From the many amazing videos, Common hand-picked his favorite, ‘Common’s Make My Day Music Video: Clip Art’, by Josh Milowe, Elizabeth Casal and Mike Potter, collectively known as Wealthy Pictures.
Check out the video above, and look for its on-air premiere Wednesday, November 4 at 11/10c during Embedded featuring Common:
This is awesome news, and a hearty congratulations is due to all who submitted to this. Thanks!
[UPDATE: Please note that when posting a story you should leave source links in your description text if you intend to include them or pull media from those links for your story. It does not matter where in the description they appear, just note that the link closest to the top of the description text will be your primary source, and you can pull media from up to five other sources. Thanks!]
While news of our new Fall episodes has been at the forefront these days, that doesn’t mean that our dev team has been twiddling their thumbs. To the contrary, we’re happy to announce that there is a new release hitting Current.com today, and we can’t wait to hear what you think of it.
Let’s face it, contributing to Current.com has never been the easiest thing to do — a refresh of this workflow has been long overdue. With this new release, clicking the “Post a Story” button (located in the green navigation bar) will now produce a submission tool overlaid on whichever page you’re on.
We’ve streamlined the process, here’s a walkthrough:
Q: In” Waiting for revolution” it appeared that the implicit comparison for the economic, social and political conditions was a middle class western style democracy. How would the piece have differed if you compared it to it’s Caribbean or Central American neighbors? — asked by gerryh
That’s a great question. Obviously if we compare it to Honduras’ present situation we at least see stability in Cuba. No one can argue that Cuba is unstable given 50 years of the same leader and system. Next, I was in Venezuela for the first “Reforma,” or reform vote in December 2007 where Chavez proposed a slew of referendums; some extending indefinite term limits, useful land reform, public grants to cooperatives like taxi unions, seamstresses, and service workers. His “Si” movement was defeated in large part by a majority of voters who abstained, and by a mobilization of students and the upper and middle classes who on the streets demanded Chavez not turn the country into Cuba. I’ll be the first to say that Chavez made massive reforms in Venezuela’s corrupt “criollo” hierarchy and when oil revenues were high injected it right back to the people (as well as to Cuba). However, there exists a real climate of censorship and propaganda heavily favoring the Chavez government with little room for opposition. I think given Cuba’s 50 year communist stance it’s difficult to compare it, exactly what makes it so contentious and fascinating.
In “Cuba: Waiting for a Revolution” Adrian Baschuk travels to Cuba to examine the potential of a counter-revolution against a leadership that has been in power for 50 years. He’s agreed to be interviewed in the same fashion as Mariana, which means we need questions from you!
Here are a few things to help get the “question asking” juices flowing:
Our Current Music team has been working overtime to bring you our brand new six part music special, Embedded. Everything is set to go for our Wednesday night premiere (October 14, 11/10c), but we need your help getting the word out.
Help us Internets, you’re our only hope.
But seriously, if you have a website, blog, Tumblr, MySpace, or [insert other social network profile] account that takes video embeds, now is your time.
Log in on Current.com (Don’t have an account? No worries, we support Facebook Connect!) and visit Embed Embedded. We’ll post a new Embedded clip for you to embed each week. The artists featured on Embedded include Mos Def, Silversun Pickups, Ben Harper, Common, Thievery Corporation, and The Decemberists to name a few. To name a few more, you’ll also catch glimpses of K’Naan, Arcade Fire, Lykke Li, Bloc Party, Amanda Palmer, Delta Spirit, Passion Pit, and Bon Iver to boot. So, expect to see embed Embedded clips from some of those folks.
And here’s the cool thing — each embed code on the Embed Embedded page is unique to you. The person with the most views on their embedded Embedded video will become the top embed user for the week, and will be showered with praise in the Current Music blog. So start embedding your unique embed code, help us spread the word, and get the opportunity to score some exclusive Embedded swag.
Medical marijuana has become big business in California and the drug is approved for a range of conditions and for “any other illness for which marijuana provides relief”. In these straitened financial times, booming sales and healthy tax revenues mean that full legalisation of cannabis may be just around the corner.Across California there are an estimated 2,100 dispensaries, co-operatives, wellness clinics and taxi delivery services in the sector known as “cannabusiness”. That is more than all the Starbucks, McDonald’s and 7-Eleven outlets in the state put together.
A citizens-science group is calling for children, adults, families, and educators to help native ladybugs.
During the past two decades as invasive look-alike ladybugs expanded their territories and pollution and habitat loss have crowded them out, species of Native ladybugs began vanishing and the invasive species began increasing. These include the multicolored Asian ladybug, checkerboard ladybug and the seven-spotted ladybug.
“This has happened very quickly and we don’t know how this shift happened, what impact it will have, and how we can prevent more native species from becoming so rare,” said John E. Losey, Cornell University entomologist.
Data can be truly eye-opening. Take a look at this visualization of McDonald’s locations across the United States, and take comfort (?) in knowing that the golden arches are always less than 145 miles away from wherever you are.
This map was created by Stephen Von Worley, who used location data on the 13,000 plus MickeyD’s locations along with some coding-fu to generate the above map. What we see is as expected, a network of the franchises largely following the freeway and highway system and increasing in density in proportion to the population density.
The Center for Community Change and the Reform Immigration FOR America
Campaign organized state-wide youth trainings in Colorado and Florida. This video takes an inside look at what happens at these trainings, it talks about what Comprehensive Immigration Reform is, and shows how the youth is organizing their communities to fight for C.I.R.
Personally, I’m a big fan of creative demonstrations. This sneak attack at an Oakland Whole Foods falls right into that category — complete with choreographed dancing and a backing band.
In case you’re not keeping up like some of us are, Whole Foods’ CEO, John Mackey, recently penned an op-ed in the WSJ in which he opined that, because he is able to provide private health insurance benefits for his (mostly young and w/o pre-existing conditions, like arthritis or CAD or osteoporosis) workforce, he is opposed to health-care reform that would make health-care a “right” in America.
He even (surprisingly) went so far as to call it “ObamaCare,” right in line with the nut-jobs who don’t want our government to mess with their MediCare.
Judging by how well this McCarthyism mash-up (via The Huffington Post and comprised of McCarthy-era footage and claims that Obama and company are a band of Communists from the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh) plays, I’d say we’re a stone’s throw away from Congressional hearings.
Don’t think so? At around the 6:05 mark, footage taken from the Chris Matthews helmed Hardball (from last October) features Congresswoman Michele Bachmann laying out what she would like to see occur:
“What I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look, I wish they would, I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and take a look at whether they are pro-America, or anti-America. I think people would love to see an expose like that.”
The Internets are weird, but partly because they expose elements of our world and culture that are odd and otherwise go unseen. For example, take any fetish that exists in well kept secrecy in the real world and expose it to the anonymity of the web, suddenly people with shared interests start connecting with one another in a way they never could before.
The method in which I arrived at my personal outlook may not be scientific, but hearing that more comfortable environments helped increase milk production doesn’t really surprise me. It also doesn’t surprise me that grass-fed cattle produce a higher quality beef product. After all, if I were facing the inevitable (in this case, a trip to the slaughterhouse), I would feel much more relaxed spending my days grazing grasslands. But in fairness, to take that scenario one step further and suppose that I discovered my fate I would more than likely try everything in my power to end up like Maxine the fugitive cow. Not only did she escape from a slaughterhouse, but she also managed to earn her way into a slaughter-free living on a farm. Pretty nice outcome.
We’re ramping up for our Birthday Blowout tonight on Current TV (it premieres at 9PM pacific), but Current wouldn’t be what it is today without you — our community.
So, we want to get you in on the fun. We’re collecting videos and webcams of people’s first experiences with Current in a new group called Current Firsts on Current.com. Staff has been sharing their first experiences, and we’ll continue to post these throughout the day.
BUT, we want your stories too! So, fire up the ol’ webcam or any other video recording device within arms reach, and follow these instructions to join in on the fun:
Login to Current.com, and head over to this group: http://current.com/groups/current-firsts/
Click the “Join this Group” button <– IMPORTANT: you need to be a member of the group to submit your video
Click the grey “Add Something” button
Record a webcam, or shoot a video and upload it!
Tell a friend!
We want to thank all of you for continuing to tune-in, browse, share, comment, contribute, and most importantly care about any and all things Current. Thanks for another great year!
