Letter by Starhawk: reflection by a Jewish woman on Israeli aggression

I received an email today from Starhawk, born a Jew in the US and long-term peace activist who many times has been to Palestine to support the people there against constant Israeli state terror. In this mail she reflects not only on the homeland myth she was raised with but also on the need for [...]

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Odetta – some songs and thoughts on a legend

Odetta Holmes, simply known as Odetta passed away at the beginning of this month. Like Mama Africa (Miriam Makeba) she was one of the great black women using music to inspire and call on people to fight for Human Rights. What Makeba did against apartheid in South Africa, Odetta did for Civil Rights in America. 
In [...]

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One of Australia’s deadliest spiders is on the prowl again, looking for love

Malcolm Brown, Sydney Morning Herald
December 30, 2008

THEY’RE sneaky, they’re bitey, and they’re out and about. Funnel web spiders are on their mating prowl more than a month earlier than usual.
Mary Rayner, general manager of the Australian Reptile Park, said that in the past few weeks up to 40 funnel webs had been delivered to the [...]

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Graham Miller – Australian Suburban Splendour

Through the Amy Stein | Photography | Blog I came across the Australian photographer Graham Miller, which is not surprising given that both artists seem to share a fascination for suburbia, its people and cultural accessories as well as the sense of “isolation from community, culture and the environment” (Stein) that seems to pervade much of the [...]

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Vertor allows to check torrents before downloading them

 

Torrent downloads can be kind of a crap shoot. If you’d like a little reassurance about what you’re about to download, take a look at Vertor.

The service launched recently and provides automated checking of torrents from a number of trackers, like Pirate Bay, Demonoid, and several others. To date, the service has verified more than 140,000 torrents.
20 [...]

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Women and guns – photos from the American culture

Before listening recently to the words of a hatred filled woman talking about gunning down Afro-Americans in the wake of Katrina, it hadn’t really crossed my mind to associate women with guns. Far from being sexist, I somehow had the notion of a wiser and more gentle gender, of women by their very nature being [...]

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Architecture: new look for the Danube Flower building – but what about the environment?

Communist architecture wasn’t exactly known for aesthetic beauty or bold futuristic design. The only exception I’m aware of so far (and there are probably a handful of  others) was the colossal Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, which remained a shell coz the regime ran out of money. Here though is another, much more modest example (in a round-about [...]

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Another crazy biodiesel idea: fuel made from coffee

The biofuel madness continues unabated. It’s been obvious for years now that the concept has mainly disadvantages from both an ecological as well as a global justice perspective: more forests are chopped down to make room for fuel crops, biofuel production uses more energy than you get from using the end product, less area is [...]

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Improve your blog design: semantic web technologies (Part II)

Widgets
CoolPreviews

CoolPreviews, also created by the Cooliris team, lets you preview links without clicking, giving you the power to browse the Web faster. Just mouse over any link, and the preview window immediately appears to show you the content. In other words, you can preview web links, images, and videos without even clicking. In addition you [...]

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Improve your blog design: semantic web technologies (Part I)

Alex Iskold published on ReadWriteWeb a couple of days ago an interesting and well summarised “Guide to The Contextual Web” (btw: I can’t see much difference between the meaning of his term and that of ‘semantic web‘). He talks about the limitations of today’s browsers, which simply store data (information) but don’t allow computers to [...]

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A prostitute’s new life

Today’s Herald featured a long article on Graham Long, the current Wayside Chapel’s general manager. In it Long talked about his biggest revelation when working for several years in prisons: the ‘them and us’ illusion. And he found the same thought pattern of course when starting his job at the Wayside Chapel: the homeless vs. [...]

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Authenticity as listening to nature

“Authenticity is the ability to listen to what nature tells us”.
I like this Gerard Depardieu reflection. Of course, I don’t know which way he chose to link listening with nature and authenticity, but his bon mot gave me a chance to reflect on my own interpretation of that triad; it is based on seeing [...]

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Beşiktaş Fish Market – aesthetically beautiful architectural design

Gorgeous design. A pillar-less simple concrete shell covering the Beşiktaş fish market. Located in one of Istanbul’s most populated and diverse neighborhoods, Beşiktaş is an eclectic area with a village-like atmosphere that is in the process of urban renewal.
The Beşiktaş Fish Market is located on a triangular site. It is an iconic venue where many [...]

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Jetson Green: green ecology and social justice architecture

The ‘green building’ blog Jetson Green posted an article on on a project called the Eco-Laboratory, a theoretical design set in Seattle with affordable and market-rate residential housing, a job training center, homeless shelter, hygiene station, and public farmer’s market. I’ve heard a lot about green buildings, and this blog features quite a few of [...]

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Noam Chomsky on democracy and the economy in crisis

Softly spoken but pointedly thinking: Noam Chomsky. He’s talking about democracy and that the only reason it can be called that is because people struggle against the two parties that in fact are two factions of the same party: the business party. Because of that struggle there [...]

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Race hatred in New Orleans

In this Nation Institute/Hidden Driver exclusive, reporter A.C. Thompson talks with innocent victims and ruthless vigilantes about his expose on shootings of black New Orleans residents fleeing the city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and police misconduct after the storm. Listening to these white pigmentalists sounds scary as well as [...]

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Faroe Islands: brutal mass slaughter of whales and dolphins – this is no place for tourism! Boycott products from Faroe!

It took me a while to work myself up to writing this post, especially after having seen these images. Every year the Faroe islanders embark on what they consider is fun: they drive hundreds of whales and dolphins into a bay, trap and brutally slaughter them. Because I can’t even comprehend why someone, leave alone [...]

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El Guincho – Alegranza

Another little beautiful, loopy, percussion-driven gem from 2008, which is as colourful as the album cover. An exultant one-man carnival of sound, El Guincho’s ‘Alegranza’ “is a mix of afro-beat percussion, calypso harmonies, psych tropicalia, world music samplers, doo wop, trance repetition, underwater pop, steel drums, and island feeling plus club oriented song structures, [...]

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Frightened Rabbit – The Midnight Organ Fight

Scottish Frightened Rabbit has got two things going for them: their harsh, metallic indie rock sound and their emotionally intense lyrics – the opposite of what the light coloured CD cover would suggest. oh, and then of course, there’s their rather great graphic album tile, a euphemism for sex. People who seem to know better [...]

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Diplo’s xmas card to fbi

that’s quite cute: a diplo xmas card to my favourite radio station: fbi, a community radio with the best mix of indie and electronica in all of australia, i suspect. the card leaves room for a number of interpretations, all of a friendly nature of course . and cool, you can read so [...]

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