I’ve never ridden in a Portland CM, but have enjoyed many PDX group rides in the past year. I used to ride in the NYC CM when we were 1500+ strong, would ride on the highway, etc. and not a single arrest. Sometimes the police on scooters would help us block traffic. It was awesome! It was fun! There were kids! Costumes!

The heavy-handedness came during the RNC in 2004, when everyone was dodging police and it got really scary. It folded into the NYC Police “We Got This (Police State)!” campaign. Consequent rides became us vs. the police and this ended up attracting a lot of troublemakers. The ride started eating itself (some might argue by the design of heavy handed policing) and the radical elements really took over. It was all just sheer adrenaline rush, and I don’t think we convinced anyone that bikes were the better form of transportation. That’s when I decided I was over CM. Antagonizing pedestrians, bus riders, etc. was against the guiding principles I enjoyed earlier in the CM movement.

Moving to Portland, the fun rides here are WAY more fun and WAY more effective than any CM I’ve ever been on. Portand *has* reached a critical mass, certainly not an *ideal* mass, but we are at the point where things are turning in our direction. Traffic is calmed, a ton of commuters are using bicycles, bike infrastructure is constantly developed, we have a zoobomb monument… yet still, plenty of work to do! I think if other cities could lead their CM rides like a pedalpalooza ride, they’d be much more effective.

Well done, Portland!

Joe Biel produced a video about PDX critical mass, aptly titled ‘AfterMass: Bicycling in a Post-Revolutionary Portland’

I grew tired of having to fire up Internet Explorer each time I wanted to check on someone currently at Graterford.  The  PA DOC site shrugs off the thought of compatibility with non-IE browsers.  Not surprising from an institution as unjust, overcrowded, and corrupt as Graterford prison.

Anyway, here’s a link I found that worked in Firefox: PA DOC Inmate Locator.  If you know anyone at Grateford, I’d enjoy hearing from you.

This is classic. Deny constitutional rights to assemble, then crack down with heavy handed police tactics. The result? We’re all distracted from the protest issues (poverty, climate change, militarism) and instead it’s us vs. the police. Then the footage cut for live broadcast makes everyone look crazy. It is not crazy to fight for things you care about, particularly if you have facts and evidence to back it up. Don’t be distracted! This is about economic justice!

From the “When Corporations Go To Far” file:

Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced an update to Music Rules!, its flagship “curriculum” for teaching copyright law to schoolkids. We wrote about Music Rules! and similar industry propaganda efforts in May, outlining some of their falsehoods and biases. For instance, the RIAA tells kids, “Never copy someone else’s creative work without permission from the copyright holder” — omitting the important right to make creative fair use of existing content. It also coins a  misleading term, “songlifting,” which the curriculum says is “just as bad as shoplifting”. The updated curriculum goes even further and asks kids to contact their local media and act as the RIAA’s own unpaid public relations staff.

via Electronic Frontier Foundation

This might be the amp-up jam of this Fall.

(experimenting with blip.fm’s audio player)