Mic Check Radio

It's story time on Mic Check Radio this week.  While this is a follow up to the We're So Fucked episode from two weeks ago, the bulk of this show is a reading which diagnoses just how fucked we human beings are by the industrial-technological system that we human beings have created...and what some potential options are for dealing with this system. [Click to Listen]

As the sports world gears up for the bread and circus spectacle of Super Bowl XLVIII, we take a look at the benefits and importance of sports on a local level-where, unlike the NFL, it isn't ruled by money and corporate sponsorships.  Then we take a quick look at what sports fans could be doing with their time, brains and energy instead of "playing" fantasy sports.  And finally, at the end of the show, we play some audio from a "news report" on the Legends Football League (aka Lingerie Football League) and how the corporate media once again asks all the wrong questions. [Click to Listen]

We (human beings) are quite literally fucked in numerous ways...on this episode we take a look at just a few of the main reasons.  Financial collapse, poor food quality, weather, climate, consumerism, garbage, diseases, air pollution, water pollution, industrialization, population growth, and just plain good old fashioned war (traditional, biological, nuclear, etc.). Oh, and solar flares, asteroids, earthquakes and volcanoes. [Click to Listen]

A look at some of the great examples of Activist Cinema from 2013:

No,

99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film,

Fruitvale Station,

Free Angela and All Political Prisoners,

A Fierce Green Fire,

The East,

GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling,

Dallas Buyers Club,

Let the Fire Burn,

The Ghosts in Our Machine,

GMO OMG,

A Place at the Table

[Click to Listen]

Our final installment in the Affluenza series.  On this weeks show we finish taking a look at the history

of Affluenza [Defined by Wikipedia as "a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload,

debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more"].  We start with the explosion of TV in the post-WWII economy and work our way thru the introduction of credit cards, presidential campaigns that employ advertisers (1952), the philosophy of retail shopping, the hippie movement, Jimmy Carter's stunning anti-consumerism speech, the deregulation of the Reagan era and how Microsoft convinced millions of consumers to install active cameras and microphones in living rooms across the country. [Click to Listen]

So, our part II of this series turned out to run so long that we broke it up into two parts.  On this weeks show we take a look at the history of Affluenza [Defined by Wikipedia as "a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload,

debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more"], starting in 1870 with the appearance of the first luxury department stores and end with the madness of the post-WWII economic boom.  Are we, as human beings, natural consumers or have we just been programmed to be obedient shopping slaves?  Trick question; it's the latter. [Click to Listen]

In part I of a two part series, we take a look at the disease know as "affluenza".  Defined by Wikipedia affluenza is "a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more".  On this episode, we take a look at the way affluenza harms the youngest among us - children.  Before they can form a coherent thought or utter a coherent word, advertisers (working with child psychologists) try their hardest to get inside children's heads and make them mindless consumers for life.  [Click to Listen]

Consumers in the United States just spent nearly 60 billion dollars (mostly with credit cards) over the Black Friday weekend on products made with slave labor (in countries with little to no environmental regulations) that will eventually fill up landfills and ruin this planet a little faster.  What else could we have spent that money on? [Click to Listen]

This episode was released on March 16th, 2013:

In November of 2012, the University of California at Irvine and Slate.com teamed up to conduct and then publish the findings of a very telling social experiment...how do we (human beings) remember news stories?  Over 5,000 people participated in the study and the results provide quite an insight as to how news stories can be manufactured, presented and accepted as true. [Click to Listen]

Activist Cinema Episode 6 - What Would Jesus Buy? (2007) is a documentary that follows Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping on their North American tour in the month leading up to Christmas 2005.  As we head into the capitalist orgy of Black Friday and the holiday shopping season, this film works as a great antidote to the consumer frenzy that is about to be unleashed.  Also, it is available free on YouTube (as of this posting).  Rev. Billy and Nehemiah are both currently (11.24.13) facing a year in prison.  Please follow this link to sign a petition for their charges to be dropped. [Click to Listen]