This is the second major strike this week. All news broadcasts and public services—including schools and all public transportation—were canceled and even the police and fireman—who cannot strike—let it be known that their sympathies were with the people. Additionally there was a huge protest last Friday that involved tear gas and a lot of property destruction. Keep it up, Greece!

More on the riots in Greece from the Telegraph:

The strike grounded all flights and brought public transport to a halt. State hospitals were left with emergency staff only and all news broadcasts were suspended as workers walked off the job for 24 hours to protest spending cuts and tax hikes designed to tackle the country’s debt crisis.

Riot police fired tear gas to disperse rock-throwing protesters at one point of the demonstration as more than 10,000 strikers and protesters marched through central Athens, banging drums and chanting slogans such as “no sacrifice for plutocracy,” and “real jobs, higher pay.” People draped banners from apartment buildings reading: “No more sacrifices, war against war.”

The demonstrators included a group of about 100 youths wearing crash helmets and ski masks, some of whom smashed windows of a department store and bank, and sprayed riot police with brown paint. Shopkeepers along the demonstration route scrambled to roll down their shutters, while a few blocks away, people sat at outdoor restaurants, continuing their meals.

 
Why in the world would any respectable company want to associate their product with a sociopathic sack of shit like Glenn Beck? And what ad buyer at which advertising agency would be dumb enough in 2010 to tell their client they should be purchasing advertising on the Glenn Beck show?!?! Whoever sold TurboTax on the idea should be drummed out of the advertising business for good. What fucking idiocy.

Nice work over at the StopBeck blog. Note how fast it was for TurboTax to pull out:

On March 9th, TurboTax advertisements began running on Glenn Beck’s show on the Fox News Channel.  Participants in the StopBeck effort promptly sprang to action.  Less than 24 hours later, TurboTax announced that they would be pulling their advertisements from Glenn Beck’s show.

This brings the total number of advertisers to drop Glenn Beck to 120.  On a related note, the broadcast of Glenn Beck’s show in the U.K. has been running without any advertisers for over a month now.

TurboTax’s statement:

Thanks everyone for your feedback, & for reminding us of what we value. We’ve pulled advertising from the Glenn Beck show.

 
OK, so it wasn’t Adam Gadahn that they caught. Whatev. But within the brief ripple of time that “Azzam the American” was on the radar again (oooo be scared, kids) my wise old pal Ron Nachmann pointed me in the direction of this article from last year pointing out that Gadahn’s father is none other than Phil Pearlman, psych-folk private press LP maker extraordinaire under such guises as “The Beat of The Earth”, “The Electronic Hole” and the delightfully monikered “Relatively Clean Rivers”. Since most of the links to the music in the original article are now dead I have tracked down a bunch of samples of said music to peruse for the sake of the edutainment of us all. Really nice stuff, truth be told.
 

 
I refer you to the comments thread of this week’s Dangerous Minds interview with Charles Johnson, of Little Green Footballs. This afternoon Charles linked to the interview from his popular blog and within a matter of minutes people were posting about the interview both there and here. Some pro, some con (I get compared to Sean Hannity for instance!), but some just nasty and fairly pointless, such as one item (since deleted by us and not at the request of Charles, either) which managed to slip in both a homophobic epithet and a not-so-veiled death threat!

Charming.

As Charles replied “Welcome to my world! These are exactly the people I was talking about in the interview.” I sent him the IP address and in a matter of minutes he tracked the guy down and found several instances of his email address posted online elsewhere.

Views were initially slow on this episode, but are trending upwards quickly. I’ll leave this up for another day before posting part 2.

via KGW Portland
thx ML Compton !

 
A prank phone call made by British author and comedian Robert Popper apparently fooled a few of the British dailies, including The Telegraph, The Sun and (sort of) The Financial Times. Popper, who makes crank calls and puts them on his website, called talk radio station LBC and pretended to be a woman who had seen Gordon Brown throw a tangerine into a laminating machine during a temper tantrum. The hoax was reported as true in The Telegraph and The Sun. The Financial Times also published a blog post on their website, stating that the call was probably a hoax and have since issued a follow-up confirming this.

Here’s an abridged version of what happened, written by Popper himself on the BBC Comedy blog:

Last Monday I decided to do one of my silly and—admittedly—childish phone calls under the guise of my Timewaster Letters character, Robin Cooper.

So I switched on LBC (a London talk radio station) where the topic was Gordon Brown’s alleged bad temper. I called up and got through almost instantly. “What do you want to talk about?” asked the LBC operator. Without time to think I replied, “Gordon Brown visited my place of work and lost his temper right in front of me.” Very soon I was on air, explaining how Gordon Brown had toured my workshop - a “lamination factory”—and thrown a tangerine into one of the machines, breaking it, before calling a member of staff a “citric idiot.”  It was all I could think of at the time. A load of nonsense. But I was quite proud of the phrase, “citric idiot.”

Anyway, skip forward to Friday night. It’s midnight. I’m lying in bed when I get a message on twitter that the tangerine story had been mentioned on BBC Two’s The Bubble. I clicked on iPlayer and fourteen minutes in, I see the brilliant David Mitchell telling his guests that Gordon Brown had allegedly thrown a tangerine into a lamination machine. 

What?! I immediately stuck my phone call up on my site (I’d animated it with my crap drawings), mentioning how it had been picked up on The Bubble. Very soon someone tweeted saying that they’d read about the tangerine incident in the Financial Times. And there was a link! Within seconds, someone else added that it had been in The Telegraph, with the headline: “Gordon Brown accused of throwing a tangerine.” The article went on to say, “One of the factory workers told The Sun Mr. Brown became angry and threw a tangerine he was holding into a laminating machine.”

But my favorite part was when a Hong Kong news agency, which had previously, and bizarrely, animated various incidents of the Brown bullying story, animated my story as well. There it was in black and orange: a sort of man throwing a tangerine into a machine. I laughed so hard, I almost puked my lungs onto my legs. To think that 6000 miles away, a news director in a Hong Kong office had actually instructed one of his animators to show the British Prime Minister throwing a tangerine into a lamination machine. Did the animator have to google ‘lamination machines’ for reference? Actually, the tangerine and the machine looked pretty good, but the factory resembled a sort of over-sized torture chamber.

Popper goes on to write that only the Financial Times was suspicious of the prank, but added “[...] to The Sun and The Telegraph, I just want to let you know that I have another amazing story of the time David Cameron visited the very same factory, and threw a carton of milk into the very same machine, before calling the very same factory worker a “lactic imbecile.”
 

 
Via Xeni Jardin/Boing Boing; cross posting this from Brand X

 
What’s gotten into the water at UC Berkeley? I personally think this is a positive development and hope to see more of it in the future. The young people in this country are too fucking passive. They need to wake up and flex their collective political muscle or risk ceding their futures to the dum-dum Tea party types… which would be a huge tactical error.

“The youth is starting to change. Are you starting to change? Are you? Together”—MGMT, The Youth

What began as a dance party on Upper Sproul Plaza led to an occupation of Durant Hall at around 11:15 p.m. Thursday to raise support for the March 4 statewide protest in support of public education.

According to a statement distributed by the occupiers, the building was selected because of its symbolic nature. Durant Hall formerly housed the campus East Asian Library and the campus Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. It is now being renovated to become office space for the College of Letters and Science, which spurred activists to “reclaim” the space for students.

UCPD Captain Margo Bennett said the occupiers “cut a lock to get into the construction area and then cut a lock to get into the building” before vandalizing the area.

“There were windows broken, there was spray painting and graffiti on the interior, there was construction equipment that was tossed around,” she said.

The occupation evolved into a riot as it moved onto streets south of campus, where a protester broke several windows of the Subway at Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue at about 1:41 a.m.

And then something idiotic like this happens at UC San Diego. “Compton Cookout”? A noose? How incredibly lame.
 

 
Am I just missing it or has the situation in Greece—2 million people, which is about 40% of the workforce, walked off their jobs in protest over cuts in governmental programs—gotten precious little press coverage in the American media? (I know, I know, healthcare and the Olympics). Considering that this is literally a crisis that could split the Eurozone—and have terrible consequences in Spain, Portugal, Italy and beyond—shouldn’t Americans be paying more attention to this?

It certainly seems more dangerous than the Asian Contagion crisis of 1997.

And Greeks know how to riot properly:

Tens of thousands of striking Greek workers took to the streets today, some throwing stones at police, in a defiant show of protest against austerity measures aimed at averting the debt-plagued country’s economic collapse.

Riot police responded with teargas when, in sporadic bursts, masked youths charged them in Athens city centre. The violence coincided with a general strike that shut down public services and closed off Greece to the outside world.

For trade unions the mass show of force was a warning shot to a government struggling to satisfy its eurozone partners with policies deemed vital for the nation’s fiscal health while appeasing angry workers at home.

“This is the red line,” said Nikos Goulas, head of a union that represents 20,000 workers at Athens international airport. “Greece is not Ireland. If the government does not back down there will be huge unrest,” he added, holding a banner that proclaimed: “As much as you terrorise us, these measures won’t pass.”

 
You Philly kids being spied on by your own school-issued laptops, this one’s for you:

We are looking for high school students and teachers across America to participate.  Photograph A Recruiter is an online photography project that invites high school students to photograph the military recruiters posted within their schools.  Through the act of looking back at the system that is looking at them, the project empowers students to consider the role of the government for which they will soon have the right to vote for.

 
(via Arthur)

Wired picked up on the Hexayurt—a $100 stable housing solution that can help put Haiti back on the rails far quicker than disposable disaster tents. (Hexayurts previously covered at Dangerous Minds here.)

With just $100 worth of plywood and screws, almost anyone can build a shelter known as a Hexayurt that can last three years and possibly even withstand a hurricane. The simple DIY structure could be a critical temporary solution for some of the estimated 1 million or more people left homeless in quake-torn Haiti.

Aid agencies have distributed around 10,000 tents to Haiti so far, according to to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), one of the dozens of charity groups in Haiti focused on emergency shelter. But 200,000 are needed, and even then, the tents won’t stand up to the weather.

“Tents are a three to five month option in the midst of the dry season,” said Vincent Houver, IOM Chief of Mission in Haiti, in a recent press release. “But emergency and transitional shelter solutions sufficiently durable to last at least two years need to be found before the heavy rains arrive in a few months.”

Tents do have the benefit of a supply chain already in place that makes it easy to ramp up production when disaster strikes, and they can be transported to remote sites and set up relatively quickly. But they run around $300 to $400 and only last about a year, in good weather.

(Find out how you can help here.)

(Wired: Hexayurts for Haiti)

(And at the UN Dispatch, here.)

 
RONLEWHORN

 
Two headlines this morning that seemed of a piece: First, in the Guardian, there was this alarming item: Utah delivers vote of no confidence for ‘climate alarmists.’ The US’s most Republican state passes bill disputing science of climate change, claiming emissions are ‘essentially harmless.’”

The original version of the bill dismissed climate science as a “well organised and ongoing effort to manipulate and incorporate “tricks” related to global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome”. It accused those seeking action on climate change of riding a “gravy train” and their efforts would “ultimately lock billions of human beings into long-term poverty”.

In the heat of the debate, the representative Mike Noel said environmentalists were part of a vast conspiracy to destroy the American way of life and control world population through forced sterilisation and abortion.

By the time the final version of the bill came to a vote, cooler heads apparently prevailed. The bill dropped the word “conspiracy”, and described climate science as “questionable” rather than “flawed.”

Okie dokey… and then in the Los Angeles Times, this story ran this morning: In Utah, a plan to cut 12th grade.

Coincidence or is the state of Utah intent of raising an entire generation of know-nothing Sean Hannity types? It boggles the mind…

 
We can all get some sleep now! From the New York Times:

The lingering mystery, though, was who was behind the site. The question was answered on Saturday when Andrey Ternovskiy responded to the questions we sent to an e-mail address on Chatroulette. Mr. Ternovskiy said he was a 17-year-old high school student in Moscow.

“I was not sure whether I should tell the world who I am mainly because of the fact that I am under age. Now I think that it would be better to reveal myself,” Mr. Ternovskiy wrote.
I asked Mr. Ternovskiy about the origin of the idea for ChatRoulette, how he manages the technical challenges of running the site, whether he viewed it as a business, and about the way some people were using Chatroulette in, as he put it, “some not very nice ways.” Here are his e-mailed responses, slightly edited and condensed:

Read more of Chatroulette’s Creator, 17, Introduces Himself

 
The wider this astonishing tale travels the most pronounced the effect it will have on the Islamist theocracy-types in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Right-wing spy novelist Brad Thor, a man who obviously has extensive Middle East connections, broke the incredible story last month of a pornography ring run by the Taliban connected Haqqani network. When the story surfaced many people were brutally murdered to make it go away. Now Thor has updated his original reporting with a new videotape that has emerged. This has the potential to turn into a really big story and could have a huge impact on tribal dynamics in the region. I’m sure the CIA are all over this one:

As Siraj Haqqani moved from village to village, rounding up the sons of poor Muslim families to fight for the Taliban and Al Qaeda, he offered the villagers free medical care.  He even sent his physician, Dr. Hassan Duraz to conduct the clinics.  There was a horrific catch, though.  Duraz was a monster.

He arrived in each village with Siraj Haqqani’s uncle, Ibrahim, and Siraj’s cousin, Ishak, in tow.  With them, the Haqqanis brought along their own very special tools of terror – a video camera and an eye for human flesh.  You see, with Haqqani healthcare, you not only received a medical exam, if you were an attractive young girl, you also got a screen test.  And heaven forbid you passed.

For those women and girls unfortunate enough to catch the good doctor’s fancy, it was show time.  The Haqqani uncle and cousin would be brought into the exam room, they would set up their video equipment, and Duraz would drop his trousers and go to work.

The Haqqanis and Duraz sexually assaulted poor women throughout the tribal regions and captured every moment of their degradation and humiliation on video to enjoy over and over again.

Times were good for the Haqqani pornography ring.  Their enterprise thrived until someone slipped up and word leaked out.  In the blink of an eye, Siraj Haqqani was in big trouble.

 
—snip—
 

Last month on the FOX Business Network, Colonel Oliver North revealed a startling piece of information.  Conservative mullahs and elements within the Haqqani terror network – known as the backbone of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the Af/Pak theater – are working to take the Haqqanis down from the inside.  Their key weapon is a disturbing video that shows the serial sexual assault of several young girls.

Colonel North explained that no one in American intelligence had yet seen this video:

A transcript of what the mullah is reading in the videotape is here.

Sad news—the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in South Dakota are about to be declared a failed reservation. A recent storm disaster flooded much of the reservation, but went completely unnoticed by the media during the mayhem about Haiti.

The first Native Tribe to officially support Barack Obama for president is now waiting for him to declare the reservation a disaster.

According to a Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe (CRST) press release, 3,000 utility poles were downed during recent severe storms. CRST Chairman, Joseph Brings Plenty, has declared a state of emergency.

Thousands of CRST residents have been without water, heat, and electricity for six days as of this morning. Experts relate it may be as long as one month to restore power across the reservation.

Wind-chill factors in central South Dakota have been subzero.

Instructions on helping here.

Photograph by Austin Hargrave
 
Al Jazeera English’s Witness takes a fascinating look at how the homeless survive in Sin City’s underground tunnels:

“Under the Neon” is an extraordinary journey below the surface of the bright lights of Las Vegas, to meet some of the city’s homeless people who are battling to make a home for themselves under the streets of gold in the city’s storm-drains and tunnels.

 
(via Mister Honk)

 
They’re approaching carnival season over in Europe, so, in true Rabelaisian style, that means it’s time to mock and jeer the powers that be.  The above float, for Cologne, depicts Barack Obama as a Fort USA-guarding cowboy, while Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad leads towards him a nuke-containing Trojan horse.  Ha!  The float below shows Obama bending over for Lady Liberty.  That’s also for Cologne, not, as one might assume, for last week’s festivities in Tennessee. 
 

 
Barack Obama And Silvio Berlusconi Feature On Satirical Carnival Floats In Europe

 
Lonely this Valentine’s Day, bucko? Adopt a pet! If you or someone you know has been thinking of adopting a new pet and you live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, this Valentine’s Day between 11 and 3pm, Amoeba Records, the best record stores in the entire world (or at least the parts I’ve been to) will be there to make your love match with a pooch or kitty.

Amoeba Pet Adoption Day

Thanks Ramie Becker!

 
I read about the beta-launch of something called Chatroulette this morning on a German blog I frequent called Nerdcore and something tells me this thing is gonna be HUGE. As in huge, huge. Facebook huge.

First off, it’s super easy to use—hit the “start” button, and you’re off. The people you’ll meet are from all over the world and Chatroulette works in real time (like Skype) and there’s audio, too.

What makes this thing so exciting/addicting/cringeworthy all at the same time is easy to summarize: You never know WHO you’re going to get when you click that button. My friend and I tested it out today. Our first interaction was with a male in his mid-20s. He said he was from China. Fifth go around we got the Jonas Brothers. No shit, it was the real Jonas Brothers. “Are you guys the Jonas Brothers?” They said they were in New Jersey. It looked like they were in an airport.  There was a lot of starring and smiling going on. They asked if I was a fan of theirs. I said nothing. Awkward moment. Screen went black, we lost contact.

But seriously, there is lots of WEIRD shit going on here. Lonely guys jacking off in front of their computers, couples having sex and waving at you, monster mask pole dancing, obese women masturbating, lesbian orgies, guys eating pizza watching football, folks wearing clown masks, wholesome families waving at you, people smoking joints, teenagers yelling “show me your tits!’... it’s endless.  I was truly shocked by what I was seeing, but that’s not to say we weren’t laughing so hard we were crying for several hours.  Aside from teen pop star siblings—I mean, what are the chances?—we also encountered a hillbilly mom and her son who looked at us on her screen and murmured “They must be ‘hipsters.’ I’ve heard all about them” as well as a man… and his dog, let’s just say, and leave it at that…

This isn’t going to end well. Not at all.
 
UPDATE: I was punked! Chat Roulette With The Jonas Brothers
 
If you want to know more about Chatroulette, read The Human Shuffle: Is ChatRoulette the future of the Internet or its distant past?
 
Chatroulette (NSFW)

 
Spotted in Royal Flush, the Motor City Madman himself weighs in on the current scene.  Here are some of the choicer meatier tidbits:

EVER THOUGHT OF TRYING TO GO VEGAN?
If I really wanted to maximize the death toll, I would go into business creating tofu for the vegetarians.  ’Cause in order to create tofu, you have to take that wonderful giant tractor, you have to go across that field and every songbird, every gopher, every squirrel, every turtle, every rabbit, every mouse, every shrew, every snake, every bug, everything there must die.  In order to go full tofu, you have to have 100% complete annihilation of all life forms.  To the vegetarians, how deep is the cloak of denial?  How can you pretend that Paul McCartney isn’t responsible for killing anything?  I kill stuff one arrow at a time.  Meanwhile, Paul McCartney, master of the final solution, only thinks of his tofu consumption.  I believe that every bowl of tofu is responsible for the death of billions of things.  I can’t compete with that and I can’t compete with Paul McCartney’s death toll.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF OBAMA?
I think that Barack Hussein Obama should be put in jail.  It is clear that Barack Hussein Obama is a communist.  Mao Tse Tung lives and his name is Barack Hussein Obama.  This country should be ashamed.  I wanna throw up.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF SOMEONE STEPPED ON YOUR LAWN?
Trespass on my property and I will kill you.  Now, that may seem harsh, but that’s tough shit.  Because ­ guess what ­ nobody’s getting killed, and nobody’s trespassing.  It’s working perfectly.

Oh, Nuge, you might indeed put an arrow in my neck if I cross your lawn, but that’s okay, we’ll always have this: