Crack Box and Crackheads

OK, I always thought of Animal Collective as good people, the Catsup Plate label as righteous, and Chris Freeman of Fusetron as one of the most honest indy distributors in the business, but the fiasco surrounding the creation of "Crack Box" has turned into an ugly thing of greed among people who are supposed to be above being greedy. Somehow, a three-lp set got inflated to a price of close to $100, then Fusetron's servers melted down trying to sell them, they sold out immediately, and people turned around within hours and tried to sell "Crack Box" for $500, $700, $1000, on eBay. Crack Box indeed, it's creepy crawlers for Crackheads.

I know, I know, it's like Bob Pollard says, "If you don't want it, don't buy it," but people can always download free live sets of Animal Collective from their fan web site, and I somehow feel that even participating in the Crack Box fiasco is like contributing to evil. Makes me very sad to see this. Particularly when we consider that the companies with the fairest prices for vinyl on Record Store Day in April were the supposedly evil, big multinational conglomerates. The most outrageous prices came from those scrappy small independent labels. Just goes to show that the evils of rampant capitalism can arise anywhere.

You Can't Tweet Science

One little piece of information I missed during my weeks without obsessive news content was the late-April gossip about a shakeup at the venerable Scientific American, in which both editor in chief John Rennie (above) and publisher Steven Yee left the magazine. While Rennie denies it, rumor is rampant that the board wants to take the magazine further into the Discover domain of consumer-aimed, Twitter-feed-led pop science. Shudder.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that Rennie didn't walk on water, though he wrote damned fine editorials and tried to hold the line against the superficiality tide sweeping science publications. SA had gone a bit crazy in brand-extension, launching bimonthly publications on the mind, and on special topics, that almost made the wider Scientific American brand as difficult to pace as The Economist. Hell, it was during the Rennie/Yee tenure that SA broadened into science cruises at sea, f'cryin' out loud ("not that there's anything wrong with that").

But I can see the 140-character handwriting on the Twitter wall now for insta-science feeds from our friends at SA. Ugh. Thankfully, Lost creator J.J. Abrams has spoken out in an essay in Wired against instant-gratification culture, and my dear friend and fellow blogger Ruth Mowry has reminded us that Twitter feeds of The New York Times were never a good idea. Scientific American, are you listening? Science can be fun and stimulating, to be sure, but it must also be serious, lengthy, and loaded with content.

Canal videos at last

After being at sea with no Internet connection for too durned long, I offer belated videos of the Canal passing:



Stops in Cartagena and Jamaica:



The Monteverde cloud forest at Selvatura Park:



And here's a final clip of the last few days at sea, with Pampas Devils and dolphins and midnight jams:

Quick Canal Update

No videos, no pics, but a quick update to let everyone know that there's no swine flu here so far. I am sailing between the Gatun and Miraflores Locks in the Panama Canal. Got a special deal on a ship that went through Jamaica and Cartagena (Colombia) on the way through the locks. But the ship is now barred from all Mexico ports due to swine flu, so I guess I'll just be back in the states soon, more details then. In the meantime, don't believe everything Arnold Scharznegger 0r the CDC tells you about virus transmission vectors, but be careful....

Day 3 - Pyeongtaek

You've already seen the kim chee dining videos from Saturday's trip to the mountains surrounding Pyeongtaek, but not to the trip beforehand. In the morning of April 18, Global Network and GPPAC had its respective business meetings, but in the afternoon, the Pyeongtaek Peace Center had a special trip planned for us. We went to the Morin gate of what is officially known as the Songtan Air Base, but which the U.S. Air Force has re-named Osan Air Force Base. Locals are demonstrating against the expansion of runways at the base, and the placement of batteries of PAC-3 missiles.

Two conference attendees I didn't get the chance to meet until Saturday were Viktoria and Vadim from Vladivostok (no, I couldn't make that kind of alliterative stuff up). Activists in Russia's Far East have been very aware of Pacific Rim struggles on both the military and on environmental issues, and it's always fun to meet folks from there. Viktoria is on the left in this shot, Vadim is on the right, and immediately to Vadim's left is Marte Hellema of GPPAC - between Viktoria and Marte is a woman I never met, named Mari perhaps?





After the protest, Kang Sang-Won led us on a guided tour of the base perimeter, where we left the bus and took a series of small vans so we could navigate the one-lane fishing roads. We saw the small villages that had been removed to make room for airfields, and the batteries of PAC-3 missiles that had been moved in to prepare for the potential North Korean assaults that obsess the minds of military planners. The continuous expansion plans at the base make it obvious the work that locals confront.



Since I had to leave Sunday, I couldn't participate in the trip to Mugeon-ri, where farmers have been displaced from rice fields because of the U.S. efforts to expand the Mugeon-ri Military Training Fields in order to test the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Bruce Gagnon has pictures and information about his trip here.

Korea, Day 2 - The Conference

Friday, April 17 was exhausting - trying to stuff dozens of presentations on arms technology, regional military base issues, and arms-control policies into a single eight-hour day. Kudos to our Korean hosts for keeping people on a strict schedule. Foundation money allowed for a full perfect-bound proceedings book in English, Korean, and Japanese, as well as simultaneous translation in all three languages. For a full list of speakers and topics, take a look at the Global Network web site. I'm not going to reference all my videos, check my library on YouTube if you're obsessive.

We began with welcomes from Dave Webb of Global Network and Marte Hellema from GPPAC (Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict). Then Bruce Gagnon of GN gave the general conference keynote:



Obviously, I didn't film my own talk, nor could I snare worthwhile videos of fellow panelists Dave Webb or Cheong Wooksik, though I snuck a few moments of Mary Beth Sullivan (who spent most of the conference under the weather, unfortunately). Lindis Percy grabbed a photo of our opening panel, inserted here.



Oh, and speaking of Lindis Percy, not only was she at her usual best decribing US bases in the UK, YouTube below, but the British government had the audacity to arrest her yet again as soon as she returned from Korea. Some people never learn. Morning region-specific talks included ones from J. Narayana Rao, Agneta Norberg, Tim Rinne, Hannah Middleton, Anna Polo (who had some outstanding videos of the Obama Prague trip, available at the Global Network site), Koji Sugihara, Katy Rose (YouTube below), and Kang Sung-Won (camera full).





I also wanted to post Katy Rose from AFSC, giving her observations on missile tech problems in Hawaii:



Afternoon speeches were dedicated to the problems of the Pacific Rim. Presentations included ones from Atsushi Fujioka, Kazuhiko Tamaki, and the wonderful Corazon Valdez-Fabros of the No-Bases Coalition in the Philippines. The main conference concluded with a fascinating speech on the sociology of the security state, from Francis Daehoon Lee of People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy in South Korea:



We packed into a small bar Friday evening to give out awards for peace work, and to hear talks by Suh Sung, a former political prisoner in the Park Chung-Hee regime; and Dennis Redmond and Park Sung Yong, who gave details of next year's World March for Peace. Later, awards were given to J. Narayana Rao, Astsushi Fujiyoka, and the VERY deserving Sung-Hee Choi, who put this whole conference together.

And then it was on to the singing. The Korean organizers riffed on a popular political tune; Tim Rinne gave animated renditions of "Nebraskaland" and "Stickin' to the Union"; Jiho Park played guitar and sang; and Agneta Norberg twisted Frank Sinatra's "Makin' Whoopee" into "Makin' Missiles" (below). No, I didn't film her raunchy soprano Swedish pregnancy numbers.)

Jane Harman, AIPAC, and the NSA

In a mere 48 hours, the case of Rep. Jane Harman and the National Security Agency has gotten so convoluted, it's almost impossible to tell who the good guys are, if any. Do the leaked NSA transcripts revealed in Congressional Quarterly and The New York Times indicate that she was a shill for the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee? Do the existence of the transcripts indicate the NSA is regularly monitoring all members of Congress? Can we believe the Harper's story that the Bush administration used the existence of the transcripts to blackmail Harman into supporting FISA bypass - and into bullying The New York Times in an attempt to prevent the paper from revealing the bypass efforts in the first place?

Here's some things we can say with certainty: Harman, who represents Venice, California in the LA area, is a very creepy gung-ho-Israel and gung-ho-national-security person, a female equivalent of Sen. Joe Lieberman. Even if Obama urged Congress to play nice with Joltin' Joe, people like Harman and Lieberman have no business being in the Democratic Party. Harman's willingness to get in bed with AIPAC and take away our civil liberties shows us that she is only getting the infamous "chickens coming home to roost" treatment.

AIPAC's efforts to bribe her into pushing the Justice Department to go easy on the lobbying organization, by offering to give her the chair of the Intelligence Committee, only shows how smarmy the organization is on a regular basis. And her willingness to go to bat for two low-life criminals Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, shows how easily she can be swayed by a good Zionist lobby.

And yet, and yet... She's absolutely right that the NSA had little business monitoring her calls to begin with, and that no one should have leaked NSA transcripts, inside or outside of the agency. Yet there is a sense of poetic justice to all of this. Harman wanted to keep the public from knowing about the NSA bypass. Apparently, she may have pushed for this in order to keep those transcripts silent. When NPR got hold of Harman Tuesday afternoon, to call her on-air responses "sputtering obfuscation" would be too kind.

Well, Rep. Harman, no honor among thieves, criminals, and authoritarian whores. The NSA is a criminal global monitoring agency, and AIPAC is a criminal gang of thugs pushing the hard-right Israel line. Play with thugs, and you shouldn't be surprised to be taken out into the back alley for a whupping.