That's right! I said I had video, but my geekiness had never extended to the ability to stream Quicktime files until this afternoon, when I finally took the time to learn how.

I don't know how many readers have Quicktime or how well this will work, but I have managed to edit and upload what I think are the two most interesting videos from Monday's Love Park immigration protest.

The first one shows the two professional cheerleader types who were on the stage, leading the crowd in a chant of "NO JUSTICIA NO PAZ!"

The slogan is Spanish for "NO JUSTICE NO PEACE!" -- a slogan often attributed to Al Sharpton, but which seems to have actually been invented in 1987 by deceased revolutionary leader Sonny Carson. It has since been adopted by various Marxists and Socialists, and I heard it screamed on many, many occasions when I served on the Berkeley Police Review Commission.

Says one activist,

Regarding message, “no justice, no peace,” is a sophisticated slogan, chanted by more than a few highly educated global justice and antiwar protesters (myself included) in recent years. It expresses an idealistic determination to disrupt the standard operating procedures of business as usual unless and until the social contract is honored by the powers that be. “The situation” is not “taken care of,” it insists, until fairness is established.

The answer of course, is that they did not. The chanters are professionals.

See for yourself.

[TO PLAY, CLICK ON THE PICTURE, AND YOUR QUICKTIME BROWSER SHOULD OPEN.]

If the stream does not play, you can copy and paste (or try clicking) the following URL in your Quicktime browser:

http://www.classicalvalues.com/JusticiaPaz.mov

The guy on the right appears to be Cuban, but there's no way to know for sure.

Later I got a nice video of the Korean drummers, who did a pretty good job.

[TO PLAY, CLICK ON THE PICTURE, AND YOUR QUICKTIME BROWSER SHOULD OPEN.]

Again here's the URL:

http://www.classicalvalues.com/Korean_Drums.MOV

I'm not sure who coordinated the Korean drummers, but the fact that they were also present at the demonstrations in San Francisco, New York, and in an earlier demo in Costa Mesa, California means it was part of this national effort.

The Korean drummers certainly get around; they've been at anti-WTO protests from Hong Kong to Cancun. Oh well, as the slogan and the album go, happiness is drumming! I just hope they're not drumming for socialism.

There's more, but these two are the best.

(Now I get to see whether this works.)

UPDATE: Interesting. It displays and the controls work fine in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer. Don't know why. (The URLs should work though.)

MORE: Dennis comments that if you double click on the picture, the video will start, and he is right. Why the controls are only visible in Firefox (and why there's a big white band around the picture in IE) I don't know.

AND MORE: If your computer is like mine and you're running IE, because I went to the trouble of embedding content, you'll likely get an annoying little "Click to run an Active X control on this web page" popup box. The reason is that Microsoft was sued for patent infringement by some company named Eolas which won a half a billion dollar judgment, and Microsoft wanted to stall paying. So they wrote a stupid workaround patch, which (as of last month) is being put into every Windows update.

The upshot is that last month, and with very little fanfare, Microsoft started pushing out an update to Internet Explorer (IE6 on Windows XP SP2 as well as the forthcoming IE7) that doesn't infringe upon the Eolas patent. This update makes all pages that use EMBED and/or OBJECT code (read: any page that makes use of a plug-in/ActiveX object) require a click from the user to "activate" the content, after which it will work normally.

Our computers are at war with their own innards.

The result? They spray us with annoying digital diarrhea, like this:

Thanks lawyers!

AFTERTHOUGHT: My computer downloaded Microsoft's new "patch" in a so-called "security update" (a lie right there) after I had published this post. Which makes the title more clairvoyant than I imagined.

UPDATE: Microsoft's bundling of litigation related non-security code in a "security update" has sparked a backlash.

Well, there's always Firefox.

AND MORE: This extreme annoyance is just starting to happen now, in millions of IE browsers all over the country!

(I wouldn't want to be having to answer the telephones at Microsoft tomorrow...)

MORE: The java script fix suggested here does not work as a correction, but I'm tired of screwing around, and I have to get ready for a trip. So I'm going to leave this alone for now and hope the Microsoft patch doesn't drive too many people crazy over night. Tomorrow, I plan to remove the embedded language, and interested people can download the videos in external players.

UPDATE: The video object embeds are removed now. (My apologies to anyone who was inconvenienced.)