youtube.com

1. Sit with your back to any windows. During the morning or afternoon, the sun may shine through into your eyes. Also, looking at parallel rows of blinds can play tricks on you after a while.
2. Avoid drinking anything, especially coffee (a diuretic), during meetings. Having a full bladder can be uncomfortable, and if you are forced to leave the meeting to go to the bathroom you might miss something.
3. Bring extra people to the meeting with you to fill the room. They don’t need to participate, and it may be more effective if they say nothing at all. If they are physically large, it can be even more intimidating.
4. Have a member of your group arrive late. Insist that the meeting can’t begin without them.
5. As a show of arrogance, put your cell phone ringer on loud and answer every call you receive, interrupting the meeting each time.
6. Generally display ignorance and lack of preparation, without guilt or shame. It will be seen as eminence.
7. Have a member of your group unexpectedly leave the meeting in the middle, and halt the proceedings until they return.
8. Bring papers that you can look at and share with your group. It doesn’t matter if they contain any data relevant to the meeting. Hide the contents from the opposition. This will make them doubt themselves.
9. Have one of your group’s silent members occasionally whisper something to you.
10. Never be the first to leave the conference room at the end of a meeting. If it’s held in your building, find a pretense to remain in the conference room afterwards, and ask the opposition to let themselves out. If the meeting is held in the opposition’s building, remain in the conference room for at least 30 minutes after the opposition has left.

Nicki Minaj - “Fitted Down (40 Bars)”

Jadakiss - 40 Bars of Terror”

Wiz Khalifa - “40 Bars”

50 Cent - “50 Bars”

JR Writer - “60 Bars of Torture”

Lloyd Banks - “70 Bars”

Lloyd Banks - “Another 70 Bars (I’m Back)”

Bow Wow - “70 Bars and No Hook”

The Roots - “75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction)”

Bizzy Bone - “76 Bars”

Chino XL - “90 Bars of Intervention”

Canibus - “100 Bars”

YaBoy - “100 Bars of Death”

The Game - “100 Bars (The Funeral)”

The Game - “120 Bars”

The Game - “200 Bars and Runnin”

The Game - “240 Bars”

The Game - “300 Bars and Runnin”

The Game - “360 Bars”

The Game - “400 Bars”

The Game - “Daytona 500 (500 Bars)”

Beanie Sigel and Memphis Bleek - “1000 Bars”

Lil Wayne - “10,000 Bars”

[There’s a rapper named 1000BARS, so maybe every song by him.]

YHWH, OH WHY

People think veganism/vegetarianism is good for a lot of reasons: raising lots of livestock is wasteful in terms of grain and water usage; it pollutes the air and the groundwater; it contributes to global warming; animals are treated in horrific ways; eating animals is unhealthy and increase your risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc.

I eat vegan like 95% of the time. It seems like I know a lot of people who are at least partially vegan or vegetarian.

The political and environmental dimensions of the vegan-vegetarian ideology are maybe an example of consumer activism: people assert power by how they choose to spend their money on goods/services. (This isn’t true for direct action tactics that some vegans/vegetarians use.)

Another example of consumer activism is choosing to buy clothes that are known to have been made in factories where workers aren’t being mistreated. This often takes the form of buying clothes that were made in countries where labor laws exist and are enforced relatively well. One clothing brand in particular, American Apparel (AA), advertised that their clothes were made in the United States in order to attract customers who oppose sweatshops. (Although AA has been accused of union busting, sexual harassment, and other offenses, maybe it’s still better to buy a t-shirt from AA than Nike? I don’t know.)

I own some clothes from AA and from other companies that manufacture their clothes in the US, but also a lot of clothes made in Mexico, Honduras, Vietnam, Thailand, etc. I probably know some people who have bought clothes from companies with similar policies for political reasons.

By this same consumer activist logic, might I and my cohort be compelled to abstain from buying Mexican marijuana and Colombian cocaine, because the money goes to fund organized crime in Latin America and in the US? Or delete our Gmail accounts and quit using the Google search engine because of Google’s collaborations with the Chinese government in its attempts to suppress democratic reform? Or throw away our IPhones and IPods for the same reasons we bought jeans from American Apparel? Or cancel our Facebook accounts…? (I haven’t read Facebook’s Wikipedia page, but any company sufficiently big must be doing something wrong, maybe?)

Maybe we’re already passed the point of How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Google. Maybe we don’t care, or have convinced ourselves of the ineffectiveness of consumer activism as a tactic for reform.

What would be the alternative, though? Does Hotmail have a cleaner human rights record than Gmail? Could someone start a nonprofit version of MySpace, like the Christian version, MyChurch? Does anyone have any ideas? Am I going to have to stop using Tumblr and start a newsletter?

zacharywhalen:

in canada life is easy

healthcare is free

alt country bands receive extensive airplay

on radio 2

the poems arrive

after six or seven chinese beers

i covet your job, your money, your car

your woman and your ability to care

about anything

mid 2011 classic

2 Chainz [1:08]

Big Baby Gandhi

French Montana [4:49]

Gucci Mane [0:56]

Jim Jones

OJ da Juiceman [0:31]

Waka Flocka [1:38]

I dont really understand what people mean when they say “dive bar.” Like I understand that a dive bar is a “shitty” or “run down” bar. But I feel like Ive never been to a bar that Id call a dive bar. And it seems that people say “dive bar” often enough that there must be lots of dive bars. That makes me think that Ive been to bars that people would call dive bars. But those bars seem fine. Which makes me think that people must have higher standards than me. Or that they like to think the bars they go to are shittier than they really are.