Dining with Terrorists

Al Jazeera has a six part series Dining with Terrorists.

Since the events of September 11 the word “terrorism” has acquired a new political dynamic.

Wars are waged and many lives have been lost in the name of combatting “terror”, strict legislation has been passed to prevent acts of “terrorism”.

It is a definition that is highly subjective and what constitutes a “terrorist” depends on where you live and what you believe in.

In a new six part series the author and journalist Phil Rees travelled to South Asia, the Middle East and the Americas to explore the debate and meaning of the word “terrorism”.

Asian Dub Foundation & the Music of Resistance

                                                                                                                        

The Asian Dub Foundation are taking a well earned break before they continue to liberate the world, next to South America for shows in Colombia and Mexico followed by some dates in Russia. 2008 has been one of the busiest yet for the band with the worldwide release of new album ‘Punkara’ and a massive European tour that kept them on the road for nearly three months. Big respect to all that have supported on their travels!

The video for Burning Fence from Punkara cries out wisdom from the streets!

“Climb on board the mothership revolution,

the true universal is the one solution,

or else you’ll sit on a burning fence,

don’t matter what your for or what your against.

Who is going to be next to rise up?”

and  Chadrasonic from Asian Dub Foundation presents….

MUSIC of RESISTANCE

A  six-part documentary series which tells the stories of musicians who fight repression and sing about injustices.The series begins this week for a total of 13 weeks with the first episode featuring Asian Dub Foundation now showing on Al Jazeera TV  and available on YOUTUBE.

 EPISODE 1) Asian Dub Foundation

         2) Tinariwen

         3) Seun Kuti

         4) Massoukos

         5) Chullage

         6) Afro Reggae

 

WWW.MUSICOFRESISTANCE.COM

                   

 For times and schedule: http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/

 

 

R.I.P. Analog TV

On February 17, 2009 all full-power broadcast television stations in the United States will stop broadcasting on analog airwaves and begin broadcasting only in digital. So you have less than 2 weeks to watch TV using ‘rabbit ears’, and you could record it on Beta. Analog Tv will be so Video Vinyl.

I can laugh now at struggling with old tech, but might need my kids help to set up my ‘holoviewer’ one day.

Whatever happened to Free TV?

Manu Chao – Politik Kills

The French/Spanish Manu Chao  brings tunes to make you dance and rise up! It’s like sunshine and molotovs, with a giant dub van cruisin’ at a demo. He is living proof that you don’t have to be big in the U.S. to be one of the world’s most important and influential musicians, and La Radiolina has lots more great songs for the revolution. 

He has also posted the parts for the song to be remixed at his site Politik Kills.

blackjack

Who is behind the series called Blackjack  at the telegraph.co.uk?

It shows London, NYC, Toronto, Mexico City, LA, and Portland all being nuked. Then a New World Order responding with nukes? to Syria, Iran, and China, and a global police lock down rounding up ‘dissidents’. 

Does the Telegraph think this is good cultural content? Is it modern viral marketing in bad taste like the VW Polo car ad just making hype for a movie release? Is it a psyops by an intell agency designed to disturb, nothing more, or conditioning? 

According to the Infowars crew the Telegraph hasn’t clarified who made them or why they are continuing to appear after many complaints.

Well, in the card game Blackjack highest possible hand is a “blackjack” meaning an initial two-card total of 21 (an ace and a ten-value card, as ace are 1 or 11). At 22  the game is ‘busted’.

The source ‘presentations’ have no sound, but here are the quick views with tunes.

 

In Blackjack Part 3 it becomes more graphic novel style and less power point presentation.

garbage architecture

Thai monks from the Sisaket province have used over one million recycled glass 
bottle to construct their Buddhist temple. Mindfulness is at the center of the 
Buddhist discipline and the dedication and thoughtfulness required to build 
everything from the toilets to their crematorium from recycled bottles shows 
what creativity and elbow grease can accomplish.

The Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple is about 400 miles northeast of Bangkok in 
the city of Khun Han close to the Cambodian border. Using Heineken bottles 
(green) and Chang Beer bottles (brown) the monks were able to clean up the 
local pollution and create a useful structure that will be a visual reminder 
to the scope of pollution and the potential we can make with limber minds.

The water tower and tourist bathrooms are even made from beer bottle litter. 
The monks were able to have the local people bring them the building materials 
which beautifully reflect the Thai sun.

the greenUPGRADER has several pictures of the recent buddhist temple in Thailand.

Of course this isn’t the first glass bottle building. In this picture you can see friends making some more empties available for building with at Rhyolite, Nevada in Death Valley. How’s that for ruffin’ it? Go to the desert and drink your way to shelter. No wonder its a ghost town.

“In the old ghost town of Rhyolite, Nevada, a saloon owner named Tom Kelly, built a house out of bottles because lumber was scarce at the time. Reportedly he used some 50,000 beer, whiskey, soda and medicine bottles to build the structure which still stands today. Mr. Kelley was 76 years old when he built the house and it took him almost six months to complete.”

It is not surprising that the monks had used Heineken bottles as Alfred Heineken in 1960 had devised the ‘World Bottle’ or WOBO for short. As the story goes, Alfred Heineken had an epiphany while on a world tour of Heineken factories. When Heineken was on the Caribbean island of Curacao in 1960 he saw many bottles littering the beach due to the fact that the island had no economic means of returning the bottles to the bottling plants from which they had come. He was also concerned with the lack of affordable building materials and the inadequate living conditions plaguing Curacao’s lower-class. Envisioning a solution for these problems, he found a dutch architect John Habraken to design what he called “a brick that holds beer.”

Over the next three years, the Heineken WOBO went through a design process. Some of the early designs were of interlocking and self-aligning bottles. The idea sprung from the belief that the need for mortar would add complexity and expense to the bottle wall’s simplicity and affordability. Some designs proved to be effective building materials but too heavy and slow-forming to be economically produced. Other designs were rejected by Heineken based on aesthetic preferences. In the end, the bottle that was selected was a compromise between the previous designs.

The bottle was designed to be interlocking, laid horizontally and bonded with cement mortar with a silicon additive. A 10 ft x 10 ft shack would take approximately 1,000 bottles to build. In 1963, 100,000 WOBO’s were produced in two sizes, 350 and 500 mm. This size difference was necessary in order to bond the bottles when building a wall, in the same way as a half brick is necessary when building with bricks.Unfortunately most of them are destroyed and no bottles are left. They are very rare and become a collectors item.

Only two WOBO structures exist and they are both on the Heineken estate in Noordwijk, near Amsterdam. The first was a small shed which had a corrugated iron roof and timber supports where the builder could not work out how to resolve the junction between necks and bases running in the same direction. Later, a timber double garage was renovated with WOBO siding. Alfred Heineken did not develop the WOBO concept further and the idea never got a chance to materialize.

The lack of support for the WOBO idea didn’t slow bottle buildings from popping up. I remember visiting the George Plumb’s ‘Glass Castle’ near Duncan, BC. Which was destroyed to make way for highway expansion. I still have some classic bottles from there before it was cleared away. 

If you wanted you could build your own earthship using bottles, tyres, and other recycled materials. You could maybe even build a place at the Earthship Landing Zone in Taos, New Mexico.

With the economic crisis I’m sure we will see more people pushed to the fringe and become desperate and build shelter with whatever is available where they are. Check out UNHOUSED for links and papers on squatting, madhousers, slum tv and Zero Yen Houses.

How Shepard Fairey elected Barack Obama

ok, I know lots of people voted for Obama, but when some peoples support means a lot more than others. Shepard Fairey’s image of ‘Hope’ made Barack Obama iconic. Fairey best  known for his ‘Obey’ series made the switch to a positive message. I can’t help it though, all I see is the Barack image with the OBEY message still.

Buddha Machine 2.0

The FM3 Buddha Machine is a creation of FM3, a China-based music duo of Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian. They are best known as the creators of the Buddha Machine （貝佛） loop-player. Inspired by buddhist chants and ambient loops a la Brian Eno, the duo made the first Buddha Machine in 2006. Since then over 50,000 have sold worldwide, and in November 2008, the new version is ready to go. 

Basically just a small box with 9 ambient loops (300 seconds) that can be selected with a volume knob and now a pitch bend. Check out Zendesk which has put together a FM3 Buddha Machine Wall with 21 of them to help you reach satori.

Israeli Attack Injures 1.5 Million Gazans

Jonathan Cook
Counterpunch
Friday, January 16, 2009

This week the death toll in Gaza passed the 1,000 mark, after nearly three weeks of Israeli air and ground attacks. But surprisingly, no one has reported an even more appalling statistic: that there are some 1.5 million injured Palestinians in Gaza. How is is possible that such an astounding figure could have passed the world’s media by?

The reason apparently is that they have been relying on the highly unreliable statistics provided by official Palestinian sources. It appears that the Palestinian health ministry only records as wounded those Gazans who need to stay in hospital because of the severity of their injuries.

That means they only count the more than 4,500 Gazans who have suffered injuries such as severe burns from exploding Israeli phosphorus shells; shrapnel wounds from artillery rounds; broken or lost limbs from aerial bombardment; bullet wounds; physical trauma from falling building debris; and so on.

But in fact there is another, far more reasonable standard for assessing those injured, one that provides the far higher total of 1.5 million Gazans – or every surviving Palestinian in Gaza. The measure I am referring to is the one employed by Israel.

Here is an example of its use. In September 2007, the international media reported that 69 Israeli soldiers had been wounded when Palestinian militants fired a rocket into the Zikim army base near the Gaza Strip. The rocket struck a tent where the soldiers were sleeping.

It is worth noting the details of the attack. Israeli officials related that, of the 69 wounded, 11 had moderate or severe injuries and one was critically injured. A few more had light wounds. The rest, probably 50 or more, were injured in the sense that they were suffering from shock.

So, if we apply the same standard to Gaza, that would mean 1.5 million Gazans have been wounded. Or is there still some doubt about whether the weeks of bombardment of Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on earth, have left the entire civilian population in a deep, and possibly permanent, state of shock?

Talking of Gaza’s civilians, where did they all go? Israel’s so-called “war” on Gaza must be the first example in human history of a conflict where there are apparently no civilians. Or, at least, that is the impression being created by the world’s leading international bodies, from the World Health Organisation to the United Nations. Instead they refer to a new category of “women and children”.

Thus, those 1,000-plus dead Gazans are broken down into percentages defined in terms of “women and children” and the rest. The earliest figures stated that about 25 per cent of Gaza’s dead were “women and children”, and that has steadily climbed close to the 50 per cent mark since Israel’s ground invasion got under way.

The implication – one with which Israel is presumably delighted – is that the rest are Palestinian fighters, or “terrorists” as Israel would prefer us to call them. It also suggests that every man in Gaza over the age of 16 is being defined as a non-civilian – as a combatant and, again by implication, as a terrorist. In short, all Gaza’s men are legitimate targets for Israeli attack.

…..rest of article

gallery of Isreali war crimes…

Al Jazeera Labs website; ‘war on gaza’ sms/twitter Incident tracking

Entropa – David Černý strikes against EU!

bbc

 

Entropa portrays Bulgaria as a toilet, Romania as a Dracula theme-park and France as a country on strike.

The Czech Republic, which holds the EU presidency, thought it had commissioned work from 27 European artists.

But it turned out to have been entirely completed by Czech artist David Cerny and two associates.

The eight-tonne mosaic is held together by snap-out plastic parts similar to those used in modelling kits.

The Netherlands is shown as series of minarets submerged by a flood – a possible reference to the nation’s simmering religious tensions.

Germany is shown as a network of motorways vaguely resembling a swastika, while the UK – criticised by some for being one of EU’s most eurosceptic members – is absent from Europe altogether.

Raised eyebrows

The 16-square-metre (172-square-foot) work was installed at the weekend to mark the start of the six-month Czech presidency of the EU.

There has already been an angry reaction to the piece from Bulgaria, which has summoned the Czech ambassador to Sofia to explain.

The three artists responsible for Entropa were led by David Cerny who, says the BBC’s Rob Cameron in Prague, is the enfant terrible of the Czech art world.

When his government commissioned him to create the installation, several eyebrows were raised, and they were not raised in vain, our correspondent adds.

Czech Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra said he was only informed on Monday that the installation was not the work of 27 European artists, but David Cerny and two colleagues.

Mr Vondra condemned Mr Cerny and said the Czech EU presidency was considering what steps to take before Thursday’s official launch.

“An agreement of the office of the government with the artist clearly stated that this will be a common work of artists from 27 EU states,” he said.

“The full responsibility for violating this assignment and this promise lies with David Cerny.”

Mr Cerny, who presented Entropa to his government with a brochure describing each of the artwork’s 27 supposed contributors from each member state, has apologised for misleading ministers, but not for the installation itself.

“We knew the truth would come out,” said Mr Cerny. “But before that we wanted to find out if Europe is able to laugh at itself.”

He added that Entropa “lampoons the socially activist art that balances on the verge between would-be controversial attacks on national character and undisturbing decoration of an official space”.

Mr Cerny first created a splash in the early 1991 when he painted a Soviet tank, a Second World War memorial in a Prague square, bright pink. His act of civil disobedience was considered “hooliganism” and he was briefly arrested.