E-mail from Eric W.:

Subject: Is PS okay?! Please blog to prove!
Hi. You have not blogged since Dec. 2008. Please blog something to let people know you are still up and running and are not locked up in an animal shelter! …Also… Have you thought about adding a section to your website where teachers can upload lesson plans, Word documents, pdf documents, etc. that would go along with you videos? They could somehow be peer reviewed before appearing online, or vetted in some way. Eric :)

Pinky’s response:

Hi Eric, Thank you for your concern. No, we’ve not been locked up (recently). And I don’t want anyone to think that we’re just sitting around watching T.V. or something so here is my mini-report on what’s going on around here at the moment: 1) editing & animating two new PS episodes; 2) putting together a new feature for the Commons Gallery; 3) Bunny is working on “tiny colonialism comix”; 4) I’m writing a children’s book (for adults); 5) we’re writing curriculum for some upcoming workshops; 6) ongoing grassroots education project re: colonialism in Hawaii; 7) computer died and (semi)resurrected; and 8) we just finished up and submitted a new grant proposal today for starting a program to collect oral histories (yay! everybody cross fingers!). So, rather than blog everyday about being on the verge of a nervous breakdown I just decided to leave the blog alone for the moment.

BUT! Regarding teaching materials idea - yes, Bunny and I have been talking about doing something like that on and off since… well, since we started this project. But things never seem to calm down around here so we’ve never actually gotten around to doing it. Hopefully sometime later this year Bunny will be able to make a Pinky Show Wiki so that interested people would be able to coordinate work on things like supplemental materials, episode subtitles, or whatever else people might find useful. We’re hoping to do that eventually, we’re just flat under a bunch of work at the moment.

But not dead!

Take care,
pinky

[ note from Bunny: The situation in Gaza has deescalated somewhat but is still dire. Please remind your friends that we have two excellent documentaries in our Dec 2008 diary archives on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land, and Occupation 101. Send them here. ]

I received this video from Phiya a while ago but kept on hesitating to put it up because I wanted the Palestine videos up at the top of the blog, etc. Well today there was a huge traffic accident near here and three people died. Human beings - please, PLEASE drive more carefully. Life is so precious and you really do not have to be where you are going just a few minutes sooner…

Please take care,
pinky

[ Kim: People always seem to forget that cars are very death-possible. Please treat your car like it is a killing machine because that's exactly what it can do. Go ask Bunny. ]

[ Bunny: I was the only one from my litter that didn't die under the wheels of a car. All of my brothers and sisters (5) are gone. But this video isn't about cats getting hit by cars. ]

[ note from Pinky: My favorite thing about this video is that it is a reminder that there are 10,000 things that we experience in our daily lives that we are not understanding. This person is a philosopher and he's using everything he has to change himself and also the world around him. Maybe it seems small, but isn't it good? Sorry, I forgot to add the website: http://trafficwaves.org/ ]

[ Kim: I know, I'm just saying cars are heavy and they go fast so they're inherently dangerous. But people just drive them unconsicously like a bad habit and then we're the ones who get runned over.]

Well we seem to have touched a sensitive nerve with our mini-zine. Quite a few hate mails - not a ton because it’s still day one - but still very impressive. I’m always fascinated by all these people who swear up and down how much they hate us but they still keep watching our show. What’s up with that?

Keep the hate mail coming. It’s very useful to us. Personally I think most of them are just over-the-top stupid and I think it’s a waste of time to respond, but Pinky’s always studying them and making notes on which points and arguments keep popping up. In the end we use them as a starting point for understanding what we need to address in our future work. So, I guess I should say, “Thank you, idiots”.

Anyway, we did recieve this encouraging e-mail from Greg. Pinky had mentioned in her What’s New update that a couple of our critics had slammed our mini-zine for not being “nuanced”. A nuanced mini-zine? Hmm. Here’s Greg’s take on it:

Pinky, Thanks again for your wonderful website, videos, and other presentations. Speaking of  ‘nuance’, your “How to Get Free Land in 5 Easy Steps” speaks to Native American, Australian Aboriginal, and many other situations where indigenous peoples have been exploited and displaced by colonialists and imperialists. It also speaks directly to the Israeli ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Palestinians as a means of confiscating their land. Once again, Pinky has succeeded masterfully in presenting a simple summation which effectively clarifies the moral issues of a social or political problem. Sometimes, by avoiding specifics, a ‘lack of nuance’ allows the reader room to interpret the message in a wider context.

Pinky and I had a conversation today on the responsibility of ordinary cats (human beings also ok) to publicly take stands against violence and injustice, whether the stand happens to be popular or not. We’ll be making that into a video.

Bunny

Tenorina the librarian was nice enough to send us a link to this photo.

(photo by davenin)

The caption says “David Shrigley @ Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, 2008″. I’m going to guess that the cat in the photo is dead/stuffed (I realize she’s holding a sign that says “I’m dead” but not everything you read is true), mostly because the pose appears somehow not totally natural and also the position of her left arm seems a bit awkward (as in “death-like awkward”). So what’s going on here? Did Mr. Shirgley (an artist) write the sign as if he was the cat? Or was the cat forced to make the sign before being killed and stuffed? Or was she perhaps the victim of a terminal disease? This is why I think art is very important - there are always many more questions than answers!

Thank you to Tenorina, David Shrigley, museum people, Davenin, and also inventor of the internet for bringing anonymous dead cat to me.

Kim

A couple of days ago I read an outrageous news story and I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then. Here’s an excerpt:

The University of Hawaii’s two submersibles will spend 15 days beginning Monday filming and taking water and sediment samples south of Pearl Harbor… Chemical weapons were reportedly dumped at two sites: The largest amount of chemical weapons believed to have been dumped in island waters is in an area 10 miles west of the Waianae Coast. The Army thinks 2,000 tons of lewisite, mustard, hydrogen cyanide and cyanogen chloride were discarded in this area. An additional 19 tons of mustard gas encased in 100-pound bombs and 155 mm and 75 mm projectiles were discarded 10 miles south of Pearl Harbor between 1932 and 1944.

< the sub (from NOAA website)

Lewisite and mustard gas (blister agents): Effects are irritation and damage to skin and mucous membranes, pain and injury to the eyes and, when inhaled, damage to respiratory tract.

Hydrogen cyanide and cyanogen chloride (blood agents): When inhaled, will interfere with tissue oxygenation process, especially in the brain. (Source: U.S Army)

Tonight I was telling Bunny about what the military did and I said something like “I still can’t believe anybody would do something this crazy.” First she shot me the “O RLY?” look, then said something like, “If I tried I could probably find 10 equally-depressing news articles every day.” I caught myself trying to figure out if that was an exaggeration or not (”maybe she’d only be able to find five equally-depressing articles every day…?”), before realizing that that’s totally beside the point.

Sometimes I feel like there’s so much bad things going on out there that I feel almost paralyzed with hopelessness. Which is probably why Bunny and I are friends. When I get depressed she always reminds me that nobody can fix the whole world all at once, all by themselves. Bunny says: “Just choose one thing that you think is good and then keep doing it until you’re dead.” I guess that makes sense.

Take care,
pinky

Pinky, Maybe you will like to watch this video next time you are feeling depressed? love, Kim

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) by Matthew Harding.

[ note from Bunny: That was nice. Okay now get back to work - those new manuscripts are not going to write themselves. ]

Today Pinky and I received a surprise announcement that we have been appointed State Envoys to the U.S. Empire by the Special High Commissioner Extraordinary & Plenipotentiary. I’ve been appointed envoy to the new state of Falvinas Islandas (Falkland Islands) and Pinky has been appointed to Namibia Minerale (Namibia). We have no idea (yet) how we will be using our new positions to further peace and mutual understanding between USE and our respective nations, but we are looking forward to what I can only assume will be many elaborate (and probably tasty) state dinners and limosine rides. These are, however, non-resident appointments, so we will not have to move to these countries - apparently we will rule them from our current home in the California desert. The fancy certificates that came along with the announcements are below, for your viewing pleasure. I’m going to frame them. - Bunny

< my certificate (click to enlarge)

< Pinky’s certificate (click to enlarge)

Later today Mimi’s going to help me make Hajji Firuz, like the ones in this picture. Can’t wait!

(photo from AFP via Aljazeera English)

Happy Nowruz everybody!
Kim

Yesterday I was talking to my friend H., and he asked me what we thought about being named to “that list of 100 websites to visit before you die”. I responded, “Huh?” Neither Bunny or I had heard of that. He couldn’t remember where he saw that list, so Bunny and I did some searching on the internet afterwards but we couldn’t find it.

Did anybody else out there see this? If that list exists, that’s pretty exciting. I’m sure there’s lots and lots of websites out there, maybe even thousands! Please let us know if you saw it - Bunny wants to add it to our list of media props if possible. Thank you!

Take care,
pinky

Hi everybody!

Sorry we’ve gotten so behind with our e-mail correspondence lately. Bunny and I are furiously trying to finish up some production work before heading off to Kaho’olawe. We got an unexpected invitation to go to Kaho’olawe and we immediately jumped at the opportunity. For us it will probably be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I’d heard that if you want to go there usually you have to put your name on a waiting list and then you sit there for maybe a couple of years before it’s finally your turn. But the way this unfolded was that we were talking to an anthropologist friend of ours the other week and out of the blue she says, I’m going to Kaho’olawe - you wanna come too? YES WE WANT TO GO TOO!

While we’re there we’ll be planting various flora (long-term re-vegetation project) and moving rocks around. In our spare time we’ll try to take photos and record our impressions of whatever we see there. The U.S. military seized Kaho’olawe immediately after the start of World War II and bombed & shot at that tiny island for around 50 years as a “practice target” and training area. As you can imagine this little island is pretty messed up so we’re going to try our best to try to heal it at least a little bit.

We’re not going to have computer access or even electricity while we’re on Kaho’olawe. I hear the stars are amazing but I’m not looking forward to bathing in the ocean (yuck). We’ll get re-attached to the internet as soon as we get back, unless we step on UXO or drown during the landing. Please cross fingers for us!

[ click here if you never heard of Kaho'olawe ]

Take care,
pinky

I just posted a “What’s New” about this but also wanted to mention here. Pinky and I recently finished work on a picture book on the subject of violence. It will be available pretty soon, but we don’t actually have a firm arrival date for the first shipment. All I know for certain so far:

• it will have a soft cover;
• the size will be about 8″ x 6″;
• it has many excellent pictures of cats-in-conflict inside;
• you’ll like it so much you’ll keep reading it over and over until the corner of each page is filthy*;
• my face is on the cover.

I don’t think we’re going to stop making videos but I have to say, making this book was a lot more fun than making videos.

If you’re not already signed up for our newsletter and would like to be kept up-to-date re: the upcoming PS book, please sign up for our newsletter.

Thank you,
Bunny

[ * I hope so ]

Hi everybody! Did you know that today is World Pinhole Photography Day? Oh okay you already knew that, sorry. Anyway, to celebrate the great history & fun of pinhole cameras this morning Bunny and I pulled our pinhole camera out of the closet and we’ll be going out in a few minutes to make some pinhole pictures. Maybe your pinhole camera would like some exercise too? Have fun today!

Take care,
pinky

Sample pinhole camera photo by Valeriy Kapenko @ Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day website. Pretty, isn’t it?

For a variety of reasons I don’t believe in the death penalty, the most obvious one being that it has been well-documented that many innocent people have been wrongly put to death.

Troy Davis is two weeks from execution in the state of Georgia, even though there is a considerable amount of evidence to suggest that Troy Davis may be innocent. 7 of the 9 prosecution’s witnesses at Mr. Davis’s trial have since recanted or contradicted their testimony. Several of the witnesses have said that they made their statements under intense police pressure and coercion. There needs to be a hearing on the question of the reliability of the evidence that was used to convict Mr. Davis - not an execution!

In order to stop his execution, people need to speak up. Please send a pre-written letter (or write your own, that’s great too) to Sonny Perdue, the Governor of Georgia, regarding this matter. It only takes a minute and really could save a man’s life (it’s happened before). [ click here ]

Short, powerful video: Interview with an Executioner (2003). Please watch and forward to friends!

Take care,
pinky

E-mail from anonymous moron, with my comments interspersed in green:

Hey Bunny, From your past blogs I noticed that I consistently don’t like you. [Please excuse me for not caring.] Your always grouchy. Why are you always grouchy? [I'm not always grouchy. You should see me with ice cream in a cone.] Why so negative? [Since I'm too "negative" for you, perhaps instead you should  write to Pinky. She has very good manners and won't actually tell you what a douchebag you are.] Maybe someone forgot to brush you ha ha. [Ha ha... *bored*] So my question is this the Pinky Show is always pointing out what’s wrong with the whole wolrd but you don’t ever provide solutions to anything. It’s a lot harder to come up with a solution and easy to complain. That’s what I had to say. [That's not a question but alright...]

Okay, this is something Pinky and I used to disagree on a lot, especially when we first started working on the Pinky Show. We couldn’t agree on whether or not at the end of each episode we should include spelled-out “solutions” for people to take away. Pinky’s position is that human beings are intelligent and flexible enough to come up with all kinds of possible solutions; my position is that there’s a lot of stupid people out there and it wouldn’t hurt to spoon-feed them answers. So we’ve had many, many conversations and arguments about which way to go.

To make a long story short, basically we agreed to focus more on the process of asking questions (short episodes) or doing structural analyses (longer episodes) without wrapping each episode with a set of “solutions”. The rationale for this is that, in general, we think too many people tend to fixate on “solving” problems they don’t actually understand. By eliminating or minimizing the solution part, we’re hoping to direct more attention towards understanding the nature of problems. So, it is a calculated trade-off. Pinky has a tremendous amount of confidence in people’s ability to produce fair and sensible solutions to a problematic situation when the situation is seen for what it really is. (For all you postmodern losers out there asking yourself “But what is really real?” - forget it, you’re hopeless) Personally I am less impressed with human beings’ track record regarding fairness and logic; I’m more interested in the open nature of Pinky Show episodes because I think that lets it function a little better as a sort of ethical Rorschach test.

Next e-mail, this one from Patricia:

Hi Pinky, I enjoy your show but I am curious why you only criticize America? Why don’t you have any episodes about Chinas treatment of Tibet? What about suppression of Buddhist dissent in Myanmar?…

Thanks Patricia, I’ll respond to your question even though you weren’t talking to me. Simplified answer: 1) Our focus is America because we live here. 2) Because 60% of our viewers are U.S. Americans. 3) The most direct way for us to reduce the total amount of violence circulating globally is to stop/reduce America’s contribution to the international violence-economy (unfortunately America is #1 when it comes to cultivating and exporting many forms of violence). Which isn’t to say that violence perpetrated in other places is any less worthy of criticism - we’re happy to note that there are many others out there criticizing away and I’m sure they’ll keep going till the cows come home. For ourselves, our main goal is to tidy up our own house before going over to someone else’s house to vacuum, dust-mop, and so on. Not that “we” actually own this house, but that is a whole other can of worms.

End of Bunny Mailbag for today. See you all later.

Bunny

Pinky & Bunny have assigned me the responsibility of marketing the I Want To Punch Your Face book. I don’t know anything about marketing so if any of you have ideas about how to market an anti-violence picture book please send comments to me care of the info@ e-mail. Click the book’s cover (below) for more info about the book.

In other “news”, recently I found a very interesting PBS/Bill Moyers interview of Dr. William K. Black on YouTube. It’s a nice compact summary of how the financial industry imploded and the logic behind the subsequent bailout. I highly recommend it.

Posted by Mimi.

One of my heroes is Aung San Suu Kyi.

After nearly two decades of almost continuous imprisonment she is in imminent danger of being re-sentenced to another 5 years of confinement. The international community needs to show the government of Myanmar that we are all witnesses to their actions - please help us flood their offices with demands for her release! The Amnesty International website has a pre-written letter that you can send if you don’t want to (or don’t have time to) write your own personalized letter. It literally takes only 1 minute - please go here: These letter-sending campaigns often really do make a difference!

Thank you,
pinky

Please don’t mind me - just parking some resources here for a presentation I’ll be doing next week. The following illustrations are from Samuel Bowles & Herbert Gintis’s classic Schooling in Capitalist America (1976):

Bowles & Gintis, Figure 5-1.

Bowles & Gintis, Table 7-1.

Bowles & Gintis, Figure 8-1.

Bowles & Gintis, Figure 5-4.

The first page of Chapter 1 from the same book:

Those who take meat from the table
Preach of contentment…
Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry
Of wonderful times to come…
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For the ordinary.
- Bertolt Brecht, 1937

“Go West, young man!” advised Horace Greeley in 1851. A century later, he might have said: “Go to college!”

The Western Frontier was the nineteenth-century land of opportunity. In open competition with nature, venturesome white settlers found their own levels, unfettered by birth or creed. The frontier was a way out - out of poverty, out of dismal factories, out of the crowded Eastern cities. The frontier was the Great Escape.

Few escaped. Railroad companies, mine owners, and before long, an elite of successful farmers and ranchers soon captured both land and opportunity. The rest were left with the adventure of making ends meet. But throughout the nineteenth century, the image of the frontier sustained the vision of economic opportunity and unfettered personal freedom in an emerging industrial system offering little of either.

And now a couple of old quotes from the same book.

The government of schools… should be arbitrary. By this mode of education we prepare our youth for the subordination of laws and thereby qualify them for becoming good citizens of the republic. I am satisfied that the most useful citizens have been formed from those youth who have not known or felt their own wills til they were one and twenty years of age. (Benjamin Rush, 1786)

In order to compensate for lack of family nurture, the school is obliged to lay more stress upon discipline and to make far more prominent the moral phase of education. It is obliged to train the pupil into habits of prompt obedience to his teachers and the practice of self-control in its various forms. (from a statement signed by seventy-seven college presidents and city and state school superintendents and published by the U.S. government in 1874)

Blocking exercise:

1) Time spent in life. (sleeping, eating, transportation, TV/movies, etc.)
2) Time spent at work.
3) Areas of study and consciousness.
4) Participation in Dominant Economies.

And finally, two points of reference that I’ll be using in the talk (from Terry Eagleton’s Ideology: an introduction):

1) Ideology is a group of ideas characteristic of a particular social class which help to legitimate a dominant political power over other social classes.

2) The process of legitimating these ideas generally follow one or more of the following strategies: promoting agreeable beliefs and values; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge them; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself (a.k.a. ‘mystification’).

~ pinky

¡Hola! A couple of days ago we received an e-mail from a Mr. Hernández of elPeriódico de Guatemala (a daily newspaper) informing us that he wrote a short article about our We Love Museums… episode, as this past Monday was “International Museum Day”. We are always very happy to be written about, but to make an appearance in a Guatemalan newspaper is extra special for us since we got to meet some of the H.I.J.O.S. people last year in Slovenia (we miss you!!!). We have been doing some studying about the history of Guatemala since then and also (slooowly) trying to learn Spanish.

Here is the article - please click on the picture below to open a bigger PDF version.

Or you can read a translated-to-English (thanks Google) version by clicking here.

Thank you to Mr. Hernández! The elPeriódico de Guatemala website is at: http://www.elperiodico.com.gt/

Take care,
pinky

[ note from Kim: I have never seen my face that big before! Wow! I feel famous! ]

Last Sunday afternoon Bunny and I were wandering around a school campus, just passing some time before a meeting we were going to got started. We were walking under a tree when I heard a sound - pat!

Bunny: Hey, that bird just fell out of the tree.

It was a very tiny bird, looked like she had just hatched pretty recently. She was lying on the grass, not able to walk or speak.

Me: Do you think we should feed her?

Bunny: I think she’s going to die.

Me: Maybe we can find a paper cup or a little box or something and put her in there.

Bunny: She just fell 20 feet onto the ground. I think we should prepare her for death. Oops, she’s dead.

I looked at the bird again and she’d stopped moving.

Bunny had some napkins in her backpack so I put the tiny bird on some napkins and then loosely wrapped her up. I could feel through the napkins her body was still warm. The ground in the area is hard and sandy and I didn’t have anything to dig with, so I just put the small bundle under a small pile of leaves next to the school building.

Me: Is this disrespectful?

Bunny: Worms and ants have to eat.

(I’m glad she didn’t ask to eat the bird)

Today, out of the blue, I receive a postcard from my friend. It had a quote on it:

“Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world; a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream. ~ Buddha

I’d been wondering to myself why a tiny bird would be born into this world, only to leave just a few days later. But I suppose this is all of us.

pinky

Apparently there is some anecdotal evidence coming to light that President Bush actually did have a really good reason to invade Iraq: God told him to do it. He (Bush - not God) was very determined to fight the forces of Satan and rid the world of God’s enemies in the Middle East. Somewhere in this whole bizarre story are Satan’s allies, Gog and Magog.

“In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated… In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on ‘a mission from God’ in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.”

Interesting? Read more here.

Posted by Bunny.

[ note from Kim: I wanted Pinky to draw Gog wearing a fur coat but she didn't do it. ]

Thirty minutes ago I was somewhere between too tired to work and not quite sleepy enough to fall asleep immediately if I’d climbed into bed. So I decided to make another t-shirt design (as if we didn’t already have too many). Here it is:

I made this because today Kim and I were talking about how lately Bunny has been the grumpiest thing ever. So grumpy.

Okay, now it’s 3:30am and I’m really ready for bed. Goodnight!

pinky

[ Bunny: Okay, so I'm grumpy for a few days in a row. Who cares. Not like I talk to you guys everyday. I would like it better if it said "NOT A LOLCAT". ]

[ Kim: Maybe you don't say anything but we still have to look at your big, grumpy face all day and your stomping around with your big feet. And you keep on going "grrr" and "rrgh!" and stuff like that, which is really annoying when I'm trying to concentrate on drinking my coffee. ]

[ Bunny: Excuse me for living. ]

[ Kim: I'll excuse you for being so grumpy if you put a bag over your head. ]

[ Bunny: Same effect if I put a bag over your head.]

May 25: Doakes and Riggs got caught in a house fire. Riggs perished in the fire, somehow Doakes found a way to survive. He needs a lot of medical care now, please help him out.

<-Doakes.

Posted by Bunny.

Every day, Bunny and I try to find at least a little bit of time to sit and chat about what we’d like to see happen during our lifetime. Sometimes we discuss desirable futures that lie beyond our approaching deaths. We know we won’t be able to achieve all of it - in fact, much of the things we end up talking about invariably involves the efforts of many others we aren’t even in communication with. But still, we think it’s important to keep our eyes focused on the future even as we do our day to day work with our minds and bodies rooted firmly in the present.

One of the reasons why we started making time for this kind of (symbolic?) conversation a few years ago, was the realization that our ideological adversaries have been engaged in this kind of productive-dreaming for a long time. They’ve got the process institutionalized. And while we may not want the same things they want, we are very impressed with their ability to make their dreams come true. Just a few examples: the machine gun, the atom bomb, the ICBM. Now the professional dreamers at the Pentagon are imagining up a new class of weaponry - it’s called PGS, short for Prompt Global Strike. Given their creativity and the enormous material resources they have at their disposal, I would not be surprised if eventually PGS becomes real.

Illustration from Popular Mechanics‘ Render Room.

Basically PGS works like this: 1) You find out - somehow (satellite, unmanned spy drone, or even some old-fashioned form of “intelligence” gathering) - that there is a person or a group of people somewhere, doing something, that you’d really like to kill. They can be thousands of miles away or even on the other side of the planet. 2) You input your “intelligence” into a computer, which then feeds the information to a super-high-speed missile, and press the big red ‘DIE’ button. 3) The missle launches, travels to its far-away destination via the exoatmosphere at hypersonic speed, then falls down on the unsuspecting target (and, presumably, any other non-lucky non-targets in close proximity) and *poof* - the ‘target’ is ‘neutralized’. It’s kind of like an ICBM, except WAY faster, non-nuclear, and the target doesn’t necessarily have to be big and stationary (like a whole city, or a military installation) in order to be shot at.

The Pentagon says “we” “need” a weapon system like PGS because of the “ever-evolving” “nature” of “threats” to “national security”. No mention of how complicated things get when our so-called enemies are forced to live under a purpose-built umbrella of instant death of human design. I wonder, do these Pentagon guys really want to live in the world they are creating? I don’t mean that rhetorically, I really do wonder that in the most practical way.

Feeling more than a little creeped out,
pinky

[ note from Bunny: I think you are missing the point on the question of motivation. To be able to strike down a rival person or group of people without having to actually fight them - can humans resist such God-like powers? ]

[ Pinky: I think there are plenty of human beings who would be happy to resist that kind of "power". ]

[ Bunny: This is an example of why you like human beings way more than I do. ]

[ Kim: How come you guys keep saying "human beings" when it's the U.S. that's actually making most of this stuff? ]

E-mail response from one of our readers:

Dear Cats, Thanks for your thoughts on the omnipotent killing device our military is planning. Unfotunately, we have a simillar system now known as UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). These can be flown in Afghanistan yet operated from Virginia, USA.  Imagine that, fly an unmanned plane around half way around the world, locate a target and “Take them out” all with just a joy stick. Then, hop in the car and hit Arbie’s for lunch and maybe run the Mustang through the car wash on the way back to the office. To kill some more. The problem I see is this fellow in Virginia keeps mistaking Wedding Parties in the dessert for terrorist meetings. It must be that the thinking is - who the heck would have a wedding in a dessert? They must be terrorists! (from Ian)

Pinky: Funny you should mention UAV. About a year ago (or was it two? I can’t even remember correctly) we were in the desert outside Las Vegas on the way back from visiting NTS (Nevada Test Site - by some standards the most heavily atomic-bombed place on this planet). We kept seeing these weird airplanes in the sky, at the time I remember thinking they looked like really big paper airplanes. After getting home we did some research and found out that those were MQ-9 Reapers flying out of Creech Air Force Base, Indian Springs, Nevada. We live so close to a major component of the U.S.’s War On Terror, “Remote Control Division”, and didn’t even know it.

photo from Wikipedia

The saddest part of this story is the death and dislocation this program has imposed on innocent civillians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. It continues to be wrapped in an enormous lie, and most American people could care less. UAV stories here and here. ~ p.

I know I spend a lot of time bad-mouthing American politicians - I don’t like them. Recently I’ve decided to stop watching those guys on CSPAN while I eat lunch - two times I threw up because of the ridiculous lies they heap upon the American people, not to mention the rest of the world. But once in a while someone has the audacity to say something honest and clear, like today, while debating the war supplemental:

“Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, had no intention or capability of attacking United States, had nothing to do with Al-Qaida’s role in 9/11, and each and every statement made by the previous administration in support of going to war turned out to be false.

“Yet here we are. A new administration and the same old war, with an expansion of the war in Afghanistan.  We cannot afford these wars. We cannot afford these wars spiritually.  They are wars of aggression and they are based on lies.  We cannot afford these wars financially. They add trillions to our national debt and destroy our domestic agenda. We cannot afford the human cost of these wars, the loss of lives of our beloved troops and the deaths of innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. So, why do we do this? Why do we keep funding wars when they are so obviously against truth and justice and when they undermine our military?  These are matters of heart and conscience, which must be explored. Our ability to bring an end to these wars will be the real test of our power.” - Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)

This guy ran for president the past couple of times. It’s easy to see why he got pounded each time.

Bunny.

6/16 Update: Congress approves the funding. How did your representatives vote? (link to Office of the Clerk)

To everybody who likes to read this blog, my apologies for neither of us blogging much lately. Bunny and I have been keeping ourselves busy with lots of stuff that all together seems to have sucked all our diary-keeping time away. And since our July and August work-calender is looking very full, I doubt we’ll be blogging for a while.

On the other hand, it does feel nice to finally be wrapping up work on several of our ‘projects’. The IWTPYF book is finally done; now Mimi is trying to figure out how to get it ‘out there’ whenever she’s not working at the hospital.

Everyday morning Bunny and I have been working on preparing work for an upcoming show (November/December 2009) at the 1C03 Gallery at the University of Winnipeg. Right now it’s a lot of planning / reshuffling using our cute little gallery mock-up that Bunny made (thanks Bunny), plus making lots of drawings, some of which will eventually become much larger paintings. The working title for the show is The Pinky Show: Class Treason Story (excerpts).

A second art exhibition we are preparing for is scheduled for a bit later (late January 2010 opening) and will be held in Belgrade, Serbia at the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art-Belgrade. That one is called Lecture-Performance and is a historical survey of the lecture-performance format and it’s development from the 1960’s onwards (Robert Morris, Martha Rosler, Andrea Fraser, etc.). The short video we posted on YouTube last night is related to our preparation for this exhibition. Bunny and I will have to sort through the questions, fashion that into an interview, and finish writing the answers to the questions and submit to the folks in Belgrade by July 20th. (*low-level panic*)

A third event we’re kinda-sorta preparing for is to do “something” with the Center for the Future of Museums (a project of the American Association of Museums). We were asked by their director if we would like to work with them to create a fabulous spectacle (j/k) for the AAM’s 2010 annual meeting in Los Angeles. It’s a big conference with about 6,000 museum people from all over the world all converging to… talk about museums (duh). We’re currently bouncing some ideas back and forth, trying to figure out what’s possible. Not sure if this one is going to happen or not, but (*cat alternative to crossing fingers*).

Also, we’re working on finishing up episodes 2A (Daisy) and 2C (Patrick Wolfe) of the Hawaii series - two of the parts that focus on Settler Colonialism. On our calendar we scheduled things out as if we’re going to be able to finish both episodes before the start of August (yeah, right). We’re pretty far along, but still, media production and unforseen delays go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Also, we’re still working on an episode about “nations”. I think we’ve been working on that one on and off for almost two years and now I just want to smash it with a large, rubber mallot. We just keep re-working it because I just don’t like the way it’s coming out.

Also, we are collaborating with the Center for Hegemony Studies on a really great community education project. We’ve been working with them every Monday or Tuesday for a little more than a year now, but I think from now is when our collaboration will really start going in all kinds of new and interesting directions (sometimes good things take a long time to take root). I’ll write more about this collaboration later in the year, after we’ve accumulated more documentation of said ‘things’!

One last thing - Bunny and I will be taking a long walk in the first two weeks of August. We’ll probably stay in desert-areas, but if we can get a ride with someone we were hoping to go as far as… I dunno, maybe New Mexico? We’ll see. But during that time we probably won’t be able to do e-mail everyday. We’ll try to get to a computer every few days to check in if possible. Kim & Mimi said they will take care of things like book orders or make t-shirts while we are gone, in case we get any PS Store orders.

As I’m writing this diary entry I just realized how much coffee we’re going to be drinking this month. There was a pretty good sale on coffee at the drug store and we bought 5 bags. Good thing.

Take care,
pinky

I hardly ever see stuff on TV that I want but this looks really good.

Posted by Bunny.

I know I said I wasn’t going to blog any more this month, but I’m always a sucker for a “Top 10 List”. When I saw Stephen Walt’s article in Foreign Policy about the ups and downs of empire maintenance, of course I couldn’t resist copy-and-pasting the main points here. I mean, it’s basically a two-for-one: favorite topic + favorite format! I like!

The basic question Dr. Walt poses is simple: Is there anything we (U.S. Americans) can learn about current place in the world by studying the rise and fall of the British Empire? Well, “yes”…

1. There is no such thing as a “benevolent” Empire.

2. All Empires depend on self-justifying ideology and rhetoric that is often at odds with reality.

3. Successful empires require ample “hard power.”

4. As Empires decline, they become more opulent, and they obsess about their own glory.

5. Great Empires are heterogeneous.

6. When building an empire, it’s hard to know where to stop.

7. It takes a lot of incompetent people to run an empire.

8. Great Powers defend perceived interests with any means at their disposal.

9. Nationalism and other forms of local identity remain a potent obstacle to long-term imperial control.

10. “Imperial Prestige” is both an asset and a trap.

Okay, I admit posting the above points is only a cheap come-on to try to get people to read the whole article (find it here!). But the article’s so short and won’t take more than 10 minutes to read (pondering time extra) - definitely waaay faster than reading Piers Brendon’s The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997 plus Gibbon’s multi-volume The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Thank goodness for internet mini-summaries!

Take care,
pinky

Here’s a nice follow-up to the last blog entry re: empires - a short list-based essay by Chalmers Johnson titled Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire, and Ten Steps to Take to Do So. Again, in the interest of making this entry as brief as possible, I’ve taken the liberty of stripping the list down to small-size (apologies to Dr. Johnson). Please read the complete essay here, or better yet, read his trilogy of books on the subject: Blowback, Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis.

Three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire…

1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism

2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us

3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases

10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire

1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide.

2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the “opportunity costs” that go with them.

3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture.

4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters — along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth — that follow our military enclaves around the world.

5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense.

6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world’s largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism.

7. We should abolish the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools.

8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces.

9. We need to reduce the size of our standing army.

10. We must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.

[ full essay here ]

Maybe it’s too obvious to be included in the above list, but my favorite reason to dismantle U.S. imperial structures is simply because they’re vicious and immoral. Enough is enough.

Okay, Bunny and I leave for our walk now.

Much love,
pinky

Hi everybody. Bunny and I finally got back home - very dusty and tired - but we’re fine and nothing bad happened to us on our walk. I’m writing this as Bunny is (voluntarily) taking a bath.

Trip summary: It’s been so hot this past couple of weeks we could hardly believe it. In some parts it got almost to 120° F (49° C). In fact it was so hot we didn’t walk everywhere as planned and ended up riding in people’s cars whenever possible. We met a lot of nice people and another good thing was that we were able to go a lot farther than if we’d just traveled by foot. After about a week we found ourselves in the Navajo Nation so we wandered around there for a little bit. One day I’ll write down some of our experiences, either here or in an episode or something, but right now I think I’m going to lie down and rest for the rest of today.

Okay I think Bunny fell asleep in the tub so I’m going to tell you one story. While walking a little west of Petrified Forest National Park, I found some really great papers stuck to a fence alongside Interstate 40 (I’m always finding good stuff alongside highways). One of the papers is a story about Navajo fry bread. I liked it so I put it in my backpack and brought it home with me and now I’d like to share part of it with you. I don’t know who the author is - if anybody reading this knows please e-mail me as I’d like to credit them.

“I like to give a little history on the Navajo fry bread. The Navajo fry bread actually evolved in the mid 19th century. In 1863, approximately 8,000 Navajos spent 4 years imprisoned at Fort Sumner, New Mexico and were given little more than white flour and lard to eat. American Scout Kit Carson and his troops drove our Diné people from their land by destroying our means of survival. Kit Carson and his troops killed our sheeps, goats, and horses, poisoned our water wells, burned our crops and destroyed shelters and anything else that was value to our Diné people.

Carson and his troops then rounded up thousands of starving Navajo women and children and sent them on what is called the “Long Walk”, a 200 mile walk from Arizona to Fort Sumner and Bosque Redondo, New Mexico, one of the saddest events in Navajo and U.S. history. As time went by, the U.S. government provided those on the reservation with wheat flour as part of a commodities program. Lard and wheat flour became the main ingredients in the making of Navajo fry bread. The Navajo women, back then had to make the best of what was often considered poor quality rations in concentration camps and the varying availability of government issued commodities.

Frying was totally new to Navajos because we were used to hunting game that was very lean and making bread in mud ovens. The iron pots were also introduced to us thus created fry bread.

As with many cultures around the world, Native Americans have an all purpose flat bread that is a staple of our cuisine. Fry bread is considered a food of inter-tribal unity and is made at all Indian pow-wows. The dough is a variation of that used for flour tortillas, consisting of flour, preferably Blue Bird flour, shortening, salt, water, and baking powder. Navajo fry bread is a tradition in Dinétah.

If you ever become a visitor to a Navajo family home or a family gathering and you’re offered fry bread or other traditional food, please take it, even if you ate 10 minutes ago,  this is to show respect to the family that offered you their hospitality. That famly that is offering their food to you put great thought and love into their work. They want you to be happy with a full tummy and a safe journey down the road of life.

THIS IS OUR WORLD FAMOUS FRY BREAD, ALSO MADE FROM SCRATCH.

5 CUPS OF FLOUR
2 TBL SPOONS OF BAKING POWDER
2 TSP OF SALT
2 CUPS OF LUKEWARM WATER (NOT HOT, WILL BURN YOUR HAND, AND NOT COLD, WILL HARDEN YOUR DOUGH)

MIX ALL DRY INGREDIENTS TOGETHER IN LARGE MIXING BOWL. SLOWLY ADD WATER, KNEED YOUR DOUGH TILL IT BECOMES A NICE AND FLUFFY.

NOW YOU ARE READY TO MAKE FRY BREAD!!

TO FRY YOUR BREAD:
1 CAST IRON SKILLET
1 1/2 CUPS OF OIL (YOUR CHOICE CORN, CANOLA OR 10W30)

TURN UP HEAT ON OIL, WATCH OUT THOUGH!!!

PUT A PINCH OF DOUGH IN HOT GREASE IF IT SINKS, IT’S STILL COLD, IF IT RISES, IT’S READY

NOW THAT YOU’RE AN EXPERT, LET’S MAKE A TACO!!

1 FRY BREAD
1 SCOOP CHILI CON CARNE
ADD THE FOLLOWING AS YOUR BASE - CHOPPED LETTUCE, DICED TOMATOES AND ONIONS AND GRATED CHEESE.

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU ARE NOW FAMOUS!!!”

So that’s the story and recipe I found. Maybe later this week when I go marketing I will buy some baking powder and try to make some fry bread. Oh - here is a photograph of some fry bread I ate at the Blue Coffee Pot Diner in Kayenta. I also ordered ice tea and that was the biggest cup of ice tea I ever saw in my whole life.

Till next time - peace,
pinky

[ Bunny: What's that comment about "voluntarily" taking a bath's supposed to mean? I TAKE BATHS. I remember that Kayenta fry bread. I ate something that looked like Chinese stir fry + french fries + half that fry bread. It was good. ]

I’m posting some photos Pinky made during our recent mini-journey.

This tree is in Southwest Colorado, near Cortez.

Burned trees, also near Cortez.

Lonely sign, Petrified Forest National Park.

Billboard, Route 66. I think this was in Arizona.

Right near home. Death Valley.

We are making some of our photos into an art project. We will post it in the PS Commons Gallery when we are finished.

Posted by Bunny.

Hi Everybody! I hope everybody is doing good. Some of your e-mails have been asking about what we’ve been up to since returning from our walk in the desert. Well, lots of things!

1. continue work on settler colonialism episodes
2. working with Teacup on hegemony project
3. planted a mini-garden (then we ate it)

But the biggest thing we’ve been working on is to prepare for our upcoming Pinky Show exhibition at the University of Winnipeg Art Gallery. The exhibition is going to be from November 12 to December 12, 2009 and is titled Class Treason Stories (excerpts).

The show will feature a brand new video made specially for the installation, a whole bunch of big, hand-painted banners, a viewing station to watch old PS videos, and some other stuff. Bunny and I are working super hard to make sure it will be a fun exhibition to visit, but also that it will have some brain-poking function in regards to questions of class treason - especially “what is it?”, and “what does that have to do with me?”, stuff like that.

Here are some photos of the banners taking shape.

Special thank you to HR02 & HR03 who are allowing us to use their studio to paint all these big things!

For more information about the upcoming exhibition, here is a PDF flier from the UWinnipeg Art Gallery:

<- click to get PDF.

Okay, I better get back to painting now.

Take care,
pinky

Yesterday Pinky and I made our monthy trek to the Marukai Store, which is kind of like the mother ship of all Japanese Supermarkets here in California. Besides stocking up on Japanese snack foods the one thing that jumped out at us was their large selection of small box-toys. You know those small box-toys from Japan right? In case you don’t know here’s how they work: each toy-box shows a selection of possible toys on the back of the box, but then they don’t tell you which toy is actually inside. Which means you have to keep buying boxes and boxes of toys until you finally get the specific toy you want. Some of the toys are really cool but making you buy a bunch of toys you don’t want is not my idea of “exciting” - it’s LAME. Anyway, this is the toy-series that had my attention:

They have little cat statues inside. Most of the cat statues in this series looked pretty boring to me but two of them looked kind of like me and Pinky. And I figured out if I squeeze the box a certain way I could peek inside, so I stood there and sqeezed all the boxes and eventually I found the two toys that I wanted. So here’s what I bought - this one looks just like Pinky:

Pooping. It even has a bunch of wheat grass, which is funny because she loves wheat grass for real. She’s always saying, “Do we have any wheat grass?” even when we don’t have any wheat grass, it’s so irritating. Here is the other one, it looks like me, sort of.

Actually I’m a lot better looking than this in real life but I thought it was good that it came with a computer because I really like computers.

I’ve never been to Japan but I want to go one day because their toys and food is really good.

In other news, Pinky is still painting every day in preparation for our upcoming Winnipeg show; I’m working on everything else.

Bunny

Somebody had this picture on Facebook and I think it is funny. Posted by Kim.

I haven’t done any public replying to e-mail in a while, but since Pinky is busy with painting at the moment I thought I’d answer some e-mail today. The first one is from a viewer in Germany:

dear bunny, there is something i’ve been thinking about, watching your film [Hawaii vs. U.S. Imperialism] i like how you point out and analyze american imperialism. (but) seeing germany in a list with vietnam and other countries as “colonized” is really weird for me. anti-facists, jewish people and non-fascists from all over europe were really glad the usa helped stop WWII… it finally put an end to holocaust, murder, and genocide by the germans [...] just to give you an impression from an anti-fascist post-war perspective. i’d love to see your work in an art show or in a discussion in europe somewhere. any plans in that direction? viele grüße, panda

My reply to panda:

hi panda,

if i remember correctly, including germany on the list (the long list towards the end of our hawaii vs. US imperialism video) was based on the US’s extensive military presence there, plus US military and CIA activities on german soil. we were pointing to how the US has made germany a part of its global imperial structure; it is not a “colony” in the classic sense.

what you say about US fighting in WWII is true - if the US did not fight germany, i would guess that probably even more atrocities against jews and other marginalized people would have occurred. we are definitely NOT suggesting that anything like genocide should ever be unchallenged. what we ARE saying that it is important to examine the inconsistencies and contradictions of US interventionism. for example, if the reasons the US gave as a moral justification for fighting germany were true (”we must enter into this war to stop genocide” or “we must fight fascism/support democracy”), then why have these reasons not also required the US to intervene in parallel circumstances? even a quick look at history shows that the US intervenes in some cases but not others. in fact, there are many examples where the US goes to a foreign country and destroys their democratic government, or supports or commits genocide. why is this? does the US just not know what it’s doing? (unlikely) or are there other factors besides moral imperatives that make the US leaders commit violent actions with their military and/or economic weapons? (i think so) this is why we say a situation like WWII cannot be analyzed only according to ‘moral justifications’ (”we have to stop genocide & fascism”). if we confine ourselves to this kind of logic we will not be able to understand why the US also engages in anti-democratic or even genocidal actions in other situations. however, when we do an analysis that takes into consideration ‘imperialism’ (what it is, how it works, what it needs to continue, and so on) - well, then suddenly a lot of things that at first seem like contradictions can be explained. so there are many forces at work!

regarding pinky show in europe, we are going to have a small thing in a group show in belgrade in january. but besides that right now we have no invitations from anybody in europe. europe is very exciting to us, we have only been there one time, for a short trip to slovenia last year. we get a lot of emails from germany though, so maybe one day something will happen and we will be able to go. we want to learn more about situations outside the US - our analysis is from a US perspective and often doesn’t directly translate to other political & social contexts very well, so we are always trying to learn more.

peace,
bunny

Here’s another e-mail from Valerie:

Hello Pinky and Bunny… I just watched the 13 Things I Learned at Kahoolawe episode and I really liked it alot. It has a sweet, gentle feel to it while sharing very valuable lessons and insights. You are amazing. Thank you. Valerie P.S…I think cats CAN actually swim, they just don’t like to (except Tigers, I think)

My reply:

Hi Valerie. I’m happy you liked the video. We would be super happy if it moved even one person to start fighting against the widespread abuse of this planet. Even if we just started with a tiny sub-category of the broader problem, like, for example, challenging the military to stop destroying native people’s most sacred places - we still would have TONS of work to do. Kahoolawe needs lots of help, and there are many other Kahoolawes too, not just in Hawaii but all over the world. Oh, regarding the other thing, yeah, I assumed I could swim too (I’ve seen videos of swimming cats before) but when I got into the water I found out that actually I can’t swim and almost died. So I won’t be doing that again. Tigers, yeah, I think they have huge feet. Take care, Bunny

Okay, last one, from a guy named Mark:

I watched the episode on illegal immigration. Weren’t native American Indians settlers too? Nothing is fair and people have been taking other peoples stuff since human existence. That’s just the way it is…

My reply:

First thing: “Weren’t native American Indians settlers too?” Good question. The answer is NO. Please study settler colonialism. I recommend Patrick Wolfe. It’s not “easy reading” but it’ll take you far. Do a search for Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology - it’s on Google Books.

Second thing: “Nothing is fair and people have been taking other peoples stuff since human existence. That’s just the way it is.” This is a good example of using (arguably) true statements in order to justify moral weakness. Yes, human beings have been jerks througout history - so what? Surrendering to the inevitability of abuse just makes it far easier to continue. - Bunny

About a month ago Pinky and I were hanging out with a friend, and we were just talking about social justice or whatever, when he asked Pinky why she is so obssessed with learning about and fighting against all the bad stuff in this world. I work with Pinky day in and day out and we talk about these kinds of things all the time, but her answer surprised me. She said something like, “In the future, I don’t want our descendents to look back and know that we were cowards.”

So that’s the end of today’s Bunny Mailbag, cuz now it’s my turn to cook lunch.

Bunny

Okay, I think I’m a fairly reasonable cat when it comes to scientific inquiry, but this experiment just makes me sad beyond words. According to NASA:

< illustration: NASA.

“The Mission Objectives of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) include confirming the presence or absence of water ice in a permanently shadowed crater at the Moon’s South Pole. The identification of water is very important to the future of human activities on the Moon. LCROSS will excavate the permanently dark floor of one of the Moon’s polar craters with two heavy impactors in 2009 to test the theory that ancient ice lies buried there. The impact will eject material from the crater’s surface to create a plume that specialized instruments will be able to analyze for the presence of water (ice and vapor), hydrocarbons and hydrated materials.”

“Excavate”? Are they joking?

If you have a 10-inch telescope or larger you’ll actually be able to see the impact from Earth. The resulting damage from the impact of these spacecrafts (actually missiles) striking the surface at over 5,000 m.p.h. is expected to be spread over an area several miles wide. Is this a respectful way to go about learning things? Does this remind anybody of settlers’ attitude toward and exploitation of “frontier lands”?

Disgusting. The moon-bombing is set to happen on Oct 9.

To read more agency-speak, click here.

Better yet, watch this awesome video. (thanks Hugo & Jordan!)

pinky

[ That's moon abuse. Scientists should follow some kind of ethical guidelines when they are designing experiments, like "Would you be okay doing this experiment to your own mommy?" If not, then probably you shouldn't be doing it! Posted by Kim. ]

I was going to write a post about President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize but what’s the point - the Juice Media guys already did it.

Bunny

Oh Dear! magazine is a cool online magazine for all you D.I.Y. girls out there. And guess what - The Pinky Show is on page 78 in this month’s issue. What does it say? I don’t know but Pinky is translating it as part of her attempt to learn Spanish.

I hope we get huge in Mexico. Oh Dear! magazine is at:

[ www.ohdearzine.com ]

Bunny

From our e-mail:

Hi Pinky & Bunny, I notice you guys haven’t been very actively lately. I was wondering How are you planning on celebrating Columbus Day today? What is your take on all these people who say he was a murderer? Do you agree? Josh

My reply to Josh:

“Not very active lately”? Don’t piss me off.

And regarding Columbus Day, we’re going to celebrate the same way most everybody else celebrates Columbus Day here in America. First we’re going to watch baseball on TV, then we’ll toast Columbus with a few beers, then finally we’ll drive our automobile to a shopping mall so we can spend money on THINGS. We celebrate all our genocidal favorites (Alexander, Hitler, Henry Kissinger, Pol Pot, etc.) on their respective special days like this. Why, you do it different?

Bunny.

Incidentally, Venezuelans should lay off the history books.

[ photo from Reuters ]

Posted by Bunny.

So I guess Jordan from yesterday’s Bunny Mailbag was offended by my resonse and took it upon himself to write back. Here’s an excerpt:

…I knew you guys would say that you hate Columbus becaues that’s the typical response from socialist fucktards like you. I see you’ll be in Canada soon so why not just stay there. YOu think they’re a utopian paradise? WHAT A JOKE. THEY have the SAME SHIT going on over there and OVERALL it’s WORSE. So enjoy your time kissing Canadian ASS and I hope you get detained at the border trying to re-enter the US! Jordan

Hilarious. I’ll just make a few points:

1. I don’t hate Columbus because I’m a socialist. (When did I say I was a socialist?) I just have a problem with greedy, slave-trading, genocidal maniacs. Plus, he was a poor administrator. Do I need more reasons?

2. Whether we live in Canada or the U.S., we’ll still keep up with our critique of U.S. hegemony, thank you very much. Why? Simply because the U.S. remains #1 in messing up the planet in oh-so-many ways. Don’t take it so personal, geez. As soon as the U.S. steps back from these bad habits, we’ll turn our attention to other topics, such as cross-stitching, which is really a great hobby (everyone should try it).

3. And finally, here’s a mini-checklist just I threw together to help answer that profound question advanced by our fan Jordan: “Should We Kiss Canada’s Ass: Yes or No?”

Have single-payer health care? Yes.
Have massive drop-dead stupid-scary oil sand project? Yes.
Have homeless people? Lots.
Settler state structure? Yes, just like U.S.
Signed UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples? No, just like U.S.
Signed Convention on Cluster Munitions Treaty? Yes, unlike U.S.
Military spending as % of GDP? 111th in world (U.S. 1st, of course)
Invaded Iraq with U.S.? No.
In Afghanistan? Yes.
Have nuclear weapons? No.
Thinks they own the North Pole? Yes.
Hockey or Baseball? Hockey.
Responsible for making Top Gun & Pretty Woman? No.
Who has nicer flag, U.S. or Canada? Canada.
Tastier ice cream: U.S. or Canada? We’ll find out when we get there.

So there it is. We’ll discuss and decide on the ass kissing thing later.

Posted by Bunny.

P.S. When I get to Canada I will be looking for one of these (below). A friend told me they are large enough to ride and I have never tried that.

[ Kim: Isn't Julia Roberts Canadian? Wouldn't that make Canada at least partly responsible for Pretty Woman? ]

[ Bunny: No, she's not Canadian. Which is another plus for Canada, I suppose. ]

[ note from Pinky: We do an exhibition in Canada and suddenly this person is verbally attacking Canada? What's wrong with this guy??? I've noticed over the years that many U.S. Americans quickly get defensive or belligerent if someone says something critical about the U.S., or god forbid even just says something nice about another country. Has anyone else noticed this or is this just my imagination? Are people from most other countries like this too or is this something that's "very American"? ]

Okay, if you’re a regular reader of our blog, by now you may have noticed that we have a perverse fascination with cutting-edge technologies of war and death. (Like this, or this…) A small part of the attraction I’m sure is just the “wow, that’s amazing”-factor involved. The remainder is more like, “wow, that’s totally insane.”

I suppose a reasonable question would be: Do we really need more craziness in the world?

Unfortunately, even if you think the answer is ‘no’, when it comes to the proliferation of weapons technologies, even the most futuristic inventions eventually become more widely available. Which means there may come a day where every nerd with a god-complex will have access to his very own swarm of MAVs.

Enjoy your paranoid nightmares.

Bunny

By Bunny, PSR.

WINNIPEG, CANADA - The first fund-raising event for the upcoming exhibition by The Pinky Show at the University of Winnipeg’s Gallery 1C03 was mobbed by enthusiastic supporters today, resulting in the sale of 18, possibly more, t-shirts.

Reports confirm it was, apparently, somewhat like an unholy shark feeding-frenzy. No serious injuries were reported.

The event, staged by the University of Winnipeg’s Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies (IWGS), was highly successful. Kim Hunter, suspected leader of left-wing fringe group Women, said, “We’ve sold 18 t-shirts”.

“18 shirts is a lot of shirts. I don’t think we’ve even sold 18 shirts from our website in the past 3 months,” commented Pinky, democratically elected leader of the fabulous Pinky Show project. “I’m not sure, I have to check.”

Semi-related: Pinky, Bunny, and Emily folded up a sizable stack of new Pinky Show mini-zines, which are set to debut at a roundtable discussion on the subject of academic freedom, November 17 at the University of Winnipeg. For more information, you gotta find out yourself because that’s all I know.

Report on bake sale based on “facts” heard third-hand by Bunny (IWGS Kim > Pinky > Bunny). Bake sale photos courtesy of IWGS Kim, mini-zine photo by Pinky.

[ Note from Pinky: Bunny & I send our appreciation and thanks to everybody who helped make this happen - Kim, Lissie, Tyler, Roewan, and Milena! xoxo pinky ]

It’s good to start off a new month with a new Bunny mailbag. Today’s e-mail comes from Shawna.

Hi Pinky, I’ve been slowly working my way backwards through your collection of videos and wanted to say that I’ve enjoyed them all in different ways so far. I just finished watching the Ribbon Sticker video where at the end you make your own sticker that says “Reject U.S. Imperialism”. I was wondering if you could think of a more positive alternative that would basically say the same thing, much like the “Support Our Troops” ribbons are “positive” (they may be misleading but the tone is positive). I believe very strongly in positive messages! Because we can’t build a social justice movement with negative slogans! I just wanted to ask you for your 2 cents! Shawna

My reply:

Hi Shawna. I’m glad you’re enjoying our videos. I’m going to respond for Pinky because she’s busy editing right now. But we talked about your e-mail and in the end we both decided there’s no simple answer to your simple question. For example, part of the problem with a statement like “Reject U.S. Imperialism” is that it actually doesn’t make sense if you really think about it. (We just went ahead and used it anyway because we wanted to keep things simple.) The reason why this doesn’t make sense is, considering how the U.S. came into existence, how it developed into what it is today, and what it has to do in order for it to “maintain its shape and form”, there is no way to even imagine the U.S. “without” imperialism. Actually, we think it’s fair to say that the U.S. is imperialism - always has been. So how could we really say that anybody should “reject U.S. imperialism”, as if the two could somehow be split apart and one side thrown away? See the problem? We still believe that the U.S. should stop stepping on people - not only all around the planet but also including people here within its political borders - but if the U.S. were to really stop doing that, we think the U.S. would literally become something so different that maybe it wouldn’t even make sense to call it by the same name anymore. Anyway - that’s getting a bit ahead of ourselves - we’ll worry about finding a good name after we’ve fixed a few problems, yes?

In the meantime, how about we just get comfortable with the idea that rejecting bad things is not negative; it’s positive.

- Bunny

Go visit www.persiflage.ca, my current favorite source for relevant news and insightful commentary.

Bunny.

I think we need a press clippings area on this website. In the past I’ve just been depositing them here in the blog, but somehow it feels very random and disorganized and I don’t like it.

Anyway, here are a couple of reviews that came out today, graciously forwarded to us by Jennifer Gibson, (art) curator at the University of Winnipeg’s (art) Gallery 1C03. Thank you Jennifer for keeping an eye out for us.

from Uptown Magazine

from Winnipeg Free Press

Pinky likes contemporary art more than I do. I like old art more, the didactic stuff. Especially old religious art - those guys were always telling you what to do! (I like) With contemporary art it seems to me a lot of people get all huffy and start stomping around if the work is somehow not sufficiently weird / ambiguous / deliberately-mystified enough. Which isn’t to say I have a problem with any of those attributes, I just get annoyed with people who think the world is not big enough to also accommodate overtly didactic work.

Which is why I find it a little odd that neither writer criticized us for making didactic work that also happens to look very art-like. Or maybe I just have a misconception regarding what art reviewers will find acceptable nowadays? (Apparently I do.)

I hope Kim and Mimi don’t get all big-headed now that their pictures were chosen to be in newspapers.

For those of you who have been asking what we’ve been up to since returning from Winnipeg:

1. Pinky got real sick. She’s still working but also sleeping a bit extra (slightly annoying) and coughing all over the place (very annoying).

2. We’ve been working on making fine art prints of some of the images in the exhibition (plus some others that we haven’t had time to put on our website). I know - after the above mini-rant it is weird to suddenly call our pictures ‘art’ but apparently people just call really, really nice prints ‘fine art prints’. Okay.

3. Finishing up two more videos.

4. Trying to troubleshoot our stupid water heater that finally stopped working. Can it be saved? Still don’t know.

5. Running all the errands that we neglected to do before we left for Winnipeg because we were busy preparing for Winnipeg.

Life is less exciting here than in Winnipeg but still okay. We’ll keep working.

Bunny

Excuse me for butchering words in order to generate fake-reverence but hey, all the big movie studios do it.

We just got another mention in the Canadian press - which is cool, but I don’t like their description of our project:

“…a collective of politically minded artists anonymously explores the ethical and moral obligations of mainstream media through a group of cartoon-cat spokespeople…”

What?

Whatevers. At least they call us “Best”.

Thanks to Milena for sending us this press clipping!

- Bunny

The guys at JuiceNews have made another video and I think I’ve already watched it 4 times! lol

I know this sounds stupid but I just marvel at how people write such sharp, informative AND funny material that actually RHYMES. Wow…

Maybe most importantly, it turned me onto the Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change, which I have to admit I hadn’t even heard of before watching this video. o.O I seriously need new news sources…

MP3 and Lyrics here (click on little “i” icon on the audio player thing).

~ pinky

Thank you for everyone who has sent me well-wishes. My cold is going away. I’m still coughing and sniffling but my fever is gone and I definitely feel a lot better. My voice still sounds a bit weird though - Bunny has taken to calling me “sexy Pinky” the past several days - which is a problem because I have to record a guest voice over for a reforestation project thing at the end of this week. I hope I don’t mess that up.

Anyway, here’s a nice e-mail we received tonight:

Dear Pinky & Bunny, I think it’s awesome that you guys came to Winnipeg! You have no idea how excited me and lots of other people were to have you here. Your show in the gallery was so special. I can guarantee you it led to a lot of conversations between us students about our futures and what we will make of it. That’s the best part of your show to me, you always make things that clarifies and sends me on a path of thinking about my life. Which leads me to a question! I attended the academic freedom panel (which was terrific by the way) and got a Pinky Show Zine after the talk. But this might be the first time I read the Zine over and over and I still don’t get what you and Bunny were trying to say. Specifically the ending –  Can you please explain to me what you were trying to say in this Zine? I hope you write me back! Best wishes, Andrea

I’m guessing there’s probably other people out there who might also be confused by the academic freedom mini-zine, so I’ll respond to it now while we’re still in Winnipeg-mode.

Hi Andrea. Thank you for your feedback for the show. It really makes us happy to hear that people are considering the implications of class treason. It is a theme that we hope to keep revisiting in the future, especially as Bunny and I continue to reflect upon the choices we’ve made as a result of our analysis in our own lives.

Regarding the mini-zine… Well, we made the mini-zine tell this little story after we saw the list of presenters for the panel. Nothing personal against any of the presenters (actually, we met three of them while we were in Winnipeg and they were all greeeat), but we DO think it’s significant that all of the people on the panel work at the university. Which is another way of saying that no one on the panel is not from the university.

I’m sure lots of people might think that such an omission does’t mean anything - after all, the topic is academic freedom, and of course academics that work at universities have lots to say about the subject, right? Of course they do. But we made our little zine in the hopes of raising a few questions: Why is academic freedom so often considered an ‘academics-only’ issue? Would non-academics have any worthwhile perspective or analysis to offer in such a conversation? Does the issue of academic freedom affect life beyond the university campus?

Universities are often thought of as being a society’s centers for research, theorizing, intellectual development, and all that other good stuff. In many ways universities occupy a dominant position in relation to other kinds of social institutions, especially as it relates to bettering society (and not just the university) through courageous acts of thinking. This is why we believe non-academics should not be excluded from these kinds of conversations. Everybody needs to understand that what is encouraged or discouraged or allowed or not allowed at a university ultimately has far-reaching consequences that affects all of us. In fact, often times the most profound effects are for those who seem very, very far away from universities.

When Bunny and I were discussing what we wanted to put in the zine, one of the things that I was worried about was the idea that people might think that we are just using the zine to poke fun or criticize the people on the panel or the organizers of the event. But Bunny pointed out to me, and I think she is correct, that not having any non-academics is not a failure of one or a few individuals (Bunny: “This is not personal.”). This is an institutional problem; this is a social problem. Maybe we should call it a collective failure of the imagination.

Sorry for the looong e-mail, have you fallen asleep by now? Anyway, I hope it gives a little background on how we are thinking about such things.

Take care,
pinky

Oh, another thing about Winnipeg. Although we did more or less finish organizing our materials for the post-Winnipeg report, since the report does contain quite a few photographs and detailed notes regarding the exhibition installation, Bunny and I finally decided to release the report after the exhibition shuts down in Winnipeg and re-opens in Toronto. If we release it now it’ll just be so boring for people in Toronto who are planning on seeing the exhibition in January/February, right?

Anyway, we have lots of things to keep us busy till then. We are currently in the process of re-accessing everything about our project, including whether or not we should continue. Mimi, who is kind of like Director of Bookkeeping & Paperwork (not a real title), has been telling us emphatically that we can’t continue like this and we need to shut the Pinky Show down. Obviously Bunny and I don’t want to do that, but we also don’t really know how we can turn things around either. Every night I pray for an idea that will save our work but so far I haven’t come up with anything really good. Maybe I’ll write about all this in more detail later.

Till next time, I wish you all peace,
pinky

As we expected, we got a lot of e-mails today asking us if we think U.S. President Obama’s announcement that he plans to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan is a good idea.

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: The U.S. needs to stop this deceptive and catastrophic “War on Terror”. U.S. Americans have to be the ones to stand up against their own leaders’ imperialist desires. Out of Iraq. Out of Afghanistan. Now. And the U.S. needs to take responsibility for all of the death, destruction, and suffering its caused. Also, the leaders of the political establishment and business elite most responsible for carrying out and supporting these vicious policies must be held accountable and punished. These are the most basic, concrete first steps that can be done to address the ongoing disaster we are all guilty of accepting.

Must read: this Marjorie Cohn essay we noted in 2008.

We’ve been reiterating similar logic over and over for years now, but somehow we still receive a lot of e-mails every day asking us things like “How can we win in Afghanistan?” or “How can we withdraw from Afghanistan and still protect our national interests in the region?” To which I have to ask: Are we really speaking a language that is so difficult to understand?

Maybe U.S. Americans need their moral and political destiny framed in terms of what they seem to understand best: Money. For your consideration, here are a couple of resources specifically relating contemporary colonial warring to The Bottom Line:

Notes re: 2009 Federal Budget (from War Resisters League)

Data re: Military Spending (from International Peace Bureau)

And, just for comparison, the IPB also includes dollar estimates for achieving the following:

Shelter for every human being: $21 billion
Eliminate ALL Starvation and Malnourishment: $19 billion
Clean Safe Water for every human being: $10 billion
Eliminate ALL Nuclear Weapons: $7 billion
Eliminate ALL Landmines: $4 billion
Eliminate ALL Illiteracy: $5 billion
Relief for Refugees everywhere: $5 billion
Stabilize Human Population Growth: $10.5 billion
Prevent Soil Erosion Globally: $24 billion

[ source ]

So yes, war is bad, expensive, and, not surprisingly, also very wasteful. If Americans wanted to stop this ridiculous tragedy NOW, a good idea would be to pressure your so-called representatives to cut off war funding - the U.S. military would have to withdraw from Afghanistan near-immediately. Just shaking our tiny furry fists at it from a distance does absolutely nothing.

Bunny

[ note from Pinky: Thanks Bunny. I'd like to add one more link relating to the war and money, the National Priorities Project's excellent Afghanistan Fact Sheet: The Numbers Behind the Troop Increase. ]

This is kind of like a continuation of Bunny’s post from Wednesday about the war in Afghanistan.

Phyllis Bennis (the same Phyllis Bennis that explained the Iran thing to us last year) is really fantastic at making complicated foreign policy issues easy to understand. So I was happy to find an article at the Institute for Policy Studies website where she breaks down the speech President Obama gave the other day on Afghanistan. Please read it!

[ Go here to read the whole article! ]

For those of you who are too lazy to click a link, here is an excerpt:

“What Was Left Out [from President Obama's escalation speech]:

• The 18-month timeline references only the “beginning” of transferring U.S. troops out of Afghanistan; there was no reference to finishing transfer of all troops out of Afghanistan and ending the occupation. The words “exit” or “exit strategy” do not appear in the speech, and the word “withdraw” appears only in a reference to what the U.S. will NOT do.

• There was absolutely no explanation of how this year’s $30 billion additional costs for the 30,000 more troops, on top of the billions more already in the pipeline, would be paid for…

• The speech assumed Afghan support for the U.S. occupation, ignoring the massive evidence to the contrary…

• Obama paid no attention to the increasingly visible opposition to the Karzai government and the U.S. occupation from the majority Pashtun population — whose southern and eastern Afghanistan territory will be the operations center for the new troop escalation…

• There was no reference to the U.S.-paid mercenaries (both local and internationals, all paid through U.S. contractor corporations) in Afghanistan, whose numbers rose by 40% just between June and September, now totaling 104,101, and already outnumbering U.S. troops…

…Obama also did not acknowledge that about 30% of all U.S. casualties in the 8-year war in Afghanistan have occurred during the 11 months of his presidency. He did not remind us that the cost of this war, with the new escalation, will be about $100 billion a year, or $2 billion every week, or more than $11 million every hour. He didn’t tell us that the same one-year amount, $100 billion, could cover the cost of ALL of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals: clean water, health care, primary education and vaccinations for the people of every one of the poorest 21 countries in the world…”

The article’s very good, I hope you all read it. It’s rare for someone to carefully go point-by-point over an important speech and show exactly what is being said, and also what is not being said. Studying the difference between the two is a fun way to learn how politicians are very crafty at taking advantage of what the public doesn’t know or understand in order to accomplish dishonesty, often even without lying! They practice this constantly and the public doesn’t counter this with learning anything meaningful so of course the politicians win all the time.

In other news, I have been working on my own comic strip. It is called The Adventures of Super Bunny and Kim. The first one I drew was about how Bunny and I were at a store and I couldn’t reach something on a shelf but Bunny’s a lot bigger than me so she got it down for me. The hardest part for me is drawing the pictures.

Bye!

Kim

Big news! The Pinky Show is going to be the cover story in the Winter issue of FUSE magazine (website at www.fusemagazine.org)! FUSE is an art/culture/politics magazine published out of Toronto, Canada, and Bunny and I were interviewed by Canadian art curator Milena Placentile for the magazine a few weeks ago. I remember it was fun (talking with Milena is always fun) but unfortunately I don’t remember anything we talked about - hopefully we didn’t say anything too ridiculous. Anyway, today we got to see a preview of the cover:

Pretty neat, huh? As you can imagine Bunny is real happy with the cover!

The launch party for the winter issue is actually going to be held in conjunction with the opening of our Class Treason Stories exhibition at Toronto Free Gallery: Thursday, January 14, 2010, at 8pm. The exhibition runs till February 21 - everybody who can get to Toronto by February 21 please come see our show! But make sure you wear something warm - Toronto can get really cold in the winter!

TORONTO FREE GALLERY
1277 Bloor Street West
Toronto, ON M6H 1N7
tel. 416-913-0461

For more information, please read this.

Take care,
pinky