less than earnest

It was March 2003, before moving to Arizona, and I had just rented a room on the 13th floor of a building on Washington Street in downtown L.A. Outside the window, visible from the freeway, a sign remained, ‘Creative Office’, put there for attracting would be tenants.

With a can of red spray paint I wrote, ‘REVOLT’ in large letters on the inside wall.

I was preoccupied by something as she doodled about the word with a red marker. It took me a bit, but then I realized what she was pointing out to me when she was done. The letters L-O-V-E in the word had been softly embellished with an unmistakable feminine touch. Where I had ended a letter, she began her floral thread.

From that room our revolt took form. A book, songs, videos, a child, all taking the shape from that whole idea, and blossoming with what we share.

—

(Ron)Paul’s followers are a veritable rainbow coalition drawn from across the political spectrum. The most striking image from his campaign – the slogan “Revolution” with the letters “EVOL” reversed to spell “love” backward – is, to use a 1960s metaphor, more Beatles than Barry Goldwater. (The creator of this slogan, Arizona libertarian Ernie Hancock, explains in an online article that the “love” refers to love of liberty, but concedes that the visual was chosen mainly for its emotional impact.)

Ernest has been visiting web-sites and becoming ‘informed’ over the last few years. Knowing the sites that he promotes on his own collage of web-sites, he had come across a slogan and an image that he has now adopted as his own.

But without due consent from the author of the slogan, Ernest, running for Secretary of State for Arizona, has now become a plagiarist at best -though he openly promotes the word ‘Freedom’ and maintains the website ‘freedomsphoenix.com’.

One must ask: What kind of freedom is Ernest promoting?

So I wrote him:

Ernest,

you are using a slogan that is not yours. you are using an image with the ‘philosophy of liberty’ that is attached to the author of the slogan. because you surf the net and come across something doesn’t give you any right to attach your name to it. this is blatant plagiarism, and not earnest ernest.

isa borg

and Ernest responded:

?????

Now, let’s refresh:

on the left: from stone.cold.baby video on the right: the fraud
In fact, even his signature is copied from John Hancock.

And there are people who notice:

Another point to be corrected is that Ernie created the r3VOLution logo. He did not.

His credit is that he spotted the image on the Internet some 18 months ago, recognized the genius of the logo — I did not when he showed it to me, thinking it no big deal — and he tucked it away for some future project. He picked the Ron Paul project and the Ron Paul r3VOLution was born.

Ernie’s other genius is that his r3VOLution is bottom up, not top down. There is no head of the snake to cut off. Everybody literally is a potential leader of their own Ron Paul r3VOLution, free to do their own thing, contribute their own ideas and efforts … and has been. The infection has rapidly spread not just across the nation, but now is going around the world. And that was (and still is) the initial goal of the Ron Paul r3VOLution.

Here is an earnest reminder of the source:(book 1: the frozen computr)

 

and of course this