connecting*the*dots

Cara Michele Forrest is one of the good people, fighting the good fight. She’s a tireless advocate for the rights of homeless people in Greensboro, NC.

When I say tireless, I’m not using empty rhetoric. Below is a shot of her in front of the NightWatch truck that hits the back streets of Greensboro each and every Friday night, usually getting her — the mother of teenagers — home well after 2am.

She’s a mixture of spunk, sass, righteousness and southern momma to boot. It’s hard to imagine anyone not appreciating her take no prisoners attitude when it comes to serving the needy in our community.

Well, don’t look now, but it’s starting to look like she’s catching some blowback for her no nonsense approach to advocacy.

It’s not coming from her friends on the street.

And it’s not coming from Greensboro residents or businesses who more often than not have adverse relationships with the homeless in town.

The unfortunate element of this story is that the flak she’s beginning to receive is from players within the very same agencies that she works with on a daily basis, in the common goal of eliminating homelessness in Greensboro and Guilford County proper.

Who Is Cara Michele Forrest?

There are a bunch of issues at play here and being that Michele is too good of a soul to air some of the details — she’s too humble to frame the issues in the context of her daily life on the off-chance of making it about her rather than the work she’s doing — I’m going to play advocate for her position.

If you have any issues with this post, it’s my thinking, reasoning and positioning.

Mine and mine alone.

Let me start off by stating that Michele isn’t a career advocate — she doesn’t take a salary to help people; she helps people because it’s a part of her calling.

It’s how she walks that fine and narrow line with Jesus.

So when push comes to shove, Michele not only has zero reasons to back away from doing everything she can to serve her community, but she refuses to bow to situations that might lead her off that narrow path.

Basically, she’s the type of person that gives Christianity a good name.

I bring this up to distinguish Michele’s character and her purpose in life. It’s what makes her such an amazing advocate. She doesn’t serve the numbers of homeless folk in town; she serves her friends in need.

She listens.

So when she tries to advance the notion that there are homeless people that can and should represent their own needs during Task Force conversations — meetings that eventually craft an approach to helping the homeless — and it falls on deaf ears, she feels wounded.

Or the time Michele worked out a program with the Greensboro Public Library to provide library cards to the homeless (usually reserved for people with proof of residency in Greensboro), but the providers in town failed to see the importance of the program and wouldn’t agree to vouch for the people they serve.

To a soul like Michele, it’s just another example of talking loud and doing nothing.

The Bottom Line

Over the last month or so, Michele has become increasingly upset with the bureaucratic machinations of the homeless industry that she finds herself dealing with on a daily basis.

She refuses to give me details regarding most of her problems — being the narrow path, tightrope walker that she is — but I know she feels that there might be improprieties in play with the operations of the Homeless Prevention Coalition of Guilford County.

A few days ago, she openly questioned an element of a certain initiative — something innocuous like the non-announcement of its launch date — but after following up internally and getting an answer she retracted the post.

Maybe she should’ve posted an update to the post with the newly found information, but she killed it instead, so all parties involved should’ve been satisfied.

Not quite.

The HPCGC now wants her blog, Chosen Fast, de-linked from their member page, stating:

“The HPCGC website is not the place to share your personal opinions and thoughts, particularly ones that are contrary to the success of the Coalition. No one’s trying to stop your advocacy, Michele, but you need to use the proper channels.”

If the HPCGC considers a link to a blog “sharing personal opinions and thoughts” they’re sitting a bit too close to their monitors.

What their position says to me is that they’re extremely controlling with their organization, and particularly inept regarding the role of the internet and their objectives in the 21st century.

More precisely stated; they value appearance over substance.

Sounds like some marketing and PR consultants have made a buck or two over there.

Here’s a little insight of my own (for what its worth):

You don’t gain trust and credibility with your clients, customers, constituents or neighbors by coming off overly slick, rounded and without flaws; you gain such respect by delivering for them while allowing yourself to be viewed as a human being.

Try to name one organization on this planet that isn’t made up of the blood, sweat and tears of human beings.

You can’t.

So why represent yourself or your organization otherwise?

I’m sure the people at HPCGC think they’re doing “the right thing,” but this is how bureaucrats stomp the passion out of people trying to make a positive difference in the world — people who are more concerned with the well-being of the people they serve than becoming a sycophant to folks who are primarily concerned with their job security.

It’s not right and it’s not fair, to both Cara Michele and her homeless friends.

And the bottom line is that it’s just not good business.

Someone needs to stick to geek publishing.

Dear Forward-Thinking Suits,

Thanks so much for pulling all of the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert clips off of YouTube. You’ve now rendered a good number of my posts useless — posts that were marketing your shows for free. That’s right, you had thousands of fans, like me, pointing to and contextualizing clips from their blogs, generating millions of page views and legions of new viewers and you killed it because they weren’t your page views.

So dumb.

Let me ask you people a simple question: How much money do you pump into your marketing department annually? I mean, what’s your budget for marketing executives, their minions and external network marketing? Can’t you recognize that whatever percentage you had set aside for TDS and TCS brand awareness (not specific show promos, just awareness campaigns) was becoming a waste of money with the YouTube fans doing our thing? We were doing your jobs for free and doing it better than you ever could have done it yourself!

Come to think of it, maybe you did understand that angle before acting…

See, the way that I view this is that from an organizational standpoint, this type of viral marketing is a perfect opportunity to cut back on traditional marketing budgets and let the web do what the web does. But then again, organizations are made up of people and people need to provide value in order to get paid by the organization.

V.P. Johnson can’t keep that corner office if he has legions of fans doing his work for him at a price that puts him out on the street. So build that wall! Keep them out of our stuff! Send them back to Mexico… er… hm.

Congratulations, again, Comedy Central executives. You’ve proven yourself to be no more forward-thinking than this administration that your talent rails on each week. Someday, your network bosses will understand what this move did to your fan-base, but probably not until a competitor network — one that won’t collude with the rest of the big boys — embraces the web and the people that put food on your plates.

Colbert and Stewart are still my boys, but my passion for your product has dropped immeasurably.

And that’s The Word.

UPDATE: Mark Glaser (MediaShift) updated his open letter to Stephen Colbert with a report that lawyers from Comedy Central are cherry-picking the clips they want taken down from YouTube, possibly in a hardball negotiating move to tweak Google and their new acquisition.

So not all clips have come down. That’s good news. How Comedy Central decides to proceed from here, though, is key.

If they want to negotiate the creation of a channel on YouTube for CC distributed shows and all discrete segments of shows, that move will serve the desires of many CC fans, especially bloggers. The amount of ad revenue they’ll make on viral replays at this point in time pales in comparison to advertising revenue from the TV broadcast itself, but tacking on an ad to the end of a video (as Revver has done with zeFrank) works well for all parties involved.

This could work out for everyone if CC doesn’t get greedy and:

• attempt to add commercials within segments and shows, which are essentially already commercials (running across YouTube and the decentralized web) for their regularly scheduled programs on TV
• police people who upload their own segment edits, instead of chalking up the “lost revenue” as a marketing expenditure.

If Comedy Central can avoid those old media trappings, they just might come out of this as new media players.

Apologize and move on, Felix — you’re just digging yourself a deeper hole with this kind of a stunt.

CounterCurrents
Why Must The Right Wing Sound So Brutally Stupid?

[…]

Of course, Condi was keeping her eyes on the big picture, as she tends to do, the picture as viewed from high above the earth where human beings become unseen bacilli in a vast fabric of coastlines and geometric patterns, not close-up where you can distinguish blood-spattered ruins and childrens’ limbs snapped like broken bird wings.

[…]

Tom Toles sums up my perspective on the future effects of this war in a single frame:

I hearby declare you… a bunch of dead plants.

————

Ed Cone, News & Record, 10/9/05
Council members speak on Truth and Reconciliation hearings

[…]

Tom Phillips did not consider attending the hearings. “My attending would not matter,” he said. He will read the report. “If we as a council think it is worthwhile, we’ll consider it. If I disagree with the final conclusions, I’ll be called names. They say we’re racists — when are people going to ask black council members why they always vote together?” He said Nelson Johnson’s involvement compromised the project (a danger I pointed to as early as 2003); that he understood that the commission was independent of Johnson; and that he wanted to know where the money Johnson raised for the project had gone.

[…]

To be fair to Tom Phillips, these quotes were from last year, only a handful of months following the city council’s vote to not endorse the investigation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

I mean, who was the idiot that placed upstanding, community politicians in a position to stand up and be counted on such an important issue to the community?

Let me step back for a moment…

Who am I to argue with another person’s sense of duty to community? I mean, the 6 of 9 members that voted against endorsing the TRC must have been serving the perspective of their immediate neighbors, right?

You know, I’m betting that Phillips has taken the time since last October to communicate to his constituency the importance of this moment in Greensboro’s continued attempts to heal open wounds and move forward as one community. If not, well, I’m positive that time has provided him with a stronger, more personal perspective on the issues that face this community-at-large.

So let’s fast-forward from 7.5 months ago to yesterday, the day following the culmination of the 2 year-long TRC investigation. Tom Phillips was once again contacted by local media, this time with an opportunity to address the culmination of the commission’s investigation and their final report.

Frank Mickens, WFMY News 2, 5/26/06
City Council Members Respond To Truth And Reconciliation Commission Report

Greensboro, NC — An independent panel says the the city of Greensboro needs to make up for mistakes it made after the Klan-Nazi shootings.

The commission’s report says city police didn’t do its job to protect the five union protesters who were shot and killed by a group of klansmen and Nazis. And it says city eroded race relations and the public trust by establishing curfews in Morningside Homes and distancing itself from what happened.

The commission wants the city to apologize. But council members don’t agree that’s a good idea. Council member Tom Phillips appeared indifferent to the report. Reached by phone he said quote, ” I could care less what they report has to say. At some point I plant to take a look at it.”

[…]

Time can erode the profiled face of a mountain, but not the position of this man.

What a rock.

UPDATE: According to Tom, the context of Tom’s quote wasn’t provided by the WFMY reporter:

Frank Mickens didn’t quite tell the whole story. I was sitting on my balcony looking at the ocean when Frank called on my cell phone (I’m changing my number). I told him I was on vacation and I couldn’t care less…….. I taken my last call from Mr. Mickens

Brush clearing, vacationing politicians everywhere feel you, Tom.

UPDATE II: Fox News reports Toms reaction when asked about a city/GPD apology for not protecting permit holders on 11/3:

Council member Tom Phillips, who said he has read most of the executive summary, said he doesn’t support an apology.

“We’ve got more important things to do,” he said.

UPDATE III: Ed Cone reports that Tom Phillips won’t come to a city council discussion in July regarding the TRC report. Tom’s words:

Ed, I recommended that council members review the recommendations in the report and if they believed that any on them should be adopted, they should bring them up at a council meeting where they can be discussed and voted up or down. I know how this group discussion will turn out and I don’t have the time or desire for another lecture from Goldie Wells. Tom

The TRC report is the culmination of a two-year process, attempting to address the ongoing issues stemming from 11/3/79 — issues that effect this community, both as a whole and especially specific communities divided along lines of class and race. Find tthe time, Tom, and be a good representative of the entire Greensboro community and join the discussion.

UPDATE IV: Tom’s foot-in-mouth syndrome continues:

“It occurs to me that we may not be going back far enough in this whole process of finding the root causes of what happened that day.�

“The reason the CWP was able to establish itself was because they were trying to improve working conditions and pay at local mills. A lot of people were getting very rich off the labor of the poor and there were those who saw that as a real injustice. If those mills had been treating their employees right, then the CWP wouldn’t have formed. Without the CWP, it is very likely that confrontation would never have happened. So if apologies are due, maybe the first ones should come from the mill owners and their descendents. If reparations are due, surely there are some trust funds around that could be tapped for that purpose.�

That last line is a killer of good faith and credibility.

Tom Phillips would never offer a serious analysis of the times — the stage of Greensboro’s labor situation and the workings of the CWP — as that would validate the CWP beyond a group of extremist rebel-rousers. Instead, he offers the analysis as a lede to dig a local, public figure (Ed Cone, related to the ownership of Cone Mills), alluding to Ed’s suggestion of an alterior route of apology to jumpstart the reconciliation process.

Congrats, Tom, you continue to do the city proud.

Uncle Cliffy… couldn’t you have just waited a month or so?

Nets’ Robinson suspended for violating drug policy

Another violation of the NBA’s drug policy will prevent Clifford Robinson from playing in the remainder of the New Jersey Nets’ playoff series against the Miami Heat.

The league announced on Friday that the veteran forward has been suspended five games for violating the terms of the anti-drug program.

The suspension will begin Friday with Game Three of the Eastern Conference semifinal series between the Nets and Heat. The best-of-seven series is tied at one game apiece.

Robinson was suspended five games for violating the league’s anti-drug policy in February 2005 as a member of the Golden State Warriors. Later in the month, he was traded to the Nets for a pair of second-round picks.

Although he is 39, the 6-10 Robinson remains a solid post defender and still can score a bit.

The Nets need all the help they can get in the interior against the Heat, who have Shaquille O’Neal and Alonzo Mourning in the middle and Udonis Haslem at power forward.

In New Jersey’s eight playoff games, Robinson averaged 4.5 points and 3.3 rebounds in 24.8 minutes. He was shooting just 33 percent from the field (13-of-39), including 6-of-19 from 3-point range.

The absence of Robinson should mean more minutes for shooting forward Lamond Murray and power forward John Thomas off the bench.

Robinson started 13 of 80 games this season and averaged 6.9 points and 3.3 rebounds in 23.3 minutes. He shot 43 percent from the field, including 34 percent from the arc.

In his 17-year NBA career, Robinson has played in 1,330 games and averaged more than 14 points and four rebounds. He won the Sixth Man Award in 1993, was an All-Star in 1994 and a member of the All-Defensive Second Team in 2000 and 2002.

Kirk Cameron is a freak. Check out the video from 3min to 4:30min.

Nicholas Carr:
“…The whole reason businesses exist is to control forces that are hard to control.”
(hey Nicholas, try keeping the comment permalinks active so next time I can properly attribute your quote)

Busting out the HOWTO Corporate Blog post over a whole bunch of nothing…

UPDATE: I’m putting where my money where my mouth is and picking up the X-Box 360. I’ve been a PS2 guy forever, with more than 25 games and waiting patiently for the PS3, but you know what? Sony’s DRM / Rootkit stupidity compared to Scoble’s integrity has proved to be the tipping point for me.

And I’m Mac addict! (read = Microsoft hater)

C’mon Locutus, quantify this decision with a corporate metric.

Let’s play a game that I call, “Guess Who’s Masturbating.” Read the following quote and try to guess who wrote it (and don’t cheat).

Quoted three years ago, a week into the invasion of Iraq:

The people of Eastern Europe stared into the abyss of tyrannical evil for decades, and recognizing the Iraqi regime for what it is, they stand with us today. Some people may mock the fact that Poland, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, and other minor countries are part of this coalition — but they remember what life was like without freedom. They remember what it took to climb up from the rubble.

They remember what it was like to hear the words of Vaclav Havel (who would go on to make more than 100 official speeches, with no speechwriters), on his New Years address as first President of the free Czech Republic:

“My people, your government has returned to you.”

Soon, the Iraqi people will hear those words. The sound you hear, Saddam, is the sound of inevitability. It is the sound of your doom.

So what’s your guess? Dick Cheney? Someone else from the PNAC gang? Not even close.

Give up?

I’d like to introduce you to Ben Domenich, the 24 year-old founding father of the RedState blog and freshly hired blogger at the Washington Post.

Only someone this young and naive could actually believe the bullshit he espouses as fact. In this particular case, Eastern Europe does what they’re told, or maybe he missed the memo on the New World Order?

While I’m a huge proponent of citizen media, and completely support young Ben’s right to publish his perspective, his track record is obviously partisan, and at times, skirting an extreme position. What is WaPo thinking? Are they trying to create a loose cannon, ideological microcosm of the political blogosphere within their walled garden?

Media Matters’ David Brock seems to think so.

The thing that WaPo doesn’t get is that by hiring Ben Domenich, they’ve taken away his blogging ID; both his credentials and his independence. In their haste to capitalize on his partisan readership in this 2.0 world, they haven’t just lowered the bar — they’ve replaced it with a hula-hoop.

Aloha, WaPo.

Fresh on the heels of their first campaign blunder, AT&T dives right back in and makes the exact same mistake:

Unbelievable.

Remember the SNL clip, “Lazy Sunday,” where two dudes from the Long Island comedy troop Lonely Island hit the streets and blew up a hip-hop trip to go see The Chronic of Narnia?

I posted about it two months ago with a link to the youtube.com hosted clip, and actually thanked NBC and SNL for finding local talent and participating in the share and share alike culture of Web 2.0. Apparently, NBC really doesn’t get it:

The New York Times
A Video Clip Goes Viral, and a TV Network Wants to Control It

When a video clip goes “viral,” spreading across the Web at lightning speed, it can help rocket its creators to stardom. Alas, the clip can also generate work for corporate lawyers.

As anyone with an Internet connection and a love of cupcakes can tell you, “Lazy Sunday” is a tongue-in-cheek rap video starring Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg of “Saturday Night Live.” NBC first broadcast the video, a two-and-a-half-minute paean to New York’s Magnolia Bakery, Google Maps and C. S. Lewis, on Dec. 17.

Fans immediately began putting copies of the video online. On one free video-sharing site, YouTube (www.youtube.com), it was watched a total of five million times . NBC soon made the video available as a free download from the Apple iTunes Music Store.

Julie Supan, senior director of marketing for YouTube, said she contacted NBC Universal about working out a deal to feature NBC clips, including “Lazy Sunday,” on the site. NBC Universal responded early this month with a notice asking YouTube to remove about 500 clips of NBC material from its site or face legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. YouTube complied last week. “Lazy Sunday” is still available for free viewing on NBC’s Web site, and costs $1.99 on iTunes.

Julie Summersgill, a spokeswoman for NBC Universal, said the company meant no ill will toward fan sites but wanted to protect its copyrights. “We’re taking a long and careful look at how to protect our content,” she said.

YouTube and others in the new wave of video-sharing sites have so far managed to avoid major legal problems even though they often carry copyrighted material without permission.

“This is an example of the copyright troubles that are waiting for YouTube, Google Video and all the other video hosting services that rely on user-posted content,” said Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group.

Several online commentators noted that NBC’s response to YouTube, while legally justified, may have been short-sighted. The online popularity of “Lazy Sunday” has been credited with reviving interest in “Saturday Night Live” at a time when it is in need of some buzz.

Ms. Supan said VH1 and other television and movie producers were increasingly putting their own clips, trailers and music videos on YouTube in hopes of jump-starting their own viral phenomena.

“We got e-mails from college students, and a lot of them said it’s the ‘Lazy Sunday’ clip that turned them on to potentially watching ‘S.N.L.’ again,” she said.

Exactly. I hadn’t watched SNL in years and that skit actually brought my eyeballs back to NBC. How much profit is enough? Don’t they realize that the viewers who watched the skit the night it aired represented the cut-off point of ROI before the blogosphere, Kazaa, etc. started passing it around? For the last two months, they’ve received extra eyeballs because of the video-sharing, which has put money in their pockets directly or indirectly. This is the thanks we get?

Dumb… like a stump. Instead of busting out the lawyers, why not take these lemons and make some lemonade. Here’s an idea for all of you suits in NBC, CBS, ABC, etc. land:

• Work out a deal with YouTube, Google and whomever else so that you receive a fair cut of the ad revenue from any page with your copyrighted content being displayed
• In turn, YouTube, Google, etc. can evolve their upload interfaces to include a “channel” option
• If I upload something taken from, say, NBC, I simply choose “NBC” in a pulldown menu and upload the video
• Once verified as an NBC property — post-upload — the *additional revenue* of click-through ads goes straight into NBC’s pocket

Multiply this scenario by the potential number of unbundled clips, contributing users and video services over a continuum of expanding users and I think you just might be able to afford that ski trip to Aspen this year.

Asshats.

UPDATE: A Boing Boing reader tells the following story:

YouTube user “aretired” posted a clip from Thursday’s CBS Evening News showcasing Jason McElwain, the autistic highschool basketball player who scored 6-3 pointers in the final four minutes of the game. The video clip shot up to #15 in alltime viewings on YouTube with 1.5 million hits in just three days — then, it was suddenly and inexplicably pulled.

User “aretired” reposted the clip and was again pulled within a day, still no explanations.

CBS sent DMCA complaints for not just that McElwain clip, but all 11 of the user’s other CBS-related clips that had up till now gone fairly unnoticed, by anyone. And, despite their huffing and puffing and pulling over a 2-minute feel-good piece of the year, you can still catch your fill of Oprah, Letterman, Degeneres, Dr. Phil and other CBS content at YouTube.

Do they want us to hate them?

Ann Coulter is one of the most disgusting human beings currently making the pundit rounds. She’s so self-serving; whenever she’s interviewed you can actually hear her mind at work, slobbering over the next opportunity to cash in on this divided state we call America.

Check out the video and story of her disparaging Pat Tillman, a fallen American hero, whose only crime was to apparently have enjoyed the work of Noam Chomsky.

Her fan base is a representative petri dish of why this country is so screwed up.

(via crooksandliars.com)