buchino

Everything Is a Remix: Part 4 Our system of law doesn’t...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:10:29 -0800

Our system of law doesn’t acknowledge the derivative nature of creativity. Instead, ideas are regarded as property, as unique and original lots with distinct boundaries. But ideas aren’t so tidy. They’re layered, they’re interwoven, they’re tangled. And when the system conflicts with the reality…the system starts to fail.

I really love this series. And the final chapter is the best. It’s long overdue that we reconsider our creativity-stifling copyright and patent laws.

Welcome to Cancerland

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:32:02 -0800

Welcome to Cancerland:

To the extent that current methods of detection and treatment fail or fall short, America’s breast-cancer cult can be judged as an outbreak of mass delusion, celebrating survivorhood by downplaying mortality and promoting obedience to medical protocols known to have limited efficacy. And although we may imagine ourselves to be well past the era of patriarchal medicine, obedience is the message behind the infantilizing theme in breast-cancer culture, as represented by the teddy bears, the crayons, and the prevailing pinkness. You are encouraged to regress to a little-girl state, to suspend critical judgment, and to accept whatever measures the doctors, as parent surrogates, choose to impose.

Worse, by ignoring or underemphasizing the vexing issue of environmental causes, the breast cancer cult turns women into dupes of what could be called the Cancer Industrial Complex: the multinational corporate enterprise that with the one hand doles out carcinogens and disease and, with the other, offers expensive, semi-toxic pharmaceutical treatments. Breast Cancer Awareness Month, for example, is sponsored by AstraZeneca (the manufacturer of tamoxifen), which, until a corporate reorganization in 2000, was a leading producer of pesticides, including acetochlor, classified by the EPA as a “probable human carcinogen.” This particularly nasty conjuncture of interests led the environmentally oriented Cancer Prevention Coalition (CPC) to condemn Breast Cancer Awareness Month as “a public relations invention by a major polluter which puts women in the position of being unwitting allies of the very people who make them sick.” Although AstraZeneca no longer manufactures pesticides, CPC has continued to criticize the breast-cancer crusade—and the American Cancer Society—for its unquestioning faith in screening mammograms and careful avoidance of environmental issues. In a June 12, 2001, press release, CPC chairman Samuel S. Epstein, M.D., and the well-known physician activist Quentin Young castigated the American Cancer Society for its “longstanding track record of indifference and even hostility to cancer prevention … Recent examples include issuing a joint statement with the Chlorine Institute justifying the continued global use of persistent organochlorine pesticides, and also supporting the industry in trivializing dietary pesticide residues as avoidable risks of childhood cancer. ACS policies are further exemplified by allocating under 0.1 percent of its $700 million annual budget to environmental and occupational causes of cancer.”

In the harshest judgment, the breast-cancer cult serves as an accomplice in global poisoning—normalizing cancer, prettying it up, even presenting it, perversely, as a positive and enviable experience.

I saw the film Pink Ribbons, Inc. last night. Barbara Ehrenreich—the author of this fantastic article—is all over it. Do yourself a favor and read the entire article.

I could spend all day checking out Google street view captures.

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:00:05 -0800

I could spend all day checking out Google street view captures.

I can finally explain this photograph. ❤ In January, 2010, I...

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 06:00:00 -0800

I can finally explain this photograph.

❤

In January, 2010, I visited my sister, Nancy, and her boyfriend, Lucas, in Boston. The only opportunity I would have to visit my friend, Jordan, would be Sunday morning at his four square league.

Nancy had made four Care Bear costumes for the previous Halloween. So, naturally, we went to visit Jordan and cheer him on as Care Bears.

But we needed a fourth.

Lucky for us—and Good Luck Bear for her—we met a Starbucks barista who thought it’d be fun to tag along. That’s just how we roll.

❤

The entire thing was shot on my iPhone 3GS, so pardon the quality. Jordan Harrison did all the editing and music and a lot of the shooting and everything else that’s magical.

Tenderheart Bear – Nancy Schroeder née Buchino
Bedtime Bear – Lucas Schroeder
Good Luck Bear – Mary Getler
Diversity Bear – Michael Buchino

Before you ask: Yes, that’s four square world champion Chris Glasser playing with the Care Bears in the background.

"There’s a tremendous amount of suffering. A lot of America is much worse off than it was four years..."

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 18:56:30 -0800

“There’s a tremendous amount of suffering. A lot of America is much worse off than it was four years ago. I think the main reason you should be angry about it is that it’s gratuitous. This doesn’t have to be happening. We actually have the tools to make most of this go away. If we could throw aside the political prejudices and bad ideas that are crippling us, in 18 months we could be back to something that feels like a much better economy.”

- Paul Krugman, Playboy Interview

"Give us convenient content at a reasonable price, and we’ll buy it. Sell the stuff without DRM, for..."

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 13:05:19 -0800

“Give us convenient content at a reasonable price, and we’ll buy it. Sell the stuff without DRM, for a few dollars. Make it available to everyone, worldwide, at the same time. Then take the massive, unending pile of money, forever.”

- Matt Gemmell, “The Piracy Threshold”

Stop treating people like shit and they’ll give you money. It cannot get any simpler than this.

Photo

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 11:00:05 -0800

Icans by Alex Pardee So sayeth Pardee: Why am I calling them...

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:00:05 -0800

Icans by Alex Pardee

So sayeth Pardee:

Why am I calling them “Icans”? Glad you didn’t really ask, but I’m telling you anyway. Well, because whether SOPA passes or not, I will continue to take any licensed character, or pop culture icon and do whatever I want with it for art’s sake, because ICAN. Also, I just want to conduct an ongoing experiment to see if ICAN take any cool icon from pop culture and make it way shittier by “re-imagining” it.

Loving these. They’re like how I draw Mickey from time to time, only better.

Porcelain Figurines by Martin Klimas From a height of three...

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:00:05 -0800

Porcelain Figurines by Martin Klimas

From a height of three meters, porcelain figurines are dropped on the ground, and the sound they make when they hit trips the shutter release. The result: razor-sharp images of disturbing beauty—temporary sculptures made visible to the human eye by high-speed photography technology. The porcelain statuette bursting into pieces isn’t what really captures the attention; the fascination lies in the genesis of a dynamic figure that replaces the static pose. In contrast to the inertness of the intact kitsch figurines Klimas started out with, the photographs of their destruction possess a powerfully narrative character.

Rainbow Beard as a notebook up for scoring on Threadless

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:00:00 -0800

Rainbow Beard as a notebook up for scoring on Threadless

Drowning in Dreams as a notebook up for scoring on Threadless

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 11:00:00 -0800

Drowning in Dreams as a notebook up for scoring on Threadless

Heart Storm as a notebook up for scoring on Threadless

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:00:00 -0800

Heart Storm as a notebook up for scoring on Threadless

Alexander Graham Bell and Mabel Hubbard Bell Love triangle?

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:00:06 -0800

Alexander Graham Bell and Mabel Hubbard Bell

Love triangle?

lukewilhelmi: Quick sketch of a Blue-Footed Booby (from the...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 11:38:56 -0800

lukewilhelmi:

Quick sketch of a Blue-Footed Booby (from the Galápagos Wikipedia page) for Charles Darwin’s birthday.

"Think about it. First, you have firms directly plugged in to the military-industrial and..."

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 06:36:05 -0800

“

Think about it. First, you have firms directly plugged in to the military-industrial and security-industrial complexes, with the DOD or TSA as their primary customers. You have the electronics industry, whose R&D was primarily government-funded throughout the Cold War, and which is protected from global competition by the drastic expansion of patent protections under the TRIPS accord. You have the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, at least half of whose research is taxpayer-funded and which are heavily dependent on government patent enforcement for their monopoly profits and market shares. And you have corporate agribusiness—’nuff said.

Subtract all this, and what do you have left? A model of capitalism in which the commanding heights of the economy are an interlocking directorate of large corporations and government agencies, a major share of the total operating costs of the dominant firms are socialised (and profits privatised, of course), and ‘intellectual property’ protectionism and other regulatory cartels allow bureaucratic corporate dinosaurs like something out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil to operate profitably without fear of competition.

”

- Kevin Carson, “It’s Not State Capitalism When America Does It”

U.S. drones targeting rescuers and mourners

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 06:12:05 -0800

U.S. drones targeting rescuers and mourners:

The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed.

The findings are published just days after President Obama claimed that the drone campaign in Pakistan was a “targeted, focused effort” that “has not caused a huge number of civilian casualties”… .

A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. The tactics have been condemned by leading legal experts.

Truth, Lies and Afghanistan

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:48:05 -0800

Truth, Lies and Afghanistan:

I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.

Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.

Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.

"The Democratic Party owes a sincere apology to George Bush, Dick Cheney and company for..."

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:24:05 -0800

“The Democratic Party owes a sincere apology to George Bush, Dick Cheney and company for enthusiastically embracing many of the very Terrorism policies which caused them to hurl such vehement invective at the GOP for all those years. And progressives who support the views of the majority as expressed by their poll should never be listened to again the next time they want to pretend to oppose civilian slaughter and civil liberties assaults when perpetrated by the next Republican President (it should be noted that roughly 35% of liberals, a non-trivial amount, say they oppose these Obama policies).”

- Glenn Greenwald, “Repulsive progressive hypocrisy”

"One reason radio is superior to TV is that radio has better pictures."

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 06:20:06 -0800

“One reason radio is superior to TV is that radio has better pictures.”

- Jim Stagnitto, WNYC engineer

I might draw what you tweet. True story.

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 05:40:05 -0800

I might draw what you tweet.

True story.