Monkeys are poll issue in Himachal

The issues are simple: Are monkeys friends or foes? Are they not an invasive pest species? Why has the state government not framed a long-term policy to control the menace so far?

‘Every election brings a ray of hope (to get a policy to tackle the monkey menace), but there is a disappointment in the end,’ said Tula Ram Negi, a farmer in a village on the outskirts of the state capital Shimla.

‘From dawn to dusk, children and women armed with sticks remain on vigil to protect their crops from these intruders who don’t let go of any opportunity of causing immense damage,’ Negi told IANS.

Another farmer, Naib Singh Thakur of Kandaghat in Solan district, said they were happy when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government came to power in the state because they thought it would deal with the issue.

‘But it has also failed to take any effective measures to tackle this menace. Now, we (the villagers) have made up our mind to tell any visiting politician: Want votes? Start scientific culling of monkeys,’ he said.

Kindra (which is Sanskrit for toy) has produced the most faboulous depiction of the Lord Hanuman. Sadly tied into the myth of Hanuman as Ramas servant the figure stands at only six inches tall. But is now mandatory in all Monkee hoseholds. This thing is freakin’ amazing and even comes with a minature mountain to help illustrate part of our honored Gods story. We have just learned of this amazing creation but apparently it came out over a yer ago, sdo you should buy one quick!

The Hanuman figure is very unique, the monkey warrior stands six inches tall (shorter than the Rama figure), he would be a taller if not for his posed legs.  He’s bare-chested with loose white short pants and bands around his forearms and lower legs. Around his neck is a golden collar, and on his forehead is the red mark of Vishnu. Finally, a long curved tail extending from his lower back.

 

"Modern Primitives": The Accelerating Collision of Past and Future in the Postmodern Era

The idea of the "primitive" is of course one from anthropology’s abandoned socioevolutionary past. While invented to simply function as a descriptive for temporal phases, it inevitably also functioned as an evaluative term, suggesting that those societies to which it was applied were inferior in terms of literacy, knowledge, technology, social organization, or moral judgement – in a word, they lacked ‘civilization.’ The notion was of course inescapably ethnocentric, since it assumed that all societies on the planet were on an undeviating climb toward the standards of Western culture with regards to religion (monotheism), marriage practices (monogramy), economics (the free market), governance (representative democracy), etc. The ‘primitive’ was at once reviled and romanticized, especially by Romantic artists fascinated with the taboo and the exotic, and philosophers swayed by the image of the unfettered Noble Savage.

While a more culturally relativist anthropology has sought to cleanse the perjorative ideas associated with ‘primitivism,’ preferring to describe idiographically rather than evolutionarily the less ‘advanced,’ pre-modern, indigenous societies of the planet, the notion of the "primitive" remained a powerful one in Western culture, which internalized representations of "primitives" from both within (the Native Americans) and without (Oceanians, Africans, etc.) To many people within Western civilization’s orbit, (which increasingly encompasses the entire planet), the "primitive" still signifies a premodern, "untainted" alternative to industrialization, capitalism, and the European Enlightenment. It represents a preferred "Golden Age" past, of things left aside in the march of "progress", to which might be juxtaposed a dystopian technological future.

And, then, of course, there is modernity. What it means to be a modern is still being argued about, as well as whether we have left the condition of modernity behind. If anything, modernity was probably the vision that the future would be radically different (and most likely better) than the present. Certainly, in the arts, modernity was associated with Futurism, involving a penchant for action, speed, power, abstraction, and change, as well as other movements in the avant-garde – Surrealism, Dadaism, Expressionism, etc. Modernity basically meant experimentation to many people; a refusal to be fettered by conventions of the past, and a demand to shock the morals and traditions of the bourgeouisie. New territories – the unconscious mind, for example – were being opened to investigation and creation.

Postmodernism, if anything, is in essence a combination of modernity and the premodern – a genre blurring of the abandoned and the untried. In a world where the old (tradition, superstition, folk beliefs, etc.) is increasingly being abandoned, there can be nothing more new and avant-garde then to reintroduce it once more… thus the ironic state of postmodernity. There can be no more postmodern movement than that of the "modern primitives," determined to follow the simultaneous tracks of the past and the future toward their inevitable collision. Having at once embraced a mythical "low-tech" past and a mythical "high-tech" future, the "modern primitives" are preeminent denizens of the postmodern, cyclical-time era…

The "modern primitives" like Stelarc and Fakir Mustafar are perhaps best known for their use of body distortion, modification (elongation, coloration, etc.), and piercing. Many moderns were familiar (from visual anthropology) with the practices found in less ‘civilized’ cultures such as footbinding, elongating the neck or skull, or ritual incision. Body manipulation is not anything alien to modernity, with its use of more antiseptic and clinical plastic surgery, but then neither is tatooing or piercing either. Moderns never gave up the urge to inscribe and mark the body, or to alter and distort its features… indeed, Foucault’s biopolitics suggests that a preeminent feature of modernity was the pursuit of unnattainable somatic norms, especially for women. Still, many people see body marking (tatooing) as transgressive, exotic, and ‘primitive,’ and this is one reason why modern primitivies embrace it as a custom.

What does make the modern primitive movement unusual is its pursuit of sensation. Borrowing from the S & M sexual subculture, the modern primitives suggest that one of the effects of modernization and industrialization has been psychic numbing. People no longer know either authentic pleasure or pain, and have forgotten the curious neurochemical ways in which they are interwoven. Piercing is more than just inscription; piercing of the genitals or other sensitive areas of the body means pain, especially during sexual intercourse… but it is a pain that becomes part of the ecstasy for ModPrims… there is this idea of a knowing through pain which modernity has forgotten.

When Mustafar or Stelarc hang themselves from hooks, or pierce themselves with sharp painful implements, they are only duplicating a practice found all over the world. It is a key ritual for many "primitive" and other societies for the person to go into trance and to demonstrate their "absorbtion" by the divine through the negation of pain and injury. The ModPrims claim that their performances are a pursuit of transcendence, proving the ability of the mind to go beyond the taxings and limitations of the body. Stelarc calls himself a "Cyberhuman," pointing to his belief that the future of human evolution toward a greater interconnection of men and machines will require humankind’s mastery over (rather than suppression of) passion, suffering, and pain.

Futher, within the ModPrim movement, there is this sort of obsession over technological invasion of the body, through prosthetics, genetic modification, implants, and so on. This bodily invasion is at once feared (as a colonization by capital) and desired (by permitting people to directly neurally link into the "consensual hallucination" of Gibson’s Virtual Reality.) The body is seen as information (DNA provides the ‘code’) and its invasion as either ‘scrambling’ (through viruses, cancer, etc.) or ‘purification’ (by removing ‘noise’ or ‘distortion.’) The technological modification of the body is seen as a reworking of the shamanic ‘deconstruction’ of a past era, where the shaman is torn apart by the gods of his tribe, and then his bones and flesh are replaced with quartz or fire or something else…

The limitations of the body need not be obeyed. It can be made to live longer, or be healthier, through artificial organs and nanotech ‘magic bullets.’ It can be made stronger and more dextrous through steroids and enhancing nervous signal transmission. The mind can be extended as well, its memory or perceptions or intelligence increased. The "primitive man’s" desire to imitate and become like his gods can be met. But ModPrims also know that there is the danger of forgetting the body as well – that in cyberspace, people will no longer be "in tune" with their tangible physicality… thus they push for ways in which the "feedback" from the Matrix will be at once tactile and visual…

ModPrims also embrace the rave as a sign of the uniting of past and future. The rave is at once ‘primitive,’ with its gathering of ‘tribes’ of young people for the experience of Levy-Bruhl ‘participation mystique’ through kinetics and MDMA (Ecstasy), and ‘futuristic’ (or modern) with its use of digitally sampled and remixed music, laser and light effects, and multimedia expositions. Ravers at once dress in way that signifies past and future – piercing their ears with computer chips, wearing 70s (or earlier) clothes with futuristic hologram jewelry, combining the fashion of folk and punk. They consider themselves the heirs of the 60s counterculture, and also its antithesis, since they reject its anti-technology, pro-natural, ‘peace and harmony,’ and idealist emphases for a more pragmatist, aggressive, and techno-positive viewpoint… to the raver, whether a drug is synthetic or organic is besides the point.

Besides raves and piercing, ModPrims are perhaps best known for their attempts at juxtaposing magick and science. Publications like Virus 23 juxtapose Crowleyan occultism with chaos theory, Neo-Paganism & Wicca with memetics and information theory, and use of ancient hallucinogens with the latest findings in neuroscience. Shamanism is shown to have a basis in quantum mechanics, and Hermeticism in astrophysical cosmology. Fringe science publications, full of diagrams of Tesla machines, antigravity motors, UFO propulsion systems, free energy devices, perpetual motion machines, and radionic/psychotronic boxes, combine at once the impossible fascinations of past eras with the latest technological principles…

Computer hackers often call themselves "wizards," for good reason. Abstruse computer programs are not all that dissimilar from blasphemous incantations; electrical logic diagrams often look like mystical Tables of Correspondences from olden times; complex systems are inevitably suspect to the interference of unguessable entities variously called "bugs," "glitches," or "gremlins." The technoshaman/computer hacker knows that he is part of an elite whose knowledge is mystifyingly undecipherable to the general public, and that society has placed an almost religious faith in the power of computers to solve the problems of society, from traffic routing and personal communications, to psychiatric diagnosis and aiding athletic performance…

The ModPrims eagerly embrace technoshamans like Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Terrence McKenna, and Jose Arguelles. The I Ching really becomes a computer code, connected to the rhythms of history and the codons of the DNA sequence. The hallucinogenic mushroom really becomes an extraterrestrial colonizing spore, seeking to link human consciousness with its cosmic roots. The use of mystical drugs like LSD really becomes a means to activate normally dormant "circuits" within the "biocomputer" known as the brain, thus making "metaprogramming" possible. Human-animal communication becomes at once a technological duty, and a necessity for realizing the interconnectedness of "Gaia," or the collective identity created by organic life on the planet…

The ModPrims themselves point to the collision of the past and future. Reading McKenna, they point to the cycles of history, and the way in which many linear trends (scientific invention, etc.) are reaching bottleneck points where they may accelerate exponentially (this being thought to be "TimeWave Zero," or the "Omega Point.") The Principia Cybernetica Newsletter advances the idea that the new webs of telecommunications networks are creating a "global brain" in which humans are the individual neurons. Others suggest that the Human Genome project may unlock the means for humanity’s next great evolutionary advance. Many ModPrims think that we have passed out of linear, past-to-future, historical time, and entered some other new kind of cyclical time or maybe even the "end of history"…

People interested in materialist analyses of culture wonder whether this efflorescence of modern primitivism, with its explicit rejection of older notions of linear progress and evolution, has anything to do with the changing material basis of culture. Has the fact that we have entered a post-industrial, service/information economy, ‘disconnected’ from material production because of automation and other forces, similarly ‘disconnected’ people from the idea of a rational, orderly march of time? Such a sense of time was essential to industrialism, in which time was money and the Puritan criterion beyond all others was time-efficiency, e.g. not ‘slacking’ or ‘wasting time.’

In his book "Time Wars," Jeremy Rifkin suggests that many of the conflicts between groups may have been over competing notions of time. Rifkin sees the conflict of our era as being between ‘industrial’ time, which is individualistic, atomistic, quantitative, utilitarian, artificial (clock-based), centralized, and mechanistic; and what might be called ‘postindustrial’ time, which is communitarian, participatory, qualitative, empathetic, rhythmic, cyclical, decentralized, and organic. From the ‘industrial’ viewpoint, time is a resource for the progressive creation of wealth, which is not to be squandered. Perhaps from the ‘postindustrial’ viewpoint, time is a resource for human lives and experiences… recognizing entropy, the person living in ‘postindustrial’ time knows that material ‘progress’ is not indefinite or without external cost.

I would suggest that the way ModPrims can perhaps best be understood are as people living in a different time-order or time-value-system. This ideological shift is partly due to the transition of people toward a post-industrial economy, where the previous system of linear industrial time no longer makes sense. For them, there is no contradiction between past and future. If time is a circle, then of course past and future are heading toward their point of uniting. In the postmodern world of the ModPrims, the "moderns" have much to learn from the ecological sense of interconnectedness of the "primitives," and vice versa, the "prims" can learn from the experimental sensibility of the "mods." Together, they can perhaps turn the spiral of time back to its point of origin, at a higher level of existence.

Steve Mizrach (aka Seeker1)

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YouTube – What do I do without you

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The introduction of the VCR in the late 70’s caused a reversal in the adult movie world. The VCR allowed millions of consumers who would in no way be caught dead in a porno theater to enjoy adult films in the privacy of their own homes. The adult video industry exploded. The inventions of new technologies have always been helped along by porn. The photograph, film, video and internet have seen porn emerge as one of their first – and most popular – subjects. In 1978, less than 1% of all American homes had VCRs, but over 75% of VHS tapes sold were porn. It has been said that Sony’s Beta-Max lost the format wars to VHS, because Sony had refused to allow the pornography industry to use their format. Today, there are over 10,000 new titles released a year; there are industry associations, trade fairs, and a multitude of publications and guides to the adult film world. Most notably Adult Video News which holds an annual Oscar style award show honoring performers each year. The boom in home video produced many of the industry’s top stars, such as Nina Hartley, Vanessa Del Rio, Ron Jeremy, and Seka. It also allowed for ordinary people to get in on the act with their home equipment, spawning the amateur porn market that would take flight seriously when the internet entered the picture.

Coinciding with the dawn of porn being introduced to family households across the world, a conservative backlash began. Stemming from anti-porn movement in the 1960’s and perpetuated by the feminist movement of the seventies, porn was under attack in the media just as its sales and availability increased. In 1978 Hustler Publisher Larry Flint was shot in an assignation attempt that left him paralyzed from the Waste down. Conservatives (who were mainly radical Christian Fundamentalist) and Feminist joined forces and by 1984 when Ronald Regan took office he immediately appointed a commission to be headed by his Attorney General to determine the effect of pornography on society. In 1986 the findings of the Meese Commission were released. The commission found that: "substantial exposure to sexually violent materials . . . bears a causal relationship to antisocial acts of sexual violence and, for some subgroups, possibly to unlawful acts of sexual violence." However, the commission was politically, not scientifically, constituted. The Meese Commission was primarily composed of nonscientists who did no research of their own and commissioned none. It solicited testimony mainly from specific parties and organizations which it knew would be sympathetic to its goals, while ignoring testimony from those it suspected would be disagreeable. It was published in 1986 and contained 1,960 pages. The findings of the Meese Commission along with several severe controversies led to United States Code Section 2257 enacted in 1987, demanding certain obligations on producers of “graphical representations of actual, explicit sexual conduct”. It does so under penalty of criminal prosecution and the imposition of a criminal sentence. The Attorney General, established regulations for the enforcement of Section2257, has propagated a series of regulations found at 28 CFR Part 75, the validity of some portion of which has been rejected by the federal courts considering them. More recently, in 2004, the Attorney General published proposed, newly amended Regulations which change some of the existing duties and which squarely address the Internet for the first time.

The controversies began with the September, 1984 issue of Penthouse Magazine which contained a nude pictorial of the reigning Miss America Vanessa Williams, engaged in simulated interracial lesbian acts taken from a shoot conducted before she won the crown. This was all over page-one news in 1984, and the ensuing outcry compelled Miss Williams to turn the Tiara back in to the pageant. Also included in that issue, was emerging porn star Kristie Elizabeth Nussbaum, who went by the stage name Traci Lords. Lords had begun her career as a nude model in 1984 and that same year she starred in her first porno film “What Gets Me Hot”, which was released in 1985, she went on to star in 107 films over the next two years. In 1987 it was discovered that she her real name was not Kristie Nussbaum, but Nora Louise Kuzma, and she was in fact only 15 years old when she began her career. The public outcry over the scandal caused millions of her videos to be forcibly removed from stores and destroyed often publicly. The public backlash caused Congress to get involved; working off the founding’s of the Meese Commission they began passing laws that would try to restrict the porn industry.

Simultaneously in California the courts were trying the case of Harold Freeman. In California v. Freeman the state tried to prove that the producer and director of pornographic films were guilty of pandering under state laws. It was an attempt to shut down the industry which was rapidly growing in the state. Although he was initially convicted, he appealed his case all the way to the California Supreme Court. The Supreme Court eventually overturned his conviction and effectively legalized hardcore pornography in California.  Prior to the case porn had often been filmed in secret locations, due to the ruling though porn was taken out of the shadows and cemented itself in southern California creating the now infamous “Porn Valley” in the San Fernando Valley area where 90% of all U.S. pornography is either filmed or owned by companies  operating from there.

The federal anti-porn crusade proved short-lived. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he and his attorney general, Janet Reno, had little interest in devoting attention and resources to new obscenity prosecutions (which declined dramatically during the first few years of the Clinton administration). The video-rental industry continued to boom throughout the Meese Commission years. Movie Gallery, the first major rental chain to carry adult videos, launched in 1985, with only five stores in 1987, expanded to 37 stores in 1992, and had 73 stores two years later—all the while continuing to carry adult product. The government’s campaign had virtually no impact on the consumer, when mail-order companies were driven out of business, the video companies expanded their mail-order business, and new companies came in to replace the old mail-order companies. Prosecuting porn would become even more problematic when the adult industries, and the would-be porn warriors, were overtaken by another set of new technologies: pay-per-view, satellite television, and then the Internet. Like video, pay-per-view and satellite offered consumers a new way to watch a wide variety of adult films on demand. Unlike video, though, you didn’t have to leave your home at all. I personally watched channels like American XXXstacy and Spice on my grandmother’s enormous yard satellite throughout the late eighties and early nineties. Though they began scrambling the reception around 1993 and you needed to buy illegal decoders to find the ever shifting signals. Then in came the Internet, and as it got cheaper, faster, and easier to use it further expanded the variety of and ease of access to porn. Both technologies were cheaper, safer, and even more anonymous than renting or purchasing videos, continually shrinking the distance between producers and consumers of adult material.

Just as it had with video, the porn industry quickly realized the possibilities of the internet. Firms that had grown big and profitable off of the home video boom such as Vivid Video, VCA Pictures, and even Playboy could repackage and resell their product almost endlessly and distribute it cheaply, via several media nationwide: rental and mail-order video, home and hotel pay-per-view, websites, porn magazines, and satellite TV. During the mid-1990s, they had begun to form partnerships with big mainstream firms like AT&T, Marriott, and even General Motors (which owns DirecTV). By the end of the 1990s, film produced by Vivid could be rented in a video store, bought through the mail, watched on the AT&T-owned Hot Network, or ordered in a hotel room. The ease of consumption made porn more popular and more profitable than ever. Between 1992 and 1999, pay-per-view revenues went from $54 million to $367 million according to research by Showtime Event Television. During 1998, the adult content market earned an estimated $1 billion. By 2001, the total was up to $14 billion bigger, than football, baseball, and basketball combined. With the birth of the World Wide Web in the mid 90’s,   pornography had gained a potent new medium. Back then porn was distributed via the Usenet newsgroups and the BBS Bulletin Board System.

As of 2004 approximately 347,000,000 web pages of pornography were created, compared with 62,900,000 political web pages; with the pornographic pages still growing. One of the biggest cultural changes in the United States over the past 25 years has been the widespread acceptance of sexually explicit material – pornography. Jenna Jameson is a household name, and Sasha Grey graces the cover of mainstream magazines. Beginning with the video boom pornography began to become more diverse for the first time small start-up companies where able to widely distribute to specific fetishes.  This expanded exponentially once the internet entered the picture. Every imaginable fetish culture was given its day and rival companies exploded to exploit each nitch market. This had a profound effect on the industry which saw its more straight-heterosexual companies take a serious loss. It paved the way for an invasion of sorts by European companies (mainly Eastern-European) to not only invested heavily in American porn, but they began importing their starlets and ways. It began as simply “gonzo” has moved into the most debasing hardcore extremes from the Old Country.

Now in doing my research for this article I could find nothing on this, but as someone whom has spent countless hours over the last 20 years watching porn I can attest to the facts I have witnessed with my own eyes. I distinctly recall reading about it in AVN many years ago, and now it seems to be erased from the history books. Though the evidence is there, not just the women imported from Prague and Hungary that litter the online porn I see daily, but the men as well. Most notably Manuel Ferrara and any of his boys, their thick Slavic accents barking order over the almost sad moans of the women they triple penetrate.   It’s actually almost frightening that I can’t find any information on what happened. I first noticed it at the turn of the new millennium. We first began seeing American stars making movies in Budapest and Hungary, then almost overnight the Eastern-European men began popping up in the valley. Now it seems they have completely dominated the landscape.  Where as in the  AIDs scare has caused more mainstream porn to institute condoms and veer away from more hard core acts like double and triple penetration, double anal, and double vaginal, the boys from across the pond openly and gleefully practice them exclusively. This has opened the door for a plethora of films that involve slapping, spitting and treating women as less than objects. Their behavior borders on BDSM without the costumes and props. While there has been many who have objected to this new direction it appears to be here to stay. Much like the Japanese Bukkake that has also had a profound effect on American porn.

Now more than ever, modern porn no longer has any borders or boundaries. From the cave paintings of old to the early stag films and bondage comics, the internet has eradicated the lines between localized tastes. The Europeans predisposition to group orgies and gangbangs are far more common to the American teen with internet access than in my day when the pages of Private magazine where a shock to my system. The infinite money to be made online and the ability for anyone with a camera to broadcast their sex lives has led to average people to display every twisted notion that comes to their mine. 50 men cum slams is no longer a joke. We live in an age, of Web cams and there is no telling where the future will take us. A Chinese company recently announced the production of the first 3D porn, bringing us closer to virtual sex technologies touted in the mid nineties.  Porn is now a $14 billion dollar global industry. The demand for those of us who are (at heart) voyeurs, to watch strangers engage in sexual acts will never go away. In fact as porn stars mingle evermore with mainstream stars and a generation grows up with porn only a mouse click away we can safely say that porn’s history has just begun.

Sun, Mar. 08, 2009

‘Monkeys’ book amid Obama display at Coral Gables Barnes & Noble prompts outrage

BY ELAINE DE VALLE

A downtown Coral Gables bookstore is facing an Internet-driven response of outrage after a prankster added a book on monkeys to a window display of books about President Barack Obama. ‘’Obviously, we wouldn’t do that,’’ said Julissa Carvahal, a cashier at the Barnes & Noble Booksellers on Miracle Mile, about a block from where an Obama campaign office closed a week after the election. “It was obviously a really bad joke.’’ Corporate headquarters in New York, which earlier had publicly apologized, on Friday issued a statement calling the ‘’malicious and despicable act’’ a hate crime. A customer called store management’s attention Feb. 17 to the ‘’inappropriate book placed in our presidential display,’’ manager Robert Martin said. “We removed it immediately.’’ He added that customers had access to the window display via a two-foot wide corridor between the bookshelf and the storefront. Employees placed a Foster Grant reading glasses kiosk at one end of the display shelf and a garbage can and stack of shopping baskets at the other to block access, and the corporate office in New York issued an apology on its website. ‘’Barnes & Noble would like to publicly apologize for what happened in our Coral Gables, Florida, store,’’ wrote Mary Ellen Keating, a corporate spokeswoman. “From time to time customers will move titles from one area of the store to another. In this particular case, we do not condone whatever message may have been intended with the placement of this title in our presidential display. It certainly was not part of our merchandising and we regret that we didn’t see the placement of this title immediately.’’ While original reports said it could have been there for days, Keating said she did not know how long the display was there and that the inappropriate book was removed as soon as it was discovered. But the real controversy has come in the past week, as someone—possibly the same person who put the book there—took a photograph of the display and circulated it in e-mails. The image—in which books about Obama, his wife and his road to the White House surround a book with a picture of and titled Monkeys—also has been commented on in a slew of blogs and websites, including the NAACP’s The Defenders Online and www.blackpower.com, and has spurred calls for a boycott. ‘’Someone became vicious, or just playing a cruel practical joke, put the book and then snapped a picture that unfortunately now everyone has seen,’’ Martin said, adding his store fields about 200 calls daily about the display. ‘’There are stretches where all you do, all the phone lines are lit up, and you just go from call to call,’’ Martin said, adding that he was glad to do it. He came in on Thursday, his day off, just to take calls so that the rest of the staff could work. “We get the opportunity to talk to our customers and tell them that’s not what we’re about. Barnes & Noble would never condone anything like that. We would never set up a display of that nature.’’ Urbanlegends.com—a site that aims to rebuke Internet-spread myths—has it on its site already. ‘’The photo is authentic,’’ the site states. “The racist implications of inserting a book entitled Monkeys in a display devoted to Barack Obama are clear and undeniable. “According to company statements, however, the incident does not reflect the attitudes of Barnes & Noble, its management, or its employees. It is believed that a customer surreptitiously replaced one of the books in the display with the offending title.’’ It wouldn’t be the first time, however, the store has been the subject of a customer prank, Martin said. ‘It’s not uncommon to find adult material in our kids’ section,’’ he said. “People think that’s funny. “But certainly nothing of this magnitude has ever happened in our store and I don’t think nationally.’’ The photograph has circulated so wide that Coral Gables Business Improvement District—an agency funded by downtown property owners who tax themselves additionally for shared marketing and services—has fielded about 50 calls and e-mails about the image. ‘’People are outraged,’’ said Taciana Amador, assistant to the BID director. “They don’t realize the issue was already addressed weeks ago.’’ The Coral Gables Chamber of Commerce has been contacted, and the city has fielded complaints from as far away as New Jersey and Arkansas. ‘’This is unacceptable and does not reflect well on your city,’’ wrote Leroy Mayfield, an administrative assistant in the Arkansas State Office of Long Term Care. “Does this represent the city’s sentiments of our 44th President of the United States?’’ Gables Development Director Cathy Swanson Rivenbark, who works with downtown property owners to help keep the city’s core thriving, told him it did not. ‘’This was an unfortunate and truly tasteless customer prank that was corrected immediately as soon as store employees became aware of it,’’ Swanson said. “Obviously, the display area is vulnerable, and they are looking at how to better protect it from happening again.’’ Barnes & Noble bills itself as an easy-going, open store where people can browse at ease, linger on a casual ‘’date’’ or grab a book and read it by the coffee counter at leisure before deciding to buy it. Might this incident change the store’s laid-back style? No, Keating said. ‘’We always have things like this going on. During the election cycle, we had customers take books off the political table because they didn’t want us to sell a particular title and stick it way back in the store somewhere else,’’ Keating said. “We always have managers monitoring the displays. Obviously, we are going to be more diligent now.’’

   This was sent to the Armada by the GreyRasta-Thanx Jimmy!

Personally, I don’t think the Barnes and Noble franchise would actually endorse something like this, risking their notoriety in the book business? If you ask me this was the doing of some stupid or inconsiderate white person who just didn’t think about the effects of putting these books in the same case, either way that will probably be the explanation of the franchise, what do you think?

Peace and Love,

Barnes and Noble had this as their store front display in Coral Gables FL in the Miracle Mile Mall. I am totally disgusted and I think it is important that we all find a different place to buy our books. Obviously this is a place of extreme ignorance. How far have we really come? God bless. Please support the boycott and pass this e-mail to family and friends. It is so sad when you have been lied to all your life of who you are supposed to be because of the color of your skin. Some people just can’t accept change. Fortunately, change will come with or without you.

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