There are a few ways to go about making OpenGraph tags work within WordPress that I know of, I’ll link one of the better plugins I found below, but first – here’s a quick one-two about getting it done yourself, without a plugin, because in actuality, the process for this is pretty simple, and I’ve found it to be more efficient to just do it.

These instructions will work for any web-platform if you know  a little about HTML, but will lean primarily on WordPress.

First, you’ll need a Facebook App ID; these are free, pretty simple to set up, and you need to go here: https://developers.facebook.com/apps to get it.

• Log in to Facebook
• Click “Create New App”
• Give your app a name, skip the other two fields, and click “Continue”
• In order to get Facebook Like button counts to actually work; fill out the “App Domain” with your site’s domain name
• Choose a Category
• Click “Website” in the second section, include the url (without the “http://” this time)
• Click “Save Changes” and you’re all set
• Keep this window open, you’ll want to copy your “App ID” (top of the FB Developer page)

If you’ve gotten this far, this is the simple part, copy/paste this into the page above the closing </header> tag (near the top of the header.php file):

<meta property=”fb:app_id” content=”Paste the Facebook App ID here” />
<meta property=”fb:admins” content=”This is your Facebook User ID (not your username)” />

<?php if (is_single()) { ?>
<meta property=”og:url” content=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”/>
<meta property=”og:title” content=”<?php single_post_title(”); ?>” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”<?php echo strip_tags(get_the_excerpt($post->ID)); ?>” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”<?php if (function_exists(‘wp_get_attachment_thumb_url’)) {echo wp_get_attachment_thumb_url(get_post_thumbnail_id($post->ID)); }?>” />
<!– if page is others –>
<?php } else { ?>
<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”<?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?>” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”blog” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=“<?php bloginfo(‘template_url’); ?>/images/logo.jpg” />
<?php } ?>

Change the above bold parts accordingly. The “logo.jpg” in the second set of “og” tags is a general image, and you should change this to the path/filename to your logo, avatar, or so forth.

That’s about it. Save and close. If you look above, what I’ve done is set the blog posts up to be different OpenGraph tag details from general pages (and the home page). The posts use the “Featured Image” as the default image for the post; if there are more than one images in the post, it will start with the one specified, and still allow uses to scroll through to use the others.

Other Tips:

• Alter the og:site_name to display something different other than the post title (appending ” – sitename.com” for example)
• Make it use any image by changing the og:image content to the path of an image
• Alter the description to include something extra (like posted date, or author name)
• You can check your work over at: http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug (copy/paste your post URL and click “Debug”)

WordPress plugin instead:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/opengraph/

Something happened in August 2011 where awkward angles and geometry really started to play a role in my shooting. Going “abstract” really brought the idea that there’s always a shot whenever you stop and look to the forefront. Everyone can shoot anything, the trick is to make it interesting to you, and have it say something. For me, these are all about tension, like most of my shots – it’s all about the tension.

As a straight guy, in a straight relationship, growing up with Republican parents, from a military household, going to school under the veil of the Catholic Church, you’d think I’d be all, “Holy, God! The gays are going to ruin marriage!” But I’m not. Not even a little bit. In fact, I’m all for it. First and foremost, I believe in the absolute power of the ideals set forth when the country of the United States was formed back in the 1700′s. Our forward thinking forefathers knew what persecution looked like, and though they might have been privileged land-owning white males, they still got a few things right. Was it perfect? No. But they did a good job to make sure the future could be better, and moving forward.

We had some great momentum for a while with progress. Independence from Britain was a good move, abolishing slavery was a good follow-up, crowned with women’s suffrage. America was coming together quite nicely there for a while. Then the Civil Rights movement started and was met with a hell of a lot more push back, with longer-lasting opposition, that’s still going on today.

Racism runs deep in every nation, but in the US, you’d think, as we’re all immigrants in our beloved country, tolerance of difference would be a little more feasible. But, as it seems, ignorance is the currency of the realm, and racism still runs deep. Racism begets discrimination, and difference is viewed as flaw, and we attempt to correct those flaws with laws baked in morality, shrouded with beliefs driven by the one thing the Constitution itself mentions the government has no business dealing with, Religion.

Freedom for all, in life and liberty. I think those seven words summarize the core beliefs of the United States. Freedom for all, in life and liberty. You can make laws all day for that; don’t kill each other, don’t beat each other, don’t steal from one another… hell, that almost sounds like the Ten Commandments. But guess what? That’s not the Ten Commandments, that’s called living like a civilized human being in a society where other human beings are your peers, and should be treated as such. I call it common sense, I call it being a good human. It has nothing to do with being a good God-fearing whatever. I believe that since we have laws that mimic the elements of borrowed religious doctrine (it’s not like the Bible invented what it means to be good to the person sitting next to you) the religious American folk feel entitled to instill their other religious beliefs into a system that has no business listening to absurd shit in the Good Book.

Hence ignoring slavery. Hence working toward treating women and men as equals, and now – hopefully – treating every citizen as a citizen of the country. Humanity first, God forbid.

Call me crazy, but the question shouldn’t be whether or not the Government approves same-sex marriage, but rather – if the Government should limit marriage between two consenting adults, regardless of any qualification. What gives the Government any right to involve itself in the personal choices of two tax-paying citizens who want to become legally bound as partners? In fact, the Government should be only concerned with things in a completely neutral manner. Here are some acceptable examples of citizen classification:

1. Minor
2. Tax Payer
3. Civilian
4. Military / Government Employee or Official
5. Criminal
6. Single / Married / Divorced
7. Business Owner

That about sums it up. Nowhere should the mention of gender, race, or creed be written. There’s no reason to be concerned with things like “whether or not someone has a penis”. The only way to level the playing field completely, and really drive the stakes home for equality is to do just that – level the playing field, and axe all gender-specific laws to become gender-neutral. If the government never indicates gender in law, then all laws should apply to “person” regardless of what their junk is comprised of; thus marriage would be a legally binding contract between two consenting individuals, thus granting things like hospital visits, medical rights, tax breaks, and so forth, equally to all the citizens of the US… imagine the possibilities.

Straight couples could go on getting married, gay couples could start getting married. Everyone could go through the perils of relationship degradation, exploration, and exploitation together, as a nation, one big gender-neutral nation, fighting to continue the good fight of eliminating discrimination. Sounds like some kind of utopian fantasy land, given the shallow-minded bigotry of “good religious” folk.

I’d really hate for Americans to think of themselves as Americans and Humans first before trying to use a sifter on who gets what rights where because of which book they read, or what pissers they mash together in the privacy of their homes. While I’m at it; the argument of the sanctity of marriage is utter bullshit. Us straight folk have completely wrecked the notion of marriage being some sacred event a long time ago. Even still, the sacred faction of marriage is the business of Religion. The legal faction of marriage is judicial, read: Government, meaning – completely different than Religious marriage, thanks to our Constitution’s separation clause. God bless that little Amendment.

If you’re part of a religion, then you’re already used to exclusionary rules and clauses that make “Buddhists evil” since they haven’t accepted “Deity” as their one and true God. That’s fine, freedom of religion, you can do whatever you’d like, but imposing your beliefs and violating the liberties of fellow Americans as a result should have no place in this nation. Freedom is about Freedom. If you want to persecute others for who they are, re-read your Good Book, and see how that all plays out; or go check out some World War II history. Better yet, how about trying to be a better person to your fellow human, reach out, and love without prejudice.

Treating people differently just because they’re different from you is asinine. Everyone’s different. Everyone’s unique. Clusters of people wallowing in their beliefs so deep they shield their ability to reasonably think comprehensively about what it means to be human-kind is such an immature notion for a species, and as it perpetuates with idiocy, it insults those of us who share this race that just want it to be unified, fighting for a better tomorrow, as a whole. Perhaps if we can get over shitting on one another for our petty differences, we can start building greatness that really spells out just how amazing humanity truly can be. One could hope…

Before this morning, I mainly used Tweetdeck, but it’s been proving itself to be a resource hog, and loads so slow, I opted to give the web interface a whirl. In order to fully appreciate Twitter for what it does, I felt that it needed a little help. Following a queue from old colleague, Dru Kelly, about modifying the site using Firebug in Firefox, I decided to see what the options for a more “permanent” solution would be in Chrome.

Here’s the down & dirty for how to make the Twitter web interface cleaner and leaner.

Step 1: Chrome Extension, Stylebot

Link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/oiaejidbmkiecgbjeifoejpgmdaleoha

Once this is installed you’ll see “css” appear in the address bar.

Step 2: Go to Twitter.com

Link: http://twitter.com

Log in, and arrive on the default timeline.

Step 3: Do the magic

1. Alt+ M (on Windows) will open the Stylebot sidebar panel
2. Select “Advanced” in the bottom (next to the blue “Basic” button)
3. Up at the top, where it says “Select an element” paste this in there “div.dashboard” (without the quotes)
4. In the “CSS for selected element(s)” window, paste this “display: none;”
5. Now, click the arrow/box button to reset the “Select an element” box
6. Repeat step 3, but paste this “div.content-main” instead
7. Then this in the CSS for selected element(s)

width: 820px;
float: left;
margin-top: 0;
margin-right: auto;
margin-bottom: 0;
margin-left: auto;

If you did that right, you should see nothing but the Twitter timeline, about 30% wider than it used to be, and no dashboard stuff.

Bonus: Add “li.topics” to the elements and give it a “display:none;” to dump the “Discover” from the navigation bar too. I have yet to ever find anything worth my attention in there & there’s always a notification glow on that button. Annoying.

It took people

When I started on reelBucket, it was actually just an app on my server at home that helped me rifle through my movie library, and pick something to watch. I found that it was better to have movie posters and plots than simply movie titles on a spreadsheet.

It took the nudging of a good friend and photography colleague, Jason Goldman, to get me off my ass and actually make it into something for everyone, and even then, it took two weeks of additional nagging. Once the decision was made though, I went all in. The name of the site was up for debate for a few minutes, and finally AV Flox rested on the word “reel”, while I went with the word “bucket”. One of the toughest things for the web these days is coming up with a name, and then actually hitting the mark when you do a URL search to find out if it’s available… reelbucket.com was.

The Lone Ranger

Getting the particulars and the business logic down for how each screen of the app would work was simple, in general. I already knew what the app needed to do from using it at home for a bit. For particulars and details I knew I didn’t have all the answers for, I crowd-sourced from my immediate surroundings, asking friends and pretty much never shutting up about it.Ultimately, I think this piece of the application road-mapping process is critical to making decisions: it not only kept me from spinning my wheels dreaming up things I was unsure of, it also kept my sanity in check by grounding my desires for the application, separating what could be done with what actually made sense to be done.

When it came time to code and design, mouse hit the pad, and I was off and running. The biggest hurdles were handling the elements of the development process I knew nothing about; Twitter/Facebook/Google authentication, and more advanced jQuery work with Ajax were the biggest speed bumps. All in all, the entire code base, and design of the site was a one-man show; with some help from Stack Overflow, and the PHP oAuth Libraries to get me through the learning process of what the hell I was doing. Granted, what’s on reelBucket right now isn’t the most efficient, but that means the fast-acting site I made today will only become faster in the future.

ProTip: No matter what you launch today, there is always tomorrow. Code for tomorrow, plan for the day after.

The Brand

A majority of the interface elements were already on the website’s current framework from the pre-alpha version of the app created for my library at home. The logo and other elements just kind of came out from what I had already mocked up for that, but with a little Photoshop work and some polish, coming to a design decision, being a committee of one, was kinda easy. The entire UI designed and finalized in a Sunday afternoon.

I’m not saying that everyone should try to pump out a site design in an afternoon; but if you have wireframes, a good road map laid out, some UI skills, and no one’s opinion but your own crazy to drive you, you can swing a rough draft in a weekend, give or take.

I’m not classically trained in design at all. When making reelBucket it just came down to making things that were intuitive to me at first. The finalized version came after presenting the mocks to my “inner circle” for some initial feedback. Normally when it comes to designing something, I have a client’s wishes to go off of – I guess one of the most important things to realize when doing stuff like this is, “I don’t know anything about everything, ask for feedback.” Since I had never launched anything for consumer-level use prior to reelBucket, releasing the site under the practice of “Make now, iterate with outside input later” was critical to making sure it was not only useful, but user friendly.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from all of this is to take every bit of criticism and input in, write it down, and consider it, no matter how crazy it seems. When feedback is volunteered, there’s a reason for that; listening to it, figuring out what to do with it, if anything, and then executing it into revisions. Taking note of input from people who offer up their thoughts on your project for the cost of their time is paramount to how your product will evolve.

The Platform

When it came time to make the buttons click, I had a few thousand options. I could have used Code Ignitor, Django, some blend of .NET, Zend or whatever the hottest ticket item is in the eyes of the dev-world, but when push came to shove I went with a homegrown MVC solution to crank things into gear.

The pre-alpha release for the project was developed in a spaghetti slop of PHP/MySQL functions and half-assed jQuery. So organizing the code-base into a more manageable fashion was a must, especially when it came to developing with site security in mind. The biggest hurdle was going to be form validation, user authentication, and how to handle writing to the database in a way that was secure to the point of comfort on the open market.

In doing this, I opted to leverage a few existing systems, a truck load of standard security practices, and did my best to build a system that was easy to manage and update if a problem was found down the road.

The Future

The biggest lesson I took away from reelBucket was that I didn’t need to have a perfect product on launch. I just needed to be ready to make it better immediately. I launched on December 1st and by the end of the day I had feedback from half-a-dozen users that had tried it out, and by December 6th, I had rolled out the next series of changes – which ended up being more extensive than I initially planned for.

Be flexible with your time. Plan for the worst.

I receive user feedback nearly daily, and thanks to close friends, and power-users on the site, I’m able to take some great feature requests into account, and start to road map how to make them happen in the product. Overall, I think that reelBucket as it is, is a powerful utility that does exactly as it was set out to do, and actually does it better than I initially planned.

It might have been a one-man show startup in terms of actually putting the keystrokes to the screen, but it really came down to not being afraid to reach out to people, listen to their input, and take it into consideration with an open hand. That’s not to say that everything I heard was created, but in one-way or another, nearly everything I heard was taken into consideration. By continuing to seek insight from others and by following my crazy vision for reelBucket, this product will grow in to something I know I can no longer accurately predict at this moment, but I have an idea.

About reelBucket
Sign up with Twitter, Facebook or Google
Invite code is: nrekReelbucket

reelBucket on Twitter | Facebook | Google+

I hope this post finds someone who has an idea and inspires them to make great Internet. I’m not going to say it was easy, but it is really damn cool to log in and see your friends support what you’ve made, and have complete strangers use it.

More often than not these days, the word [INFOGRAPHIC] has become synonymous with the word “bullshit”, but unfortunately for those of us who are calling it what it is, they’re here to stay — because (drum roll…) they get page views, shares, ???, profit.

Done! Just like that. So easy a “graphic designer” armed with WordArt and Microsoft Paint could do it. Now, go get yourself some FREE TRAFFIC!

Are you familiar with the term SERP? It’s an acronym, stands for Search Engine Results Page. It’s no mystery that Google is the number one way traffic finds it’s way to Internet destinations. There’s a reason companies spend millions, actually billions, of dollars in online advertising every year. SERPs. Companies, marketing campaigns, brands, and even people, want to be searched for, found, clicked through, read, and in some cases purchased from.

That’s just the way of the web.

Death by SERP

So, how did Google do it? Well, via a one-two punch to the Face(book) to Mark Zuckerberg’s tired, shriveled little social network, of course. These Google people are viciously clever. Last week, to the dismay of most power-users of Google Search, the Google removed the ability to use the “+” in a normal search string, and asked that people use quotations:

Instead of this: Steve+Jobs keynote

Use this: “Steve Jobs” keynote

Of course, a lot of people were up in arms, because we all hate change. Google didn’t really care though, they had a plan set to slaughter their competition. Now, if you go to Google and do a search like so:

+Google

You will be forwarded right off to their Google+ platform, and see the left-hook to their rollout, the Google+ Brand Pages. Not only are Google+ Brand Pages excessively simple to set up, and not only are they as feature-rich as Google+ Profiles, they’re cleverly limited on who they can follow to reduce broadcast spam, and requires that actual people seek out the brands before the brands can follow them back. Brilliant.

Facebook Just Lost

I’m calling it now. Facebook, done. Mark Zuckerberg is in a state of denial about it, Google doesn’t have to care. People need email, they use Gmail, people need a Search Engine, they use Google Search. Even moreso, small business need office-type software, email servers, and enterprise tools for organization, so they use Google Apps.

Now, this isn’t to say that everyone that needs email, search or enterprise apps will magically just use Google+, there are tons of options out there for online document collaboration, inbox management, and search, but the important take away is, no one needs Facebook. There isn’t a single secondary service that Facebook can offer me other than being Facebook that will get me to sign up for their service if I’m simply not on it.

What does Facebook actually do?

That’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? What is it Facebook does? I mean, they’re a neat website with the ability to share pictures, start up brand pages, get some marketing juice going, collect your data, sell it to advertisers, and allow you to play Angry Birds, but after that – Facebook doesn’t actually do anything. You can use it for messaging, but how lame is that? You can use it as a web page and build apps in it – giving you a guaranteed audience… sure, but it still doesn’t actually do anything.

Google versus Facebook

There is no “versus” in my mind. Google is a tool shed filled with platforms, utilities, tools, software, and is a major gateway to Internet discovery. Facebook is merely a tool, like a rake. It scrapes along the ground, collects a majority of things under it’s business-end, and piles it up to display that it works. There’s not much else to it, really.

When it comes to Google+, it’s just an addition to Google. Facebook can’t have a plus, it’s just what it is – a social networking site that doesn’t really provide value to anything other than Facebook. So when I see people trying to compare Google+ to Facebook, I think they miss the big picture. I’ll try to spell it out:

Google

• Google Search / Image Search / Video Search
• Google AdSense
• Google AdWords
• Google Apps
• Android
• Android Marketplace
• Google+
• Google Reader / News
• YouTube
• Zagat
• Google Maps / Places / Navigation / Latitude
• Google Books
• Google Finance
• Google Talk
• Google Voice
• etc… etc…

Facebook

• Facebook

That about sums it up, I think.

I wasn’t paid to post this, but

Go sign up for the company with staying power. Facebook is going to MySpace in a year or so. I’m willing to bet Google and Google+ will stick around a lot longer than that. Not only that, but if you have stuff on Google+, did you know the links aren’t no-follow? (That’s a search engine term meaning links on Google+ are still seen by Search Engines… links on Facebook aren’t – meaning; you’re wasting your time).

The editing is tighter.

The syncing is more exact.

The speed is faster.

For the third installment of this project I wanted to make it as perfect as I saw fit for the video at the time. It’s important for me to portray my photography works in a light that I feel expresses the urban, geometric, calculated, yet chaotic feel in the shots I take, share, and continue to shoot… while being as kick ass as possible. Flux Pavillion’s remix of Don’t Do That by Culprate was just the track for this.

The fourth installment in this “thing” will be equally aggressive, and possibly longer than 1:50.

Details for the Video

Enrique Gutierrez vs. Flux Pavilion was edited over a twelve hour span using Adobe Premier, beat-by-beat, in 3 to 5 frame spans at ~30 frames per second, the resulting 110 seconds of video is comprised of approximately 600 edit points for fades, spins, blurs, and cuts, and includes 206 photos. I guess it’s worth nothing that this was edited by hand, without the help of some magical A/V sync-software.

Overall, I’m going to try to be as comprehensive as possible, I’m going to try to explain it all as clearly as I can, but at the end of this post, you should see how Banks, all over the globe, drive the state of the working class down, perpetuate themselves, and are actually the cause of the global economic strife. 

This goes beyond “the Government is bought by lobbyists”, “the Banks own everything”, “down with the large corporations”, or even “I’m the 99 percent”, this isn’t about that at all. This isn’t even about being a Democrat or a Republican. This isn’t about power-to-the-people, it’s about Algorithmic Trading.

Where it starts

Algorithmic trading is a faster-than-lightning trading approach, performed at every stock exchange, globally. It is the result of a series of computer systems placed inside the stock exchange that calculates fluctuations in the the stock market at thousandths of a second. These computer systems are owned by Investment Bank businesses.

Investment banks use these systems to drive their successes in trading. In fact they use these systems to inject their investments ahead of high volume trades, and thus generate advancement as a result of getting in ahead of a big bump in stock sectors.

Step 2

If you have a computer inside the stock exchange, you can basically change and drive the outcome of trading to be in your favor. Now, I’m not talking huge leaps and bounds, I’m talking about fractions of a penny, but done to the tune of trillions of dollars. So, if I’m working with $2,000,000,000 and move the needle on 1,000 trades per day at 1/32 of a cent, I can turn out $625,000,000 a day.

Of course, that’s just hypothetical, and probably at a volume a lot greater than what is allowed.

Allowed?

Let’s take an excerpt from http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/25/deutschebank-korea-idUSTOE71O02L20110225

 25th February 2011 – Deutsche Bank’s South Korean brokerage unit was fined nearly $1 million by the country’s exchange operator, the largest it has ever imposed, for failing to notify it on time about big derivative trades. [...]

In 2009, Deutsche’s corporate and investment bank generated 2.67 billion euros in revenues from the Asia-Pacific region excluding Japan compared with the almost 28 billion the bank made globally.

From Wikipedia

A special class of algorithmic trading is “high-frequency trading” (HFT), in which computers make elaborate decisions to initiate orders based on information that is received electronically, before human traders are capable of processing the information they observe. This has resulted in a dramatic change of the market microstructure, particularly in the way liquidity is provided.

Where’s it go from there?

Let’s say you’re too big to fail, and you get some $2,000,000,000 (trillion) dollars from the US government after you generated billions of dollars of financial trouble, globally, for gaming a real-estate market, both commercial and residential. Let’s say that you also took it upon yourself to sell those reckless loans to countries like Norway (all of this actually happened, let’s not forget).

What would you do with $2,000,000,000 if you could perform HFT trades in global markets? Help the public? Are you kidding? No, you’d use it to do the following:

1. Lobby, you need power. Power is in deregulation, deregulation comes from Governments, you need more wiggle in your business, to drive your own economy
2. Algorithmic trading, FTW!

How’s this effect the 99%?

Last I checked, none of us little people have the capital to even think about investing at the rate these Investment Banks are operating at. Not only that, even if you did, you don’t have the computers inside the stock exchanges. Even better, if you bank with these huge businesses, chances are they’re playing against their own customers’ money, well before they’re playing with anything else.

I mean, why would you want to raise any flags? If you invest against your own investments, in volume, you can make your company rich, and still give “some” results to your customers to keep them happy.

Tie it all together

The best way to make money in a world fueled by currency that isn’t based on anything tangible, but rather, perceived value, is to generate more value. The only way to do that is through stock prices. Therefore, quarterly earnings reports are gold. Thus, the highest priority for any company with a stock-ticker-symbol is the cherished opinion of their shareholders. It is within every large corporation’s best interest to appear valuable to Investment Banks, so they can become “more valuable”. In short, here’s the corporations priority list:

1. Investment Banks
2. Perceived-Value
3. Quarterly Earnings
4. Shareholders
5. Company Executives
6. Strategy around increasing share value
7. Cover up bad press (PR)
8. Building the appearance of “good business” (Marketing)
9. Sending the appearance to The People (Advertising)
10. Avoid lawsuits
11. Avoid regulation from Governments
12. Lower costs … highest cost for corporations is The People

Nowhere in that list will you find, “creating a great job market”. Creating a healthy job market doesn’t involve recursive, positive effects in any of the above points. Besides, humans are the liability in this machine. At the end of the day, money is the tune they want to play their music to, not humanity.

Humanity has nothing to do with stock prices, in fact, humans waste time, they waste money, they waste resources, and they are a cost that shareholders (read: Investment Banks) find to be a strain on their end-result — The Bottomline.

The Market is not Free

See, this is where the Right versus the Left battle comes into play. Do you regulate? Do you claim a need for socialist intervention on the money machine? How far do you take this type of action under Government control?

Well, the best part for Corporations about this is, We The People are ridiculously divided, because all we see are keywords like “joblessness”, “deregulation”, “socialism”, “Marxism”, “free markets” etc — but are never given the actual cause of the problem.

Since the people are too busy fighting over the cream at the top of the cappuccino, we’re failing to see the coffee table the mug is sitting on, and thus, too tied up in the surface, and “get the money out of politics” arguments.

We’re all being too shallow-minded with our “Left/Right wing media is biased!” and “Down with Corporate America/Socialist agenda” viewpoints. We would all be better off if we focused on the actual cause of the problems faced with, instead of the end results we’re fighting against like water over stone.

To put things into a perspective we can all roll our eyes at:

Michael Bay’s Armageddon movie has something we can all learn from, you can’t save the planet by chipping away at the surface, you have to drill down into the core of the problem, and destroy it from the inside out if you want to win.

Solution

• Corporations aren’t bad. Their priorities are.
• Their priorities are bad because too much Greed controls their priorities.
• The reward for being greedy is very high, thanks to Investment Banks controlling the markets.
• The Bottomline needs to be the wealth of a Nation, not whether or not a company looks appealing to Investors / Investment Banks.
• Mix all this with politics, and you have yourself a nightmare.

The Free Market is about allowing non-Government entities to operate and generate capital within a country for the betterment of the country – as whole. This isn’t some communistic plea to “give people what you’ve got”; it’s a simple fact – I own a company, I’m not a government employee, simple.

The Free Market mixed with an automated Money Market, not actually based on anything tangible, but rather, things that can be driven by the very hand that benefits from it – is not free. It’s a prison, and will end up being the worst crime against humanity in history if a solution can’t be reached, together, as a People.

I’ve cropped them to fit the iPhone 4 and Android phones. Downloads here via zip files:

Android Wallpapers Download (zip 1.4 MB)

iPhone 4 Wallpaper Download (zip 2.5 MB)

The above files include the below images:

Photographic Tribute to Jackson Pollock