Yesterday morning we shipped our Pinky Show stuff to Arlington for the Picturing Politics 2008 exhibition. I couldn’t believe how expensive it was to ship - I think it was about $160 - more if you include the ridiculous amount of bubblewrap and coroplast Pinky used to wrap everything up. (Can you say “anal retentive”?)

Anyway, if any of you live near Washington D.C., please go see the show. And if you could take a picture of our work in the show, that’d be great because we can’t afford to actually travel to Arlington to see the show ourselves. If we get any good pictures of our work installed in the AAC galleries I’d like to include it in the On Native Land entry in our Commons Gallery.

By the way, in response to questions about the art pieces (For example, “But what does it mean???”, etc.), Pinky has expanded the explanatory notes that appear as mouse-overs in the gallery. You have to put your cursor over the picture in order to have the notes pop up.

Bunny

[ Kim: Lost in all this is Bunny forgot to mention that the art work came out really beautiful! Just wanted to say that! ^_^ ]

Here in the United States, July 4 is also known as “Independence Day”. As President Bush spoke today in a Fourth of July speech to the nation from Monticello, Virginia:

“You represent many different ethnicities and races and religions. But you all have one thing in common - and that is a shared love of freedom. This love of liberty is what binds our nation together, and this is the love that makes us all Americans.”

My theory is that there are other people around the world, who are not Americans, who also love things like liberty and freedom. So I think it’d be terrific if all the freedom-loving Americans President Bush is talking to would stand up and commit themselves to stopping their own country from denying freedom and self-determination to people elsewhere. Seriously, you can’t have democracy and occupation at the same time.

To acknowledge the concept of independence, today we release a new episode - Iraq Under Occupation: Raed Jarrar decodes the misinformation. I admit it’s a little long (~ 1 hr 10 min), but I hope everyone who is not already familiar with Raed Jarrar or his work will take the time to watch it. It is crucial that every American understand the implications of what he is saying.

Watch the video here.

- Bunny

[ note from Kim: Please be careful of hot dogs and soda, they are not good for you no matter how yummy they are. *smack smack* ]

Hi. We have a new video: see it here.

Pinky & I made this video for the launch of the new NEO.org website. It’s a neat site based in Switzerland where you publicly state your intent to change the world for the better. The basic idea, as I understand it, is that you have to have right thought before you can have right action. Pinky and I have a couple of problems with the language of the declaration so we’ll be writing an open letter to the authors of the Neo Declaration and the Neo community. But overall we think it’s good and when I finish writing my declaration of intent I’ll be posting it there. Pinky already did hers.

We have a bunch more videos almost done. Please stay tuned.

- Bunny

The long lost shipment of Tote Bags from American Apparel FINALLY arrived yesterday afternoon *shakes clenched paw at American Apparel*, so the Pinky Show designs have been lovingly applied and the tote bags promptly shipped out this morning. My personal apologies to those of you who had to wait the extra weeks for your order to ship. For all the late orders we’ve included a small letter of apology plus secret mini-present on the side that I hope you will enjoy.

Thank you again for your support of The Pinky Show and please excuse my grumpy picture (above) - Pinky still has not made me a non-grumpy picture, which I’m starting to think she’s purposely dragging her feet on.

- Bunny

posted by Bunny.

Update (6/16): We just got word from the Arlington Arts Center exhibition curator that the title of the upcoming show will be Picturing Politics, 2008: Artists Speak to Power.

“The intersection of art and politics will be the subject of an exhibition organized by Washington artist, independent curator, and critic Rex Weil. The show will examine a wide array of strategies in contemporary visual arts for addressing controversial issues and promoting social change in a political landscape dominated by mass media.” (from the AAC website)

If any of you in the Washington, D.C. area are able to go to the show, we’d be really grateful if you could take a snapshot of our work installed in the museum for us. This will be our first art show and it’d be really cool if we could post a picture of that to our website! Thanks, Bunny

[ Please read this whole message - I promise it won't take you more than 3 minutes! ]

Hi! This is Pinky - I’m writing to tell you about some great news we just received!

The Pinky Show has been offered a challenge grant from the Pierre and Pamela Omidyar Fund of the Hawaii Community Foundation. What that means is that for a limited time, any donation that’s made in support of The Pinky Show will be half-matched by their organization. For example, if you were to make a donation of $100, the Pierre and Pamela Omidyar Fund would then donate $50 to us too. After so much struggling to keep The Pinky Show alive, this could really make a huge difference for us!

I just wrote a short appeal to put on our donations page, I’ll include a bit of it here:

“…People often forget that we will not have a world-society defined by peace and justice unless we are willing to fight for it, one mind at a time. So far The Pinky Show has been successful in bringing our message of openness and compassion for all living beings to a fairly large international audience - over 5 million episode views from over 155 countries. But keeping our project alive has been extremely difficult. Only 1 out of approximately 10,000 viewers actually takes it upon themselves to support our work…”

5 million views is a lot! And that’s not even counting all the people that use our videos offline - raising awareness in classrooms, workshops, teach-ins, community & adult education, public access television, and so on.

Since we started this project about three years ago, we’ve received thousands of expressions of solidarity and thanks via e-mail from people all over the world. But unfortunately, not too many donations. We sincerely appreciate the well-wishing, but we do need material support in order to create new episodes, pay our server fees, upkeep our equipment & software, and not die of starvation.

We’re trying to do this project in what we consider to be “the right way” - no pay-per-view, no commercials in our videos, no advertisements plastered all over our website, no sweatshop t-shirts for sale in our store, no DRM, and so on. All of these decisions we’ve made represent a particular set of values we believe in - openness, justice, and compassion for others. By deciding to make direct donations from our viewers the foundation upon which we continue (or don’t continue) our work, The Pinky Show project has also become for us an experiment. We are genuinely curious to know if people really do believe that a tiny, committed group of individuals can change the world for the better by taking on enormous challenges. We chose consciousness as the site of intervention and we’re dedicating our lives to putting as large a dent as possible in Domination and Exploitation of all kinds.

So along with the great news, I’m also ending with an appeal. If you’ve ever thought that you’d like to support our work, there’s never been a better time than right now. I sincerely hope you’ll give it some serious consideration.

Thank you,

pinky

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Posted by Bunny.

This is a great lecture that Pinky turned me on to late last night. I was sleepy but it was so good I ended up listening to the whole thing and going to bed at 4 a.m. You can listen to it here. It’s audio only so I stuck a Wikipedia photo of Dr. Yunus on it.

After I listened to the lecture Pinky and I were looking up some microcredit info when we ran into the Kiva website (www.kiva.org). This is a website that allows anybody to make a tiny loan to somebody who really needs money to start up some kind of business or other life-sustaining project. Excellent idea, I think I can do this. My felt can wait.

- Bunny

My friend Teacup recommended this video to us and we all thought it was an excellent presentation. It’s a Creative Commons (3.0) video so I decided to post it in the Pinky Presents area. I hope lots of people watch it. If you find yourself moved by the analysis there’s an excellent website at www.storyofstuff.com with a ton more great resources - an excellent blog (by Annie Leonard), an extensive NGO list, reading list, organizing materials, etc.

~ Bunny

Last Friday I mentioned that we have been receiving e-mails from some people in Europe saying that they can no longer access our What’s Wrong with GMOs? episode at YouTube. Well, the story checks out: visiting the YouTube site via an anonymous European proxy server returns the message ‘video not available’ if you try to access the GMO video. Okay. But looking into the matter I’m discovering that there’s actually all kinds of weird things going on at YouTube.

For example: If you do a YouTube search for ‘GMO’, our What’s Wrong with GMOs? video - although being the most popular video on the subject by far - is buried way down in page 3 results, right next to all the other videos nobody ever watches. Our Islands at Risk: Genetic Engineering in Hawaii video is also receiving the same treatment (search: “GMO taro”).

Some of our YouTube subscribers have e-mailed us asking whey they’ve been ‘unsubscribed’ from our YouTube channel. Others have been asking us if we’ve been deleting their comments (we never delete comments).

Strangely enough, if you do a search for “Iraq War Illegal”, our The Iraq War: Legal or Illegal? video still pops in at number 1 (1 million+ views). Our Vietnam War video comes in on the first page of returns, as does our illegal immigration video. So why is our GMO episode (only ~40,000 views) being suppressed in Europe? Is it related to the pressure the U.S. is exerting on European countries to accept GMO? I don’t know.

As you can imagine it’s going to be very difficult to find out what exactly is going on at YouTube/Google. Censoring a nobody organization like The Pinky Show is easy - we’re not the New York Times and don’t have a small army of researchers or lawyers to look into this.

Bunny