Since fast-food has been on my brain lately, I couldn’t help but comment on the recent headline that is jolting Americans. It appears, according to a recent AP article, that one of the greatest things we can do to prevent Global Warming from getting worse is to clean up America’s piss-poor diet and exercise routine.

It really makes sense when you think about it. Our glutinous demand for fattening foods causes far more damage than it may seem.

First of all, our lazy asses should walk down to the Kentucky Fried Chicken, instead of driving. More cars on the road means more pollution, more smog and more carbon.

Second of all, feeding our selves with deep-fried-processed carcass in turn feeds the Mass-Mechanized-Slaughter-Industry. Mass-factory slaughter is not only unhealthy for the land (such as the contaminating of the water supply with an-imaginable amount of animal urine and feces), but the processing plants are infamous for pollution, not to mention it puts the small town farmer, the backbone of America, out …

I don’t normally recommend movies. People’s tastes vary so dramatically that it is often a pointless task. However last night I saw Fast-Food Nation. I expected a comedy like approach to fast-food, a la Supersize Me, or perhaps an advocacy film that beats you over the head with the ideals of being a vegan. Instead what I saw was a dramatic, intense and realistic mirror image of America’s unsustainable system of mass-mechanized-slaughter, illegal labor and corporate greed. It’s not a feel-good movie, however Fast Food Nation is the kind of film that should be mandatory viewing, especially for people who joyously indulge in their fast-food without a thought in their minds as to where it comes from.

I never read the original novel, although many around me did, I really had no idea that the story had very little to do with fast-food, and more to do with how and where America gets its food. The film is primarily a scathing look at the meat packing industry and the system of fast-food outlets that peddle the low-grade beef to the …

Halloween has become a major holiday in this country. I can’t help but feel as if that this is a reflection of our cynical times. The decadence is abundant in all forms: sexuality, consumption of junk-food and spirits, greed, selfishness, excessive capitalism and encouraging bad behavior. It is a holiday you would expect the evangelical Right to assault, and yet, it has become a rare opportunity for Americans to be open about our decadent nature, rather than repress it as we always do. If we looked in the mirror a little more often than we do today, I think we’d see that we wear that Halloween mask far more than we think we do, and I’m glancing over to the Right side of the spectrum on that one.

Halloween, like many holidays, demonstrates a major facet of the American lifestyle, while it may not be a uniquely American holiday, we celebrate the holiday in a uniquely American way.

Halloween is a celebration of life and happiness. It’s these little things that keep us going each day, so let us enjoy this holiday in truest American fashion: be bad tonight, than wake up, feel …

Hookergate II (not to be confused with the CIA hooker scandal last year) is now in effect, and the D.C. madame and ABC News, who have her list, will be releasing some names. Once again, it is a laugh riot watching the media respond to any headline that has the word sex in it. It seems to me, that we live in a second age of yellow journalism, where anything that catches your attention, and sells advertising space, is news.

That being said, let’s bring on the hookers!

Get this: Ms DC Madame now claims, the REAL reason she squashed outed hooker consumer and former Deputy Sec. of State Randal Tobias, was to help smoke out potential witnesses to help prove her services are legal. I suppose next she’ll say that her hookers were giving the money they raised not having sex to fight poverty and fund education. Considering her services were primarily college girls, she may have a point. Especially since that’s the same schlock that college girls who work in the sex trade tell others and themselves while they whore themselves for material gain. There have always been hookers, it’s …

Let me start by saying this: I own thousands of albums. I literally have
somewhere in the ballpark of 1300 CDs at home and also a fair number
sitting in my old bedroom at my parents’ house. They have called asking me
to clear out those CDs, as well as another 1000 albums on cassette and
vinyl, and even a couple of 8-tracks I once picked up at a pawn shop in a
misguided attempt to be cool. (Ah wayward youth!)

With almost as much clarity as I remember waking up hungover on September
11th 2001 to a frantic answering-machine message from a friend yelling
something about planes and terrorists, I recall the first time I loaded up
Napster (then a free and unenforced haven for file-traders). The program
that opened in front of me prompted me to search for an artist (a task I
had attempted many a time before on FTP-portal sites and IRC channels). I
typed Radiohead, and hit the enter key. The screen filled up with
hundreds…maybe thousands…of clickable links….albums, bootlegs,
singles, b-sides. The stuff I could buy at normal price and the rare items
with $50 Ebay reserves, sitting side …

Recently, Ventura Blvd. in Studio City has been littered with dollar bills that have bizarre and mostly unintelligable rants scrawled along the edges. At least that’s what it seemed like as bill after bill kept turning up in planters or nestled in the cracks in the sidewalk. Most likely a person would not have “spent” these dollars without a message or purpose that they thought was important. But if they did have an ultimate purpose, then it was definitely lost on me.

Fast forward a few weeks to browsing comments on Myspace. A graphic of a dollar bill with the same sort of writing (only more focused and politically slanted) was posted on the comments section of a blog. It turns out it was from a profile called Dollar Disobedience. They are trying to create a new type of protest flyer, one that people “can’t throw away.” It sounds good in concept, and it worked to the extent that I took the time to at read some of what was written on the bill. But did it open my eyes to anything new? Were these few words going to change …

Happy Birthday to Soapblox!

While we had a large 9 month or so preparation phase, the official launch of Soapblox.com was on the 4th of July. We may only be one year old and there is obviously more growing that needs to be done, yet so much has changed in that first year and a lot of progress has been made.

We are born on the 4th of July and I would like to point that out, as our roots are American as American can get. I speak not for my self when I say that here at Soapblox, we stand tall for our nation and celebrate the pride of the world’s first modern democracy. While it may have been first, and it may be powerful, it is not immune from sliding backward into past mistakes and above losing it’s true democratic essence. Democracy needs participation! Which is why Soapblox.com was created, under the belief that anything that can be done, must be done to keep our population from sliding into a veil of ignorance.

This site is devoted to the Progressive movement, one which will ultimately save this nation from the clutches of those wishing …