 2017, NSA contractor Reality Leigh Winner was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act for providing a media organization with a single five-page top-secret document that analyzed information about alleged Russian online intrusions into U.S. election systems.
Reality, who has been jailed without bail since her arrest, has now been sentenced to five years in prison. This is by far the longest sentence ever given in federal court for leaking information to the media. Today, she is being transferred from a small Georgia jail to a yet-unknown federal prison.
Several months before her arrest, the FBI’s then-Director James Comey told President Trump that he was (in the words of a subsequent Comey memo) “eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message.” Meanwhile, politically connected and high-level government officials continue to leak without consequence, or selectively declassify material to advance their own interests.
Join Courage to Resist and a dozen other organizations in calling on President Trump, who has acknowledged Winner’s treatment as “so unfair,” to pardon Reality Winner or to commute her sentence to time served.

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