Manifesto

Yo no canto por cantar
ni por tener buena voz
canto porque la guitarra
tiene sentido y razón
tiene corazón de tierra
y alas de palomita
es como el agua bendita
santiguas glorias y penas
aquí se encajó mi canto
como dijiera Violeta
guitarra trabajadora
con olor a primavera

Que no es guitarra de ricos
ni cosa que se parezca
mi canto es de los andiamos
para alcanzar las estrellas
que el canto tiene sentido
cuando palpita en las venas
del que morirá cantado
las verdades verdaderas
no las lisonjas fugazes
ni las famas extranjeras
sino el canto de una lonja
hasta el fondo de la tierra

Ahí donde llega todo
y donde todo comienza
canto que ha sido valiente
siempre será canción nueva
siempre será canción nueva
siempre será canción nueva

“I don’t sing for love of singing
or to show off my voice
but for the statements
made by my honest guitar
for its heart is of earth
and like the dove it goes flying
tenderly as holy water
blessing the brave and the dying
so my song has found a purpose
as Violetta Parra would say
yes, my guitar is a worker
shining and smelling of spring
my guitar is not for killers
greedy for money and power
but for the people who labour
so that future may flower
for a song takes on a meaning
when its own heartbeat is strong
sung by a man who will die singing
truthfully singing his song

I don’t sing for adulation
or so that strangers may weep
I sing for a far strip of country
narrow but endlessly deep
in the earth in which we begin
in the earth in which we end
brave songs will give birth
to a song which will always be new”

It is truly an amazing set of circumstances wrapped around one person simply doing the right thing instead of his J O B.

If I may be so bold, you live (and will for a long time continue to live) in a world shaped by the events in this documentary …. you will be inspired by this human being and, according to him, ignore him just as quickly as you were inspired. I think you might be amazed how little you knew about these events - and wonder why.

Then try to believe 9/11 was an “outside job” one more time … you won’t be able to do it.

See this Documentary if it kills you.

Ok - if that didn’t work - the things a VERY FRUSTRATED Nixon says will make it worth the viewing - Ok?

According to WikiLeaks, which made the video public on its WikiLeaks.org website, the video shows the mistaken killing of two Reuters journalists, photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and his assistant and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40. The site has posted the video on YouTube with the title ‘Collateral Murder.’

It wasn’t mistaken, it was purposeful. The soldiers just couldn’t tell the difference between a camera and an AK-47, people trying to help and insurgents, the difference between making an informed decision and hiding behind bureaucratic rules, and the difference between using restraint while NOT under attack and unloading 50 caliber rounds (watch how destructive) because they’re there. If they weren’t reporters we wouldn’t know about it.

I’m not a pessimist, I’m having the time of my life. But…is that all there is to strive for? Live for? Dream for?

Ben Stewart (Greenpeace):

“The most progressive U.S. President in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speakerphone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that might challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation which put a man on the moon can’t summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantel of a religion.
Then a Chinese Premier who is in the process of converting his Communist nation to that new faith (high-carbon consumer capitalism) takes such umbrage at Obama’s speech that he refuses to meet – refuses, in fact, to do much of anything beyond sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager’s house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere.
Late in the evening the two men meet and cobble together a collection of paragraphs which they call a ‘deal’, although in reality it has all the meaning and authority of a bus ticket, not that it stops them affixing their signatures to it with great solemnity. Obama’s team then briefs the travelling White House press pack – most of whom, it seems, understand about as much about global climate politics as our own lobby hacks know about baseball – and before we know it the New York Times and CNN are declaring the birth of a ‘meaningful’ accord.
Meanwhile a friend on an African delegation emails to say that he and many fellow members of the G77 block of developing countries are streaming into the corridors after a long discussion about the perilous state of the talks, only to see Obama on the television announcing that the world has a deal. It’s the first they’ve heard about it, and a few minutes later, as they examine the text, they realise very quickly that it effectively condemns their continent to a century of devastating temperature rises.
By now the European leaders – who know this thing is a farce but have to present it to their publics as progress – have their aides phoning the directors of civil society organisations spinning that the talks have been a success. A success? This deal crosses so many of the red lines laid out by Europe before this summit started that there are scarlet skid marks across the floor of the Bella Centre, and one honest European diplomat tells us this is a ‘shitty shitty deal.’
Quite.
This deal is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no indication of when or how they’ll come about. There isn’t even a declaration that the world will aim to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees C – instead leaders merely ‘recognise the science’ behind that vital threshold, as if that were enough to prevent us crossing it. The only part of this deal anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now becoming apparent that even that’s largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.
Not all of our politicians deserve the opprobrium of a dismayed world. Our own Ed Miliband fought hard on no sleep for a better outcome, while President Lula of Brazil offered to financially assist other developing countries to cope with climate change and put a relatively bold carbon target on the table. But the EU didn’t move on its own commitment (one so weak we’d actually have to work hard not to meet it) while the United States offered nothing and China stood firm.
Before the talks began I was of the opinion that we would only know Copenhagen was a success when plans for new coal-fired power stations across the developed world were dropped. If the giant utilities saw in the outcome of Copenhagen an unmistakable sign that governments were now determined to act, and that coal plants this century would be too expensive to run under the regime agreed at this meeting, then this summit would have succeeded. Instead, as the details of the agreement emerged last night we received reports of Japanese opposition MPs popping champagne corks as they savoured the possible collapse of their new government’s carbon targets. It’s not just that we haven’t got to where we needed to be, we’ve actually ceded huge ground. There is nothing in this deal – nothing – that would persuade an energy utility that the era of dirty coal is over. And the implications for humanity of that simple fact are profound.
I know we greens are partial to hyperbole. We use language as a bludgeon to direct attention to the crisis we’re facing, and you’ll hear much more of it in the coming days and weeks. But really, it’s no exaggeration to describe the outcome of Copenhagen as an historic failure that will live in infamy. In a single day, in a single space, a spectacle was played out in front of a disbelieving audience of people who have read and understood the stark warnings of humanity’s greatest scientific minds - and what they witnessed was nothing less than the very worst instincts of our species articulated by the most powerful men who ever lived.
I will leave the last word to the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who would have given voice to the insanity of Copenhagen better than I ever could, and whose poem Requiem is perhaps appropriate at this moment: ‘When the last living thing, has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up, perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, “It is done. People did not like it here”.’

Well said. But let’s end on a seemingly happy moment as we love to do…with moving images accompanied by music…The video has some 80s issues but focus on the lyrics…no apologies for the advertisement….WE DESERVE IT.

Something pertinent I just discovered as I wrote this post. I know how pernicious subtle edits are to art and I found it interesting that the sponsored version of the Grateful Dead video of the song “Throwing Stones” ends with “Picture a bright blue ball just spinning, spinning free
It’s dizzying, the possibilities…” Whereas the song end’s with:

Heartless powers try to tell us what to think
If the spirit’s sleeping, then the flesh is ink, yeah
History’s page, it is thusly carved in stone
The future’s here, we are it, we are on our own
On our own. On our own. On our own.

This documentary is the best summary of how wrong copyright, the RIAA, MPIAA, Disney, and lots of other too powerful organizations have got it all wrong. The clip above shows just a couple examples of the illusion of original ideas in music and how groups like our beloved Rolling Stones are a bunch of scam artists that now want to protect something they stole in the first place. Some of us have known this for a long time but didn’t much mind until society started calling us thieves. Ironic since our society is based on thievery. This is an important film, one that people are trying to shut down on YouTube and anywhere else but in reality it will always survive. Hopefully it’s seen by many and remixed by more. That can be done here:

Open Source Cinema

And as Lars Ulrich from Metallica so eloquently puts it: “It’s about control.” See part 3

And if you love Disney, you’ll love this little history of their creativity.

A sample of the creativity attempting to be squashed…

And a proponent from the Ivory Tower….

Lawrence Lessig

-Charles Bowden