Holy Thursday AIDS action: This afternoon some Clark and St Michael’s students went to the local office of Abbott Laboratories dressed up as bunnies and carrying 4,000 black plastic eggs. They delivered 300 letters asking Abbott to make one of their AIDS drugs available to all of the developing world, as they’ve done in South Africa. An Abbott guy gave them the name of someone they can discuss the issue with, so the demo had a happy ending.
I made a short movie of the events (WMV, 1.9MB).
Update: NECN video clip of the event. I like how the anchor says they were “rotten” eggs, then Andy Lacombe clarifies that they were plastic. There’s no way there were 8,000, though.
Wikipedia: I should point out that learning there was an entry on Stale Urine was a complete surprise. And it’s over a year old!
Site of the Day: Mark Dixon’s Wal*Mart piece was the “Site of the Day” at an Irish ISP. Got a few hundred hits from that.
Darfur on Worcester TV: Two pieces on Darfur are coming up on the mighty WCCA, cable channel 13 in Worcester.
This weekend’s edition of “Community Vision” news features a brief piece about the March 29 Darfur civil disobedience. Saturday, April 15 at 1am, 9:30am, 5pm, and 9pm. Sunday, April 16 at 3:30am, 9:30am, 5pm and 11:30pm. Monday, April 16 at 11am and 9:30pm.
You can also watch me pretend to know something about Darfur on “Flipside.” Monday, April 17 at 7:30pm. Tuesday, April 18 at 11am. Wednesday, April 19 at 9:30pm. Thursday, April 20 at 1:30pm. Pre-empted. Maybe next week.
If you want to watch the internet stream, your best bet is to point your video player at
http://www.wccatv.com:8010/;stream.nsv
On Windows, try Winamp. On GNU/Linux, try VLC.
The Non-violent Passion: In his essay on “The Passion of the Christ” (PDF), Father Charlie McCarthy calls Mel Gibson’s film “the single finest cinematic representation of the nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of nonviolent love”:
It has become a cliché of critics of The Passion of The Christ to say, “The film’s violence is over the top.†It might be “over the top†for those who prefer their wars, abortions and capital punishment executions to be kept out of sight or at least at a tastefully abstract distance. But for those who want to know conceptually and emotionally what real violence against a human being is and why Jesus rejects it as the Father’s Will, this film is a significant step on the road of conscientization—on the road that leads from a destructively “naïve awareness†of a socially imposed consciousness to a “critical awareness†that gives birth to the imperative of nonviolent love in a transformed conscience.
Errol Morris: in the latest Believer:
Take historial analogies. I believe that historical analogies are always wrong. This is a long discussion, but to me, the most dangerous thing about Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler at Munich is not the fact that Munich happened and it led to further Nazi aggression and so on and so forth, but that the example of Munich has been used to support thousands upon thousands of bad policies and inappropriate decisions.