MEGAPOST – 1960s McDonald’s Commercials

DJ Academe is amused.

“Weird” Al Yankovic – Amish Paradise (1996)

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis – Same Love ft. Mary Lambert (2012)

In support of marriage equality. Follows a gay male couple.

SAME LOVE – MACKLEMORE & RYAN LEWIS (PARADISE FEARS COVER)

Lyrics from Rap Genius:

[Verse 1: Macklemore]
When I was in the 3rd grade
I thought that I was gay
Cause I could draw, my uncle was
And I kept my room straight
I told my mom, tears rushing down my face
She’s like, “Ben you’ve loved girls since before pre-K”
Trippin’, yeah, I guess she had a point, didn’t she
A bunch of stereotypes all in my head
I remember doing the math like
“Yeah, I’m good a little league”
A pre-conceived idea of what it all meant
For those that like the same sex had the characteristics
The right-wing conservatives think its a decision
And you can be cured with some treatment and religion
Man-made, rewiring of a pre-disposition
Playing God
Ahh nah, here we go
America the brave
Still fears what we don’t know
And God loves all his children it’s somehow forgotten
But we paraphrase a book written
3,500 years ago
I don’t know

[Hook: Mary Lambert]
And I can’t change
Even if I tried
Even if I wanted to
And I can’t change
Even if I tried
Even if I wanted to
My love, my love, my love
She keeps me warm [x4]

[Verse 2: Macklemore]
If I was gay
I would think hip-hop hates me
Have you read the YouTube comments lately
“Man that’s gay”
Gets dropped on the daily
We’ve become so numb to what we’re sayin’
Our culture founded from oppression
Yeah, we don’t have acceptance for ‘em
Call each other faggots
Behind the keys of a message board
A word rooted in hate
Yet our genre still ignores it
Gay is synonymous with the lesser
It’s the same hate that’s caused wars from religion
Gender to skin color
Complexion of your pigment
The same fight that lead people to walk-outs and sit-ins
Human rights for everybody
There is no difference
Live on! And be yourself!
When I was in church
They taught me something else
If you preach hate at the service
Those words aren’t anointed
And that Holy Water
That you soak in
Is then poisoned
When everyone else
Is more comfortable
Remaining voiceless
Rather than fighting for humans
That have had their rights stolen
I might not be the same
But that’s not important
No freedom ’til we’re equal
Damn right I support it
[Trombone]
I don’t know

[Hook: Mary Lambert]

[Verse 3: Macklemore]
We press play
Don’t press pause
Progress, march on!
With a veil over our eyes
We turn our back on the cause
‘Till the day
That my uncles can be united by law
Kids are walkin’ around the hallway
Plagued by pain in their heart
A world so hateful
Some would rather die
Than be who they are
And a certificate on paper
Isn’t gonna solve it all
But it’s a damn good place to start
No law’s gonna change us
We have to change us
Whatever god you believe in
We come from the same one
Strip away the fear
Underneath it’s all the same love
About time that we raised up

[Hook: Mary Lambert]

[Outro: Mary Lambert]
Love is patient, love is kind
Love is patient (not cryin’ on Sundays)
Love is kind (not crying on Sundays) [x5]

Explaining China’s Communist Party

Published on Nov 7, 2012 by AlJazeeraEnglish
The Communist Party Congress is a gathering of China’s most powerful people. One of the key tasks is to announce the Party’s new leadership line-up.

Al Jazeera’s Gerald Tan looks at the structure behind the highly choreographed Congress.

Peru’s forcibly sterilised seek justice

Published on Mar 10, 2012 by AlJazeeraEnglish
After years of denying any wrongdoing, Peru has reopened investigation into forcible sterilisation of women, what human rights groups say was a crime against humanity.

During the 1990s, more than 300,000 women were pressured into being sterilised by the government.

Doctors and nurses under Alberto Fujimori’s administration, between 1996 and 2000, were assigned monthly quotas and given bonuses based on the number of sterilisations they performed.

Al Jazeera’s Latin America Editor Lucia Newman reports from Anta on the women’s quest for justice.

The Impact of India’s Caste System on Women – Half the Sky

Published on Sep 18, 2012 by IndependentLens

Urmi Basu, the founder of New Light, explains to America Ferrera the caste system in India and how women end up in prostitution.

Perversion for Profit (1965) and Printed Poison – Citizens for Decent Literature

Perversion for Profit is a 1965 propaganda film financed by Charles Keating and narrated by George Putnam. A vehement diatribe against pornography, the film attempts to link explicit portrayals of human sexuality to the subversion of American civilization, and briefly draws a parallel between pornography and the Communist conspiracy. The film is in the public domain, and it has become a popular download from the Prelinger Archives. Perversion for Profit illustrates its claims with still images taken from various soft core pornography magazines of the period, though with some portions of human anatomy obscured by colored rectangles.

To bolster his position, Putnam makes several references to “Dr. Sorokin, the renowned Harvard sociologist”. This individual is Pitirim Sorokin, a Russian-American who founded Harvard’s Sociology department and served as the American Sociological Association’s 55th president.

In an article discussing the Prelinger Archives for the San Francisco Chronicle, Peter L. Stein observes that the film has gained a different sort of utility than its producers intended: …as the parade of girlie magazine covers, men’s physique pictorials and campy S&M leaflets continues, the film betrays a kind of prurience the filmmakers could hardly have intended. What results is a remarkable visual record of midcentury underground literature and sexual appetites, and a gloss on the values of the society that condemned them.

At the time the Chronicle article was written, Perversion was the Archive’s second most popular download, superseded only by Duck and Cover. Ephemeral film scholar Rick Prelinger, founder of the Archive, views the popularity of such films as a sign the “unofficial evidence of everyday life” has become more interesting than “‘official’ documents from Washington or New York”.

In 2004, a Prelinger Archive user going by the pseudonym “Trafalgar” produced a remix, in which short clips from the film are rearranged to make a pro-pornography advocacy video. Trafalgar’s remix, entitled Come Join the Fun!, is available from the Internet Archive’s open-source movie collection. The electronica band 3kStatic sampled audio from the original Perversion film for the title track of their 2005 album Perversion: for Profit.

Printed Poison – Citizens for Decent Literature

the “infection” of “so-called” nudist mags in a community and “abnormal perversions”

Lil Wayne – How To Love (2011)

Wikipedia – How To Love

The video first shows a young woman deciding to not get an abortion and running out of the hospital. Her child is born a girl and lives through tough times with her single mother, due to her father being in jail. When the girl is an adolescent, her mother’s boyfriend molests her. When she becomes a teenager, she is promiscuous. When she became an adult, she has two children and soon becomes a stripper. A customer from the strip club pays her to have sex with him and she is diagnosed with HIV. She runs out of the hospital, like her mother at the beginning of the video. The music video then rewinds and shows a different life that the girl could have lived. Her mother would move into her own mother’s house and even marry a better man, with her little daughter as flower girl. In the end, the daughter grows up to be smarter and more mature, and graduates from high school, making her mother and grandmother proud. When she becomes an adult, she is in the same hospital again awaiting a test result and the doctor tells her she is pregnant, she is happy and hugs her mother, thanking her for teaching her “how to love.”

MEGAPOST: 1940s-1950s Sex Education

Disney ’46 The Story of Menstruation

The Story of Menstruation is a 1946 10-minute animated film produced by Walt Disney Productions in 1946.
It was commissioned by the International Cello-Cotton Company (now Kimberly-Clark) and was shown to approximately 105 million American students in health education classes.

It was one of the first commercially sponsored films to be distributed to high schools. It was distributed with a booklet for teachers and students called Very Personally Yours that featured advertising of the Kotex brand of products, and discouraged the use of tampons, where the market was dominated by the Tampax brand of rivals Procter & Gamble.

The Story of Menstruation is believed to be the first film to use the word vagina in its screenplay. Neither sexuality nor reproduction is mentioned in the film, and an emphasis on sanitation makes it, as Disney historian Jim Korkis has suggested: “a hygienic crisis rather than a maturation event.”

Day In The Life Of A 1950′s Small Town

A 1952 documentary showing small town 50′s America from morning to evening. Many kinds of people doing many kinds of work, and then bowling. 1952, B/W.

US Communities Rally For High School Football

Football – the American form of the sport – is an iconic part of American high school life, especially in small towns, like Macomb, Illinois, and everyone gets involved. Selah Hennessy report from Macomb, Illinois.

Russia struggles with high teenage suicide rates

Feb 9, 2012

Russia has one of the highest teen suicide rates in the world. The official figure is three times higher than the global average, but some say the real picture may be worse.

Al Jazeera’s Neave Barker travelled to Saint Petersburg

Social Class in America (1957)

If this film was designed to stimulate thought, it succeeds. We follow the lives of three small town high school buddies; “Gil Ames” who is rich and happy; “Dave Benton” who is poor and doomed; and “Ted Eastwood,” who is middle class and doomed. Gil is sent to an Ivy League school (where he meets “men of his own kind”), returns home wearing a bow tie, and takes over his father’s very profitable business. Dave gets married, has lots of kids, and winds up working in a gas station. Ted wants to be an artist, but he falls in love with “Mary” and becomes a white collar bookkeeper.

Mary, however, wants a man with a bigger bank account, so she dumps Ted, who then decides to move to Manhattan and “make something” of himself. After many years of hard work as an advertising artist and art director, Ted lands a painfully dull white collar job in an advertising agency and gets to play golf with rich men. This is “vertical mobility,” the narrator explains, “particularly characteristic of the United States.” Ted returns home wearing a snappy hat, but Mary has married Gil, and both really don’t want anything to do with him.

This film was produced to explain basic concepts of sociology, but ends up presenting a rather dark view of social class and mobility in America.

Producer: Knickerbocker Productions
Sponsor: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc.

South Korea’s exam suicides

Nov 10, 2011

In South Korea, an 18 year old has committed suicide in the city of Daejeon – just hours before he was due to take a university entrance exam.

Teen suicide rates have risen by more than a third in the last decade – and the intense pressure to succeed academically is often the cause.

Al Jazeera’s Harry Fawcett reports from Seoul.

I got you fired so you could be my wife (1956)

“Just about an hour ago I got you fired.”
“Well what did you do that for?”
“I figured being my wife would take up all of your time.”

From the film Indestructible Man, a hilariously outdated clip that shows just how much our values have changed.