Zombie Barker - Martin Whitmore, flickr creative commons

For a long time being a business major in college was considered to be a low rent degree. It was a major of the snot nosed upper middle class kid who could do nothing else. Too stupid for any of the sciences and to lacking in talent for the arts and too illiterate for english.

Even those who went into the trades were held in higher regard by most. In the last couple of decades this has all changed, as Sam Smith points on in his current essay.

By 2005 these schools graduated 142,000 MBAs in one year.

There are plenty of worthy arguments to be made correlating the rise of business school culture with the decline of our economy and our country. A cursory examination of American business suggests that its major product has become wasted energy. And not just the physical sort Compute all the energy loss created by corporate lawyers, Washington lobbyists, marketing consultants, CEO benefits, advertising agencies, leadership seminars, human resource supervisors, strategic planners and industry conventions and it is amazing that this country has any manufacturing base at all. We have created an economy based not on actually doing anything, but on facilitating, supervising, planning, managing, analyzing, tax advising, marketing, consulting or defending in court what might be done if we had time to do it. The few remaining truly productive companies become immediate targets for another entropic activity, the leveraged buyout and the rise of the killer hedge fund.

Hi, y’all.

What do you do with outer space cabbages (a.k.a. kohlrabi)?

“Talk Show Subway Car” is the latest sketch by New York City prank collective Improv Everywhere:

For our latest mission, we converted a New York City subway car into a late night talk show set. Host Pat Cassels (CollegeHumor) interviewed random commuters from his desk as bandleader Evan Gregory (The Gregory Brothers) kept the car rocking.

Enjoy the video first and then go behind the scenes with our mission report and photos below.

The full report is worth a look to see just how far this crew went in creating a TV show set in a moving subway car.

Of course, my favorite ever Improv Everywhere sketch is “No Shirts,” where over a hundred men of all ages and body shapes invaded an Abercrombie & Fitch with their shirts off.

Our garden is growing beautifully, with handfuls of tomatoes and herbs for harvest every day. Pumpkin sprouts just came up over the last 24 hours. We’ve added 3-4 new garden beds just since the season started, slowly converting more of the yard into productive space.

But we’re also customers of Texas Farmhouse, a community-supported agriculture business which sends us produce from several local farms every other week. We sometimes get vegetables I’d never buy like fennel and kohlrabi. I’m still working on using both, but today made progress on the latter with this recipe for apple and kohlrabi slaw from A Veggie Venture. I substituted lime juice for lemon, and soy milk (since we only buy milk or cream for specific recipes), and added some fresh dill. Yum.

Since I was cooking all the things, I also finished off the last of the garden carrots in a decadent carrot gratin recipe from Fine Cooking, which used up some smoked sharp cheddar I had in the fridge.

Moving away from food, if you’re anything like me you would love to attend this stage production of Princess Mononoke using puppets made from recycled parts. From Crunchyroll:

In cooperation with Studio Ghibli, the Whole Hog Theatre presented the world’s first theatrical staging of Hayao Miyazaki’s renowned animated film Princess Mononoke at London’s New Diorama in sold out shows April 2-6th. Today, they shared a series of photos of the production, which retold the ecological fable using giant puppets made from recycled material.

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Tell me about your favorite weird looking foods and how you cook them. You can talk about anything in the comments.

Here is a link to the Live report from KFOR.  And one from KOCO TV.

UPDATE:  37 fatalities so far confirmed by the medical examiner.  AP – http://bigstory.ap.org/article/tornadoes-slam-plains-midwest-1-dead-okla

MyFDL Editor’s Note: Community activists, as well as members of Occupy, Anonymous and Tar Sands Blockade are creating community-driven relief efforts. Please check the hashtag #OpOK for info.

John Lennon . . .

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

Current reality is a reflection of us all, it’s a reflection of the choices we’ve made on this death march we keep making between administrations of evil and administrations of lesser evil. While we’ve been busy just trying to survive, the masters of Earth Incorporated have been busy too. Very busy. The bridge to Peace is burning, the bridge to Justice is burning, the bridge to the Future is burning, the corporate masters are burning them all.

Michael Ruppert . . .

The US economy, the privately-owned Federal Reserve system, and the government which they operate like a franchise are the greatest enemies of the entire human race and especially the rapidly-deteriorating and fragile ecosystem which supports all life.

The corporate masters aren’t the only ones with the torches, they’re getting plenty of help from conservative arsonists determined to burn everything they don’t like or believe in, which pretty much includes everything except guns and the Book of Genesis.

Chris Hedges . . .

I think we have powerful proto-fascist movements in this country, and I look at the Tea Party, the militia, the Christian right, where they celebrate the language of violence, they celebrate the gun culture. They have a long list of people they don’t like. And I think that is a very – remains a very frightening and powerful undercurrent within American society.

All of us know on some level that it’s a kind of suicidal trajectory, and I think that it’s clear that the formal mechanisms of power are not going to save us, either from the rise of the security and surveillance state, the degradation of the ecosystem and the kind of fraying and destruction of what is left of our democracy.

I don’t know why so many progressives still believe it matters which corporate party controls the formal mechanisms of power. But I know what the consequences of their illusions have been. These illusion peddlers tell us they’re serious people, they tell us they’re realists, they expect us to believe that taking a brief death march break every two years to elect new guards is the best that we can do.

I’m not a preacher, I’m not a leader, I’m not here to tell anyone how to feel, but the harsh reality of what is happening can be seen along every agonizing mile of this endless march, it can be seen in the firelight of all those burning bridges, it can be heard in the roaring of the flames, a searing message is being written in fire for all the world to see . . .

The formal mechanisms of power are not the solution, they’re the problem.

The false world of the corporate masters gets all the attention while the real world we all live in is ignored. They tell each other that my world, your world, our world is theirs for the taking, that we’re powerless, but our world is beyond their reach, it is within us and cannot be corrupted, the moral courage of Gandhi lives on in us, the moral vision of Dr. King endures on our websites, the moral wisdom of the ages is reflected in everything we stand for and defend.

The corporate masters can burn all the bridges they want, there are other ways to cross the River of Life. We can find our way, limitless undying love is shining all around us like a million suns, calling us on and on, showing us the way. They can never change our world, they can never own it, they can never rule it, a higher consciousness is emerging, humanity is finally awakening from this long night of deceit and destruction, millions are seeking and finding the empowerment that comes from within, that has no limit, that liberates as it enlightens, that unifies at it expands.

We are many, they are few.

Our world will not fall. Their world will.

Jai Guru Deva Om . . .

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

What comes after Hope?

I worked for years as an editor at Pantheon Books. Its publisher, maybe the most adventurous in the business, was André Schiffrin. Among his many accomplishments, he “discovered” Studs Terkel (already a well-known Chicago radio personality), published his first oral history (Division Street: America), and made him a bestseller.  Sometime after I arrived at Pantheon in the mid-1970s, he asked me to take a last look at a new manuscript by Studs. It was the equivalent of sending the second team onto the field, but it began my own long relationship with the famed oral historian. He was an experience — a small man who, when he wasn’t listening professionally in a fashion beyond compare, never stopped talking. In doing so, he had an almost magical way of making those around him feel larger than life. Later, I would be the editor for two of his oral histories, one on death and the other on hope (in that splendid order and the second with the Studs-appropriate title Hope Dies Last).

Last October, Bill Moyers interviewed me about the dismal state of American politics.  As our conversation was ending, he suddenly asked: “What keeps you going against all the evidence?” At that moment, Studs came to mind. I mentioned editing “one of the greats of our world” and responded this way: “It turned out that when he wrote his book about hope, it was all about activists and the basic point he made was: in good times you could just be hopeful about your life. You didn’t have to be an activist. You didn’t have to be an anything.  In bad times, if you want to be hopeful, you have to take a step. You’ve got to take some step to do something in the world. And in that sense, TomDispatch is my medicine against despair.  So what makes me hopeful is doing TomDispatch.”

All true. But I realize now that it wasn’t quite a full response. I had left out one crucial figure in my life: Rebecca Solnit, who taught me how to hope in a world that seemed dismal indeed.  She was the one who — I’ve written about it before — slipped through the barely ajar door of my life in May 2003, at a moment as grim and dreary as any in my political experience. The largest antiwar movement ever to protest a war that had yet to happen had just packed its tents and gone home in despair, while Baghdad was occupied by American troops and George W. Bush and his top officials were in their “mission accomplished” triumphalist mode.  Many activists then feared that they would remain so forever and would have dismissed out of hand someone who suggested that their Pax Americana dreams of domination would begin unraveling in mere weeks (as happened), not decades or centuries.

Ten years ago, exactly to the day, I published Rebecca’s miraculous piece “Acts of Hope,” which she would later expand into her book Hope in the Dark. It was written to welcome that “darkness” which seemed already to be enveloping us.  It was written with a sense of how the expectable unravels, of how the future surprises us, often enough with offerings not of horror but of hope.

With few people can you ever say, she (or he) changed my life, changed the very way I understand our world. For me, she’s one of the few — and she’s still doing it with her miraculous new book (out in June), The Faraway Nearby.  She taught me how to look into that future darkness with hope. Like Studs, she taught me that acting, even while not knowing, is a powerful antidote to despair. So it means the world to me that she’s returned to the subject of hope to celebrate the tenth anniversary of her arrival in my life and at TomDispatch. Tom

Too Soon to Tell
The Case for Hope, Continued
By Rebecca Solnit

Ten years ago, my part of the world was full of valiant opposition to the new wars being launched far away and at home — and of despair. And like despairing people everywhere, whether in a personal depression or a political tailspin, these activists believed the future would look more or less like the present.  If there was nothing else they were confident about, at least they were confident about that. Ten years ago, as a contrarian and a person who prefers not to see others suffer, I tried to undermine despair with the case for hope.

A decade later, the present is still contaminated by the crimes of that era, but so much has changed. Not necessarily for the better — a decade ago, most spoke of climate change as a distant problem, and then it caught up with us in 10,000 ways. But not entirely for the worse either — the vigorous climate movement we needed arose in that decade and is growing now. If there is one thing we can draw from where we are now and where we were then, it’s that the unimaginable is ordinary, and the way forward is almost never a straight path you can glance down, but a labyrinth of surprises, gifts, and afflictions you prepare for by accepting your blind spots as well as your intuitions.

The despairing of May 2003 were convinced of one true thing, that we had not stopped the invasion of Iraq, but they extrapolated from that a series of false assumptions about our failures and our powerlessness across time and space. They assumed — like the neoconservatives themselves — that those neocons would be atop the world for a long time to come. Instead, the neocon and neoliberal ideologies have been widely reviled and renounced around the world; the Republicans’ demographic hemorrhage has weakened them in this country; the failures of their wars are evident to everyone; and though they still grasp fearsome power, everything has indeed changed. Everything changes: there lies most of our hope and some of our fear.

I’ve seen extraordinary change in my lifetime, some of it in the last decade. I was born in a country that had been galvanized and unsettled by the civil rights movement, but still lacked a meaningful environmental movement, women’s movement, or queer rights movement (beyond a couple of small organizations founded in California in the 1950s). Half a century ago, to be gay or lesbian was to live in hiding or be treated as mentally ill or criminal. That 12 states and several countries would legalize same-sex marriage was beyond imaginable then. It wasn’t even on the table in 2003.  San Francisco’s spring run of same-sex weddings in 2004 flung open the doors through which so many have passed since.

If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change. Not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of courage, love, and commitment, the small drops that wear away stones and carve new landscapes, and sometimes by torrents of popular will that change the world suddenly. To say that is not to say that it will all come out fine in the end regardless. I’m just telling you that everything is in motion, and sometimes we are ourselves that movement.

Unstoppabilities

Written by Amanda Marcotte for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

Will sexting laws hurt victimized young women?

While I suspect most teen sexting is relatively harmless, most of us are rightly concerned about incidents in which naked pictures of teenagers get forwarded and distributed without their consent. In most cases, a girl shares a nude photo of herself with a boy (or man, in some cases) whom she trusts will behave appropriately with this vulnerable image, only to have him show it off to others, post it online, or otherwise try to shame her for it. In a couple of sad cases, the humiliated girl has even committed suicide. It’s a problem that needs fixing. Unfortunately, West Virginia’s approach — to outlaw sexting and charge those found “possessing, distributing or producing sexually inappropriate photos, videos or other media” with delinquency — is exactly the wrong way to go about this.

This law may be well-intentioned, but it will almost certainly serve mainly or even entirely to punish victims who are already enduring a public humiliation. After all, the only way that a “sext” will come to the government’s attention is if it’s being disseminated, usually without the person in the photograph’s permission. Private text messages that are kept private will, for obvious reasons, not draw legal attention.

I can confidently predict how the enforcement of this law will turn out most of the time: A girl will send a nude picture to a boy. He will forward it, publish it, and share it generally. Once it becomes known that the picture is out there, the girl, who is already suffering from a public shaming, will be charged with delinquency. The boy who originally forwarded the message may get charged, but in many or most cases, probably not. After all, it’s easier to prove that she was engaged in sexting, because of the image, than to bother to figure out who forwarded it first. They can’t charge everyone who shared the image, right? So she, the victim of this hateful behavior, will be the one punished. It’s tailor made for victim-blaming and abuse.

How do I know that’s how it will go down? Well, common sense should be good enough, but we also have actual real-world evidence. High schools have already experimented with punishing students for sexting, and the punishments often fall more heavily on the girl whose only crime was trusting too much, and not the boys who violated her trust. Jezebel reported in April about a teenage girl who sent a topless photo of herself to her male friends, and sure enough, she was the one who got expelled while the boys weren’t punished.

The American Civil Liberties Union shared a similar story from 2010 in which the girls in the sexts were charged with child pornography, even though the photos didn’t show nudity:

( Pigging Out With Koch)

By Jerry Waxman

In case you haven’t heard the news, the Chicago Tribune reported that headline the day that Truman won the election in 1948. Their track record has been about as accurate ever since that date. The great and iconic columnist Mike Royko went to work for them in 1984 only after Rupert Murdoch bought the Chicago Sun Times. Some of Royko’s choicest criticisms against Murdoch were “No self-respecting fish would want to be wrapped in a Murdoch paper” and “His goal is not quality journalism. His goal is vast power for Rupert Murdoch, political power”. It’s amazing how something said 30 years ago is still relevant today. Current Tribune ownership couldn’t possibly be more right wing than Murdoch so why is Chicago still in the hands of the Democrats? Could it be that Murdoch’s and Sam Zell’s message just sucks? That may not be a scholarly treatise but you can bet that it’s pretty accurate. Cities like Philadelphia have recently witnessed the demise of a formerly great newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, bought by Moses Annenberg in 1930 to take advantage of his racing sheet empire, but elevated by his son, Walter and again by the Knight organization over the years. McClatchy bought it from the Knights and then sold it to a group of conservative businessmen who in their own Charles Foster Kane egos thought it would be “fun to own a newspaper.” P.S.  They are in receivership.

So, let’s say that you had a couple of billion dollars just lying around and your candidates nationally had just been whupped in the 2012 elections after you and your allies had spent a gazillion dollars trying to get them elected. What would you do? Well, it might be “fun to own a media empire”, especially at fire sale rates; after all, the price mentioned is approximately 15% of what Sam Zell originally paid for it. For Charles and David Koch the sale is mere pocket change. They wouldn’t even miss it if the enterprise failed, and they would make more money by giving it to Mitt Romney to liquidate. Business people look at bottom lines. Forgetting what it costs to buy, the day to day costs of running that media empire would be dear. It would take years to make things profitable if that’s even possible. They are better off just buying out all the advertising space in all of the enterprises and spreading their message that way. No muss, no fuss, plenty of coverage.

Many people in Central Florida are very concerned about this because the Tribune Corp owns the Orlando Sentinel, the region’s only print daily, and fear that a Koch takeover could spell doom and gloom in the region and cancel any hope of objective journalism in Central Florida, yet the conservative element is hoping and praying that they will. Upon hearing the news blogger Tom Tillison posted on his Facebook page “Be still my beating heart!”  Yet, West Orlando News Online publisher Keith Longmore, a true progressive, thinks that this could be the best thing to happen for his publication.

Florida Watch Action head, Amy Ritter, is quite upset about the possibility of a Koch Bros. takeover and organized a protest Thursday afternoon, May 15, at the offices of the Orlando Sentinel. Approximately 30 protesters waving signs showed up. Prior to the organized protest several members of the Sentinel staff came out to say hello, but were completely silent on the issue. Similar demonstrations have taken place in cities like Allentown, Pa., Chicago and Los Angeles where Tribune papers are. In Los Angeles, many staff members threatened to quit if the sale went through, but L.A. is a big media town with many more opportunities than Orlando. This is an extremely small media market, and you don’t want to lose your job here. We did manage to espy Scott Maxwell, Mark Schlueb and Dave Damron, but they were nowhere to be found once the protest started. Other members of the press were there and recorded the event, however, no broadcast or cable stations were present. As far as I am aware the only videos taken were by yours truly and Tom Tillison.

(Left to right  Tom Tillison, BizPac Review, Billy Manes, Orlando Weekly, Mark Schlueb and Scott Maxwell of the Sentinel)

Ritter addressed the crowd of about fifty voicing her concerns about the Sentinal turning into a propaganda machine for the Koch Bros narrow Tea Party type views Other speakers included Sue Casterline, a subscriber for over 30 years, who will cancel her subscription if the Koch’s buy the paper, Holly Fussell, a Rollins College student, who uses the Sentinel for research and she fears that her information will be tainted by Koch ownership and Melissa, another concerned student who echoed Casterline’s and Fussell’s concerns. Ritter then ended the gathering with a chant and encouraged everyone to wave signs at rush hour traffic.

Ritter states that there will be other actions and that the community at large needs to know what’s happening. The Sentinel can’t comment on it and the Koch Bros. will not comment on a pending sale. A spokesman for the Kochs said that they invest in a lot of business opportunities and that the Tribune Company is just one. That’s all well and good, but I don’t want to wake up one morning and find out that Dewey won in 2014. Do you?