MICHAEL W. DEAN – Page 25 – Feeding the hamster in your brain

Neo-con right-wing hit piece against Ron Paul that’s so silly it could have been from The Onion

The other day this article called “Drugs, Guns and Madness in the Ron Paul Revolution” came out on the inaccurately named neo-con blog, “Accuracy in Media.” It’s so stunningly stupid, you must read it. An Excerpt:

Ron Paul didn’t do as well as the media thought he would in Iowa, but he is moving on toward New Hampshire, where the candidate has what the media call a good “ground game.” But the “Ron Paul Revolution” in New Hampshire looks a lot like what Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn tried to accomplish with the 1960s generation. Disillusioned young people, brainwashed with illegal mind-altering drugs and armed with weapons in the name of “liberty,” are being taught to hate their government and the police. They believe Ron Paul is their savior.

Remember that communist terrorist Dohrn had said, “We fight in many ways. Dope is one of our weapons. The laws against marijuana mean that millions of us are outlaws long before we actually split. Guns and grass are united in the youth underground.”

The same attitude is apparent in some of the libertarian-anarchist groups backing Paul in New Hampshire.

In order to grasp this phenomenon, consider what happened at the Porcupine Freedom Festival (PorcFest) held in New Hampshire in June of last year.

A film called “Guns and Weed: The Road to Freedom” was screened for the PorcFest participants. The “weed” is marijuana. This very disturbing video, which carries a warning, features many objectionable scenes, including one of a rapper with a gun dancing in front of a huge poster of marijuana leaves. “Today,” says the narrator, “many cops who enforce pot laws do so because it provides them with cushy jobs, good benefits, and a chance to push people around.”……

It goes on with this tone, for many many paragraphs.

Even real conservatives think it’s a stupid article. This user comment is spot on:

Old Right said:

Wow, Cliff. You and AIM have really gone downhill over the years. I used to enjoy your work on the UN and would distribute AIM’s sister group Accuracy in Academia’s material at my political correctness plagued campus. But man…..what happened to you? This tirade just sounds like some drunk yelling at people in a bar. Oh well. Old-school conservatives used to understand that big government in our own country was the biggest threat to our liberty, not the Gay Muslim Mexicans. Thankfully, that idea has come around again. Ron Paul by far wins the youth vote in Republican polls, and now that the primaries have started he won the under-40 vote demographic in the Iowa caucus. Peace, liberty, and sound money are the future of the conservative movement, Cliff. Get with the program or get left behind.

I think the hit piece came from two reasons:
1. Simply IGNORING Ron Paul is no longer working.
2.There’s a lot more MONEY in sounding insane and mean than there is in making sense. Look at the SPLC. I think of Accuracy in Media as the right-wing SPLC.

The Accuracy in Media site is pretty popular, and the guy who wrote the article, Cliff Kincaid, used to be the editor for Oliver North’s newsletter. (As someone said “No wonder he knows so much about guns, drugs and violence.” lol.) And it got re-blogged on several hundred other blogs. (Probably automatically. They were probably syndicating him and haven’t yet noticed his meltdown, like Old Right has.)

And this isn’t just some fly-by-nite blog of one guy in his mother’s basement. They have an office on tony Connecticut Avenue in Washington DC, a staff of nine, and according to their financial statements, they have nearly five million dollars in assets. Who the hell is funding these trolls? (Billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon oil fortune, according to this.)

Fortunately, like Mr. Burns, they are old and will one day die off. Their ideas will die with them. The path of America will go in one of two directions: socialism, or liberty. Everyone slammed in that article hates socialism as much, if not more, than the guy who wrote it claims to. The only thing that’s going to keep socialism from prevailing is people like the folks slammed in that article, and their good activism and media work.

As horrible of a bullshit bit of writing it is, I’m honored that our Guns and Weed film was included. And of all the things that are being thrown around these days to try to stop Ron Paul, I never thought I’d be one of those things!

Most of the people mentioned in the article are friends of mine.

While this hit piece in “Accuracy” in Media was way off the mark with the tone, I DO feel like it’s right in one respect: we are the spiritual godchildren of the 60s radicals. Or at least I know I can say *I* feel that way.

The first piece of “alternative literature” I ever got my hands on was Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman (PDF). That was 1975, I was 11. Sure, he was a commie, but that book is all about guns and weed and not trusting the government and cops.

My older sister lived in New Hampshire in the 70s and I used to visit here there. She was involved in the 70s blockades on the Seabrook Nuclear Plant. She’s an Obama lover now, but she was a big influence on me in showing me “the majority isn’t always correct.”

While most people thought that Timothy Leary and the “Tune in, Turn on, Drop out” thing erupted and spread spontaneously, in reality, he and Allen Ginsberg and a few others had frequent conversations about “running it like a business”, and sent out press releases and did a lot of very proactive things like that behind the scenes.

I’m thinking and working like that lately.

The book Steal This Book contains this image, (bad scan from the PDF is here, click to see bigger):

It’s a cartoon of some 60s radicals running a pirate radio/TV station. It’s hard to read all the text in this scan, but I can read two of the word balloons. One is coming from the door, it says “Open up! it’s the police!” “We got some nice LSD for ya! Har har.” The guy in the back right with the pot leaf shirt and the bandoleer and shotgun is looking at the door saying “The mad lackeys are in for a sample of revolutionary justice, folks.”

But the whole idea of pirate radio and TV fascinated me as a kid when I read this. I never did do pirate radio, but I did build legal micro-transmitters as a kid to try to reach the world. So that picture really spoke to me.

Though guns scared me back then. Not these days, I have at least three loaded guns within ten feet of me right now.

But the cool thing is, thanks to the internet, my friends and I reach the world 24/7 with podcasting and satellite radio and community radio. While we’re calmer and not commie, our bedrooms now are the studio in that cartoon above.

–Michael W. Dean

Above: Antigone from Sex, Lies and Anarchy podcasting

Kevin M. Sanchez-Cruz of CopBlock podcasting.

Neema Vedadi podcasting Freedom Feens

Me podcasting Freedom Feens

Garrett Fox from Cop Block surfing while editing

From left to right, Carla, Stephanie, and Meg, all in-studio during “She Talk live”

Free Talk Live remote radio broadcast

Pete Voluntaryist Eyre doing activist video

Ademo Voluntaryist Freeman from Cop Block doing activist video

Stephanie Murphy in her home studio

Michael Dean’s secondary editing setup

This mini air compressor is going to extend my lifespan!

electric-duster-600-500x250 — Metro Vacuum ED500 DataVac 500-Watt 0.75-HP Electric Duster

I used to spend tons of money on canned air. I use it to clean my keyboard, to clean the inside of my computer, to blow out the clinging dust from my bag-less vacuum cleaner, and a lot of other things. Canned air is expensive, it really ads up, and it’s really toxic….People even huff it to get high, and it causes brain damage. Not something I want to use in my home.

When I go to WalMart weekly with my wife (Which we call “hunting”, because we read somewhere that cats think you’re out hunting when you work and shop, because you’re gone all day and you always have lots of treats for them), I usually grab a magazine from the racks, read it while she shops, then put it back before we leave. In some gun magazine I ran across an ad for the Metro Vacuum ED500 DataVac 500-Watt 0.75-HP Electric Duster (Available on Amazon, HERE.)

At 50 bucks, it will pay for itself in me not buying canned air in about six months. It does seem louder than a jet engine (I wear ear plugs) and does get warm quickly (it even says that in the user’s manual) but it gets the job done, without poisoning you or your kitties. It has a 12-foot AC cable, which is enough for most uses, and I just add an extension cord for more. It’s made in the USA by a company that’s been in business for generations. It’s solid steel and built like a tank.

I love it I love it I love it!

MWD

Darned Optimum

Ever since Optimum Online (a New York City company) took over Bresnen (a local area company here in Wyoming that did a good job), our TV service has been wonkie, our Internet has been intermittent and our phone service scratchy and sometimes not working at all. They’ve also been throttling BitTorrent, which I use to legally share media I create.

But the final straw that I think is going to make me switch to one of their competitors is that it took them FOUR DAYS to come out and fix a downed cable. Friday night, the wild, wooly Wyoming wind blew down the cable that supplies my DSL, land line phone and cable TV. I called them every day for that four days, and every day, after waiting for an interminable period and repeating all my personal information, they said “Someone will be out today.” Sure, one of those days WAS New Years’, but still, they told me they’d come and they didn’t until today.

And it wasn’t just my service, this cable was down in the alley, and provides service to the whole block.

Fortunately, my service was not interpreted, but that’s got nothing to do with Optimum and everything to do with the fact that Casper, Wyoming is not heavily populated and people are alert, respectful and polite. If this had happened when we lived in California, the downed cable would have been destroyed by a speeding car, or harvested by meth heads to sell for the copper. I can tell by the lack of tracks in the snow that no one drove over it in the alley. It looks like one or two cars started down the alley, but saw the wire and turned around.

Optimum5 — Downed optimum cable in the alley

Heavy Inspiration for the Boondocks Theme Song

When I was a kid growing up in the 70s, whenever I went to the local movie theater, there was this 20-second or so motion logo with some really hip music that would play after the trailers and before the main feature. If we were still at the concession stand or hanging out in the lobby, as soon we heard this groovy beat, we’d run into the theater to sit down. The visual of this logo was swirling colors (I’ve put a still of it behind Riley from the Boondocks in the image I Photoshopped, above.)

This was literally the first “hip” “groovy” music I ever heard in my life, and was also the first “psychedelic light show” type imagery I ever saw. After I grew up and went to theaters that did not use this logo (or when the logo was replaced by other things, mainly more trailers), I often thought about it. It somehow had an important place in my mind. Even in my 40s, I could still hum the melody I hadn’t heard since I was 8, and I always wondered what this motion logo was.

A few years ago I discovered the animated show The Boondocks, and I love it. Neema lent me all the DVDs, and even after watching them all three or four times, whenever my wife and I are channel flipping and there is a Boondocks episode on, we watch it. The excellent theme song for the Boondocks (by the very talented rapper Asheru) contains a horn line that seems to be heavily inspired by a horn line from that 70s movie theater animation logo.

This got me thinking about the motion logo again. What was it? Who made it? Was it in all theaters or only mine? I’m assuming all, but as a kid I didn’t travel much and really thought of my tiny town as the whole world.

That theater has long been torn down and replaced with a statue of Habeas Corpus suspender and first Republican Abraham Lincoln with Grace Bedell. Grace is the little girl who famously told Lincoln to grow his beard. Grace was from my tiny town, Westfield, New York.

Grace Bedell was about the only claim to fame we had, except Westfield also being the birthplace of Welches Grape Juice.

Lucille Ball and Natalie Merchant were from our county, but not our town.

The other night I was surfing around YouTube and watched a trailer from a 70s biopic on the legendary and murderous blues singer Lead Belly. (Yes, Lead Belly is properly spelled as two words, not one. The man himself spelled it with two words.) At the end of the trailer, someone had added THE MOTION LOGO FROM THE 70s that had been so important to me as a kid. I was elated! I finally found it! It actually exists and I didn’t imagine it!

Here’s a direct link to the motion logo at the end of the Lead Belly trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48aQbh1lV1s&feature=player_detailpage#t=324s

(That link should take you directly to where the logo starts. If it doesn’t, and starts and the beginning of the trailer, scroll over to the last 20 seconds of the video.) Someone has added text over the logo on the YouTube video, that text was not in the theater version. Obviously,…it’s a Web URL for a DVD company. Web URLs and DVDs did not yet exist in the 70s. Which is why I went to movie theaters as a kid!

For comparison to the much later Boondocks theme song, here’s a direct link to the horn line I think was inspired by the 70s motion logo horn line:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgRGpbVYZz0&feature=player_detailpage#t=30s

(If that doesn’t take you to the direct spot, the line comes up over and over in the song, it’s the descending horn part after the ascending piano part.)

I still don’t know what that 70s logo animation was, or who owned it. I think Quentin Tarantino may have purchased the rights to it, someone said he’s used it on some of his DVDs. I wouldn’t know, I haven’t liked him since Pulp Fiction.

Anyway, I just wanted to share this nifty little revelation with you.

Before I go, another thing I really love about the Boondocks Theme Song is the reference to the concept “The Four Boxes of Liberty“, with the lines

I am the ballot in your box
The bullet in your gun

Neema and I are fond of the concept of The Four Boxes of Liberty, and have discussed it in the Freedom Feens Podcast, in this episode.

–Michael W. Dean

How To Bypass BitTorrent Throttling, step-by-step settings

A lot of ISPs throttle BitTorrent traffic: Charter, AT&T, Qwest, ComCast, CableVision, and many more. There’s a full list HERE. There are lot of tutorials out there on bypassing the evils of throttling. Some work, some don’t, some work for a while then stop working when the ISP figures it out. Below are step-by-step settings that worked for me in uTorrent. I went from being throttled to about three hours a week to being on 24/7. The bandwidth isn’t quite as high as before I was being throttled, but overall my weekly throughput is MUCH higher, because I can now be on 24/7.

NOTE: I do not recommend that you do anything illegal. I use BitTorrent ONLY for seeding my movies and podcasts, things I own, movies like Guns and Weed, the Road To Freedom and the Freedom Feens podcast, things I produced myself that are released Creative Commons. In fact, you can grab my torrents HERE. If you like this article and get something out of it, please do grab those torrents, download and enjoy them, and SEED them. Thanks! But I’ve done a test, and these techniques do work for downloading as well.

Overall, showing bandwidth I’m getting:

Here are the screenshots of my custom settings that are bypassing throttling on my end. (under Options/Preferences):

General settings:

UI settings:

(No screenshot for Directories. Doesn’t matter what you have for Directories.)

Connection settings: (If this port doesn’t work for you, try a different random port, but do not randomize port for each start.)

Bandwidth settings:

BitTorrent settings:

Transfer Cap settings:

Queuing:

Leave the last four, Scheduler, Web UI, Playback and Advanced, as is. You don’t need to change anything on them.

Enjoy. Always obey the law, brush your teeth and do what your parents tell you to. And don’t forget to vote, because your vote counts and politicians are looking out for your best interests. HA HA HA HA!

–Michael W. Dean