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This is terrible. Now Mr. Revolutionary is the genuine center of the pop culture universe, which means that there are even fewer companies dominating the entertainment business and that every time we buy an Apple product we are indirectly financing the next Mel Gibson effort.

Tags: Apple| disney| mel gibson| steve jobs

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Rosanne and I have decided to start a new group blog together, the lab partners. The idea, hopefully, is to set a conversation topic and write about until our fingers run dry, then set another topic.

Here’s Rosanne’s version of how the blog started:
after talking to each other for a while through their own respective
“blogs,” [...]

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Hossein Derakhshan, also known as Hoder, the blogger, is an Iranian-Canadian living in Toronto who writes a hugely popular blog in both English and Persian that, he says, boasts 20,000 Farsi-language readers a day.
This week, Hoder made a trip to Israel as a citizen journalist and a peace activist.   In his words, he wants [...]

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I took a class on realist cinema last year in which I was treated to French and Italian neo-realist films that were revolutionary for their location shooting, use of non-actors, and socially relevant themes.
One thing I noticed (and that the teacher adamantly denied) was that, in almost every one of these films, the treatment [...]

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So Disney and Pixar are now one.  I haven’t scavenged the web for people’s reactions to this.  But I’m worried that it means that, effectively, Disney and Apple are now closer than close, since Steve Jobs is head of both Pixar and Apple.  So Apple will start offering Disney content over other companies’, Mickey Mouse [...]

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Rosanne is wondering whether the leftward-tilt South America is taking is major enough to shake the world. I think it is. The U.S. is dependent on Venezuela for oil, fighting a clandestine war in Colombia in the name of the war on drugs, a war that involves Bolivia’s leader, former coca grower Evo [...]

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I really do hate Hummers. One of my many pastimes is thinking up ways to softly harm them. My favorite idea is printing out a bunch of bumper stickers with funny slogans and pasting them, irrevocably, onto people’s Hummers.
It turns out I’m not alone. This great site, FUH2 | Fuck You [...]

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Richard MacManus at the Read/Write Web linked to this brilliant piece by Lawrence Lessig, author of Free Culture and law professor at Stanford, about the threat of the “Read-Only” web vs. the “Read/Write” web. This is something I discuss at great length in my Social Software for Social Change wiki — corporate interests that [...]

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