Bernard Loomis (July 4, 1923 – June 2, 2006), the marketing genius who did far more than anyone else to help transform children’s television programming into a promotional arm of the toy industry, died of heart failure at the age of 82.

Largely through his introduction and marketing of dolls, action figures, and products including Chatty Cathy (the first talking doll), Barbie (measurements: 39- 21-33), The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Baby Alive (who “realistically” pooped when fed), Play-Doh, The Man from Atlantis, Care Bears, and the entire Star Wars action figure collection, Loomis’ efforts helped spawn a “toyetic” world of “entertainment multiplexes.” Every company he worked for became the world’s largest toy company during his tenure.

Loomis entered the world on July 4, 1923, in the Bronx, and claimed that his father, a Russian immigrant who “dabbled in show business and generally failed to make a living as an itinerant salesman of woolen goods,” never bought toys for him. Such deprivation led him to create a baseball simulation game based on a deck of cards and memorize the Lionel train catalog.

The young Bernard was not the only one of his generation to grow up toyless. “The Great Depression…made it impossible for most people to buy a lot of toys, and the war had the same effect,” according to a 1986 Atlantic article about the industry. “When prosperity returned…the modern toy industry was born as well. Propelling it toward maturity were the two great engines of postwar American culture: television and plastic.” 

It was his vision for the fusion of those two engines that launched Loomis’ career and earned him the moniker “The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning.” In 1968, while working for Mattel, Loomis was assigned to market Hot Wheels, a new line of miniature toy cars. He created the first animated series based on a toy property, which premiered on ABC on September 6, 1969. The FCC (at the behest of a now-defunct competitor, the Topper Corporation) declared that the Hot Wheels series was not entertainment, but “a 30-minute commercial for Hot Wheels.” ABC cancelled the series in 1971.

Loomis was predictably critical of the FCC’s ruling. “It is not fair for anyone to judge that ‘you can’t do that because you started out as a commercial product rather than a different kind of commercial product,’” he protested. “The original Disney or Snoopy cartoons were commercial products. They were done for the purposes of making money, selling films and selling newspapers. And to say we can’t broadcast a TV show because we did the toys at the same time, rather than sequentially, is nonsense.”

Loomis persevered in his efforts and, in 1980, collaborated with the American Greetings card company (who’d found that strawberries were the most popular element on greetings cards) to foist the television special Welcome to the World of Strawberry Shortcake onto prime-time television with nary a peep from the FCC—despite the fact that the show was but one part of a marketing empire that also included toys, games, and hundreds of licensed products.

Loomis was not merely a deft businessman who pulled himself up from his modest beginnings by his very own bootstraps. If that were the case, his might merely be one more hackneyed story in the thick annals of USAmerican free-market folklore. What truly distinguishes Loomis is his absolutely central role in robbing children’s entertainment of any motive but profit.

“Manufacturers create a fantasy world, and this has led to a very sophisticated relationship between them and the child,” said Loomis in an interview from the mid-90s. “We are now in the business of multiple sales to the same children in the same fantasy.”

Perhaps Loomis’ own daughter, Debra, aided by her proximity to the world’s premier marketer of children’s toys and entertainment, understood only too well the falseness of a fantasy constructed entirely for the purpose of “multiple sales.”

She never watched Saturday morning cartoons.

—Brian Awehali

From the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow – The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt

Music can do a lot of different things. There’s music to comfort you, music to make you dance, music to make the time pass easier.

And then there’s music that whacks you upside the head, assaults you, is radically unconcerned with your comfort, and comes to get inside and change you, forever.

Such was the music of Captain Beefheart, AKA Don Van Vliet (1941 – 2010), which was a heavy influence on everyone from PJ Harvey and Tom Waits to Radiohead and Merrill Garbus of Tune-yards. Beefheart’s name, he claimed, was a pun on him having “a beef in my heart with the world.” (He made other claims as to its other meanings, too, and always enjoyed toying with his interviewers.) He once told an interviewer that rock and roll was obsessed with this “4/4 momma heartbeat,” and that he was more interested in “anti-hypnotics.” During the same interview, he also said that he was interested in “breaking up the catatonic state…. and I think there is one…” Van Vliet was a trickster in the true sense; alternately and sometimes simultaneously profound and nonsensical, as deadly serious as a fart in the wind.

The music he made with others was unique: he himself knew almost no music theory, yet he consistently attracted world-class musicians (like Ry Cooder) who were willing to put up with his almost cult-like creative process. For a year prior to recording the landmark 1969 Trout Mask Replica, which consistently makes critics’ “top 100 of all-time” lists on the basis of its wide cultural influence, Van Vliet locked his fellow musicians up in a house and demanded they be in performance mode 24 hours a day. Only one person was allowed to leave the “studio,” once a week, to buy meager supplies. Pictures of the musicians at this time show gaunt, hollowed-out cheeks and a feral lysergic electricity behind the eyes.

Then they walked into a studio that was reserved for three weeks’ time, and, in about three hours’ time, recorded the avant garde “rock” album to end all such albums: a sprawling surrealist prose poem trundling along on ether and the primordial grunts of ur-bluesmen, an ecstatic and complex ode to nature and the Marvelous, all chaos and wonder. Utterly unique. [Here are three of the more accessible tracks from the album: "Moonlight On Vermont," "Veteran's Day Poppy," "Pachuco Cadaver"]

One long-time music reviewer described “Trout Mask Replica” as

about to break apart at the seams, bursting with seemingly diametric differences. The music is utterly new, yet steeped in tradition. The lyrics are non-sensical yet intellectual. The musicianship sounds spasmodic, yet is precisely disciplined. The emotions are playful yet also have a gentle sadness. Everything seems to be directed towards disorientation. The beautiful alliteration and repetition is hallucinatory. The odd time signatures and frenzied changes lend a feeling of vertigo. The tracks do not flow. The entire sound is lopsided ­with much more happening in one channel than the other if you played with the balance…While to some [Beefheart] doesn’t even seem human, he has a remarkably compassionate feeling for humanity. And his empathy for the mother earth and its critters continued through the rest of his recording career, and on to his painting career…

Here’s the Captain and his Magic Band in 1968, playing “Electricity” and “Sure ‘Nuff ‘n Yes I Do” on Cannes Beach. [Full lyrics to "Electricity" at the end of this post.]

Van Vliet turned his back on music suddenly, many years ago, after releasing one of his stronger albums, Ice Cream for Crow. He had always sculpted and painted, but he decided to devote himself fully to his painting and made an unlikely crossover and won a significant level of critical recognition for his painting.

Don Van Vliet in front of one of his paintings, 1980.

Just last week I was talking to my friend Eric about Captain Beefheart and his music. We were in a studio filled with a banjo, a drum, painted studies of the human form, some trapeze rings dangled from the ceiling, and a big theme unifying much of the art on the walls was Third Nature — nature taking back over what industry and civilization had commandeered. We’d been talking about eros, about The World, and about staying fascinated with our various pursuits when Beefheart came up. It all seemed somehow perfect. How to stay fully awake and fully alive in a sleepwalking world was the feel of it.

I was moved and affected by Don Van Vliet’s art and play, and his light in the world. His lyrics were deep and weird and full of many layers of meaning. If you don’t really know his work, I think you might be moved well by him, too. It’s not easy listening, and it does not generally comfort, but you will be rewarded if you persevere. In some cases, you’ll hear things that sound familiar because of how widely studied and copied he’s been, but keep in mind that he was making most of this music 30-40 years ago.

For those who are curious, John Peel and the BBC also did a great short documentary titled “The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart” that is available in segments on You Tube. (Part 1 of 6.)

“Electricity”

Singin through you to me; thunderbolts caught easily
Shouts the truth peacefully Eeeeeee-lec-tri-ci-teeeeeeee

High voltage man kisses night to bring the light to those who need to hide their shadow deed
Go into bright find the light and know that friends don`t mind just how you grow

midnight cowboy stains in black read all roads without a map
To free-seeking electricity (repeat) (Repeat both lines)

BONUS LINK: Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band Performing “Click Clack” and “Grow Fins,” from the 1972 album, Spotlight Kid.

The L.A. Weekly did a great post, “Top 14 Reasons Why Captain Beefheart Was a True American Genius” that’s worth checking out in its entirety, but which features this gem as Reason #10:

“in the late 60s fused delta blues, beat poetics, Dada/Surrealist techniques, avant jazz, R&B & the kitchen sink into a metaphysics of the imagination that tore a giant hole in the ozone of pop-artistic possibility. Like an American Van Gogh he seemed to open up new landscapes of consciousness as much as of music.”

 

by Brian Awehali

Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney
January 30, 1941- 2010

“Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn’t do you any good if you lose,” Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney, first appointed to office by Richard Nixon, told journalist Tim Russert in 1976. And it could be argued that until his final heart attack late yesterday afternoon at his Wyoming ranch, Cheney never did truly lose, despite bringing scandal, ethics investigations, and eventual doom to every administration he worked for. By demonstrating his loyalty to an aggressive and frequently extra-legal realpolitik intentionally divorced from the realm of ethics–and getting away with it–this avid chili lover, “stump” of a high school football player from Wyoming, who dropped out of Yale, was twice nabbed for drunk driving, and who shot rabbits, birds, a hunting partner, and other animals in his free time, became a grimacingly enduring icon of American business and politics.

“He said the presidency was like one of those giant medicine balls,” said Bruce Bradley, who hired Cheney to work at his investment firm in 1973, after Cheney left the imploding Nixon administration. “If you get ahold of it, what you do is, you keep pushing that ball and you never let the other team push back.” During debates arranged for the benefit of Bradley’s clients at the time, Cheney would argue forcefully that Nixon’s resignation was forced merely by his enemies’ political ploys, and not because Nixon had violated any laws or betrayed the oath of his office.

Check out a part of the David Frost/Richard Nixon interview below, in which Nixon articulates his own Cheney-esque conception of democracy when he states that when the President does something illegal it’s not illegal:

In their 1983 Kings of the Hill: Power and Personality in the House of Representatives, co-authors Richard Cheney and his wife Lynne Ann Vincent Cheney fawned over House Speaker Henry Clay, describing him as the “most spectacular” asserter of power in history. “No one managed to do what young Henry Clay did to thrust a nation into war,” the couple wrote, referring to the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain. “Audacious and bold, he and his war hawks were exhilirating company as they maneuvered a doubtful president and a divided nation into a firm and fiery course.”

The book, written in 1983, goes on to admit that this “firm and fiery course” into the War of 1812 met with a series of “bloody and painful defeats” on land and ultimately ended in something of a stalemate, but this did not mean that Dick Cheney, the 46th Vice President of the United States, was slated to learn the lessons of history he and his wife wrote of in their book. Almost 20 years later, after repeatedly asserting that US troops in Iraq would be greeted as liberators, and that “the streets in Basra and Baghdad [were] sure to erupt in joy,” Cheney, flanked with propaganda from the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the American Enterprise Institute, as well as the short-lived Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), constructed a relentless and almost wholly fabricated public relations campaign that led the US into its disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Interestingly, he gave an almost exact opposite – and infinitely more accurate – analysis of the likely effects of a U.S. invasion of Iraq in a 1994 interview on C-SPAN:

Born January 30, 1941 at 7:30 pm in Lincoln, Nebraska, Richard was the oldest son of Richard, who worked for the US Soil Conservation Service, and his mother Marjorie, who was a homemaker. When he was 13, his family moved from Lincoln to Casper, Wyoming, a town of 17,000 at the time, where Cheney occupied himself hunting, playing poker, fishing, playing football, waterskiing on planks with a car towing him along the Alcova Dam aqueduct, and nurturing a reportedly lifelong love of military history and biographies.

After earning a scholarship to Yale in 1959, Cheney flunked out: “I had a lack of direction, but I had a good time,” he said. He returned to Casper, Wyoming, and worked as a lineman for a power company. In 1964 Richard married Lynne Vincent, whom he’d met at the age of 14. Lynne was a state champion baton twirler in high school. According to a Time Magazine profile, Lynne would start her routines by setting the ends of her baton on fire before hurling it impressively into the air. When she was done with her pyrotechnics, she would hand the baton to Cheney, who had been standing inconspicuously off to the side with a coffee can full of water, ready to douse the flames.

In 1973, Cheney joined Richard Nixon’s White House staff, serving in a variety of positions. In 1975, he was made the youngest ever Chief of Staff when Gerald Ford appointed him to the post. Following Ford’s defeat in 1976, Cheney successfully mounted a campaign to represent Wyoming in the US House of Representatives, where he served from 1978 until 1989.

He suffered the first of his many heart attacks in 1978, at the age of 37. Subsequent attacks are responsible for his distinctively crooked grimace of a smile.

During this time, Lynne Cheney was pursuing her own political career, and served as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 until 1993.

In 1989, when George Bush Sr.’s nomination of John Tower was rejected, Cheney was nominated for Secretary of Defense. In 1993, Cheney returned to the private sector, joining the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank founded in 1943 primarily to support limited government, vigorous private enterprise, and strong national defense, for whom Lynne Cheney was also a senior fellow in education and culture. In 1995, Cheney became chairman and CEO of Halliburton Energy Services, and he put his connections to muscular use for his new employers: under his watch tax havens increased dramatically, and Halliburton won a variety of highly profitable no-bid or faux-bid contracts.

Staying busy on several fronts, Cheney, along with Donald Rumsfeld, William Kristol and others, founded the previously mentioned “Project For a New American Century” (PNAC), a think tank which had a defining influence on the disastrous foreign policy of the second Bush administration.

When Cheney departed Halliburton in 2000 to run for Vice President, he was paid $20 million and retained a significant number of guaranteed stock options for his efforts. According to the New York Times, despite his great wealth (estimated at between $30 and $100 million) Cheney requested and received permission in 2001 to transfer the estimated $186,000 annual electricity bill for his 33-room mansion, on the grounds of the Washington Naval Observatory, to the Navy.

One of the more infamous and emblematic moments of Cheney’s truthless career occurred during his October 2004 debate with fellow Vice Presidential candidate, Senator John Edwards. Through his crooked half-smile, Cheney said: “”In my capacity as vice president, I am the president of the Senate, the presiding officer. I’m up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they’re in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.”

Edwards, clearly rendered momentarily speechless by the statement, had met Cheney twice: in 2002, when Edwards escorted Elizabeth Dole to her swearing in as Senator for North Carolina, where Cheney administered the oath, and at a National Prayer Breakfast in February 2001, where a transcript of the event shows Cheney acknowledging Edwards. Cheney was either lying, on live television, in front of millions of people, with little regard for how easy his claim would be to disprove, or he was mentally incompetent. [Footage: Cheney meets Edwards, pt. 1; Cheney meets Edwards, pt. 2]

While some critics saw the assertion as a particularly cynical tactic, those perceiving mental infirmity were bolstered in their suspicions when, on February 11, 2006, Cheney shot alleged friend, 78-year-old attorney Harry Whittington in the face and torso while hunting quail on a Southern Texas ranch. Whittington, who suffered a non-fatal heart attack three days later, due to a piece of buckshot lodged in the outer wall of his heart, passed away a year later. [Read comedian Louis C.K.'s take on what might really have happened.]

Cheney’s back and always-troubled heart kept attacking him in the months and years after he left office. Public outcry mounted about the occupation of Iraq and his deliberate use of false information to manufacture support for the 2003 invasion, his role in the CIA leak grand jury investigation, otherwise known as the Plame Affair, and his financial dealings while affiliated with Halliburton Energy Services. Through it all, Cheney remained publicly uncowed and vociferously defended his actions.

Cheney died sometime yesterday after suffering what would prove to be the last of his many heart attacks. He is survived by his wife, Lynne, and his two daughters, Mary, and Elizabeth, who has four grandchildren with former Homeland Security General Counsel and probable future Republican candidate for higher office, Philip J. Perry.

His body will surely decay faster than will the stain of his legacy.

FEATURES | ESSAYS | INTERVIEWS| LiP: INFORMED REVOLT

FEATURES

» After the Twister – A Day in the Ruins of Joplin
“I was born in Joplin, but I am not a local. Since my parents divorced and left when I was three, I’ve lived in Tulsa, the Hague, Immokalee (Florida), Albuquerque, New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Santa Fe, Asheville, Oakland, and China. My worldview is not like the Joplinites. I’ve long since renounced any belief in theism or supernatural determinism, and don’t believe that tornadoes or anything else for that matter are acts of God, unless you mean it metaphorically…”
:: The Brooklyn Rail :: July 2011

» Drift to Live: Words with China’s People’s Historian, Liao Yiwu
“Why should the government fear me?” says Liao smiling, the first day we meet, along with an interpreter and several of his writer friends, at a riverside teahouse outside of Chengdu, in Sichuan province. “I’m just a guy who tells stories…”
:: Counterpunch :: April 2011

» China’s Underground Historian
Liao Yiwu may be the most censored writer in China. His work has been translated into several languages and has enjoyed international critical acclaim, yet in his hometown of Chengdu, where his books are banned, he’s virtually unknown.
:: The Progressive :: April 2011

» Mongolia’s Wilderness Threatened by Mining Boom
Multinational mining companies eye Mongolia’s earthy fortunes
:: Earth Island Journal / Guardian (UK) / Third World Resurgence (Malaysia)/ Ger (Denmark) :: 2010-11

» Native Energy Futures
Renewable Energy, Actual Sovereignty & the New Rush on Indian Lands
:: LiP :: 2006 :: Project Censored award winner :: PDF version

» Trust Us, We’re the Government
How to Make $137 Billion of Indian Money Disappear
:: Alternet :: 2002 :: Project Censored award winner

» The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ $100-Billion Shell Game
:: Z Magazine (cover) :: April 2002 :: with Silja Talvi

» Broken Promises
Government malfeasance continues in landmark Indian Trust case
:: ColorsNW :: 2003 :: Society of Professional Journalists award-winner :: with Silja Talvi

» New World Disorder
How U.S. arms dealers and their Cabinet-level cronies profit from the war on terror
:: LiP / Alternet :: 2002

» Monitoring Your Every Move – A Guide to Biometric Technologies
What are the facts about biometrics? Predictably, industry leaders and critics paint wildly different pictures. Here, however, are a few brief looks at today’s leading biometric technologies, which may be a much bigger part of your life than you’d expect, in a considerably shorter time than you’d imagine.
:: High Times :: 2002

» Profit, Control, and the Myth of Security
The advance of Total Surveillance Society, aka Total Security, promises a world free of danger and uncertainty, yet the arguments for a comprehensive surveillance society comprise a fear-addled litany of threats and fantastic promises of security that are grossly exaggerated by the very corporate and government serial offenders who pose the greatest threat to our health and safety.
:: LiP :: 2006 :: with Ariane Conrad

» Life After Corporate Death Care
As traditional religious death rituals have given way to more secular alternatives, a consumer revolt against the high cost of dying in America is well underway.
:: Alternet :: 2004

» David and Goliath in Indian Country
The feds are on the losing side of the largest class action lawsuit ever filed against the U.S. government. This time, the Indians may actually beat the cavalry.
:: Alternet :: 2005

» Propaganda, Public Relations, and the Not-So-New Dark Age
Edward L. Bernays birthed the public relations industry in the United States. His clients included General Motors, United Fruit, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, the U.S. Department of State, Health, and Commerce, Samuel Goldwyn, Eleanor Roosevelt, the American Tobacco Company, and Proctor & Gamble. He directed public relations campaigns for every president from Calvin Coolidge in 1925, to Dwight Eisenhower in the late 1950s. He was, in the estimation of cultural historian Ann Douglas, the man “who orchestrated the commercialization of a culture.”
:: with Stephen Bender :: LiP :: 2006

» Challenging the War on Drugs
A landmark conference on drug policy in Los Angeles convened nearly 600 attendees from across the U.S. and Europe.
:: Santa Fe New Mexican / Alternet :: 2002

» Nike Come Home, All is Forgiven
Oregon invites shoe giant to consider the economic advantages of domestic prison labor.
:: LiP :: 1998

ESSAYS

» Inventing Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving Day provides an ideal opportunity to consider the formation of national identity and the concept of a civil religion. It’s also a living metaphor of the prevailing American model for immigrant assimilation and the ways in which history can be reinterpreted, and indeed wholly reinvented, to serve competing ethnic, patriotic, religious and commercial ends.
:: Britannica.com :: 2002

» Where Fools Rush In – Custer’s Last Stand
July 25, 1876 ― The U.S. Army today suffered its worst defeat ever in Plains Indian warfare, as more than 260 soldiers in the 7th Cavalry were killed along the banks of the Little Bighorn River in the disputed Montana Territory. The bloodbath ensued after an evidently ill-conceived charge under the command of Gen. George Armstrong Custer.
:: Britannica.com :: 2000

INTERVIEWS

» Madness and Mass Society
Pharmaceuticals, Psychiatry, and the Rebellion of True Community
:: an interview with Dr. Bruce Levine :: LiP :: 2006

» Torture Taxi – Anatomy of a CIA Front Company
Anatomy of a CIA Front Company
:: an interview with A.C Thompson and Trevor Paglen :: LiP :: 2007

» Remote Control Hip Hop
Culture, power and youth…
:: an interview with Jeff Chang :: LiP :: 2005

» Who’s White?
Race, Humor and the New Black/Non-Black Breakdown
:: an interview with damali ayo and Tim Wise :: LooseLiP podcast :: 2007

» Bad Vibes – Poison Pleasure Products?
Words with Jessica Giordano, co-founder of the Smitten Kitten and the Coalition Against Toxic Toys (CATT).
:: with Lisa Jervis :: LiP :: 2006

» Conveying Correctness
The Prefabrication of Political Speech
:: an interview with Chip Berlet :: LiP :: 2005

» Designing Our Demise
One respected Cornell robotics expert is in firm belief that machines will acquire human levels of intelligence by the year 2040, and that by the middle part of this century, they will be our intellectual superiors.
:: an interview with Hans Moravec :: Britannica.com :: 2000

» Membership Has Its Disadvantages
Whiteness and the Social Entropy of Privilege
:: an interview with Tim Wise :: LiP :: 2005

» Notes On a National Disorder
A look at the growing problem of excessive concentration in the U.S. culture industries, and the oligopolistic sway of just a few giant players over television news, book publishing, popular music and cable TV. Also, how the hell Bush II happened.
:: an interview with Mark Crispin Miller :: LiP :: 2005

» Addicted to Waste
Harm Reduction, Disposability and the Myth of Activist Purity
:: an interview with Julia Butterfly Hill :: Tikkun :: 2005

» On Irony
A pointed Q&A with author Rebecca Solnit
:: LiP :: 2006

LiP: Informed Revolt

In 1996, I started a zine called LiP in Chicago, learned a lot from it, took a break for several years to do other things, then relaunched it as a full-fledged North American periodical in 2004. The magazine, always printed on 100% recycled PCW paper, using non-petroleum-based inks, and with either worker-owned or union printers, explored radical (root/fundamental) aspects of the world and its power relations in a way we hoped could reach beyond the choir and be compelling for a wide readership. We did surprisingly well with our all-volunteer staff, 600+ contributors and no appetite for running an actual business, garnering awards from Project Censored, Utne Reader, East Bay Express, South by Southwest and Clamor during our run. Below are links to one complete issue of the magazine, and to various items related to the publication of the LiP anthology, Tipping the Sacred Cow (AK Press).

LiP No. 5:
The Relentlessly Persuasive Propaganda Issue [PDF]

Featuring: Eduardo Galeano, Vandana Shiva, Dr. Bruce Levine, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Jeff Conant, Antonia Juhasz, Timothy Kreider and Hugh D’Andrade, among many others. 

“‘Making the world safe for democracy,’ that was the big slogan.” – Edward Bernays, on his work for the first US government propaganda ministry, the 1917 Committee on Public Information

“In really hard times the rules of the game are altered.” – Journalist and social theorist Walter Lippmann, speaking of both elite manipulations of society and history’s mass cataclysms.

Tipping the Sacred Cow
The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt (AK Press)

“Tipping the Sacred Cow is a savvy and well-curated collection of the comics, illustrations, articles and interviews featured in LiP’s myriad print and online incarnations from 1996-2007. Capturing the magazine’s cheeky nature, it reads like a super-special edition of LiP—complete with illustrations by cartoonist Eric Drooker, a “theft ethics” quiz, a glossary of culture-jamming lingo and other useful appendices—including some exclusive, behind-the-scenes, previously unpublished material…. Tipping the Sacred Cow serves as a worthy headstone for a publication that died before its time.”

– “R.I.P. LiP” - In These Times, 11/2007

“Every single article in this anthology forced me to shift my thinking about issues near and dear to my heart (feminism, the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr., eco-friendly policies—even the fine art of using the toilet).”

– Feminist Review, 11/2007

“[There's a] paradox that’s becoming increasingly difficult for independent publishers–especially progressive, environmentally conscious ones–to resolve. ‘Being values-driven,’ says Awehali, ‘I think we’re fundamentally and structurally at odds with the systems we use to print, to distribute, and so on. It’s really no surprise that [LiP] found it difficult to survive and thrive in a hypercapitalist periodicals marketplace.’”

– “Shelf Life,” Utne Reader, 11/2007

• new as of May 2011: Download Tipping the Sacred Cow [PDF, 9.3M]
• ZNet author Q&A: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz interviews Brian Awehali about the publication of Tipping the Sacred Cow. (2007)
• Wikipedia page for LiP: Informed Revolt