Oh, and Many of those Gourmet Treats You Pick Up at Whole Foods Deli, are Prepared by Prison Laborers

 

 
Following a year-long investigation into widespread "pricing inaccuracies" in California, Whole Foods agreed to pay an $800,000 settlement. According to the Los Angeles City Attorney's office, the luxury grocer's transgressions included:

• Failing to deduct the weight of containers when ringing up charges for self-serve foods at the salad bar and hot bar;
  
• Giving less weight than the amount stated on the label, for packaged items sold by the pound; and
  
• Selling items by the piece, instead of by the pound as required by law (such as kebabs and other prepared deli foods)
  

In a statement, Whole Foods claimed that their pricing is 98 percent accurate and added this little piece of somewhat contrite-sounding corporate speak:

We will continue to refine and implement additional processes to minimize such errors going forward."

For those keeping track at home, that $800,000 settlement is somewhere along the lines of what it would cost to buy 50,000 pounds of Sockeye Salmon Fillet or maybe 32,000 pounds of chocolate-dipped orange peels at Whole Foods.

Whole Foods has also agreed to designate employees to check pricing accuracy at each of its 74 California stores and conduct random audits of the markets.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that Whole Foods was among the many retailers enjoying access to artisanal foods produced by prison laborers. Unsurprisingly, California is on the forefront of that movement.

Your Privacy/Life is PRECIOUS Pay Attention

I've tried to bring articles to your attention, to stimulate your resistance to  the trends in multiple arenas that believe they have a right to intrude and know all that is going on in your Life.

Below are two articles to deepen your understanding of today's policies and trends. The first article introduces you to a new cell phone that quite frankly is frightening in all it's built-in functions. The horror is that most of these do not serve the user/owner, but provide moment-to-moment and extensive  information on the life of the user to the corporation behind the phone. 

What I pay attention to is the fact that, " The company’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, has been fairly candid about the primary purpose of Amazon’s hardware: to get the device’s owner to buy more stuff." 

The second article reveals that in 2010, a 25 year old Mark Zuckerburg announced that at his company, they'd decided that, "Privacy was no longer a social norm". Do you get what I'm saying? A 25 year old....pretty wise guy huh?

Anyway, read the article....I don't need to say anymore. I mentioned sometime ago that from time to time, I'd share articles that I'd categorize under the heading, 'The Way Some People Think'. Beloveds, add these two to the file.
lovu~
Kendke  

Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos presents the company's first smartphone, the Fire Phone, on June 18, 2014 in Seattle, Washington. (Photo / AFP)

Amazon's New Phone is Not Your Friend

Online retail giant double-charges customers by selling a phone that is simply a portal to its shopping service

June 24, 2014 1:45AM ET

Al Jazeera America

Opinion

by Joshua Kopstein

 

With last week’s introduction of Amazon’s Fire phone, many are wondering whether the online retail giant’s long-anticipated foray into the mobile market will be able to compete with entrenched competitors such as Apple and Samsung. But the new device raises a more profound question: What happens when the phone in your pocket — a machine holding intimate details about your life and relationships — becomes a tool of consumption in service to a single corporation?

We tend to consider computers tools that act as extensions of our will. Just as we wouldn’t expect a new car to have an agenda beyond allowing us to travel from point A to point B, we traditionally assume that the electronic devices in our homes, in our pockets and, more and more, on our bodies simply follow orders — that ultimately we are the ones behind the steering wheel.

With the rise of the smartphone, this idea of computers as general-purpose machines fully under our control has quickly fallen by the wayside. Many mobile devices are becoming more akin to household appliances, deliberately crafted to perform a handful of functions while arbitrarily discouraging or disallowing others. Today’s mobile operating systems, such as Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, orbit around centralized app stores, walled gardens that push participation in the company’s larger software ecosystem. When you buy a phone or tablet from Apple or Samsung, you are not just buying a product; you are buying into a captive platform that controls your private data and incentivizes certain patterns of user behavior that benefit the manufacturer’s bottom line.

Amazon’s Fire phone is perhaps the most ambitious realization of this captive consumer dynamic. The company’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, has been fairly candid about the primary purpose of Amazon’s hardware: to get the device’s owner to buy more stuff. Whereas computers were once impartial tools that made it easier to do things, Bezos wants the smartphone, that most personal of devices, to become an interface for the Amazon shopping service — to wit, a dedicated point-of-sale system.

So where does Amazon end and your device begin? It’s a distinction that is increasingly and worryingly hard to draw.

 
 Mike Kane / Bloomberg / Getty Images

Panopticon in your pocket

It’s not the first time Amazon has pushed the boundaries of gadget ownership. In 2012 it released a new line of Kindle tablets running a special operating system based on Google’s Android. As part of its normal functioning, the device tracks and records user activity (including how long users spend reading each page of an e-book) and shows advertisements for Amazon products on the basis of the data it harvests. After complaints, the company offered the ability to turn off the ads for $15. The result, I noted at the time, was like buying a high-tech shopping cart flanked by pesky salespeople you had to pay to leave you alone.

"Amazon wants to turn every moment of your life into an opportunity to buy stuff."

The new Fire phone runs the same operating system as the Kindles do, and it goes a step further by boosting Amazon’s shopping service in more novel (and unsettling) ways. It’s ironic that a year after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden sparked international anxieties about government spying, Bezos is selling a phone that features not one or two but six cameras. Four of those cameras are forward facing and are capable of advanced head tracking and face detection, something Bezos said took the company four years to develop. They support an innocuous-sounding app called Firefly, which uses the phone’s cameras and microphone to watch, scan and listen to everything around the user. If you’re listening to music or watching a movie, the app will automatically identify and log your selections. Firefly even uses the phone’s camera mode to identify and save all the objects you come across in the physical environment, such as the books in your house, the landmarks you visit while sightseeing and the paintings you see at the museum. (Bezos says the app can recognize up to 100 million items.)

It may seem novel and quirky, but the message is clear: Amazon wants to turn every moment of your life into an opportunity to buy stuff. And crucially, it wants you to do so on a $649 device that channels that urge directly to its storefront, all the while gathering more precious data points about your communications, relationships and movements.

Double-charging customers

Amazon is not uniquely at fault for this trend, even if its implementations are the most explicit and unabashed. Facebook, for example, has a long history of slowly changing its default privacy settings so that users unwittingly share more data with more people — an obvious benefit to the company, whose business model depends on monetizing user data with targeted advertising. Commenting on an infamous privacy bait and switch in 2009 that left millions of Facebook profiles exposed to the entire Internet, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “We decided that these would be the social norms now, and we just went for it.”

This is in some ways to be expected from free services such as Facebook and Google, which we grudgingly use knowing their true cost is in the data they collect from us. But it’s quite another thing for Amazon to charge money for devices that surveil and monetize their users and, moreover, serve as portals to the company’s online shopping mall.

Such double-charging of customers is becoming common practice in the technology space. In 2012, Verizon Wireless began selling data about its customers as part of a service called Precision Market Insights, including their smartphone Web browsing habits, geolocation information and app usage. Earlier this year it expanded the program to collect Web-browsing data from users when they log onto Verizon’s website to pay their bills.

This flies in the face of the common mantra about Big Data’s business model that if you’re not paying for it, you are the product being sold. Companies such as Amazon and Verizon want to have their cake and eat it too, making us both the customer and the product. And too often, they’re finding they can get away with it.

The market will determine whether Amazon’s Fire phone succeeds in a crowded field. What should be a far greater concern are the implications of a corporation’s having this much influence over consumers’ dollars and data. As computing devices fall more in step with the routines of our lives, we should scrutinize the motives and biases coded into the software that runs on them. Otherwise, our tools risk becoming not really ours at all.

Joshua Kopstein is a cyberculture journalist and researcher from New York City. His work focuses on internet law & disorder, surveillance, and government secrecy.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own (Joshua Kopstein) and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy. 

 

• News
• Technology
• Facebook

Privacy No Longer a Social Norm, says Facebook Founder

• Bobbie Johnson, Las Vegas
• theguardian.com, Sunday 10 January 2010 20.58 EST

People have become more comfortable sharing private information online, says Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. 

Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP

The rise of social networking online means that people no longer have an expectation of privacy, according to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Talking at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco this weekend, the 25-year-old chief executive of the world's most popular social network said that privacy was no longer a "social norm".

"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people," he said. "That social norm is just something that has evolved over time."

Zuckerberg said that the rise of social media reflected changing attitudes among ordinary people, adding that this radical change has happened in just a few years.

"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was, 'why would I want to put any information on the internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'."

"Then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way, and just all these different services that have people sharing all this information."
His statement may not be a surprise, particularly since it helps to justify the company's recent – and highly controversial – decision to change the privacy settings of its 350 million users.

But it also represents a remarkable shift from where the Californian company originally started out.

Launched in 2004 as an exclusive network for Ivy League students, the site grew in part because allowed people to communicate privately – or at least among small groups of friends.

The constant tug of war between public and private information that ensued led to a series of embarrassing incidents where individuals published information online thinking it was private, only to have it reach the public.
These episodes are partly the result of the way people use Facebook, which has changed its service on several occasions in recent years. Each time the site brings more information into the public domain – and at each point it faces a series of protests and adverse reactions from users.

Moves included the decision in 2006 to introduce the "news feed" – an update of people's activities that is now central to Facebook's service. A year later it launched Beacon, a contentious advertising system that allowed advertisers to track your activities online. That eventually led to the company settling a lawsuit for $9.5m, but it did not prevent it from bringing in new privacy changes in December that one campaign group called "plain ugly".

In his talk, however, Zuckerberg said it was important for companies like his to reflect the changing social norms in order to remain relevant and competitive.

"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built," he said. "Doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do.

"But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."
Not everybody agrees. Marshall Kirkpatrick, of the technology industry blog ReadWriteWeb, said Zuckerberg's statement was "not a believeable explanation" and pointed to the company's complicity in changing the way people think about online privacy.

Meanwhile, others have rejected the idea that younger people, in particular, are less concerned about privacy. Last month Microsoft researcher and social networking expert Danah Boyd told the Guardian that such assumptions often misunderstood the reasons that people put private information online.

"Kids have always cared about privacy, it's just that their notions of privacy look very different than adult notions," she said.

"As adults, by and large, we think of the home as a very private space … for young people it's not a private space. They have no control over who comes in and out of their room, or who comes in and out of their house. As a result, the online world feels more private because it feels like it has more control."

No Money, No Time/ How That Equals Inequality in America

Food for Thought~

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages-Opinionator

The Great Divide

The Great Divide is a series about inequality.

No Money, No Time

By MARIA KONNIKOVA

Javier Jaén

 June 13, 2014 7:19 pm

THE absurdity of having had to ask for an extension to write this article isn’t lost on me: It is, after all, a piece on time and poverty, or, rather, time poverty — about what happens when we find ourselves working against the clock to finish something. In the case of someone who isn’t otherwise poor, poverty of time is an unpleasant inconvenience. But for someone whose lack of time is just one of many pressing concerns, the effects compound quickly.

We make a mistake when we look at poverty as simply a question of financial constraint. Take what happened with my request for an extension. It was granted, and the immediate time pressure was relieved. But even though I met the new deadline (barely), I’m still struggling to dig myself out from the rest of the work that accumulated in the meantime. New deadlines that are about to whoosh by, a growing list of ignored errands, a rent check and insurance payment that I just realized I haven’t mailed. And no sign of that promised light at the end of the tunnel.

My experience is the time equivalent of a high-interest loan cycle, except instead of money, I borrow time. But this kind of borrowing comes with an interest rate of its own: By focusing on one immediate deadline, I neglect not only future deadlines but the mundane tasks of daily life that would normally take up next to no time or mental energy. It’s the same type of problem poor people encounter every day, multiple times: The demands of the moment override the demands of the future, making that future harder to reach.

When we think of poverty, we tend to think about money in isolation: How much does she earn? Is that above or below the poverty line? But the financial part of the equation may not be the single most important factor. “The biggest mistake we make about scarcity,” Sendhil Mullainathan, an economist at Harvard who is a co-author of the book “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much,” tells me, “is we view it as a physical phenomenon. It’s not.”

“There are three types of poverty,” he says. “There’s money poverty, there’s time poverty, and there’s bandwidth poverty.” The first is the type we typically associate with the word. The second occurs when the time debt of the sort I incurred starts to pile up.

And the third is the type of attention shortage that is fed by the other two: If I’m focused on the immediate deadline, I don’t have the cognitive resources to spend on mundane tasks or later deadlines. If I’m short on money, I can’t stop thinking about today’s expenses — never mind those in the future. In both cases, I end up making decisions that leave me worse off because I lack the ability to focus properly on anything other than what’s staring me in the face right now, at this exact moment.

“Under scarcity, you devote a lot of resources to the thing you’re lacking,” says Eldar Shafir, a psychologist at Princeton who has been studying poverty for over a decade and is Mr. Mullainathan’s co-author on “Scarcity.” “When people are juggling time, they are doing something very similar to when they’re juggling finances. It is all scarcity juggling. You borrow from tomorrow, and tomorrow you have less time than you have today, and tomorrow becomes more costly. It’s a very costly loan.”

When Mr. Shafir first began to study poverty, he came in with an overarching assumption: The poor made the same mistakes in judgment as everyone else, except theirs ended up being more costly. He soon learned he was wrong. “They were making mistakes that were different. They weren’t the typical decision errors. They were worse,” he recalls. “When you don’t have enough, you focus on the little you have, and it leaves you with less attention.” And the “little you have,” he found, didn’t have to come from financial hardship.

In 2012, Mr. Shafir, Mr. Mullainathan and Anuj Shah, a psychologist from the University of Chicago who had studied under Mr. Shafir at Princeton, teamed up to test how scarcity of the less-noticed kinds would affect decision-making ability and subsequent wealth.

First, they randomly assigned each participant to either “poor” or “rich” conditions. The participants labeled “poor” would have less of a certain resource — time, in some studies, or number of turns, in others. They then had everyone play multiple rounds of a game: “Wheel of Fortune,” a version of “Angry Birds” called “Angry Blueberries” or “Family Feud.” In some situations, a player could borrow the resource in question (time or guesses) from future rounds, either with or without interest.

In the “Wheel of Fortune” study, poor participants were able to make six guesses in each round, while rich ones had 20 guesses. Mr. Shafir and his colleagues found that poor participants engaged more with the game, and consequently became more cognitively exhausted — they performed worse on a subsequent task that measured mental fatigue — and ended up performing significantly worse over all. Knowing how few guesses they had, they worried too much about each guess. As a result, they got too tired too quickly, and the quality of their guesses deteriorated.

But in the “Angry Blueberries” game, the opposite happened. Poor participants (who had three shots compared to the rich’s 15) were again more engaged, taking more time to aim each shot. Now, however, that added intensity allowed them to score more points per shot. Was poverty actually making them better in this game — a case of knowing how to make your dollar stretch further when it’s one of the few you have? Not quite.

We tend to assume that pressure makes us more efficient. I work fastest when I’m on deadline. I stretch my grocery budget the most when my funds are running low. But in reality, it’s not that you’re working better when you’re stressed. It’s that the opposite situation, overabundance, often makes us less efficient.

It’s a fine balancing act: Overabundance makes us less efficient, but we need to reach a certain threshold of sufficiency before that effect kicks in.

Mr. Shafir likens the effect to a traveler’s packing a suitcase. If you have a small suitcase, you have to be efficient when you pack, but with a big one, you can afford to leave some slack. True, it takes you less time (and fewer cognitive resources) to pack it, but as a result you may end up not packing it nearly as well. It wasn’t that the poor participants were doing better; it was that the rich ones were doing worse.

But that’s not always the case. Consider filling out a loan application when you have a big suitcase (so to speak) versus a small one. In the first case, you can compare packages and lenders, think about interest rates and mull over the pros and cons of taking out a loan to begin with. In the second, you’re so stressed with obligations that you don’t have the time or mental resources to do that. You’re far more likely to just take whatever loan is offered to you, even if it’s an incredibly bad idea, like a high-interest or exploding loan package or a payday loan. Reflection is a luxury good.

When I ask for an extension, I have plenty of options to consider, including the opportunity to ask for some pressure to be relieved in the first place, and no other outstanding obligations that stand in my way. It’s fine if my paycheck arrives a few weeks late or if, in an extreme case, my assignment is canceled. But if I were constantly stressed about time and money, the simple solution wouldn’t be so simple: I probably wouldn’t have the luxury of choosing it or even of realizing it could be chosen.

Efficiency is always the more exhausting and demanding alternative. Attention is finite. For a while I may be more focused, but I can run on all cylinders for only so long. If I’m forced to operate under constraint all the time, my performance will suffer — and I may not even be capable of recognizing the deficit. Indeed, when the rules of the game were changed so that the “Angry Blueberry” players could borrow shots from future rounds, poor players ended up borrowing significantly more shots and performing significantly worse over all. They had, in a sense, over-borrowed, earning fewer points than they had when their shots were limited but fixed. They were making themselves richer in the immediate term, but poorer over all.

“Abundant time can make us procrastinate. Deadline pressure makes us more efficient,” Mr. Shafir says. “What scarcity does is make you focus. When there’s no scarcity, you relax, you take it easy, and then you wonder, what happened to the day? You’re treating time the way the rich treat money.”

In three further studies, Mr. Shafir and his colleagues made time their scarce resource, specifically the number of seconds each player had per round in a game of “Family Feud.” You could use the time you were allocated, borrow with no interest, or borrow with twofold interest. When borrowing was an option, the poor borrowed more of their total budget than the rich, regardless of interest rate. The more debt they acquired, the more they borrowed. They performed best when they couldn’t borrow at all.

Not only did the poor sacrifice future time for the present, but they failed to take advantage of any potential mitigating strategies. When the experimenters showed players a preview of the next round’s questions, the rich ones took advantage of the edge, performing better over all, while the poor acted as if they couldn’t see the previews at all. They were so focused on operating under scarcity that they couldn’t think their way through to a strategy — or, indeed, even realize that an opportunity to do so was available. “Scarcity, of any kind, will create a tendency to borrow,” the researchers conclude.

The traditionally poor borrow money at high rates (often the only rates they can get, but even those start looking good compared to the crunch of the present). But they must also borrow time. That’s the invisible part of poverty that tends to be missed: Even the little time they have is eaten up by what Mr. Mullainathan calls the bandwidth tax.

Take the example of sugarcane farmers between harvests, a group Mr. Mullainathan and Mr. Shafir followed in subsequent research. He may not have much money in the weeks leading up to harvest time, but he seems to have all the time in the world. Not so. “In a weird way, that’s the biggest false illusion people have,” Mr. Mullainathan says. “Those farmers sitting on the stoop aren’t doing nothing. They’re churning.” The farmers, in other words, aren’t sitting and relaxing. They are sitting and thinking hard about all of their obligations and how they will meet them.

And the most unfair aspect of the whole thing is that the bandwidth tax doesn’t affect everyone equally. If you aren’t your fully strategic self all the time, so be it. If I miss one deadline — or even two — it’s far from the end of the world. But if I’m also poor in the traditional sense? Suddenly, the lack of time has a nonlinear, compounding effect: My bandwidth isn’t just a bit more taxed. The tax is completely off the charts, and I have little recourse to repair the damage.

“When you get overloaded and you feel this deadline is overwhelming, you can say, I’ll take a vacation, I’ll focus on work-life balance,” Mr. Mullainathan points out. “Poor people can’t say, ‘I’ll take a vacation from being poor.’ It’s the same mental process, but a different feedback loop.”

The poor are under a deadline that never lifts, pressure that can’t be relieved. If I am poor, I work or I churn until decisions like buying lottery tickets begin to seem like attractive alternatives. I lack the time to calculate the odds and think of alternative uses for my money.

Mr. Mullainathan suggests that the mental bandwidth tax is powerful enough to make the overall problem run deeper. The poor, he says, are “so taxed they don’t even realize they have a problem.”

Javier Jaén

AND of course how much money you have affects how much time you have. “If you keep busyness constant, the rich have it much easier,” Mr. Shafir says. “You can buy nannies and drivers and lawyers and the like. It’s easy to give yourself time if you have money.”

If poverty is about time and mental bandwidth as well as money, how does this change how we combat its effects? “When we think about programs for the poor, we don’t ever think, hey, let’s give them programs that don’t use a lot of bandwidth,” says Mr. Mullainathan. Instead, we fault people for failing to sign up for programs that are ostensibly available, even though we don’t factor in the time and cognitive capacity they need to get past even the first step.

“If I give people a very complicated form, it’s a big demand on cognitive capacity,” Mr. Shafir says. “Take something like the Fafsa” — the Free Application for Federal Student Aid — “Why is pickup for the low-income families less than 30 percent? People are already overwhelmed, and you go and give them an incredibly complicated form.”

To him, the obvious conclusion is to radically change our thinking. “Just like you wouldn’t charge them $1,000 to fill out a form, you shouldn’t charge them $1,000 in cognitive complexity,” he says. One study found that if you offer help with filling out the Fafsa form, pickup goes up significantly.

Another possibility is to offer immediate ways to relieve some of the cognitive and time pressures that typically prevent people from saving. “For a while we had impulse savings cards in India,” Mr. Shafir says, as part of a small pilot program with Eko, a provider of mobile banking services. “If you have a dollar in hand, the market gives you many opportunities to spend it. We gave out cards so you could impulsively save it for the future.” Because of the program’s small size — only a few hundred cards were sold — they couldn’t draw any strong conclusions, but the results seem to make for a promising starting point.

Ultimately, Mr. Mullainathan suggests, we need to reimagine our perception of poverty completely. The focus now is on poverty as a fixed, immutable entity. We should view it instead as something far more malleable.

“That’s what I feel is missing in this whole debate,” he says. “In neuroscience, they understand plasticity,” that the brain changes in response to the external environment. “But the poverty field is stuck in 40 years ago,” he said. “I don’t understand why people haven’t grasped that. Even if you’re poor, you have a brain with all the majesty of any human brain. It’s just subject to different pressures.”

---

Maria Konnikova is a contributing writer for The New Yorker online and the author of “Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes.”

I say, Here Here!!! What do you think?

New York Times 

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

Peaceful Nonreconciliation Now

By DANI DAYAN 

JUNE 8, 2014

Credit Vahram Muradyan

MAALE SHOMRON, West Bank — 

JOHN KERRY’S failed Middle East peace effort has made it clear that a negotiated political agreement is impossible at the moment. The two-state formula enjoyed decades of exclusive stardom, in which its appeal thwarted all innovative and alternative thought.

Government officials in Washington, Brussels and other capitals seem to have no idea how to proceed or are clinging desperately to a bygone idea.

But despair is not an acceptable policy. There are practical issues that can and should be solved. First and foremost, Palestinians deserve drastic and immediate improvements in their everyday lives. Obviously, this is not their main aspiration, but, unlike others, it is feasible right now. We are engaged in a bitter national conflict with the Palestinians. But we settlers were never driven — except for fringe elements — by bigotry, hate or racism.

Israel must initiate an ambitious and bold plan to improve every aspect of day-to-day life for Palestinians in Judea and Samaria — commonly referred to as the West Bank in these pages. Israelis must let go of the trauma of the Second Intifada that terrorized them between 2000 and 2005. They can’t go on living under psychological siege while imposing sweeping, burdensome restrictions on the Palestinians because of heinous acts of terror perpetrated a decade ago.

The security barrier separating Judea and Samaria from the rest of Israel should ultimately be dismantled and Palestinians should enjoy complete freedom of movement and be able to re-enter the Israeli job market. There’s no reason Israel should import thousands of foreign workers while so many Palestinians among us struggle to earn a living. Palestinians need to return to Israeli cities, and not only as blue-collar workers. Palestinian academics should be included in Israel’s advanced industries: An engineer from Ramallah should be able to work in Tel Aviv, and a Palestinian doctor treating patients in an Israeli hospital should not be a rare sight.

Barriers, checkpoints and military restrictions on movement must be lifted, and all Jews and Palestinians should be allowed to move freely. Palestinians should be allowed full entry into Jewish towns in Judea and Samaria and to cross the Green Line, and vice versa; the gates in the security barrier could be opened regularly as a preliminary phase before it is completely dismantled and removed. Palestinian security forces could continue carrying out the same tasks they do today. And in the absence of checkpoints, the Israeli Army will have to be more active than it is now. If violence erupts, this incremental process would be halted or reversed.

Israel must also ensure that Palestinians have quick and convenient access to the international airports of Israel and Jordan and remove the majority of barriers and delays that currently impede Palestinian imports and exports entering and leaving the West Bank.

It is not in Israel’s interest to weaken or dissolve the Palestinian Authority or disrupt day-to-day Palestinian life. That means ending delays in transferring tax payments to the Authority and striving to promote its efficient functioning.

Moreover, the civil administration in charge of Israeli contact with Palestinians should no longer be run by the Israeli military, but by civilians who serve the Palestinian civilian population efficiently and courteously. A 50-year-old Palestinian shouldn’t have to deal with soldiers and officers half his age.

Palestinians should also be included as full-fledged members of the civil administration’s planning and building committees that consider construction in Arab towns. And Palestinian magistrates should be included in courts that decide on civil disputes, including those involving land. The law that applies to a 16-year-old Palestinian caught throwing stones should be the same as the one that applies to a 16-year-old Jew caught throwing stones and any other 16-year old of any ethnicity committing the same offense inside the Green Line. There is no practical or moral justification for a different legal policy for Palestinians and Israelis.

Finally Israel, in conjunction with the international community, must take measures to improve the infrastructure for water, sewage, transportation, education and health with the goal of narrowing the huge gaps between Israeli and Palestinian societies.

This also means thoroughly rehabilitating West Bank refugee camps. It’s unacceptable for fifth-generation Palestinian refugees to continue to live in abject poverty, which leads to frustration and violence. Camp residents should be provided with suitable housing, employment, health care services and education.

There should be zero tolerance for violence on either side. Just as the Israeli Army will remain to ensure security, the so-called price tag attacks perpetrated by Israelis against Palestinians and their property — to exact a “price” for perceived anti-settlement policies — must be stopped once and for all.

The Arab-Israeli territorial dispute is a zero-sum game, but the human considerations are not. We gain nothing from a Palestinian’s humiliation or poverty. Improving Palestinians’ quality of life does not conflict with other proposed endgames like annexation of Judea and Samaria or the two-state formula. Nor will final-status issues change; Palestinians will continue to vote in Palestinian Authority elections and Israelis in Israel’s elections.

It should be clear: This is not a plan for permanent peace but rather a blueprint for peaceful nonreconciliation.

Dani Dayan is a former chairman of the Yesha Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria.

Early Studies with Earth's Beloved Dolphins

You know I love all animals, and I've found this fascinating 'fish' tale for you.

En~joy! 

Kendke

The Dolphin Who Loved Me

In the 1960s, Margaret Lovatt was part of a Nasa-funded project to communicate with dolphins. Soon she was living with 'Peter' 24 hours a day in a converted house. Christopher Riley reports on an experiment that went tragically wrong

• Christopher Riley
  
  
•  Saturday 7 June 2014

Marine girl: Margaret Lovatt at the Dolphin House on St Thomas Photograph: courtesy Lilly Estate

Like most children, Margaret Howe Lovatt grew up with stories of talking animals. "There was this book that my mother gave to me called Miss Kelly," she remembers with a twinkle in her eye. "It was a story about a cat who could talk and understand humans and it just stuck with me that maybe there is this possibility."
Unlike most children, Lovatt didn't leave these tales of talking animals behind her as she grew up. In her early 20s, living on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, they took on a new significance. During Christmas 1963, her brother-in-law mentioned a secret laboratory at the eastern end of the island where they were working with dolphins. She decided to pay the lab a visit early the following year. "I was curious," Lovatt recalls. "I drove out there, down a muddy hill, and at the bottom was a cliff with a big white building."
Lovatt was met by a tall man with tousled hair, wearing an open shirt and smoking a cigarette. His name was Gregory Bateson, a great intellectual of the 20th century and the director of the lab. "Why did you come here?" he asked Lovatt.
"Well, I heard you had dolphins," she replied, "and I thought I'd come and see if there was anything I could do or any way I could help…" Unused to unannounced visitors and impressed by her bravado, Bateson invited her to meet the animals and asked her to watch them for a while and write down what she saw. Despite her lack of scientific training, Lovatt turned out to be an intuitive observer of animal behaviour and Bateson told her she could come back whenever she wanted.
"There were three dolphins," remembers Lovatt. "Peter, Pamela and Sissy. Sissy was the biggest. Pushy, loud, she sort of ran the show. Pamela was very shy and fearful. And Peter was a young guy. He was sexually coming of age and a bit naughty."
The lab's upper floors overhung a sea pool that housed the animals. It was cleaned by the tide through openings at each end. The facility had been designed to bring humans and dolphins into closer proximity and was the brainchild of an American neuroscientist, Dr John Lilly. Here, Lilly hoped to commune with the creatures, nurturing their ability to make human-like sounds through their blow holes.
Lilly had been interested in connecting with cetaceans since coming face to face with a beached pilot whale on the coast near his home in Massachusetts in 1949. The young medic couldn't quite believe the size of the animal's brain – and began to imagine just how intelligent the creature must have been, explains Graham Burnett, professor of the history of science at Princeton and author of The Sounding of the Whale. "You are talking about a time in science when everybody's thinking about a correlation between brain size and what the brain can do. And in this period, researchers were like: 'Whoa… big brain huh… cool!'"
Tripper and flipper: Dr John Lilly, who started experimenting with LSD during the project. Photograph: Lilly Estate At every opportunity in the years that followed, John Lilly and his first wife, Mary, would charter sailboats and cruise the Caribbean, looking for other big-brained marine mammals to observe. It was on just such a trip in the late 1950s that the Lillys came across Marine Studios in Miami – the first place to keep the bottlenose dolphin in captivity.
Up until this time, fishermen on America's east coast, who were in direct competition with dolphins for fish, had considered the animals vermin. "They were know as 'herring hogs' in most of the seafaring towns in the US," says Burnett. But here, in the tanks of Marine Studios, the dolphins' playful nature was endearingly on show and their ability to learn tricks quickly made it hard to dislike them.
Here, for the first time, Lilly had the chance to study the brains of live dolphins, mapping their cerebral cortex using fine probes, which he'd first developed for his work on the brains of rhesus monkeys. Unable to sedate dolphins, as they stop breathing under anaesthetic, the brain-mapping work wasn't easy for either animals or scientists, and the research didn't always end well for the marine mammals. But on one occasion in 1957, the research would take a different course which would change his and Mary's lives for ever.
Now aged 97, Mary still remembers the day very clearly. "I came in at the top of the operating theatre and heard John talking and the dolphin would go: 'Wuh… wuh… wuh' like John, and then Alice, his assistant, would reply in a high tone of voice and the dolphin would imitate her voice. I went down to where they were operating and told them that this was going on and they were quite startled."
Perhaps, John reasoned, this behaviour indicated an ambition on the dolphins' part to communicate with the humans around them. If so, here were exciting new opportunities for interspecies communication. Lilly published his theory in a book in 1961 called Man and Dolphin. The idea of talking dolphins, eager to tell us something, captured the public's imagination and the book became a bestseller.
Man and Dolphin extrapolated Mary Lilly's initial observations of dolphins mimicking human voices, right through to teaching them to speak English and on ultimately to a Cetacean Chair at the United Nations, where all marine mammals would have an enlightening input into world affairs, widening our perspectives on everything from science to history, economics and current affairs.
Lilly's theory had special significance for another group of scientists – astronomers. "I'd read his book and was very impressed," says Frank Drake, who had just completed the first experiment to detect signals from extraterrestrial civilisations using a radio telescope at Green Bank in West Virginia. "It was a very exciting book because it had these new ideas about creatures as intelligent and sophisticated as us and yet living in a far different milieu." He immediately saw parallels with Lilly's work, "because we [both] wanted to understand as much as we could about the challenges of communicating with other intelligent species." This interest helped Lilly win financial backing from Nasa and other government agencies, and Lilly opened his new lab in the Caribbean in 1963, with the aim of nurturing closer relationships between man and dolphin.
A few months LATER, in early 1964, Lovatt arrived. Through her naturally empathetic nature she quickly connected with the three animals and, eager to embrace John Lilly's vision for building an interspecies communication bridge, she threw herself into his work, spending as much time as possible with the dolphins and carrying out a programme of daily lessons to encourage them to make human-like sounds. While the lab's director, Gregory Bateson, concentrated on animal-to-animal communication, Lovatt was left alone to pursue Lilly's dream to teach the dolphins to speak English. But even at a state-of-the-art facility like the Dolphin House, barriers remained. "Every night we would all get in our cars and pull the garage door down and drive away," remembers Lovatt. "And I thought: 'Well there's this big brain floating around all night.' It amazed me that everybody kept leaving and I just thought it was wrong."
Lovatt reasoned that if she could live with a dolphin around the clock, nurturing its interest in making human-like sounds, like a mother teaching a child to speak, they'd have more success. "Maybe it was because I was living so close to the lab. It just seemed so simple. Why let the water get in the way?" she says. "So I said to John Lilly: 'I want to plaster everything and fill this place with water. I want to live here.'"
The radical nature of Lovatt's idea appealed to Lilly and he went for it. She began completely waterproofing the upper floors of the lab, so that she could actually flood the indoor rooms and an outdoor balcony with a couple of feet of water. This would allow a dolphin to live comfortably in the building with her for three months.
Lovatt selected the young male dolphin called Peter for her live-in experiment. "I chose to work with Peter because he had not had any human-like sound training and the other two had," she explains. Lovatt would attempt to live in isolation with him six days a week, sleeping on a makeshift bed on the elevator platform in the middle of the room and doing her paperwork on a desk suspended from the ceiling and hanging over the water. On the seventh day Peter would return to the sea pool downstairs to spend time with the two female dolphins at the lab – Pamela and Sissy.
'If I was sitting with my legs in the water, he'd come up and look at the back of my knee for a long time': Margaret with Peter. Photograph: courtesy Lilly Estate By the summer of 1965, Lovatt's domestic dolphinarium was ready for use. Lying in bed, surrounded by water that first night and listening to the pumps gurgling away, she remembers questioning what she was doing. "Human people were out there having dinner or whatever and here I am. There's moonlight reflecting on the water, this fin and this bright eye looking at you and I thought: 'Wow, why am I here?' But then you get back into it and it never occurred to me not to do it. What I was doing there was trying to find out what Peter was doing there and what we could do together. That was the whole point and nobody had done that."
Audio recordings of Lovatt's progress, meticulously archived on quarter-inch tapes at the time, capture the energy that Lovatt brought to the experiment – doggedly documenting Peter's progress with her twice-daily lessons and repeatedly encouraging him to greet her with the phrase 'Hello Margaret'. "'M' was very difficult," she remembers. "My name. Hello 'M'argaret. I worked on the 'M' sound and he eventually rolled over to bubble it through the water. That 'M', he worked on so hard."
For Lovatt, though, it often wasn't these formal speech lessons that were the most productive. It was just being together which taught her the most about what made Peter tick. "When we had nothing to do was when we did the most," she reflects. "He was very, very interested in my anatomy. If I was sitting here and my legs were in the water, he would come up and look at the back of my knee for a long time. He wanted to know how that thing worked and I was so charmed by it."
Carl Sagan, one of the young astronomers at Green Bank, paid a visit to report back on progress to Frank Drake. "We thought that it was important to have the dolphins teach us 'Dolphinese', if there is such a thing," recalls Drake. "For example we suggested two dolphins in each tank not able to see each other – and he should teach one dolphin a procedure to obtain food – and then see if it could tell the other dolphin how to do the same thing in its tank. That was really the prime experiment to be done, but Lilly never seemed able to do it."
Instead, he encouraged Lovatt to press on with teaching Peter English. But there was something getting in the way of the lessons. "Dolphins get sexual urges," says the vet Andy Williamson, who looked after the animals' health at Dolphin House. "I'm sure Peter had plenty of thoughts along those lines."
"Peter liked to be with me," explains Lovatt. "He would rub himself on my knee, or my foot, or my hand. And at first I would put him downstairs with the girls," she says. But transporting Peter downstairs proved so disruptive to the lessons that, faced with his frequent arousals, it just seemed easier for Lovatt to relieve his urges herself manually.
"I allowed that," she says. "I wasn't uncomfortable with it, as long as it wasn't rough. It would just become part of what was going on, like an itch – just get rid of it, scratch it and move on. And that's how it seemed to work out. It wasn't private. People could observe it."
For Lovatt it was a precious thing, which was always carried out with great respect. "Peter was right there and he knew that I was right there," she continues. "It wasn't sexual on my part. Sensuous perhaps. It seemed to me that it made the bond closer. Not because of the sexual activity, but because of the lack of having to keep breaking. And that's really all it was. I was there to get to know Peter. That was part of Peter."
Innocent as they were, Lovatt's sexual encounters with Peter would ultimately overshadow the whole experiment when a story about them appeared in Hustler magazine in the late 1970s. "I'd never even heard of Hustler," says Lovatt. "I think there were two magazine stores on the island at the time. And I went to one and looked and I found this story with my name and Peter, and a drawing."
Sexploitation: Hustler magazine's take on the story in the late 1970s. Photograph: Lilly Estate Lovatt bought up all the copies she could find, but the story was out there and continues to circulate to this day on the web. "It's a bit uncomfortable," she acknowledges. "The worst experiment in the world, I've read somewhere, was me and Peter. That's fine, I don't mind. But that was not the point of it, nor the result of it. So I just ignore it."
Something else began to interrupt the study. Lilly had been researching the mind-altering powers of the drug LSD since the early 1960s. The wife of Ivan Tors, the producer of the dolphin movie Flipper, had first introduced him to it at a party in Hollywood. "John and Ivan Tors were really good friends," says Ric O'Barry of the Dolphin Project (an organisation that aims to stop dolphin slaughter and exploitation around the world) and a friend of Lilly's at the time. "Ivan was financing some of the work on St Thomas. I saw John go from a scientist with a white coat to a full blown hippy," he remembers.
For the actor Jeff Bridges, who was introduced to Lilly by his father Lloyd, Lilly's self-experimentation with LSD was just part of who he was. "John Lilly was above all an explorer of the brain and the mind, and all those drugs that expand our consciousness," reflects Bridges. "There weren't too many people with his expertise and his scientific background doing that kind of work."
In the 1960s a small selection of neuroscientists like John Lilly were licensed to research LSD by the American government, convinced that the drug had medicinal qualities that could be used to treat mental-health patients. As part of this research, the drug was sometimes injected into animals and Lilly had been using it on his dolphins since 1964, curious about the effect it would have on them.
Margaret Lovatt today. Photograph: Matt Pinner/BBC Much to Lilly's annoyance, nothing happened. Despite his various attempts to get the dolphins to respond to the drug, it didn't seem to have any effect on them, remembers Lovatt. "Different species react to different pharmaceuticals in different ways," explains the vet, Andy Williamson. "A tranquilliser made for horses might induce a state of excitement in a dog. Playing with pharmaceuticals is a tricky business to say the least."
Injecting the dolphins with LSD was not something Lovatt was in favour of and she insisted that the drug was not given to Peter, which Lilly agreed to. But it was his lab, and they were his animals, she recalls. And as a young woman in her 20s she felt powerless to stop him giving LSD to the other two dolphins.
While Lilly's experimentation with the drug continued, Lovatt persevered with Peter's vocalisation lessons and grew steadily closer to him. "That relationship of having to be together sort of turned into really enjoying being together, and wanting to be together, and missing him when he wasn't there," she reflects. "I did have a very close encounter with – I can't even say a dolphin again – with Peter."
By autumn 1966, Lilly's interest in the speaking-dolphin experiment was dwindling. "It didn't have the zing to it that LSD did at that time," recalls Lovatt of Lilly's attitude towards her progress with Peter. "And in the end the zing won."
The dolphinarium on St Thomas. Photograph: Lilly Estate Lilly's cavalier attitude to the dolphins' welfare would eventually be his downfall, driving away the lab's director, Gregory Bateson, and eventually causing the funding to be cut. Just as Lovatt and Peter's six-month live-in experiment was concluding, it was announced that the lab would be closed.
Without funding, the fate of the dolphins was in question. "I couldn't keep Peter," says Lovatt, wistfully. "If he'd been a cat or a dog, then maybe. But not a dolphin." Lovatt's new job soon became the decommissioning of the lab and she prepared to ship the dolphins away to Lilly's other lab, in a disused bank building in Miami. It was a far cry from the relative freedom and comfortable surroundings of Dolphin House.
At the Miami lab, held captive in smaller tanks with little or no sunlight, Peter quickly deteriorated, and after a few weeks Lovatt received news.
"I got that phone call from John Lilly," she recalls. "John called me himself to tell me. He said Peter had committed suicide."
Ric O'Barry corroborates the use of this word. "Dolphins are not automatic air-breathers like we are," he explains. "Every breath is a conscious effort. If life becomes too unbearable, the dolphins just take a breath and they sink to the bottom. They don't take the next breath." Andy Williamson puts Peter's death down to a broken heart, brought on by a separation from Lovatt that he didn't understand. "Margaret could rationalise it, but when she left, could Peter? Here's the love of his life gone."
"I wasn't terribly unhappy about it," explains Lovatt, 50 years on. "I was more unhappy about him being in those conditions [at the Miami lab] than not being at all. Nobody was going to bother Peter, he wasn't going to hurt, he wasn't going to be unhappy, he was just gone. And that was OK. Odd, but that's how it was."
In the decades which followed, John Lilly continued to study dolphin-human communications, exploring other ways of trying to talk to them – some of it bizarrely mystical, employing telepathy, and some of it more scientific, using musical tones. No one else ever tried to teach dolphins to speak English again.
Instead, research has shifted to better understanding other species' own languages. At the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, founded by Frank Drake to continue his work on life beyond Earth, Drake's colleague Laurance Doyle has attempted to quantify the complexity of animal language here on our home planet.
"There is still this prejudice that humans have a language which is far and away above any other species' qualitatively," says Doyle. "But by looking at the complexity of the relationship of dolphin signals to each other, we've discovered that they definitely have a very high communication intelligence. I think Lilly's big insight was how intelligent dolphins really are."
Margaret Howe Lovatt stayed on the island, marrying the photographer who'd captured pictures of the experiment. Together they moved back into Dolphin House, eventually converting it into a family home where they brought up three daughters. "It was a good place," she remembers. "There was good feeling in that building all the time."
In the years that followed the house has fallen into disrepair, but the ambition of what went on there is still remembered. "Over the years I have received letters from people who are working with dolphins themselves," she recalls. "They often say things like: 'When I was seven I read about you living with a dolphin, and that's what started it all for me.'"
Peter is their "Miss Kelly", she explains, remembering her own childhood book about talking animals. "Miss Kelly inspired me. And in turn the idea of my living with a dolphin inspired others. That's fun. I like that."


Christopher Riley is the producer and director of The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins, which will premiere at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival on 11 June, and is on BBC4 on 17 June at 9pm

Enlightened Living~

I'm ready to move in!

Man Builds His Dream Mini-Home In Only Six Weeks For $9,000

The Mind Unleashed

on 25 March, 2014 at 23:02

Have you ever wanted to live in a home where you still felt like you were connected to nature and things were simple and pretty well off-grid? One man has done this in Thailand and it only cost him $9000 to do it.
Steve Areen was offered some land on his friends mango farm to build his dream home. To Steve, it was a home that was simple, inviting, nature oriented and sustainable. As you can see in the images below, Steve adopted a dome like design that has a number of benefits. He was able to put up this home in only 6 weeks from start to finish using cement blocks and clay bricks. While he likes the design, next time Steve intends to build the home using Earthen bricks. It’s important to note that he was able to achieve this for only $9000 because of Thailand’s cheap cost of living. He was able to put up the main structure for only $6000 and then spent $3000 filling it with goodies.
Steve isn’t the only one looking to build these sustainable and unique homes. It seems people all over the world are desiring off-grid and sustainable homes that are more in touch with nature. Is it perhaps that people are growing tired of the cookie cutter homes that are packed into neighbourhoods? Or are people craving more nature? Or maybe people simply want to get off the grid as they grow tired of the overpriced cost of living and governmental reliance being on the grid comes with. Whatever the case, it is clear the future of our world is off-grid sustainable living. It’s just a matter of when. With designs like Earthship’s and technologies like free energy, there is no reason why any of us need to be living on the grid and paying for utilities today.

Credits: Joe Martino of Collective Evolution, where this article was originally featured.

I couldn't get the video to load, so click this link and scroll to the article's end to see the video which gives a tour and shows the construction.
http://themindunleashed.org/2014/03/man-builds-dream-mini-home-six-weeks-9000.html 

Remember this Marvelous Sweet Sweet Guy?

A blast from the past~ Enjoy this interview and visit with Melvin Van Peebles four years ago.

Many years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr.Van Peebles when we attended court hearings along with son Mario, to support the release of Geronimo Pratt from incarceration.
A memorable delight!
Kendke 

June 1, 2010
By Jonathan Smith
Vice Magazine
Photos by Brayden Olson

Aside from having one of the most amazing names I've ever heard, Melvin Van Peebles has tried, and succeeded in pretty much every type of artistic endeavor I can think of. He's a novelist, journalist, painter, film director, playwright, actor, musician...he was even a fucking stock trader on Wall Street. He's an intimidating guy to write about, much less meet, because whatever your life goal may be, Van Peebles has probably already done it, and done it better than you ever could. It's actually sort of annoying.
He's the father of blaxploitation films, and really, independent films as a whole. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, his 1971 film, not only opened the floodgates for black cinema, but completely blew away every money making record for indy films up to that time. Sweetback scared the shit out of the man too, and it was stamped with an "X" rating. Because of the film's "fuck whitey," attitude, The Black Panthers made it required viewing for all their members.




We met up with Van Peebles last Saturday in his apartment. After getting past the fancy doorman and taking the elevator to nine we knocked on his door and got the old "No English," reply in a flawless Spanish accent. Van Peebles opened the door laughing like a crazy man and led us in.
The place was like a weird-ass museum. He kept all of his files in a gigantic hot dog, complete with mustard and relish, made of fiberglass and handcrafted by himself. The top of the bun lifted up to reveal rows and rows of semi-important looking manila folders. They probably would have looked very important indeed, had they not been stored in a Herculean frankfurter. In the middle of the room was a skylight that transformed into a table, complete with fake bird shit on top and spider-cracked panes. On the side of the room opposite the wiener was the ass of a vintage VW bus embedded in the wall with what looked like nothing more than some blue-painted caulk. He flipped a switch under the bumper and an unsettling amount of smoke billowed out from the muffler. Paintings, illustrations, and sculptures, all made by Van Peebles, were on the walls and scattered randomly throughout the apartment. Some of the artworks had fancy velvet ropes guarding them, and all were titled with painfully clever names. The hot dog, for instance, was titled "Jesus (21st century version) working his 'Fish & Loaves Magic' on 'The Multitude.'"
Anyway, after we finished gawking at all of the incredible crap littering his apartment we sat down for a little chat about his life and early work.


Vice: Hi Mr. Van Peebles, can we just start from the beginning? Where are you from?
MVP: I started off working for my dad. I’m from the ultra hood, I mean, I’m from the south side of Chicago--don’t get mixed up in that. My dad had a small tailor shop and I started running it when I was ten. I took care of the money and all the other stuff. I used to stand on wooden Coca-Cola crates, so I could get up high enough to run the cash register. I was sort of the forman of the guys who worked for him too. So that’s what I did after school everyday and that’s where I picked up business. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I never had too much of a childhood because I was always running the shop.
You went all the way through school though, right?
Yeah, I went to a white high school in the city and grade school in the suburbs, so I actually lived two lives. After school every day I’d catch a train and come to work. All day Saturday and Sunday I’d work, and I spoke two languages. You know, I spoke the hygroscopic nuclei stuff on one hand, and, "Yo motha’ fucka', you didn’t pay me," on the other.
I never went to a prom, and I never saw a baseball or a basketball game, I worked everyday. But that was fine with me because I learned how to wheel and deal. I finished grade school when I was ten but they held me back for two years. So, I finished high school when I was 16 and college when I was 20. I had an art scholarship, but I needed extra money. Someone had told me about these classes that you could get paid for taking--it was called the ROTC. I didn’t know what the fuck that was…but I sure as hell found out, haha!
So that's how you got involved with the military?
Yeah, two weeks after I got out of college--I thought I was gonna save my money, go to Europe--bullshit! I was in the Air Force. I flew jets for three years as a navigator for a semi-secret bomber we had. I was flying around with a god damn atomic bomb! So this was around the time of the first wave of African American soldiers, and I remember one time we were flying over Hawaii and the pilot told us there were only three people on the plane because they didn’t know how to pressurize the cabins too well. So, there’s three guys doing the work of eight guys. I was the navigator, the radio operator, and the bombardier, and the copilot was my assistant and the pilot’s assistant. Anyway, the pilot says, "We’re having trouble with engine number one," so they take down engine number one, and they cut off engine number two. Then he says, "I think we’re having trouble with number three, maybe we’re gonna make it," and I hear this black voice saying, "Oh Lord, just let me make it to 23 Lord, please.” Who the fuck was that? That was me. They say you don’t have any atheists in the foxholes, but you don’t have any atheists on a plane on fire either. Well, the plane somehow recovered, and eventually I got out of the service.
And then you moved to San Francisco?
Well, as soon as I got out I went to the closest border around me, and that was Mexico. Mario, my oldest son, was born while I was living in Mexico. And when I decided to come back to the states things had cooled off a bit, and the best city I had seen so far was San Francisco.
I got a job as a gripman. Most of the gripmen were much larger, but I had these very thin hands, I had to wear two pairs of gloves to protect my hands.

How did The Big Heart come about?
I just realized one day that I could write an article about my job on the cable cars. And then I realized the article could grow into a book, and I told my wife, "I’m gonna do this book," and she said, "Yeah right." A lot of encouragement. So I did the book and I sold it with photos.
And that book was a sort of segue for your film career.
Yeah, a guy got on my cable car one day looking for Melvin Van Peebles. Someone on the car pointed to me, and the guy says, "No, no, the guy who wrote the book." And the man who knew me said again, "No, that’s him." So the guy comes over and starts gushing about the book and he told me my book was like a movie. "Shit, I’ll go into movies" I thought. So that’s how I went into movies.
That simple?
Yeah, I called a guy I knew who knew something about film and I told him I had a camera, and that I was gonna make a film. He says, "You gonna do it in 16 or 35?” I said, "What’s that?" Then he said, "16 or 35 millimeter," I said "Oh, what’s that?" I didn’t know shitall. But I persevered and after I got the first part of the movie done, I showed it to him and he said, "It’s not a movie yet. We haven’t edited it yet." And I said, "What’s that?" The guy showed me how to stick two pieces of film together and that was my film school. I taught myself the rest.
You made a lot of the music for the films yourself too.
Well what happened with that, the guy who was supposed to do the music kept saying "Hey man, I’ll do the music for you,” but he never showed up when he was supposed to. So I wrote the music myself. I couldn't read or write music but I could count, so I numbered all the keys on the piano. That’s how I write music to this day…I just write numbers down that correspond to the keys. That’s the way I do it. It works, shit!


Makes sense to me.
So anyway, I had made these short films. I thought they were gonna be features, but my first "feature" was ten minutes long. Around this time I got fired from the cable car because the guy didn’t think Negroes should read let alone write, so they fired me. I did a great job and had never once been late, but they fired me.
So I went down to Hollywood with my movies and they threw me down the steps. I decided to go back to my second love--mathematics. I had a GI bill so I wrote to the Dutch and said I was gonna come early to get my PhD. I told them I just needed to brush up on the language. Implicit when you say you’re gonna "brush up" on the language, is that you speak it, and I didn't know a word.
To get to Holland I had to catch a boat from New York, and there was a guy in New York at that time who took avant-garde films and showed them in auditoriums or gymnasiums. Most of the films consisted of little dots and shit like that, but I wanted to tell stories. He ended up buying one of my films, I didn't think anything of it at the time, but one day when I was in Holland I got a letter from the cinematheque in France saying they had seen my films and they thought they were genius. Well, finally someone understood me. So they invited me to come over, so I hitchhiked to France.

How did the French like your early stuff?
The French loved me. They were very nice and they showed my films and everybody told me what a genius I was. After my first screening though, the lights came up on the Champs Elysees and the people and the head of the museum told me how great the film was, and that I should be in cinema. And then they got in their cars and drove off.
They just left you?
I’m standing in the fucking middle of the Champs Elysees and I can’t speak a word of French and I'm broke. I got three cans of film and two wet cheeks, from the kisses, what the fuck? So yeah, they left me there, but they’d done the most dangerous thing--they’d given me hope. So I became a beggar. I begged in the streets for years. I’d sing and beg. And I remember my big songs were La Bomba and Take This Hammer, those were my crowd pleasers.
Wait, this was after you’d shown the films and everyone said how great they were, and you were still begging in the streets?
Yeah, oh yeah. It wasn't like in America. Here, if they invite you over, they'll feed you. Fuck that, there they said, "You’re great," and walked off!
That's fucked up.
Yeah, but I got by. And as luck would have it I was walking down the street one night, I remember this very well, I was in the Southern end of Paris, and I saw a newspaper and began thinking that the story sounded like bullshit. I had learned to read French and I didn't realize it! I had been there long enough that I was reading the French paper. It was about a murderer. So I go to this newspaper, and I told them I thought the story about the murderer was bullshit. Then the editor  told me to follow it up and he would make me a reporter for the set. I later realized that the only reason he told me to follow up on the story was that it was August, and August in France is when everyone leaves for vacation. If it had been any other time of the month, he would have put one of his regular reporters on it. So I go and I follow up on the story and I get a huge murder scoop. I made a discovery that changed the whole god damn investigation. And suddenly I’m a big, smart journalist, so I became a crime reporter.


What was the scoop? What did you find out?
It was a murder that happened in a place called Everette. Some guys had killed somebody and it just sounded funny, you know they were saying somebody jumped off a subway or something--yeah right. So then I became a French journalist, and eventually I became one of the editors of a French humor magazine. I had been writing novels this whole time too, and it was around this time that they began to sell. Then I discovered there’s a French law that a French writer can have a directors card. Duh!
What's a director’s card?
A director’s card allows you to make films, it’s like being in the union.
The French government still doesn’t fund the film though, do they?
They can. If you have a director’s card you can ask. So I got a director’s card and I went and asked them to put up money.
What was the law? What defined being a writer, did you have to have a certain number of published novels?
There was no definition. So I went to the place and I cased the joint. I found out they hate to back down. It was like I was doing a bank job. I went and watched the people. I noticed right after their coffee break they all seemed to be in good humor. And I also realized, if it's a law, even a weird one like the director's card, they don't want to go against it. So I went when everyone was in a good mood and I said, "Well, I’m here for my director’s card," he says, "Director’s card?"
He didn't know what the card was?
I don't think so, I had to explain to him that it was a law that said a French writer can have a director’s card. Then I showed him my novels and told him I wrote in French. He didn't say anything at first, and man, that was the longest fucking ten seconds of my life. Finally he said, "Yeah, sure," and gave me the card.
Wow, so then you had the card, did the government end up helping you with funding?
Well, I had to write a movie that was flattering to the French and then I got a partial government subsidy. Then I was able to parlay my other things into the rest of the money and I made my first film.
And then again, luck. I was at a party, and a well-dressed, tall, very majestic looking black guy was there. Someone asked if I wanted to meet him. So we were talking, and the guy was very polite and very eloquent, and he asked me what I was doing. I told him I was a writer, and that I was making a film the next day. It turned out he was the curator for the San Francisco Film Festival. He said he was there looking for films and I was like, "YO!" He asked me if my film would be ready for the festival, and I told him yeah, I'd have it ready. In the end I think it was myself, Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy who were invited.

This was before he’d seen the film?
He hadn’t seen the film, no. But he told everyone he had found this great film, so he lied. So all my underworld friends, the hookers and everyone else, we all pooled our fucking money and bought me a plane ticket. That’s how I came back to the States. So anyway, I went to the festival and I won the festival. Then Hollywood sent a plane for me to go down there, every studio wanted to talk to me.
The film was The Story of a Three Day Pass, right?
Yes, The Story of a Three Day Pass, every studio offered me a job to come work for them. Because Hollywood couldn't afford to have this American, black director doing French films. But I refused, because I felt that if I got the job no other minorities would get a shot. I’d become the resident genius. So my calculations were that if I didn’t do it, it would spark the search for the Great Black Hope.
And I still didn't have any money. I used to live on a park bench down near the Woodward Line Theater. The first night I was there, I remember I had to wear baggy clothes with newspapers stuffed in them for insulation.
It seems like Three Day Pass would have been hugely controversial, I mean, it’s a love story of an African American man and a white woman. How was that received?
Where?
Well, I guess France, and also here.
Well, France loved it because they thought it showed how liberal and open-minded they are, but that's bull-shit. When I first came to France the cops used to stop me all the time, the French people used to put a gun in my face like I was in Mississippi or some shit, and then he’d see my paper and say "Well, you’re an American, welcome to the fraternity, blahblahblah."

 
When did you decide to return to the States?
I had shot on location with The Story of a Three Day Pass and so Hollywood kept after me, I was the jewel of the crown. I told them I would come back and make a movie if I could shoot it in Hollywood, because I thought that would be the next political step, to shoot a movie in Hollywood where the unions are strong and this and that. They agreed, and that’s how I made Watermelon Man. And Watermelon Man, just like I predicted, changed everything once again. Then, after that, I said OK, well, I’ll play my next card, I’ll make the film I want to make, how I want to make it, and that was Sweetback.
Yeah, Sweetback was not only a huge milestone for African American filmmakers--but also for independent film as a whole.
Yeah, Sweetback broke all the money records, it was the largest independent film that had ever been made up until that time. So I’m the grandfather of The Blair Witch Project, as well as other things.
Yeah.
But, there’s a price to pay for that. I’ve never had a partner since. I had a three picture deal from Columbia--and they told me that my contract was up.
Because of Sweetback?
Yep.
That’s shitty.
Yep.
You're still blacklisted today?
Yeah. See, I promised people two for one. I promised them that they could feel like a liberal by helping me, and two, that they could have their white theories vindicated by my failure. Well, everybody got pissed off when I didn't fail. So I decided to do something else. Because it's very hard to control all aspects of a film--I went to Broadway. That’s how I decided to make Ain’t Supposed to Die. Because I could handle that. There was only one theater, one place that I could handle. A thousand funny things happened there. I used to be the bouncer too, and I would look this way (makes a mean face), and say, "Don’t fuck with me." Haha, it was funny! Don’t fuck with me. It’s not good for your health.
I can tell. I'm a little scared right now.
I remember I was making a movie in Canada once, with Mario and his brother, and they said "Dad, no fighting." I told them to put an amendment to that. "If anybody fucks with me," I said, "I'll send them to you. After that, if you don't get it straightened out, they're mine." That’s just the way it had to be.
You made Sweetback without the backing of a studio. How'd you go about getting it distributed?
Well, I had to hire a white guy to say he was the boss.
I would imagine theater owners, especially white ones, would be hesitant to show a movie like Sweetback at that time. Where did it play at?
Oh yeah, only two theaters in the entire United States would show it--two theaters. But it did so well there that everyone started calling. It ended up playing absolutely everywhere.
Jared (Melvin Van Peebles' assistant): I saw it in Dayton, Ohio at the drive-in. Because back in the day the drive-in was really the thing to do on the weekends to get away from the folks, and I remember when we went to see Sweetback the women got really mad, because they were like "Hey, we're in the back seat waiting," and we were like "No, no,  check out this movie!"
MVP: Opening night man, fucking people around the god damn block. It was huge, huge, huge. It opened on a Wednesday in Detroit and on a Friday in Atlanta. When I got to the theater in Atlanta, I told the guy not to worry, that people would show up. Then he told me the theater was already full.
I went into the theater and you could have heard a rat pissin’ on cotton. They had just desegregated Atlanta, so it was packed with black people, but not a sound. I found one seat, and this was really one of the most interesting points in my life, there was an old black lady sitting beside me, and when Sweetback was out in the desert she said, "Oh Lord, let him die. Don’t let those men kill him." Because you see, in movies up to that time, if a minority stood up, he died before the end of the movie. Fuck that. Nobody could believe he was gonna actually live or get away.
Yeah, but it seems like regardless of the message, and the fact that the main character was an African American killing white cops, you would think the money alone would have made distributors pick up your stuff after something that financially successful.
You'd think. Don’t Play Us Cheap, my second Broadway show wasn’t supposed to be a show, but after I finished the movie and I went to get it distributed nobody would do it.

The Story of a Three Day Pass obviously deals with racial issues as well, but in a much more subtle way. Sweetback was killing cops and just a bad mother fucker in general, was there a reason that you were more blatant about your message in Sweetback? Were you becoming more angry at everything going on during that time period?
Well, with The Story of a Three Day Pass I had to get money from people to make it.
So you were pandering to the French?
Yeah, it was flattering to the French, but not too flattering to the Americans. I had to show how wonderful France was.
Right.
If somebody’s gonna fuck you, just hope they use Vaseline. You know what I mean? Shit, you gotta be realistic. So with Sweetback I shot my first scene salaciously so that the unions would think that I was shooting a porno movie. Then, the next part I shot in the hood in such a way that they would be reluctant to come down and start trouble. Then, the third part I shot in the desert where nobody knew where the fuck to find me.
Haha. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that opening scene. Salacious is almost an understatement for a little kid plowing a grown woman. How old was that kid?
That was Mario, my son. He was about 12, I guess.
Was he excited about it? Or was he weirded out?
He didn't want the kids at school to see him doing that. You know kids, I told him not to worry about it, shut the fuck up and do what I say. Now, every time he gets a broad he says, "Hey honey, come and watch me in this movie."
Yeah I'd be showing everybody that, it's like he had a sex tape before he hit puberty.
Hello--of course. But you know kids, what the hell. And now he’s making movies so that's great.
And it all started from lying naked on top of a grown woman in '71.
Yeah, but what I found very interesting, is that people couldn't believe I used my own son. Everybody’s somebody’s kid. If it was so wrong, why would I do it with somebody else's kid?
What sort of backlash did Sweetback get? I read somewhere that you got some death threats.
Oh, there’s been lots of them. Yeah.
Can you talk about some of them?
Well, there’s not much to talk about. People don’t give you a threat and then say, "Oh, you can get me at this number." The most dangerous ones I got were from black organizations, because they had decided how the revolution, or how the change was gonna happen, and here I am making it happen without them. They would say, "We must take over the world this way, and we must take over the world that way." No, just take over the world god damn it. That was some funny shit.

The Black Panthers made your film required viewing for its members. That's pretty badass.
Fucking yeah, that was great, it also got a lot of people to see my film.
Had they ever done that with anyone else's work?
No, who else's would they have shown? They never did it before, they never did it after.
Before that though, you put "Free Huey," on the back of your record, Br'er Soul.
Haha, yeah, they thought it meant "Free? Huh, no way," but it meant Huey Newton was still in jail. Nobody else was standing up for the motherfucker.
So they had no idea what it meant?
Nope, no idea.
Suckers.
And The Panthers asked me if I needed backup, and offered to be my bodyguards too, but I never asked them to make Sweetback required viewing.
Did you feel pretty invincible like, "No one can fuck with me now"?
Nope, somebody can fuck with me, but I will try and bring them down with me. You see, when is an animal most dangerous? When it’s cornered. What the fuck did I have to lose? I’d never been late for the cable car and the guy fired me after the book was a success, so the way I saw it, if somebody fucked with me, I had nothing to lose, so you don't want to go there. You got a goddamn canary cornered, he’ll fight.
Of course.
But you just can't take any shit. I remember one time, Sweetback was showing in Boston, and it didn't do well in Boston, and  this guy called me and he said he had seen the film in Detroit when it first came out, and he wanted to know why I had cut stuff out for the Boston theater. I didn't know what the fuck he was talking about, so I took my gun and I went down to the theater. I went to the guy in charge and I said "Hey motherfucker, I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off. Put the fucking film back how it was." He tried to tell me he didn't like that scene, who the fuck asked him what he liked?
What scene was it?
I don't know.
You don’t know? There was a couple of them, he was just chopping it down.
Was he chopping it down for size, or because he thought it was too risque?
He found it offensive blah blah, whatever. I guess it was too militant or some shit, but I’m standing on the edge of a cliff. Like I said, I don't have shit to lose.
After talking to you for a while, it certainly sounds like you live up to the ass kicking character of Sweetback, but you're really talkative, is there a reason Sweetback was so tight-lipped? Why did he have so few lines?
That is such an interesting question. One day, I was walking past the corner deli, and this group of guys looked at me and said, "OOOOHRRHHGGFF." I said, "oh fuck," I didn't know what their deal was, but it turned out they were deaf mutes, and they liked the film because they could understand it. Also, people talk too much, they say, "Oh, do you know you're invading my rights as an American?" No motherfucker, you fuck with me you’ll learn a fucking lesson. I’ll blow your fucking head off, period. Talk doesn't get it, it's not a bible he needs, it’s a brick. Somebody fucks with you, that’s what you do. Another thing the lack of dialogue did that I thought was interesting, was it made the audience read his mind.
Yeah, it’s true, it’s really weird how you can sort of tell what he's thinking from the facial expressions and things like that. Like when he’s watching the two cops beat the other guy and then he just goes ape shit.
He didn’t have to say, "Wow, you see how they treat us colored people, golly!" No.
Right.
I was at a bar the other night, and a girl was looking at me. Come on now, you don't need words, haha, you know what I’m thinking, you're thinking the same thing I’m thinking, alright. Let’s do it.
It never seems to work out like that for me.
You got to do it with real meaning. It's great when you're in some fucking foreign country and you don’t have to go through all that fucking shit. It's just like, I can’t talk to you and you can’t talk to me, well what do you understand? All right, come on mamason, let’s get it on.
Haha, yeah.
One time I was down in Denmark, at this party. As I was leaving I met this woman--she can’t speak English, I don't speak Danish, so what the fuck are we going to say, do you know what I mean? Otherwise you've got to have 20 minutes of talk, "Oh yes, you take what classes? What did you study?" Neither one of you is listening. So I went home with her, and I see a picture of her with her husband and she says, "He won’t be back until five o’clock." OK, so it’s about three-thirty and she gives me some pajamas to put on. So I put on the guy’s pajamas and, OH SHIT, FUCK THAT! They were huge! I said "You’re married to fuckin’ King Kong. Fuck you!"
You can tell a lot from the size of a man’s pajamas.
Yeah, exactly.

melvinvanpeebles.com

Written by: Jonathan Smith

Jun 1 2010