Ben Masel – Professional Activist

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Ben Masel addresses the crowd from the north steps of the state capitol during the 1995 Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival in Madison, Wisconsin.

This weekend, Wisconsin lost one of its unique and colorful characters with the passing of Ben Masel.

Ben and I used to shadow each other during the late 80s and early 90s. I was selling propaganda for a commune I belonged to at the time (a long story for another time), making the rounds of college towns, Grateful Dead concerts, political rallies and festivals. Ben would show up at these same venues advocating for cannabis legalization, selling propaganda and merchandise while promoting his own rallies and festivals.

We first met at an Alpine Valley Dead show in 1987, where he was making a spectacle of himself cruising the parking lot handing out handbills for the Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival. This was an event Ben put together each year, where advocates for cannabis legalization would gather in Madison. They’d march down State Street from the university to the state capitol, then there’d be a rally with music and speeches.

I asked him if early June might be kind of early to promote an event scheduled for October, and in the middle of a parking lot filled with license plates from everywhere in the country said, “So how likely is it that I’ll run into you again between now and then?” In my case, it turned out to be pretty likely, but I got his point.

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Intro to MacOSX for First-Time Users

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In a partnership between Obbie’s Help Desk and Youtorial Market, I’ve just released a series of instructional videos on basic Mac usage called Introduction to MacOSX for First-Time Users. However, to call this product a “series of videos” doesn’t do justice to the teaching platform for which they’re built.

The Youtorial Player is an application that presents its content from a corner of the screen to walk you thru computer tasks. The content includes a video capture of the instructor’s screen accompanied by his/her voice describing and explaining the task. The content developer (i.e., I) can program the display of text and links in a box below the video, and I can make chapter breaks and “pause points”, where the presentation pauses to give the user time to try things out.

Given my extensive experience training users new to the Mac, the high praise I’ve received from those users and their supervisors, and the availability of purplearth’s production facilities and experience, I thought this was something I could do and do well, so last fall I submitted a demo video to the Youtorial people and was given a “Go.”

The course is targeted to two types of users I’ve regularly worked with over the years: those that come to the Mac from the Windows world, and those who are new to computers entirely (The prerequisite for the latter group is the ability to type and use a mouse). It starts at the Desktop of an account opened by a new user for the first time, and takes the user on a tour of the system and its workings, then goes on to guide the user thru personalization of his/her system.

Many parts of this course are based on lessons I’ve taught to users seemingly hundreds of times over the years. For twenty bucks, you get over two hours of lessons, which is a better hourly rate than you’ll find anywhere. There’s a 25% discount for the first month, so you can get it for fifteen dollars if you BUY NOW!  😉

In the future, I’ll be developing a follow-up course for Mac Administrators, and a course on basic Mac applications (iTunes, Safari, Mail, etc.).

I’ve seen what other publishers charge for tutorial videos, and I can confidently say that I’ve produced something that is a lot better and more useful than many products costing much more. So if you or someone you know is grappling with adjusting to the Mac way of doing things, send them here.

UPDATE (2013/03/21): All of the links to youtorial market no longer work… they went belly up without selling a single download. I still have the original videos, so I may do something with them at some point.

One Hail of a Storm

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Goldilocks wouldn’t care for the kind of Spring we’ve been having. Our normal days should be in the low 50s (low teens C), but it’s stubbornly been ten degrees colder than that. So for a change, today it got warm… a July kind of warm.

They told us there would be storms. There are always storms when the temperature changes this radically. But the early afternoon was calm, warm and mostly sunny.

We were on the phone with a friend when, at about 4:35, we noticed it was dark and we could hear thunder. RoZ pulled up the weather page and saw the words “Tornado Warning.” That got our attention and we got off the phone.

At 4:45, it was pouring rain but it wasn’t windy at all. The weather people were saying the tornado would be here in five minutes. However, we weren’t panicking too badly, as no one had physically seen the tornado (it was “detected by doppler radar”), and we had a good view in the direction it was supposed to be coming from.

At 4:50, the hail started. We’ve each lived thru hail a handful of times, but never anything bigger than peas or marbles. This sounded like rocks hitting the house, and we saw ice balls nearly the size of golf balls bouncing in the yard.

We scrambled around to close windows and “monitor” the progress of this event as best we could. Suddenly, the rain and hail let up. At 4:55, the sun came out, and Obbie went into the yard to collect some hail stones for closer inspection. Here they are….

RoZ holds a sampling of hail stones from the La Crosse hailstorm of April 10, 2011

RoZ holds a sampling of hail stones from the La Crosse hailstorm of April 10, 2011

Not quite “golf ball” size, but definitely at least the size of quarters. At any rate, this is the largest hail either of us has experienced in our ample lifetimes.

Miraculously, all of our windows are intact, and we don’t have a car to worry about being dinged up right now. We are also thankful this didn’t happen a few weeks later, when delicate young plants will be trying to establish themselves in our garden.

This coming week, the economy will improve for insurance adjusters, body shops, and window people.

The “Green Thing”, Back in the Day

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We’re not big on regurgitating viral emails. It amazes us how many lame and cheesy messages keep popping into our inbox, years after we first saw them. Why is so much crap viral, but dispatches of much higher quality fade out in a couple of days? Must be a conspiracy of some sort.

At any rate, we recently received a forward from an unusual source… unusual in the sense that this is someone who we’ve regarded as somewhat conservative. After the jump is a rant I wish I had written, as it succinctly describes the drift toward “magenta” living (opposite of green living) that we boomers have witnessed over the course of our lifetimes. Read on →

Breaking the Koch Habit

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The Koch family has a long history of funneling money to the most extreme right-wing organizations and think-tanks. Fred Koch was a founding member of the John Birch Society, and his sons Charles and David are sponsors of the Cato Institute, Americans For Prosperity, and the new crop of crazy Tea Party Republican politicians.

The Koch brothers get all of their money thru Koch Industries, the largest privately held company in the United States. They’re into coal mining, oil refining and pipelines, and they own Georgia Pacific and Invista. They’re also into climate change denial, dismantling of environmental regulations, and union busting.

We don’t want to give any money to the Koch brothers, but we recently discovered we were inadvertently giving them money when we spotted the GP logo on our toilet paper. Needless to say, we now buy a different brand of toilet paper.

After the jump, I’ll take you on a tour of the brands to avoid if you don’t want to give the Koch brothers any money either.

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Dooh Nibor

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Scott Walker claims that he must bust unions because “Wisconsin is broke.” Actually, the only reason we have a $137 million deficit is because he gave away $140 million to corporations in the form of tax breaks. So in order to pay for gifts to the rich, he wants to steal from programs that help the poor.

That makes Walker into a modern-day Dooh Nibor… Robin Hood in reverse. Newly elected Republican lawmakers nationwide are acting like an army of Dooh Nibors, giving away the treasuries to rich people, and then crying that there’s no money to help poor people.

After the jump, there’s a great chart showing how we can pay for important parts of the social safety net by rolling back specific giveaways to rich people.

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CEOs, Tea Partiers, Union Workers, and Cookies

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A tale of our times that’s been making the rounds…

A CEO, a tea partier, and a union worker are sitting around a table where a platter of 12 cookies is delivered.

The CEO instantly chows down 11 of the cookies. He then turns to the tea partier and says, “Watch out for that union guy, he wants part of your cookie.”

This perfectly describes the political and economic forces at work, where the rich are playing one group of exploited workers against the other. But since the average CEO makes 1000 times what the average worker makes, to be mathematically accurate the plate would have to contain 500 cookies, of which the CEO eats 499. That would not only illustrate the greed and arrogance of the current CEO class, but also its grotesque gluttony.

Hat tip to Thom Hartmann.

Mutant Hay

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Back in the day, I baled a lot of hay. It was something every rural Wisconsin kid of a certain age did for extra money in the summertime. I must’ve handled thousands of rectangular bales during those years, and I was disappointed to discover that they had been replaced by huge round bales that couldn’t be moved without a tractor. So now there’s one less way for teenage boys to earn money and stay out of trouble.

We have great farms in Wisconsin because we have great hay. It’s what we feed to the cows that make the milk that makes the cheese we all love so much. We also feed it to our horses, goats, sheep, and any other animal that likes to munch on leafy greens. Our ample summer rain and rich soil assure Wisconsin farmers that they can grow hay in abundance with minimal effort.

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The Crowd You Weren’t Allowed to See

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La Crosse is usually a “slow news” town. That means that the five news organizations that cover this part of the world often struggle to find compelling copy to fill their time or their pages. They spend a lot of time covering inane stuff like high school show choirs or cute kids doing charity fundraisers.

There have been times when Tea Party rallies came thru town, and all the cameras and microphones would converge on an event attended by only a few dozen people. So when hundreds show up for a hastily planned town hall meeting for workers rights, that must surely be news, right?

Apparently, no. Not one reporter showed up. I asked some of the organizers if they had called the media. They said that not only did they tell the media it was happening, but once the hall was packed they called again and said, “There are close to 500 people here, you should come.”

If you don’t see a picture of this meeting at the top of the page, then click here.

If the “professional” media isn’t biased, then someone needs to explain to me why a dozen tea-baggers foaming at the mouth is newsworthy and several hundred progressives gathering on short notice isn’t.

UPDATE Thursday Feb. 23: Yesterday afternoon we attended a solidarity rally for union supporters outside City Hall, where hundreds of people held signs and chanted to passing rush hour traffic, and passing drivers honked their horns in support. One TV camera was spotted at the rally, but since no report could be found on any local media web sites, this video will have to do:

Busting Democracy

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For groups of people to elect representatives to advocate their interests is a foundational principal of American democracy.

Imagine a scenario in which a president dictates how tax money is to be spent, and then announces that he is dissolving Congress and stripping citizens of their right to vote. The population would be unified in its outrage, and rightly so.

This is why Scott Walker’s proposal to strip public employees of collective bargaining rights is so disturbing. Unions are nothing more than groups of employees who elect representatives to advocate on their behalf. Republicans in Wisconsin are trying to eliminate democracy in the workplace.

The right wing claims that this must be done to balance the budget. Bovine excrement! For one thing, the governor inherited a surplus, gave money away to his rich corporate buddies, and the”hole” in the budget is exactly the size of those giveaways. In spite of this, the state employee unions are willing to make the economic sacrifices outlined in this proposal in exchange for retention of their collective bargaining rights.

Walker greeted this gesture of compromise and accommodation with the words, “nothing doing.” This proves that the “save the budget” reasoning was a lie. This is all about crushing unions – dictating working conditions and shutting down any possibility of future negotiation.

This is mean-spirited and un-American, and it must not stand. I am ashamed of our governor for proposing this, but I am proud of our fellow citizens who are resisting.