Author: Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert

A lifelong activist, profitability and marketing specialist Shel Horowitz’s mission is to fix crises like hunger, poverty, racism, war, and catastrophic climate change—by showing the business world how fixing them can make a profit. An author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker, his award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, lays out a blueprint for creating and MARKETING those profitable change-making products and services. He is happy to help you craft your messaging and develop profit strategies. Learn more (and download excerpts from the book) at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com

By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

I’m running into more and more people whose Twitter profile shows only, “This person has protected their tweets.”

After almost five years on Twitter, I still don’t understand why people would want to do this, and why Twitter actively encourages new users to protect their Tweets. It’s not any kind of security feature. All it does is make your tweets invisible unless someone’s following you. And why would anyone follow you if they can’t see what you’re posting and decide if you’re worth their time?

When you “protect”—a more accurate word would be “isolate—your tweets, they cannot get passed around. And people who are checking you out will not tend to follow. A far better way to inoculate yourself against Twitter spam is to follow people who post intelligent and interesting tweets. Yeah, you’ll get the occasional nasty tweet with a virus link, when some idiot hacks into one of your friends. But you’d get those even if your tweets are protected, as it does nothing to stop inbound tweets. And they’re easy enough to spot and ignore/delete. (Hint: if anyone’s saying they saw a funny picture of you, they can’t believe you’d do this, etc. and a link—or just a link with no text—don’t click, and drop them a note that they’ve been hacked.)

If you’re so impressive and famous that new followers want to follow you without knowing what you’re saying, well, OK—but you’re still shooting yourself in the foot. More followers—more REAL followers, not autobots—give you more influence, and even more status.

People with protected tweets tend to have very small numbers of followers of which a fair percentage are autobots. And this means they exclude themselves from a lot of co-marketing and self-marketing possibilities; no company is going to want to partner with someone whose tweets are invisible, no one will visit your blog on the basis of a tweet they can’t read.

Fortunately, it’s easy to turn the “protection” off again. If you’re not on Twitter so people can read your stuff, notice you, and build relationships, why ARE you on Twitter?

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Politics Tagged with , , , ,

It is worth remembering that the Boston Tea Party of 1773, which was one of the sparks leading up to the American Revolution, was as much a reaction against the corporate greed of the British East India Tea Company—the most powerful corporate monopoly of its time—as it was against overreach by the British monarchy.

Yesterday, the Senate keeled over in front of their corporate masters, represented by the NRA, despite overwhelming public support for the tiny steps toward sensible gun policy. How can anyone make a coherent argument that criminals or crazy people should be able to walk into a gun show and buy a weapon of mass destruction without getting a background check? And yet the Senate balked at this simple and sensible little step, just two days after the Boston marathon bombing.

You need a license to cut hair or drive a car. We have a long list of behaviors that are subject to government regulation. Why can’t the federal government take even the slightest step toward sanity around gun control? Assault weapons are far more dangerous than a barber’s shears and shavers.

My conservative friend Ted Cartselos thinks gun control will happen state-by-state, as it did in Connecticut. But Connecticut is a liberal, northern state, still reeling from the Newtown tragedy. I can’t see that happening in, say, Mississippi.

Let me state clearly: I am not opposed to gun ownership per se. In the rural community where I live, most of my neighbors—good, friendly, caring people—have guns. But there’s a big difference between a hunting rifle or a personal-protection pistol and an assault weapon that has no defensive purpose.

Voters will remember this betrayal. We, the people, have the right to walk down the street or go to school or shopping mall without some lunatic coming after us with an assault rifle. Let’s invoke the spirit of our wise revolutionaries from 200 years ago and say no to corporate intersts and their government bootblacks that trample on our rights.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Peace and War, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , ,

This is very personal to me; my son’s college is about a mile from Copley Square.

He was fine, but he and a group of friends decided to walk home (several miles) rather than take the train as usual.

9/11 was also very personal. I was one connection removed from at least two people who were killed, and it took me two frantic weeks to find out that my ex-housemate from my Brooklyn days, who was at that time living just two blocks from the WTC, was all right.

But what made me want to write tonight was not those deep personal connections. It was a question by my friend @PeterShankman, founder of HARO, about how he can talk about this sort of random violence to his daughter, due to be born in a few days.

My answer, I admit, talked around his question rather than going straight for the center. I wrote:

We explained to our young kids (now 20 and 25) why we were bringing them to protest various wars and injustices and environmental atrocities, and to talk of the importance of NOT accepting evil, that we could always do SOMETHING and whether it worked or not was less important than that we did not turn a blind eye.

Interestingly enough, they both have been involved in social justice work quite a bit. My daughter defended a nerdy male classmate against bullies when she was six, and my son was also six when he organized a children’s fundraiser for Save the Mountain, the environmental group my wife and I started that actually did save our local mountain. I was and still am very proud of them.

I do feel that one of the things we did right as parents is to inculcate our kids both with a sense of social justice and with the knowledge that they can actually have an impact. These were lessons I got from my own mother, the late Gloria Yoshida; as a young mom in New York City, she was one of the white volunteers civil rights groups could call upon to find out if that “already rented” apartment was REALLY rented, or if it was only off the market if a black family came to look at it.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , ,

The organizers of a rally to protest Karl Rove’s appearance at the University of Massachusetts tonight opened the microphone to anyone who wanted to talk. I hadn’t planned to speak, but I felt I had something to share with this crowd of 150 or so, most of them in their 20s.

My remarks went something like this:

Back when I was a teenager protesting the Vietnam War, we had a president named Richard Nixon. We thought he was pretty conservative—but his record is to the left of Barack Obama.

Obama blows with the wind. He feels the breeze of the Tea Party—but he doesn’t feel us. We have to ‘have his back’ when he does the right thing—and make a lot of noise when he doesn’t.

Richard Nixon brought us the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, detente with the Soviet Union, a newly opened door with China…

Barack Obama took nearly three years to get us out of Iraq, failed to close Guantanamo (and hasn’t tried very hard), escalated drone strikes, backed away from his early rhetoric on climate change, and refused to provide the deep change he was elected to bring.

Even on his signature issue, health reform—one area where he was actually willing to act presidential–he wouldn’t even talk about the real reforms, like single-payer. Yes, I know he has done many good things, and I now he’s been battered by a hostile Congress. But he could have done much more, if he’d enlisted the support of progressives around the country.

And not only has he failed to undo most of the policies of the Rogue State Government of George W. Bush, he has let the treasonous, anti-moral crooks and liars of the George W. Bush administration, including Karl Rove, walk free.

Obama is weak and susceptible to public opinion. Yet, only the opinions of the right-wing fringe seem to sway him—because the left does not understand how to pressure politicians. We elected him twice, and we can get him to listen to us. But for that, we need different strategies and much much better framing.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Arts & Entertainment, Diversity, General Commentary, language, media-general Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Recently, a local high school was targeted by an out-of-state hate mail campaign because it chose to produce “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told,” a gay and lesbian retelling of the Bible by Paul Rudnick. Protestors from various church groups promised to picket the performances. The story even made the Huffington Post.

It happened that the school producing the play was Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public High School, where both my children attended some years ago—a school known for its fabulous (reference intended) theater and dance departments. We’ve continued to attend many of the school’s performances even though my younger child is already a sophomore in college.

So of course, both to defend freedom of speech in the Pioneer Valley and to enjoy a night of theater we knew would be terrific, we attended. And we were gratified that in addition to the antigay protestors, a goodly multitude of pro-performance church groups were on hand to lend support.

The interesting thing is…if you accept the basic premise that gay and lesbian couples exist (and, in this play, were present at creation and right through modern times)—there’s almost nothing blasphemous in the play, which centers on Adam, through the ages, trying to find meaning in life. His questioning is very much rooted in the Old Testament tradition of prophets arguing with God. The whole alternate world is set in motion by a Stage Director (female, in this performance), which makes it clear from the get-go that this is an imaginary theatrical universe within the universe we all now, as opposed to any real redefinition of Biblical history. I found exactly one scene that fundamentalists might object to: 30 seconds out of a two-hour play that imply the Christ child was born of the play’s lesbian couple—and even this keeps the virgin birth intact.

Of course, the vast majority of those who protest this play wherever it is performed have never seen or read it. Fundamentalism, of any religion, leaves no window for dissenters and questioners.

By contrast, I just saw a 1999 movie called “Dogma,” a low-budget flick with a superstar cast (including very young Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as a pair of very foul-mouthed sin-avenging angels on a killing spree, George Carlin as a shady, street-tough Catholic Cardinal in New Jersey, Chris Rock as the delightful unknown 13th Apostle, and Salma Hayek as as a celestial being-turned-stripper). Early in the movie, we see Damon in an airport lounge, casting deep doubts about God’s existence into the mind of a confused Catholic nun. After she leaves, Affleck points out the irony that Damon’s character has known God directly.

An angel who kills with an assault weapon is only one of the many blasphemies—not all of them violent. The reimaging of several different pieces of the Jesus story as well as the portrayal of God will no doubt raise a few eyebrows among the faithful. Hundreds of people die in this funny but very gory film.

Now this is a movie that many Christians and religious Jews would find blasphemous all the way through—if they can stop laughing long enough to reflect on it. And yet, I didn’t remember any protests around it!

But Google has a better memory than I do; there were protests, actually. In fact, Disney’s Michael Eisner cut the film loose from his empire, under pressure from the Catholic League. Not only that, but the film’s director, Kevin Smith, infiltrated one of the protests—what a brilliant publicity move! He wrote and spoke (quite humorously) about his experience on this page, which also includes a TV news report of the protest, where he got recognized and interviewed.

I can understand that a film about a couple of angels cursing and shooting their way through modern America would upset people. But what does it say about our culture that people also get upset about sincere and committed expression of same-sex love?

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By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

These are my rough notes from Podcamp Western Mass 5, held March 30, 2013 at Holyoke Community College. It uses abbreviations: SM = social media; the others are pretty obvious. If I spelled your name wrong, I apologize.

According to organizer Morriss Partee, @mmpartee, since the Boston folks did a big regional thing several hundred miles south, this is now the longest continuously running Podcamp in New England.

I took notes on every session I attended except my own session, “Making Green Sexy.” I would be happy to send the slides from my talk; simply e-mail shel at greenandprofitable.com or Tweet @ShelHorowitz with the message “Podcamp PPT” (if tweeting, be sure to include your e-mail).

BUILDING OFFLINE RELATIONSHIPS FROM ONLINE CONNECTIONS

Thomas J. Fox, former addict, financial literacy/econ devel, lots of speaking:

I started in SM as the Pajama Poet on MySpace! Became the top poet there.

Social media eliminates the gatekeeper. I get an invitation to sit in on a financial literacy conference at the White House, b/c Twitter. Ask questions of important people, start conversations, build on conversations get known by them—get immersive. But it can’t be about you you you—be genuine. You build the relationship organically.

And then you take the relationship OFFline. I had a coffee with a guy I met on Twitter and I connected him to 10 people in the community. When you meet, you already know what you have in common. It goes right to how to help each other. You’re catching up with an old friend.
Listen 100% to what someone is saying.

Not interacting on SM is like having a drawer full of business cards.

Work/exercise your networking muscle, and remember you’re a brand.

Vine: new platform, 6-second videos!

Foursquare can build your brand. If you login from PV Planning Commission, Develop Springfield, etc., networking events, it shows you’re serious. And every time I’m speaking, publish an article, I post on SM. People see I’m serious and I’m genuine. At networking events, I focus on the coordinators, and they know everyone else.

And if I’m traveling to speak, I make time to meet SM contacts in Denver or wherever. And it can be huge for business.

Promote others.

For three years, I’ve been trying to meet Harold Grinspoon. I met a janitor who works for him, and he introduced me. Just because you don’t think someone can help you… I’ll have coffee with anyone. You never know.

Audience: people who built their personal networks BEFORE they needed them were much more effective. This predates the web, but online makes it faster and easier.

I’m doIng everything I do right now b/c one person invested time in me. Otherwise, I’d be dead in a ditch somewhere. I work w/ Junior Achievement to create economic opp for young kids. It takes a village to sustain an economy. Get involved in SOMETHING: friends of the homeless, whatever.

SOCIAL MEDIA FOR ACTIVISM (open panel)

Cool apps:

ittt: If then then that: tweets take actions depending on your tweet

software to give nonprofits access to your tweet stream (David Pakman knows what it’s called, shared it last year)

Triberr, spread messages throughout tribe

BufferApp.com (allows prescheduling and bit.ly shortening and some analytics): time a ppt preso as tweets, coordinate with tweetchat and hashtag

Aldon Hynes: sharing my coloring books in kindergarten, 1965, was social media. The oldest post I can still find online is from 1982. Wrote some of Howard Dean’s Deanspace, in Drupal.

Trends: Geocaching, gamification

Leslie Rule: I train how to do three-minute videos, data wrapped around a narrative, very teachable.

Aldon. I have a FB interest group and a Twitter list to monitor state reps in CT.

Tip O’Neil was right that all politics is local, but also, all politics is personal. I can reach my Senators directly, they will read my message because of the work I’ve done in social media.

Me: you have to merge online and offline. Congress all seem to tweet. But when the developer saw Save the Mountain at the farmers market, it got to them.

Leslie. You in MA are too polite. In CA, if you don’t like your rep’s actions, you go picket their house. And with coalitions, build allies, it’s not just yourself. It’s other people with 10,000 members. You won’t get allies saying schools need a hard reboot, but you CAN find allies to oppose Common Core.

Consensus: all of these causes and constituencies overlap; we have to get out of our silos and collaborate.

PERSONAL BRANDING

Lesley Lambert, Realtor. I remember when there was a book, and you’d fall in love with a house and it would have been sold two weeks ago. Now I spend no money on offline advertising. I’ve niched myself as the high-tech realtor with old-fashioned service.

80% of buyers start online, I suspect it’s even higher. I use social media/Internet to market my clients as well as myself. I have a hand in most SM but especially Twitter. I’m also very community-based and spend a lot of time talking about where we live.

Alfonso Santanello, Creative Strategy Agency (and Strictly BusiNews, business TV show)

I’ve been getting more personal, sharing about me and not just about my business. People wan to do biz with people they like. So I show people who I am. Who I am in person is exactly who I am online, and that’s very important when you brand yourself.

Kelly Gellanis, Red-Headed Diva, social media education for educators. “Professional socializer.” I help them reflect an online persona that reflects who they are offline.

Myke Connolly, stinkycakes.com, “the diaper cake boss” Twitter: diapercakeboss and mrstinkycakes People are paying attention. You have to watch what you say, keep in mind others’ feelings (and personal safety). I’ll post about a trip AFTER we come back. I posted something that someone else interpreted as degrading. That was not my intent. The goal of SM is to get people to fall in love with you. Then they support your projects.

Lesley: My name is the one brand that will be with me forever, sop if you put my name in any social network, you find me. If I’d named myself MissParkSqaure and Park Square was no longer, all that branding is wasted. But there are advantages of company name, etc.

Alfonso: Even if I don’t intend to participate, I grab my name on every social platform. I don’t want someone else impersonating me. Whatever you do, stick to it across all platforms.

Kelly. I use redheadeddivak on all sites, b/c redheadeddiva was taken on Twitter when I started (adult toys).

Myke: I listened to what my audience called me.

But if your name is taken, and a lot of celebs can’t get their own name, you can be creative. Or fi celeb enough, you can get it back. Go ahead and call yourself Stinky Cakes; you will be writing me a check.

All: you also want to get a business page if your biz has a different name. SEO benefits (Lesley).

Alfonso: with FB’s new Graph Search, biz shows up before personal, and they’re ranked by activity and engagement.

Kelly: But even on a biz page, sprinkle some personal stuff in.

HappyGrasshopper.com: email marketing service that does the writing for you (realtors. Others?), and guarantees replies. It’s a 3-sentence e-mail that has nothing to do with real estate, just little viral-video text messages. I approve the messages, and they get more response than anything else. It reminds me that consumers aren’t always looking for dry toast; they want fruit or at least some butter.

Myke: And those messages, we can forward them around, and oh yeah, Lesley does real estate. It’s more memorable than something dry about real estate that you get 50 different people sending you.

Being known before needed: Myke: I love Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends And Influence People.

Kelly: I treat my name like Target does. What I do as RHD may shift, but I will always have that as my name.

Alfonso: I got business because I did the TV show, and I didn’t talk about marketing, I talk about business and the local WMass scene, and without ever talking about the agency, it brings business. I used that platform to get known before people knew what I did.

Lesley: Blogging has been huge, and that’s why I write a lot about non-real estate. I blend community and R.E. and my life. I do a lot of video blogging. I’m an open book. If it happened to me, I probably blogged about it, and that includes the ups and the downs. And hopefully you’ll feel a little empathy coming through, and they’ll know me when they’re ready.

Myke: One of my mentors says “there’s a butt for every seat.” Your audience will follow you. I spent a year getting the same qs over and over when I was training kids at Westover Job Corps. So I did a book, and I go back to the same people and say hey, I put it all in a book. And the big brands are losing because you can’t know the people behind the brands.

Lesley: the best response I ever got was asking “do you care if your realtor wears a suit?” (and the answers were overwhelmingly no).

Myke: Different fish need different bait. Not all posts will work for everyone. Most will not. So figure one answer represents 250 people. Listen to your audience, see what they engage about and start to add to that convo. Then they will engage when you don’t expect.

Alfonso: 99% of your videos won’t be viral, and most that do are mistakes or embarrassing moments. You have to have patience.

Myke: you move viral much faster if an influential person picks it up. You can buy a lot of followers, but they’re not engaged.

PSYCHOLOGY OF SM: Jennifer Williams, @verilliance

Every platform has a psychological profile. It’s all about interaction.

FB: Who am I

Tw: who am I/what’s in the world RIGHT NOW

Pinterest: who do I want to be

Instagram: How an I express myself and my world?

G+: What do I think?

LI: How am I important? What do I have to offer? What’s on my resume?

Audience (Jeff): LI will show up first on Google, and most are high-income. I did a search for a certain HR credential, and it brought up thousands of people. Those are people I can network easily with.

Psych profile influenced by timing of entry, intent, parameters, demographics

FB entered when MySpace was “kind of a hot mess.” MySp was unfriendly to age 25+. I didn’t like the anonymity, and usability was atrocious. FB had no intention of uprooting MySp but it was a very clean, simple interface. You had to use your real name, lot of white space, and people were ready by the time that hit. They realized they wanted to connect wit the people they know. It ix the closest representation to who we are. They only want to associate with you if you attract on a deep personal level. It’s deeply intimate. 67% of all Internet users, but skewed toward under 30s.

Twitter: after FB, tried to capture snippets. Who am I with, what am I doing/reading/watching right now. Half-life of a tweet is 8-15 minutes, vs. 80 minutes in FB  post. Archive is difficult to search, everything is pushed down very quickly. As a business, don’t say what you’re doing, but give others something to relate to right now: news, opinion, quotes.

Pinterest: aspirational. ~66% women—do women want to gather more? They are still the primary homemakers. It’s very concrete, what color things are, what your furniture or food looks like. Some college education, more rural. Is there not enough opportunity in real world so they’re doing it online? Yes, images, but they have to be aspirational. Quotes do really well in an image. “I want to be that good.”

Instagram: self-actualization. Everybody loves pictures. Smartphones were becoming ubiquitous, but the pictures looked terrible. Instagram provided simple filters to make them look nice. Lower income, urban, younger (under 30). If using in business, use in conjunction with other tools, or be REALLY visually interesting. It integrates very well with FB.

G+ looked a lot like FB, people looked at it  as FB competition, but Google was looking at something different. The people who flocked in were tech people, early adapters, thought leaders. Huge population of scientists I don’t see anywhere else. Also great space for artists. You get much bigger images, text area, and videos, and real-time commenting. A doodler was able to build a whole product line from his hobby. There’s still a dialog happening about the images, what inspired them to create it, how technically did you get that photo? Audience (Karo Kilfeather, @aspiringkaro): you get the best of Twitter—discovery—and FB—big canvas.

Jennifer: The ability to select who sees which messages. Like Twitter, you don’t have to follow them back. You can put them in the “I don’t know these people” circle or just ignore.

I don’t focus on upping the numbers on any of the channels I’m on, and I have wide variance in numbers. Much more important is how you’re sharing.

Personally, I don’t want to be connected all the time. I disconnect. But when I connect, I want to know right where to go and jump in, post the right things in the right platforms.

SM should be your outpost; your base should be your own website.

Blog posts on Twitter: you have to pique their interest.

Val Nelson: But I want the complete thought. I don’t want to go clicking over to the blog.

Jennifer: that’s what I like about G+, you have room to see a whole blog post.

Audience: I miss the full conversations on Twitter. Now, everything’s a link.

Paul Bogush: Twitter has shifted from stationary computing to phones, and it changes what people tweet about. Fewer in-depth convos. And people want to be seen as smart, so they tweet links to good content.

Jennifer: but young people, Latinos, blacks are using Tw for convos. White upper class have more access to other tools.

verilliance.com/hispi: co-op for high-end group marketing/conversion consulting.

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By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , ,

I just got back from a Nigerian Highlife concert at Mount Holyoke College. The place was set up with a huge dance floor and folding chairs off on the sides. The audience was mostly female, mostly 20-something college students, and more racially mixed than the typical crowd in this mostly-white area.

And yet—for the first fifteen minutes or so, I was the ONLY one on the dance floor, even though the opening song was a very danceable number called “Shake Your Body,” and even though the bandleader kept imploring people to get out and dance! I’m a 56-year-old white guy with gray in my beard and a history of ankle and shoulder injuries, and I was dancing, by myself. Why weren’t those lithe 20-somethings out on the dance floor?

Finally, the bandleader pretty much ordered everyone on the floor. And what do you know—one they were out there, they liked dancing, some of them were quite good, and a lot of them stayed dancing (as did I) for the remaining hour and a half. A few even got up on stage and strutted their stuff with the band.

But in my day, we didn’t have to wait to be commanded to dance. We heard music, and we danced!

(Note: in case it’s not obvious, this post is an attempt at humor; I’m not actually upset, just surprised.)

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, Innovation, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , ,

Note to manufacturers: your green products (including recycled products) have to compete on quality. If someone buys a recycled product and discovers it’s crappy, not only are they a one-time customer who won’t repeat, but they’re also a negative talking machine, trashing not just your product but in many cases, green products or recycled products in general.

In other words, any time you put out crap in the name of selling recycled products, you hurt the prospects of every green business. Don’t rush to market; take the time to get the quality right first!

This rant was inspired by the cleanup after my daughter’s Passover Seder.  She had recycled aluminum foil. I was excited to see it, as I hadn’t known such a thing was  available in the consumer market. But my excitement quickly turned to frustration when I tried to use it, and discovered it was so brittle that I had to use about three times as much; it ripped wherever I touched it. It was as bad as the first generation of biodegradable diapers that we tried to use when she was a toddler, circa 1990. As bad as the solar cell-phone charger I bought a year or two ago that was so ineffectual I returned it for a refund.

Now, I’m a committed green, and I will give recycled aluminum foil another try in five years or so. But if this had been my first experience of a recycled product, it probably would have been my last.

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By Posted on Posted in Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Assault weapons have only one purpose: to kill the largest number of people in the shortest possible time. And yet, the Senate leadership just pulled the limited assault weapons ban out of the new gun control legislation. Apparently they cannot even figure out that we don’t have to put up with them. Either they are too intimidated by thuggish pressure from the NRA or they are actually in favor of people walking down the street with enough firepower to take out a whole schoolyard full of kids. And where is the pressure from honest citizens to regulate these ultradangerous weapons? If Congress has no spine on its own, it needs to find its backbone through citizen pressure for an assault weapons ban.

I see no justification for refusal to control assault weapons in the Second Amendment. On the contrary, I see that regulation actually comes before the right to bear arms. Grammatically, the phrase “well regulated militia” is the focus point of the paragraph—the justification for what follows. It could be restated as “BECAUSE a well-regulated militia is important, citizens may possess guns.” Here’s the complete text:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Seems to me, the Second Amendment actually creates an obligation to regulate weaponry. I don’t see how regulating semiautomatic assault weapons is any more a contradiction than banning fully automatic weapons (which have been illegal for most of a century). And those regulations could clearly include banning weapons of mass murder, background checks, and the rest of it.

Do we really want more Newtowns and Auroras and Virginia Techs and Columbines? Isn’t it time we approached this with some common sense? After all, the government regulates who can cut hair, for goodness sake!

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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

Ten years ago, the United States began its illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq: an operation based on numerous lies, no real evidence, and a lot of testosterone.

Iraq, as we know now and strongly suspected then, had no connection with Al Quaida, nor did it have “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” It had a stable, if nasty, government. And it had the bad judgment to have a little war with the U.S. over Kuwait during the first Bush administration.

So George W. Bush and his minders decided to get even. And the United States became the “rouge state” that the Bush administration accused Iraq of being.

What did we accomplish with this shameful chapter in our history? Hundreds of thousands dead and injured and homeless, vicious acts by US troops and Blackwater mercenaries at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and widespread enmity throughout the Arab world. Oh yes, and the worst kinds of extremist terrorists established a beachhead in places where they had never had strength before, including Iraq itself. And Iraq’s economy shattered. And the US economy—let’s remember that GW Bush inherited a SURPLUS from Bill Clinton—badly damaged.

A weak President Obama has brought us back into the company of nations, and partially rebuilt the US economy but has failed to reverse so many of the wretched Bush policies and has allowed the right-wing extremist fringe to frame and control the discourse.

To commemorate these ten years, MoveOn.org asked people to share one memory. Rather than focus on the negative, I wrote:

I remember the amazing demonstration in NYC just before the invasion that filled at least four wide avenues on the east side of Midtown Manhattan. I am guessing there were about two million of us, and the police wouldn’t even let people down to the low-number avenue (I think it was 1st Ave, near the UN) where the “official” rally was—so we spilled over and filled up 2nd, 3rd, and Lexington. The media only counted people on the official avenue, but those of us who were there know it was enormous–possibly the largest US peace demonstration in history.

Of course, it should not be a surprise that the mainstream media severely undercounted us. After all, Judith Miller of the New York Times and many other supposedly skilled journalists were cheerleading the run up to the war, neglecting their journalistic due diligence, and even firing those among them who dared to speak out (including Bill Moyers and Phil Donahue).

No more illegal, immoral wars!

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