Last week, YouTube partnered with WITNESS, an international group that uses video to promote human rights, to begin a series of blog posts that will demonstrate and explore how film has become an integral facet of the worldwide human rights initiative.
Last week Saturday’s blog post kicked off the start of the series, and featured the full-length version of “For Neda,” a documentary on citizen reporting. The title of the documentary is a reference to Neda Agha Soltan, the young Iranian woman whose death by a sniper during the 2009 Iranian election protests was captured on camera and quickly distributed across the internet.
I don't know if anyone will read this, but if you do, I am selling t-shirts to raise money for amnesty. They can be found at www.everthustodeadbeats.etsy.com
They picture ahmadinejad with a caption of 'demockracy'. I will donate 50% of any profit to amnesty international, or perhaps a more specific charity if someone can point me in that direction. I would donate more but I have to miss work to make the shirts and like most on here I'm pretty close to hand to mouth living. Anyways, peace.
Factory food sickens humans, livestock and the environment
What we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the last 10,000. So asserts Robert Kenner's new film, FOOD, Inc., which opens nationwide June 19th. The vast bulk of food production is now controlled by just a few mega-corporations with one value: profit. Relying on genetic engineering, pesticides and antibiotics, factory food is cheap, requiring little land. But the external costs to our health, the environment and the natural food industry are enormous.
Director: Robert Kenner
Producers: Robert Kenner and Elise Pearlstein
Co-Producer: Eric Schlosser
Released by Magnolia Pictures, with Participant Media and River Road Entertainment
93 minutes
FOOD, Inc. is the single most important film of the decade. Transcending hype and industry muzzling, the film exposes some of the cruel and unnatural aspects of industrial farms and food processing. It links epidemic rates of US obesity and diabetes with our intake of genetically engineered food.
NPR called it this summer's "suspense thriller."
The film condemns how workers and animals are abused. Illegal immigrants, who cannot complain about working conditions, comprise most of the workers at industrial food plants. They are vulnerable to raids and deportation. No corporate executives are arrested.
Well researched and well scored, the film debunks the pastoral fantasy spin. Industrial food is not grown, raised or processed on a farm. The animals see no sunshine, are kept immobile in cages, and are genetically or chemically modified. Those that are somewhat mobile are bioengineered to plump their bodies faster than their bones and muscles can support. They flop helplessly to the floor when trying to move.
The announcement that Brandeis University was going to close the Rose Art Museum and sell off part or most of the collection, a collection that includes one of the best representations of America in the 1950s and 1960s - a time when the center of art theory and practice moved from Europe to the USA, caused a ruffle in my house. My artist wife is very fond of the Rose, was just up there in the past year, and, frankly, couldn't believe the University's decision.
On July 17, I sat in the U.S. Senate Gallery - watching as Senators stayed up all night and debated whether we should bring our troops home from Iraq.
Idaho Senator Larry Craig sat all alone. As other Senators debated this life-or-death issue of war, Craig looked down and doodled on a small piece of paper the size of a coffee coaster. He did this for at least a half hour, probably more - meticulously drawing some four-sided object and switching pens from time to time.
It seems to me that a Senator from Idaho should have been engaged by the debate - using every waking minute to think about Blake Stephens, Carrie French, Kelly Morris, James Holtom, Emerson Brand, and others among the Idaho residents who have died in Iraq. But Craig doodled away, oblivious to the realities of this war.
Craig then voted against ending the war. Adding insult to injury, Craig voted earlier against a Democratic plan to give troops one year at home for every year in Iraq.
As Craig comes up for re-election in 2008, I'm curious - is someone who doodles against the troops the best person to represent Idaho in the U.S. Senate?
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