Short Notes: will brady's ruminations

A blog adjunct to rondak.org [click on the globe] | Perspectives on: human rights; environmental concerns; life as a visual artist; 21st century feudalism; progressive politics; aboriginal culture; new urbanism; permaculture; sustainable technology; non-traditional families; achievable utopias

2004-05-27

HUMAN RIGHTS
PRISON ISSUES
California Pols think educating inmates helpful | From the Sacramento Bee, the astounding news that some politicians, even Republicans, find it appaling that people spend years in prison and still leave to the streets with a fourth grade reading level or worse | Some actually seem to think there's a correlation to "parole failure" and recidivism to engaging in crime as a career choice | What will they think of next?
To correct this, the California Legislature proposes to:

...would require the Department of Corrections to evaluate the educational, vocational and mental health needs of inmates within 90 days of their incarceration.
     The measure, which still requires Assembly approval before it can be placed before voters, would also require prison officials to prescribe and implement a plan to address the inmates' educational needs.
     Proponents of the measure say spending more on education means spending less on prisons.
     For every dollar spent on educational and vocational programs in prison, the state can count on saving between $1.71 and $3.23 in improved public safety and reduced prison costs, according to various studies cited by Vasconcellos.
     Other studies show major savings from mental health and parental education programs.
     "We can't just be tough on crime," said Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles. "We must be smart on crime, and including rehabilitation as part of the mission in corrections is about as smart as I believe we can get."
     For the rest of the story see the Bee article Prisoner ed measure advances

Seriously, does anybody think this doesn't make sense?
Mind you, even if the measure passes, California's citizenry will still have to approve it by referendum | No telling how smart the rest of the populace is | I reman cautiously hopeful | Maybe the rest of the nation will start thinking smart again, too |

Posted by: Will Brady / 11:47

LIFE AS A VISUAL ARTIST || WILL BRADY'S GALLERY

Sense of Dignity | The text:

Each person on earth is endowed with some quality or skill unique and special to oneself || It is not for mere mortals to deny another one's birthright of sharing that gift because of social prejudice, custom, superstition or set of beliefs || Rather we must grow and provide the opportunity for all people's to develop their gifts, then all may grow with their fruition || Anything less denies us that to which we are entitled || To one's sense of dignity

     Penned in 1987, it took until 1990 to come up with the center illustration | This is one of a collection of works that I consider to be my personal values statements |
     There have been those who looked at this work and stated immediately thereafter, "oh, you must be anti-abortion" | While one would be accurate in surmising that I believe that sentient life begins at conception, there are so many other parameters to weigh in on with that subject that I find statements such as that too concrete, almost simplistic |
     Would that life was so concrete, ..so black and white | But it isn't | the sentiment is also off the mark, maybe even misses the point | I'll be posting other samples of my work as time allows |

Posted by: Will Brady / 00:34

21st CENTURY FEUDALISM || ECONOMIC TREASON
dollar sign

corporate nations & their citizens | Perhaps one thing that ain't exactly clear, when considering the idea of economic treason is that those who would commit such crimes, while nominally citizens of some land-based nation, aren't the least bit interested in the sanctity nor sovereign authority of that nation |
     Lacking any clear way of recognizing who are ersatz citizens to land-based nations (such as passports or other identifiers) it is by the actions and consistent behaviors of the corporate nationalists which must be used to ferret these interlopers out |
     To be sure, some folks may have genuine beliefs that they are only citizens by their landed-nation birthright | Others, more canny, cling to flags of convenience when in reality they pledge loyalty to the nations who support them, and whose aims they attempt to pursue |
     The irony here is that, particularly in the United States, corporate nation politicos have increasingly taken over the polity of the people | Pledging fealty (as spoken by their actions) to more fluid nations like ENRON, General Electric, Capitol Cities, and the like, these individuals (Phil Gramm, fer instance) have pushed their own ideological/national agendae at the expense of the safety and security of the US of A | The costs of this are only now surfacing, in the guise of corporate greed |
     Greed, indeed, was a factor, but not the only one | Plundering the conquered nation's treasures ("privatizing" for instance) was ~ and continues to be ~ considered fair game for the foreign agents hiding behind Old Glory | Rewriting the laws of the nation ~ as was done during the Newt Gingrich led Contract On America period in the 1990s ~ so as to hold themselves apart from being responsible for their rapicious acts is another motivation | And all of this done with the well promoted effort toward "market globalization" |
     What we really need now, in order to begin to correct this, is for corporations to be held accountable as global citizens themselves | They ought to be entered into the United Nations as distinct entities and their citizens should be required to register as aliens in whatever land-based nations wherein they reside | I'm not sure how to accomplish this, mind you, but it would be a start |
First posted at rondak.org weblog 2 nov 2002

Posted by: Will Brady / 00:04

2004-05-26

FREE SPEECH

support free speech | adopt a blog | Living on the Planet, another blog community, focuses on blogwriters from parts of the globe beyond the scope of north america | They also encourage and support free speech for others who want to maintain blogs yet who get censored by their home country | Adopt-a-blog is the vehicle to acheive this | There's a particular focus on China and the community's developers are actively seeking folks with independent ISP storage space to provide censored bloggers with storage space for their blogs |
I have not yet committed to this, in large measure because I don't know enough about the specifics and due to the recent difficulties I'm still having with Cleartel | But I'm clear on the concept, and find it meritable | The Living on the Planet site says this about it's efforts:

The Adopt a Blog project is not a political agenda seeking to oppose the PRC or its policies. It is not confined to any particular country. It was founded strictly to uphold free speech, regardless of content. Its main idea is: we spread out our blogs, and when they block a blog, we move it elsewhere.
One of the reasons that blogs have been so easy to block is that their authors tend to use free services which keep many blogs together on one server. This works fine, until that server is blocked (as was the case with Blogspot and Typepad). If bloggers could all afford their own domain names hosted on different servers, blocking them all would become quite a headache for would-be blockers. Unfortunately, the expenses involved make that solution impractical.
Although the majority of bloggers use free hosting services, there are a large number of individuals that buy their own domains and pay for their own hosting. These individuals often use blogging clients such as Blogger or MovableType to maintain their websites. In many cases, these individuals are paying for way more space on the server than they actually use. Now consider that even a blog that has been going for 2 years, updated several times a week, containing some photos, in its entirety is not likely to take up as much as 10 MB of space online.

Posted by: Will Brady / 21:56

POP CULTURE / KITSCH

things I absolutely positively can't live without | [not] | No disrespect meant, the seller of the objet d'art makes some attractive garden ornaments | But I can't imagine actually buying it... or even having something like it in my yard |
     But the sculptured table is, I suspect, more acceptable to me than container ships full of slime monster toys, dolls with two heads, little plastic guillotines or books about fingernails | Makes me wonder what workers in Asian sweatshops think about people in industrialized cultures |
     I mean, really, this culture of acquisitiveness is every bit as unhealthy as the disease once known as "consumption"
     Forget about our global addiction to oil and it's byproducts | That we distract ourselves with absolute utter nonsense products is more disturbing |
     Now that I've brought that all up, that wine table garden statue isn't all that bad ~ at least it has a use |

Posted by: Will Brady / 10:25

DRUG CARTELS || CORPORATE CONTROL || ECONOMIC TREASON
Drug company accepts fine | admits no wrong | I love these things | Litigation settled where the defendant says "I din't do no wrong" then comes up with agreement on how to correct what was supposedly not done | In this case, GlaxoSmithKline agrees to $75M Settlement | [from the AP wires]

Posted by: Will Brady / 09:53

IRAQ QUAGMIRE
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
copyright notice

Iraqi Provisional Government flexes Rule of Law muscles | I'll sleep restfully tonight knowing that Iraq's provisional government has approved a new copyright protections law | And I suppose Mohammad [may Allah praise him!] would be the first to demand such protections by copyrighting the Qu'ran, if he'd written it today | ...not that the provisional government is comprised of Islamic militants, mind you | Just wouldn't want anybody else getting paid for his good works some 1400 years ago |
Equally comforting, is knowing that the new copyright law expands the old law's protections by an additional 25 years [now life+50 years] |
Why, I'll bet this is as important to the gneral populace of Iraq as the new Iraqi flag |

Posted by: Will Brady / 00:17

2004-05-25

WEBSURFING || ALTERNATIVE ENERGY LINKS
the jeep

rebel wolf's website | Sometimes you don't have to be elaborate, or provide a continual running monologue to make a point | Such is the case with the site known as rebelwolf's | Clean, succinct, easy to navigate ...not at all like my rambling labyrinth at rondak.org |
The site selects a couple of favorite subjects: astronomy, alternative energy, model rocketry, videography, willys jeeps, wolves and a couple of pithy visits with himself to for you to get acquainted |
Although he hasn't got a page on the site about it, he also writes on water conservation, in fact, I came across the site while reading a thread about "on-demand" gravity feed water systems |

Posted by: Will Brady / 23:49

WEBSURFING
Regarding recent posts | I want to take pause and make note of a number of sites and documents that have een online for quite some time | To speak upon or allude to other subjects and options about our planet, the geopolitics and other chaos and phenomena we watch, and barely have time to deal with amidst so many other distractions to choose from | Yet, for us to change, to find more positive directions, we have to seek under every nook and cranny, every rock and crevasse |
Such are among the examples mentioned here | They've been in my bookmarks for years | It's way past time to share them | may not agree with all of what they say, but that's a beauty to it | The information is there | We can review it and come to our own conclusions |

Posted by: Will Brady / 02:01

21st CENTURY FEUDALISM
Trufax | In my conspiracy theories files, this is yet another site I find a thoughtful, if dense, read | Actually, it's less about conspiracies (though it does repeatedly reference the robber barons and chicken hawk adventurers that run the planet) and more about becoming AWARE | There is more to the universe and reality than our materialistic, sensate experience had to offer ...much more | The authors of this site bring this to our attention|
Roam around | And if you are still stuck in the sensate, check out the astrological connect on the page to see one astrologer's prediction for October 2004 - coming to terms with one's actions |

Posted by: Will Brady / 01:47

ANTI-UTOPIAS
SURVEILLANCE

Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon | Cartome's description: "Bentham’s Panopticon -- the Greek neologism signified ‘all-seeing place’-- was all about vision and transparency, but vision and transparency operating one-way only: in the service of power. Bentham specifications called for a concentric building whose periphery was divided into non-communicating cellular enclosures, in which confined inmates would be held in isolation, invisible to each other. At the center of the annular design was a tower, the lodge, which housed the omniscient inspector. The panoptic mechanism’s asymmetric system of lighting and wooden blinds ensured that the individual inmate was constantly visible, identifiable, and classifiable to the inspector -- who was a kind of secular version of the allseeing god's-eye."
The principles and design concpts behind Panopticon became the foundation and model for the new commonplace penitentary systems | Then seen as massive retreats for penitents, wrong doers, and as places for miscreats to reflect upon their crimes, they instead became frieghtful, dehumanizing edifices where people may have come in anti-social and left socially insane |
Deborah Natsios, the brainchild behind Cartome, prsented an alternative vision in 1991, Reverse Panopticon, an architectural vision that looks away from complex and labarinthine edifices, to open source, vernacular, inviting design | Worth review as far as I see it |
Incidentially Cartome is "...an archive of news and spatial / geographic documents on privacy, cryptography, dual-use technologies, national security and intelligence -- communicated by imagery systems: cartography, photography, photogrammetry, steganography, camouflage, maps, images, drawings, charts, diagrams, IMINT and their reverse-panopticon and counter-deception potential."
Fair Warning 2! | The Authors of Cartome and Cryptome provide cautions that some members of the USA's secret police (CIA/FBI) have let them know that these sites are, or have been, monitored for their use and visitors | There are no secrets, anyway | Electronic trails, like the slime from a garden slug, can always give yo away if somebody's looking | But then, that's what Panopticon warns about |

Posted by: Will Brady / 00:46

2004-05-24

WEBSURFING || CULTURAL DARKNESS

Mayhem's Internet Crime Archives | Oh, 'tis a strange place this one | Grim, creepy, bio blurbs on serial killers, mass murderers, famous cannibals | More detail than you ever wanted to know about what happened to Jeffrey Dahlmer's estate ...the curious saga of Ted Koszinki's family | As well as where and how to get Antonio Mendoza's book Teen Rampage | The site could hardly have been made by one person alone, and the site gives credit to the contributors |
Maybe someday, and updated page will also host images of famous early 21st century war criminals, whomever they end up being | I can't imagine |
Fair Warning! | Some of the anti-art sections of the site are so intense, they may just cause your browser to freeze up, or even make you re-boot your computer |

Posted by: Will Brady / 23:32

2004-05-23

ACHEIVABLE UTOPIAS
World Revolution | Of course, it serves little for one to be critical of the powers that be, yet offers nary an alternative | So for this I submit the website for World Revolution |

Brief Overview
     The World Revolution is an idea for a new, global grassroots social movement for progressive social change. It aims to resolve in a definitive and comprehensive manner the major social problems of our world and our era.
     The World Revolution is intended to be a large-scale, mass social movement, involving large numbers of people, and international in scope. It is also intended to be a long-term, yet urgent social movement. A tentative time-frame for the WR is 15-25 years.
     There are four broad 'issue areas' of the WR: 'Peace', Human Rights, Environment, and Development.
     The World Revolution is intended to be a primarily peaceful and nonviolent revolution, based on nonviolent activism, organizing and advocacy.
     A major aspect of the WR is an attempt to unify both the various organizations as well as individuals throughout the world that are working for global justice.
     The WR is intended to be a free and open social movement, and not a formal, official organization. It is intended to be fully democratic, decentralized and non-hierarchical in its structure and decision-making.
     Types of activity and activism envisioned by the World Revolution include: protests, public education, media activism, civil disobedience, direct action, and other traditional as well as new, innovative forms of activism, advocacy, campaigning and protest.

You might want to also look at Global Issues for detail on the destructive nature of the current regimes |

Posted by: Will Brady / 23:40

POP CULTURE || POLITICS OF THE ABSURD || 21st CENTURY FEUDALISM
Grandpa had a good life | A little lightness from the folks at mantlepies |

The next item I gotta thank bloggerheads and Mr Power for bringing to my attention

pix from http://www.bible-prayer-europe.com/--v

The Jesus Landing Pad | Bush White House checked with rapture Christians before latest Israel move [A Village Voice piece by by Rick Perlstein]

It was an e-mail we weren't meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that "the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level"—this to a group whose representative in Israel believed herself to have been attacked by witchcraft unleashed by proximity to a volume of Harry Potter. Most of all, apparently, we're not supposed to know the National Security Council's top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios.
But now we know.
patriots or profiteers?

"Everything that you're discussing is information you're not supposed to have," barked Pentecostal minister Robert G. Upton when asked about the off-the-record briefing his delegation received on March 25. Details of that meeting appear in a confidential memo signed by Upton and obtained by the Voice.
The e-mailed meeting summary reveals NSC Near East and North African Affairs director Elliott Abrams sitting down with the Apostolic Congress and massaging their theological concerns. Claiming to be "the Christian Voice in the Nation's Capital," the members vociferously oppose the idea of a Palestinian state. They fear an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza might enable just that, and they object on the grounds that all of Old Testament Israel belongs to the Jews. Until Israel is intact and Solomon's temple rebuilt, they believe, Christ won't come back to earth.

There's More...

Posted by: Will Brady / 21:48

since 12 june 1999