Category: Culture

Activism, Culture, Direct Action, Resources & Downloads

People’s Park: Still Blooming – free download!

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This classic photo-history, edited by Terri Compost and published in 2009 by Slingshot Collective, is now available from Direct Action and Reclaiming Quarterly as a free downloadable PDF!

Visit our People’s Park webpage for PDF or links to print edition.

People’s Park: Still Blooming shows how a good cause can lead to good rallies, riots, concerts, and lasting friendships. This book reminds us not only to recount our stories and struggles, but to celebrate them too!

People’s Park: Still Blooming is our family heirloom, memories, scrapbook, the story of the courage and hope that freed and tended this sacred piece of earth. It is for us to remember, but mostly it is for the next to come. This book is an attempt to capture the spirit and story of the Park.

​​It was published with the hope that, like seeds, copies will find fertile ground in the hearts of young people and encourage them to try again. We are connected. The land wants to live. Let a thousand Parks bloom.

Numerous Reclaiming folks including editor Terri Compost were deeply involved in People’s Park over the years – we’re very glad to add this book to our website!

Culture

A Golden Age of Grift

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Quick update – Trump and Milei meet to compare crypto-scam notes.

Is this a golden age of grift, or what? A con man for President, and the richest con man in the world as his chief advisor.

Quick thoughts on a few cons that Trump & Co are pulling in their first month back in office:

Crypto – 100% scam. Crypto is a useless faux-currency whose only “value” is that some other sucker might pay more for it. If Bitcoin or some other crypto-currency somehow took hold, the most it can do is supplement existing currency – in other words, increase the money supply and cause inflation.

Governments having a “strategic bitcoin reserve” – this is nothing but a funnel from taxpayers’ bank accounts into the pockets of the techno elite. There is absolutely no need for such a “reserve” – it’s just a way to pump the price of Bitcoin etc by creating more buyers.

Memecoins – these are always scams. How could they have any enduring “value”? It’s the nature of a meme to be transitory. Crypto is going to have to show the public more than “what’s trending on yahoo” as a basis of a new currency.

Trump & Melania memecoins – considering that most of the buyers are Trumpies (many of them “onboarding” to crypto for the first time) this is quite the karmic scam. At this writing, Trump’s coin is sitting at about 25% of the price most people paid, and Melania’s is at 10%. The First Family and Friends have pocketed at least $2 billion. Crypto brokers have made $100 million in fees. Ka-ching!

Image: Motley Fool

Culture

Speaker Johnson – the Dirt Beneath Trump’s Putting Green

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Thought I’d share part of a letter I wrote to Speaker of the House Johnson a month or so ago, when he was so happy about Trump getting elected.

Now, even before Trump is sworn in, Johnson is discovering that he is “less than the dirt beneath [Trump’s] putting greens…”

Written and mailed late November 2024.

Dear Speaker Johnson:

I see that you worked hard – against the public demands of your leader, Mr Trump – to keep the government operating this Fall. You crossed the aisle just like Representatives have for most of our history.

Probably you think Trump will be grateful to you for your service, and will say “thank you” just as I, a left-liberal, has.

Forget it, Mike.

Now that Trump is in, you will be kicked into the gutter so fast it will make my head spin. You are nothing to him. You are less than the dirt beneath his putting greens.

Thank you for sticking to your job through thick and thin, despite the horrendous hand you have been dealt (Matt Gaetz? Marjorie Greene? I pity you.)

But keep your eyes open. You are about to find out just what you are worth to Mr Trump.

Blessings – George Franklin

Image: The Nation

Culture, Music, Satires

AI Gets It Right – Black Sabbath Revisioned as 1950s Pop

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OK, I’m a convert – the entire Paranoid album revisioned as 1950s pop-swing. I wish I’d thought to type that AI prompt!

I’ve never liked 50s mainstreamers like Sinatra or Brenda Lee (Rockin’ Around the Xmas Tree excepted, of course!). But maybe the problem all along was the songs.

The youtube comments are pretty good too!

We owe it to a better future to promote this beneficent use of AI.

Here’s the spoof – and the real deal just below.

Culture, Satires

The Death of Comedy – Internet Cats!

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Jerry Seinfeld was musing lately about the “death of comedy,” which he initially blamed – surprise! – on PC attitudes.

He backed off later, and admitted that a comedian’s job is to make us laugh at the world as it is, not as they wish it was.

Of course, the alleged Joe Rogans of the world think he was right in the first place. When they don’t get laughs, they blame us!

Internet Cats to the Rescue!

It’s not PCers that are killing standup comedy, folks. It’s internet cat videos.

Used to be that your cat would make you laugh now and then. Today, though, you can watch one cat after another busting your gut. When one video ends, youtube recommends ten more.

Who needs comedians?

No Future in Whining

There’s a deeper problem, though. When your entire schtick is predicated on whining about how mistreated you are – how long is your shelf life?

You might be funny, but once we hear your whines, it’s old news. You can’t milk whininess forever (unless your name is Woody Allen).

Bottom line – standup comedy as we have known it is dead.

Art forms have a lifespan. They don’t last forever. Who writes epic poetry today? Or swing songs?

Standup comedy is dead. Long live internet cats!

Culture, Satires

Meet President-For-Life Pennystock!

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Para-Journalist Luke Hauser goes underground to get the scoop on President-For-Life candidate Phineas J. Pennystock!

Whether it’s dodging bullets, selling NFTs of his farts, legalizing slavery, or invading Mexico, you’ll get the latest reports here!

President-For-Life Pennystock – click here

Subscribe to this blog for updates – subscribe link on this page.


Culture, Satires

Strategic Boot-Licking

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Nauseating to see the sycophancy of GOP Reps and Senators — only a few years ago they were cowering under their desks as Trump sicced the J6 mob on them. But I can appreciate the strategy of their latest round of obeisance.

After all, if you know that sooner or later you are going to be licking the boot, it makes sense to go first so you can lick the upper side.

Culture, Satires

Vanilla or Vomit?

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Woke today to a crude insight:

Joe Biden is like going into Baskin Robbins 197 Flavors, studying the menu for a mouth-wateringly long time, and finally going, “Give me a big double scoop of vanilla!”

Sure, it’s not Pistachio Almond Marshmallow Delight. But vanilla isn’t so bad, when you think of it.

The alternative seems to be a double scoop of warmed-over vomit.

If GOPers visit during this election cycle, here’s some helpful tips:

How to Clean Vomit Off Your Sofa – click here

Culture, Direct Action, Middle East

Campus Uprisings Support Palestine

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Reports from Various Campuses – April 28, 2024 – click here

Nothing like Spring to bring out student activism. So mote it ever be!

2024 sees a wave of protest of the genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza. Like the anti-Apartheid movement in the 1980s, the key demand is that Universities and their various billion-dollar endowments divest from criminal regimes.

The tactics are classic Occupy (and also echo the “shanty-towns” of the Apartheid protests) – set up a highly visible, round-the-clock encampment and let the authorities create your publicity.

With an ineptitude matched only by the Republican Congressional Caucus, administrators at one campus after another have blundered into confrontations that spotlight the protests.

A challenge for these protests – dealing with anti-Semitism – never far from the surface in American politics.

Personally, when I (a goy) am involved in protests of Israel’s policies, I take my lead from Jewish Voice for Peace.

Photo – Columbia University – by Lev Radin/Crooked.com

Book Review, Culture

Get A Life: A Memoir by Dress Wedding

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Get a Life

Get A Life: Chronicles of a Conscious Scofflaw

by dress wedding

Get A Life shares Reclaiming activist dress wedding’s journey of engaging in subversive actions and taking chances to build a life of freedom and meaning. The colorful narrative traces his evolution from drug-dealing Grateful Deadhead with self-esteem issues to becoming a nonviolent activist confronting injustice and police over decades in many different facets of the peace movement.

In early activist life, dress became a self-proclaimed witch, embracing the Reclaiming Tradition. And eventually moved to a very different form of action, becoming co-founder of Oakland’s Harborside Health Center in 2006, one of the largest and most respected cannabis retailers in the world.

In 1983 dress was arrested while wearing a wedding dress at an anti-nuclear action at Lawrence Livermore Labs in Berkeley, California. He has been wearing dresses ever since as a personal action against patriarchy, challenging people to think about what it means to “be a man” in our world. Dress writes in depth about how this personal action has impacted others in his life, especially his children and their mother. Also its impact on the Harborside marijuana business as he helped transform the new world of medical cannabis. The book offers a brief critique of the state of cannabis regulation, before outlining hopes for a new venture providing legitimate payments to the industry.

Throughout the manuscript dress notes how imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy has benefitted him and those around him. He explores how depression has affected him as a male in a society that suppresses this possibility. His motivation has always been to improve the human condition and relieve suffering, and his hope for the book is to inspire others to join in this effort.

Website & more information.

Available at Amazon etc.