[weekly linkdump, somewhat edited]

#watch and

Making beats on the iPad with WerkBench – “WerkBench is now available for the iPad in the app store”

Thievery Corporation – The Numbers Game – R.I.P. Chuck Brown

TAPE RIOT – ASPHALT PILOTEN (BRUSSELS) – German Artist Performance in Brussels, Dancers, Duct Tape Street Art

Beastie Boys – Sabotage / MCA tribute – Worked on this with the wife, kids and our nephew over the past week to pay tribute to Adam “MCA” Yauch.

How to wake up a kid – ( Breed- Nirvana ) – “How to wake up a sleeping kid. Only 3 years old!”

The Making of the Leica M9-P »Edition Hermès« – sexy craft work for a perverted and decadent camera

GMO Film Project Sizzler – “Today in the United States, by the simple act of feeding ourselves, we unwittingly participate in the largest experiment ever conducted on human beings. Massive agro-chemical companies like Monsanto (Agent Orange) and Dow (Napalm) are feeding us genetically-modified food, GMO’s, that have never been fully tested and aren’t labeled. This small handful of corporations are tightening their grip on the world’s food supply—buying, modifying, and patenting seeds to ensure total control over everything we eat.”

Vinyl Throw: MusicBunk – “Vinyl record trick shots.”

Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers – EULAs for your after life, please select a plan

How to Sweep. By Tom Sachs – “Watch the other two movies from the “Energies and Skills” trilogy: Love Letter to Plywood: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZU1B8kb8EQ Space Camp: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-jSSTGqU5c”

#learn

Ufabulum — track by track written by Squarepusher – “exclusive writing from Tom Jenkinson aka Squarepusher, bringing you one step closer to the thought processes behind the new album Ufabulum.”

Scott Scheidly’s “Portraits” – “From Hitler’s pink armband to Chairman Mao’s heart shaped glasses, Scheidly’s work casts some of history’s most notorious characters in a new light rife with suggestion and commentary on masculinity, power, and satire.”

Pepe Deluxé sample stalactites, pneumatics and Tesla coils on latest album – “The way we work on albums is quite a unique combination of art and science,” said Spectrum. “When doing music we mix early hip-hop sampling and collage approach with our version of 50s and 60s studio techniques.” Geeky stuff

Mobile Evolution – “Miniaturisation in the style of a Russian Doll” Exiting, fantastic, funny

How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet – “What happened to Flickr? The same thing that happened to so many other nimble, innovative startups who sold out for dollars and bandwidth: Yahoo.”

The Story of Send – ‘Take a journey through Google’s data centers by following an email along its path.’

Will Work for Fun – “When you’re out of money to give a company, you can always give them your time. The company will always find a way to reconvert the gift of your time into profit, though you probably won’t care when transfixed by the glittering explosions of fun lighting up the screen like framed miracles.”

Why Disco Happened – “The simple answer is a combination of beat, tempo, instrumentation, and song length. The disco beat has four beats per measure, with equal emphasis on every beat: BUMP BUMP BUMP BUMP.” i quite enjoyed reading this, but have read better accounts on the history of disco.

Italian anarchists kneecap nuclear executive and threaten more shootings – “We are wild lovers of freedom, and will never renounce the revolution or the complete destruction of the state and its violence.”

Cards Against Humanity – “Cards Against Humanity is a party game for horrible people.”

New Cement-Making Method Could Slash Carbon Emissions – “Cement production alone emits 5 to 6 percent of total man-made greenhouse gases, and most of that comes from producing lime. Some of the greenhouse-gas emissions from conventional cement production come from using fossil fuels to heat up limestone to high temperatures—about 1,500 ⁰C.”

Super weeds no easy fix for US agriculture-experts – “Many of the worst weeds, some of which grow more than six feet and can sharply reduce crop yields, have become resistant to the popular glyphosate-based weed-killer Roundup, as well as other common herbicides.” Gee thanx, Monsanto

Aerial tilt-shift photography – “Right, here we go with small selection of tilt-shift pictures taken from the plane around the Manchester and Bolton area, hope you enjoy.”

Russell Brand says drug addiction should be treated as a health matter – “Actor tells MPs committee on drugs that an abstinence-based recovery approach would better benefit addicts”

#lang:de

Studio Bühler: “Selbstmordquartett” – “Das Selbstmordquartett besteht aus 32 Spielkarten die in 8 übergeordneten Kategorien unterteilt sind: Selbstmord durch Vergiftung, Selbstmord durch Elektrizität, Selbstmord durch Verkehr, Selbstmord durch Erstickung, Selbstmord durch Waffen, Selbstmord durch großen Blutverlust, Selbstmord durch Springen und Selbstmord durch Idealismus.”

Street Party Bern 11.05.2012 – Lerch sei dank

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[Download this image in better resolution here]

Many people probably saw this image that has been going around facebook, a visualization of our “choice” in food brands, tracking many smaller brands back to a few global players, the usual suspects, coca cola, kraft, nestle, etc.

When i saw it, I was reminded of a list of who owns some of the organic health food companies in the USA:

Recently during a discussion with a vegan friend I mentioned this list, cited by lierre keith in her book the vegetarian myth. I find many other points in that book very questionable or even disagree with them completely, but this list alone should make anyone re-evaluate how environmentally helpful a vegan/vegetarian diet really can be.

If companies like exxon/mobil, monsanto, mcdonalds and of course big agriculture companies have an interest to invest in soy products and organic health food companies, there must be something fishy going on.

This article appears to be the source of the information quoted by keith:

What We Need to Know About the Corporate Takeover of the “Organic” Food Market by Carole Resnick

A familiar brand name to organic shoppers is Hain. This company now owns many other organic brands, which continue to appear to be independent. Some examples include: Bearitos (chips), Bread Shop (granola), Celestial Seasonings (tea), Garden of Eatin’, Health Valley, Imagine Foods (Rice Dream), Terra Chips, and Westbrae (canned vegetables, soy drinks, pastas, and more). And who owns Hain? The prime investors in the Hain Food Group are mutual funds and holding companies. Their principal stockholders are Phillip Morris (tobacco), Monsanto (genetically modified food), Citigroup (responsible for rainforest destruction), Exxon/Mobil, Wal-Mart, Energy Nuclear, and Lockheed Martin (weapons manufacturer). In 9/99 the H.J. Heinz Co. acquired ownership of nearly 20% of Hain. And, no surprises here, Heinz is principally owned by the same mutual funds and principal stockholders as is Hain.

Cascadian Farms (the brand offering much of the organic frozen food on the market) and Muir Glen (tomato products) are owned by Small Planet Foods, which is the organic marketing “niche”owned by General Mills, the third biggest food conglomerate in North America. Agribusiness is guilty enough for negative impacts on the global environment, local economies, and the nutritional quality of the food most of us have little choice but to consume. But look who “owns” General Mills. Their principal investors are Philip Morris, Exxon/Mobil, General Electric, Chevron, Nike, McDonald’s, Target Stores, Starbucks, Monsanto, Dupont (weapons & pesticides), Dow Chemical (Agent Orange, breast implants, napalm), Pepsico, Alcoa Aluminium, Disney, and Texas Instruments (weapons producer and one of G.W. Bush’s top contributors).

Fresh Samantha, a popular organic juice brand regionally produced in Maine, merged with Odwalla in 5/00. Little do health conscious consumers suspect that Odwalla Juice is owned by CocaCola, as part of their Minute Maid unit. Boca Burgers is owned by Kraft Foods, which is owned by Philip Morris. Stoned Wheat Thins is made with GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and is owned by Nabisco, which was acquired by Philip Morris in December, 2000. Arrowhead Water and Poland Spring Water are owned by Nestle (which is being boycotted because its “breast milk substitute” causes the deaths of millions of babies). Silk Soy Drink is owned by White Wave, which is owned by Dean Foods, whose main shareholders are Microsoft, General Electric, Philip Morris, Citigroup, Pfizer, Exxon/Mobil, Coca Cola, WalMart, PepsiCo, and Home Depot.

Writing for the New York Times Sunday Magazine (5/13/01), Michael Pollan reported that Organic Cow, previously represented to consumers as an organic dairy based in the Northeast and consisting of a network of small farms, was bought out by Horizon. Another source of organic dairy products, Horizon is a $127 million public corporation that has become the Microsoft of organic milk, controlling 70 percent of the retail market. The milk is now “ultrapasteurized” using a highheat process that “kills the milk,” destroying its enzymes and many of its vitamins so it can be sold over long distances. Arguably, ultrapasteurized organic milk is actually less nutritious than conventionally pasteurized non-organic milk. Horizon’s “factory farms” in the West are described as a clear example of the certifiability of inhumane practices through the emerging corporate organics system. Pollan writes: “On Horizon’s dairy farms in the west, thousands of cows that never encounter a blade of grass spend their days confined to a fenced dry lot, eating (certified organic) grain and tethered to milking machines three times a day.”

Now, many of these companies are only known in the USA, some we know here as well, Celestial Seasonings, Health Valley, Westbrae. I remember many of them when I was a vegan, organic food coop shopper, and naturally I was shocked.

But I wonder, if it is as bad in Switzerland and Europe. Something worth researching, if anyone wants to help?

Edit 1:

We already checked Biofarm here in Switzerland. Pheew, it seems to be ok, owned by a cooperative.

Rapunzel seems okay as well, according to this article, Nestle und Rapunzel.

Lima, a good european source for japanese based health foods like Miso, Seaweed, Soysauce etc. however is owned by Hain, which is owned by … see above. Other Hain brands operate in Europe, but we didn’t know them that well. Some nice body care products like Avalon Organics and Jason are also in the Hain Group portfolio, see here.

edit 2: this website has a bunch of infographics showing the Organic Processing Industry Structure:

especially interesting is the animation depicting acquisitions over time between 1995 and 2007.

[weekly linkdump, somewhat edited]

#watch and

Do Cute Kids Like Radiohead? – Paranoid Android Review – “Our gang of adorable tykes are back and this time they’re reviewing Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android”.” [via b3ta]

Beastie Boys 1987 – Beastie Boys in japanese TV show

Rob Hopkins – My Town in Transition – TED talk by the Initiator of the Transition Town Initiative, Rob Hopkins

DJ Food’s Summer Bottled – Sunspot – Bee sounds made into Beats! Love it. But for a Beer Commercial? Well I suppose it pays the rent, innit…

History of New York City – sweet animation

a grain of sand – “In the thirty-six-years that he has lived on the island, Brendon and his friend, Rene Lafortune, planted sixteen-thousand trees, built 4,8 kilometres of nature paths, and brought and bred 110 giant land tortoises, creating an island of incredible beauty now worth 34 million Euros.” my new hero

David Shrigley vs Anish Kapoor – “David Shrigley jokes about Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate.”"

Orgstep Dubgasm (EM) – “EM’s latest NSFW bass warped supercut is Orgstep Dubgasm, a dubstep mashing of some of the most iconic orgasmic scenes from film.”

#learn

Banksy Ideas (banksyideas) – “There’s this cow, yeah, but it’s face looks like Obama. And sucking on its cow tits are Cameron, Sarkozy and Kim Jong Un” Remember when Banksy exited us? [via b3ta]

Avaaz Attacked: Cyber-war vs People Power – “Use the tool to the right to donate to an Avaaz defence fund to take our security to the next level, and show our attackers that whatever they throw at us only makes us stronger.”

White Car – Now We Continue (Heinrich Mueller Continuum) – Gerald Donald, half of Drexciya during much of the 90s, remixes white car.

Off the Grid : Eric Valli – “There are growing number of people who have decided to live light on the earth to not be a part of problem anymore I spent the last few years with four of them striving for harmony with nature in the most pristine corners of United States.”

Occupy Wall Street’s anarchist roots – “The easiest way to explain anarchism is to say that it is a political movement that aims to bring about a genuinely free society – that is, one where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence.”

Urban Plant Tags – Include Care Instructions

May Day, 2012 (big photo gallery) – with xeni selecting the photos, the gallery must be great

Brain Rot: Hip Hop Family Tree, Rappers Delight is Released. – the latest episode is out, “They Gonna Kill the Culture with Vinyl”, wait what? Oh…

Moss Grafiti – what do they mean by water-retention gel?

A Mixtape for Your May Day – “May Day is finally here, so pump yourself up with this Occupy.com exclusive download, inspired by Occupiers all over the world.” free mixtape

John Peel’s Record Shelf – A is out!

Wormworld: Chapter 3 – A Monstrous Forest – “Ok, I’d say go and have a good time with Chapter 3!”

Get Our Damn Book and Support The Cause – “The Architecture for Humanity team has assembled an indispensable handbook for anyone committed to building a more sustainable future.”

Moment of Clarity by SoulDr3000 – “featuring clips from Occupy The Hood Radio”

So what the fuck has occupy done so far? – “Off the computers & into the streets.”

André-Alexander Giesemann: #15 – Photo Series of German Clubs after the Party, in full light

Facebook likes aren’t speech protected by the First Amendment-Bland v. Roberts – “it’s well off the mark to say in this case that “likes” were not speech for First Amendment purposes. As menial as a Facebook like may be in the overall scheme of life, it’s an announcement to your Facebook friends that you support something, whether it’s a cause, a candidate, a company, or another person.”

#lang:de

what’s the system and how can i fuck it? – “FUCK THE SYSTEM!? — WAS IST DAS SYSTEM UND WIE KANN ICH ES FICKEN? Fuckfuckfuck.org ist ein Online Kurzfilmwettbewerb für alle, die sich trauen sich dieser Frage zu stellen. Finde es heraus oder scheitere kläglich. Aber tu es. Und gewinne 1000 CHF dabei.”

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[weekly linkdump, somewhat edited]

#watch and

IN BED WITH INVADER – “Shot in winter 2011, this movie invite you to spend one night in Paris with the street artist Invader.”

Spike Lee / The Dolly Shot – “A montage of unique dolly shots from the films of Spike Lee. Music: “Bra” by Cymande”

#learn

Let’s Ride the Magic General Strike Bus – well, it certainly won’t be the posters fault if May Day fails. some fantastic pieces.

Update: Filthy Luker – gotta love these scary AND cute sculptures

Klouchebag – Klout parody determines your level of douchbagery on twitter

The Pirate DVD King of Long Island, “Big Hy” Strachman, Keeps Soldiers in Free DVDs – “‘Big Hy’ — his handle among many loyal customers — would almost certainly be cast as Hollywood Enemy No. 1 but for a few details. He is actually Hyman Strachman, a 92-year-old, 5-foot-5 World War II veteran trying to stay busy after the death of his wife.” arrest that, hollywood

Laurie Penny: A papier-mâché puppet and a badly tuned guitar… how to go on strike when you haven’t got a job – “Whatever future these young people collectively create – and sooner or later, they’ll have to come up with one – the meaning of direct action, the meaning of work, and the meaning of success and failure itself will be redefined. That’s not something to dismiss in haste.” does the left really only set themselves up for failure? hmm

May Day General Strike posters – !!!

Bruno Neri, the footballer who stood up to fascism – “The players are lined up in the centre of the pitch, standing in front of the still unfinished stands and all are giving the fascist salute. Except for one: Bruno Neri.”

YouAreMinecraft Live Map – asks people to upload minecraft avatars

Joebot: Memes @ Gallery 1988 – “Straight from the World Wide Web and into your hearts comes the new hit album “Haters Gonna Hate” from The Internets! Now you can sing along with hit songs such as “Friday”, “Trololo”, and “Bed Intruder Song”.”

Sex toys found on Swiss trains for sale – “A vast array of weird and wonderful items from the Swiss rail network’s lost-and-found department is now on sale, including butt plugs, dildos and worn underwear.”

Descriptive Camera – “The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene.”

Mr Oizo 3000 – Mr. Oizo New EP Stade 3, free to download

The hidden side of your soul: How the FBI uses the Web as a child porn honeypot – “The FBI had set up its fake CP site for precisely this situation. When investigators had a lead on someone specific, they e-mailed the person with a custom password and the site URL.”

The True Size of Africa – Can you fit the USA, China and India inside African Continent? Yes. And Much more…

Holy cow … – “how google drive terms compare to dropbox and Microsoft. ..wow.” whatever happened to Don’t be Evil?

Tour for GHOSTS WITH SHIT JOBS, a Lo-fi Sci-fi Feature by Jim Munroe – “By 2040, the economy has flipped and North Americans are a cheap labour pool for wealthy Asian markets. A Chinese documentary show focuses on the “ghosts” (Cantonese slang for white people) unlucky enough to have been born into the slums of Toronto in a special report that translates as “Ghosts With Shit Jobs.”"

Occupy Wall Street: what is to be done next? | Slavoj Žižek – “How a protest movement without a programme can confront a capitalist system that defies reform”

How Can I Recharge My Depleted Motivation? – “Regaining your motivation involves a combination of combatting the sources of its depletion and tricking yourself into taking the first step.”

Various & Gould: “Zu Gast Arbeit” – strong work by german street artist duo various & gould for instanbul group show OUTSIDE-in, the swept a street in the city with a mix of sand and blue pigment addressing the issue of migrant workers in the cities

Some Objections To Occupy May 1st – “As the call has spread around and become something inseparable from Occupy as a movement, there have been a number of objections or concerns about a May 1st general strike.” reading through some of the comments makes me lose all hope…

Chains of oppression: Katie Roiphe, Lena Dunham and the sexual counter-revolution. – “Female sexual autonomy itself is what’s really unorthodox today. Agency and self-determination, the right to own our own desire – those are the kind of forbidden fantasies women across the world still pant over in private, unable to pronounce for fear of being slut-shamed.”

The History of File-Sharing – “Last century filesharing was a fringe hobby, only for geeks who were lucky enough to own a computer that could dial into the World Wide Web. How different is that today, where filesharing has become daily routine for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. In just a few years swapping files has become mainstream. Time to take a step back and see how it all came about.”

More OWS Arrests, Staggering Police Presence At Federal Hall – “the first eight arrests, which occurred across the street from Federal Hall, and wrote that they were prompted by the protesters’ desire “to draw attention to statements made by police commanders over the last few days that protesters were not allowed to lie on the sidewalks.” This interpretation of the law, despite a court ruling from 2000, has forced protesters off the sidewalk on Broad Street and onto the stairs of Federal Hall.”

Dani Alves: ‘At Barcelona we are taking football back to its origins’ – “Barcelona’s buccaneering right-back explains that staying true to attacking principle is secret of Catalan club’s ongoing success”

IHTFP Hack Gallery: Tetris on the Green Building – “MIT hackers have long considered “Tetris on the Green Building” to be the Holy Grail of hacks, as the side of the building is a wonderful grid for the game.”

Why And How To Strike On May Day – “We are striking to halt the flow of capital, reclaim a tool of resistance, and unify movements against exploitation, repression, and corruption.”

#lang:de

apokalypse now (and then) – “In den aktuellen Katastrophen und weltpolitischen Ereignissen spitzen sich die tiefgreifenden globalen Umwälzungen der vergangenen 25 Jahre dramatisch zu. Je nach Perspektive werden sie von den Menschen als Krise oder als Chance auf einen Neuanfang interpretiert. Auf nahezu allen Ebenen politischer, philosophischer und künstlerischer Diskurse erleben wir eine Konjunktur apokalyptischer Rede.”

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I wrote this a few days ago, but then hesitated to post it.
Why would I keep moaning about my idiotic life?
Who cares?
What’s the point of such a post?
Today I decided to post it anyway, who knows, maybe it will help me to turn a page and to move on.
I am so low, something has got to give.
Does anyone have any suggestions?

This is how my days look like.

I get up at 5:30 to meditate for half an hour. At that time it is quiet. As an atheist I don’t believe in god or any other deities, nor in any other religion, buddhism may come closest. Still I consider it a good thing to just sit in silence for a while and face the emptiness, experience the nothingness that I am. At the end of the meditation I repeat a few times “May all beings be happy”. Note how I say “all”. That would theoretically include me even though I realize that I could never be happy. At the same time I am fully aware, that if I am not happy myself, wishing happiness for others won’t be of much use.

That concludes the semi-useful part of my day.

Around six my wifi starts up and I grab my iPad to check email, twitter and finally my RSS feeds to get my first news fix of the day. The interesting things that I find I post on various social media websites – delicious, twitter, facebook, tumblr, pinterest and mlkshk. I am a news junkie, no harm done to others in that. But I use an iPad and a Macbook Air for my news intake, fully aware that these machines were assembled in China under very questionable working conditions, then shipped halfway around the globe, some of the components that were used are toxic to the environment and Apple is a huge corporation that like all huge corporations should be boycotted. My huge online time contributes to worldwide server usage, which fast is growing into one of the major energy wasters. My daily allowance according to the 2000 watt society is probably covered by my internet, tv and other computer usage alone.

Around 6:30 I wake up my wonderful wife, which is the absolute highlight of my day. I love the sounds she makes and how beautiful and peaceful she looks when i wake her. We share a glass of Chi, which I justify because I think it’s good for my health. Chi is the closest to proper Kombucha I can find in Switzerland. But Chi is produced here in Switzerland by the cult community formed by the late Sri Chinmoy. So much for my atheism supporting a religious sect. While is not produced locally at least it does not get shipped half way around the globe. Really I should just make my own Kombucha, which is very easy to do. But I am too lazy to find a “mother”.

Next I go to my garden plot and dig around in the dirt for a few hours. I am a terrible gardener and really hate the work, but this gives me the illusion of doing something useful. Since I can’t seem to find a job or a career that interests me, I deceive myself in believing that this urban farming thing could be my “job” of sorts, my calling, and more gravely, that it could contribute to making the world a better place. But of course it does no such thing. Our plot with its 150 square meters is fairly big and should suffice to feed the two of us for nine or more months out of the year. But I fail miserably, we only eat homegrown food seven or eight months of the year. I still buy most of my seeds, despite being fully aware that worldwide seed production is controlled by just five huge international corporations, Mosanto et al. Some of the tools I use are produced in China and in other such countries. We are supposed to garden organically in these family gardens, but my direct neighbor secretly uses a ton of poison on his plot, fertilizers, pesticides and what have you, which means a. his vegetables grow twice as fast and are twice as big as mine, b. all the pests move from his to my plot and c. some of the poisons get onto my vegetables. According to knospe, the swiss organic food certification standards, the food I grow is not even organic, since it is produced in such close vicinity to non-organic farming.

Then I go home and make some tea with organic milk. Organic milk that gets shipped here across the country. Or not. I wouldn’t know. I can’t really buy local organic milk. To be brutally honest the only reason I still buy organic food is to calm down my bad conscience. It still costs much more to buy organic food, but the organic food market has turned into a joke since the major supermarkets have jumped on the organic food bandwagon. Recently I bought organic chickpeas “Produced in China”. Oh really… I keep buying organic because I think it healthier and because it gives me the illusion that this contributes in some absurd and esoteric way to make the world a better place. But I know better, it does not. You can’t shop to make a difference, there is no such thing as green shopping. It’s all the same mechanism, exploitative to the earth, and questionable on so many more levels. Supermarkets kill small businesses, the work conditions of people in the food industry, organic cucumbers from Spain all year long, and I could go on…

It is now time to take a bath and eat a banana. Yes, you guessed it, a fair trade and organic banana, see above. The bath uses more water than I should be allowed to use per day, considering that water scarcity is a reality. It does not matter that we have plenty of water in Switzerland, to really make a difference I would have to consider the global picture and take a bath only once or twice a week. Clean water will soon turn into such a rare resource that we won’t be allowed to waste any of it. As most others I keep wasting water as long as I am allowed to do so.

The rest of the morning I try to read my books, if the noise level allows it, checking and re-checking twitter, facebook and email, watching jon stewart and other videos stuck in my browser from my morning internet surfing. Yes, yes, wasting more energy, justifying nuclear power plants, see above.

At noon I fix a lunch. I am still vegetarian, again out of some sense of guilt or weird antiquated principle, and most probably just out of habit. But I am fully aware that eating vegetarian does not make the slightest bit of a difference. Some claim I would have to go vegan to make a difference, but I find that claim quite questionable, if only for all the soy that gets shipped half way around the globe. I believe the best I could do is eat only local, seasonal food, that either I produce myself, or that gets produced by people I know and trust. Eating some meat would make sense, for many reasons, just one reason here: you need manure to produce good vegetables. Usually my lunch consists of shop bought bread and cheese, yes yes, all organic, LOL, see above. Foods that I neither produce, nor know who does, and just blindly assume that it was produced in ethical and ecological ways, which knowing humans, it probably wasn’t. On the TV I watch the weather and the news, which is probably just a habit to try and make me feel superior, since I got all the news much earlier online on twitter and elsewhere.

In the afternoon I usually try to have a small project, fix stuff, in summer organize something for my urban farm, make jam, conserve food, what have you, currently I want to make preserved lemons, or sometimes I go shopping. Blah. The rest of the time or if I am depressed (most of the time) I just lay around, agonizing. Sometimes I watch a movie or play a game.

I try to read whenever I can, which is rare. It is usually too noisy, so I can’t concentrate. We live above a family with two small boys, both of them around two, just a year apart. Two boys in their terrible twos. Great. All day long they have a competition going who can cry the loudest. If they don’t cry they bang shit on the walls or floors, or run around in those clumsy, loud infant steps. If the kids are quiet you can usually hear their mum screaming around. Because of them, it is almost never quiet in our flat. When they go out to the playground, I know it would now be possible to concentrate enough to read my books. Sometimes I manage to find it in me to pick one up, but usually I just fall asleep enjoying the temporary quiet.

My wife and I, we don’t have kids. A while ago we decided not to have kids. We had tried to have one for some time, but it never worked out. We then started to see the advantages of not having kids. There are already way too many kids on this overpopulated planet, it is one of the biggest ecological contributions you can make, not to put any more kids on to this planet. Plus kids are noisy and obsessed with themselves. Me me me. Pure ego. So, no own kids, but live above two small boys who terrorize me all day long? Brilliant. I try not to hate the kids, but I’m afraid I hate these two more and more every day. And I really question their parents for being so egotistical to bring kids to this fucked up place. We don’t have kids, but most of our direct neighbors have two or more. On balance the positive ecological effect of us not having kids is instantly erased.

There are many more such things. If I move around the house I usually walk up and down the stairs, in order not to use the elevator and save some energy. I live in the fifth, the top floor. People in the floors bellow us, even people living in the second floor, use the elevator all the time. What I manage to save in energy by walking the stairs gets used up by them. I also don’t own a car. I really love to drive, but ecologically I can’t justify owning a car. Again, everybody else in our house owns a car. For my vacations I try to only visit locations I can reach by train, I try to fly as little as possible. Meanwhile my friends and family travel to thailand over christmas. Whatever I may save in energy and resources the people in my direct vicinity waste ten fold. And in these individualistic times I can’t even confront them with it…

In the evening my wife comes home and we fix an early dinner. We like to cook and eat well, creative, luscious vegetarian cuisine. We should feel so guilty that we choke on every bite, because we are so privileged, with all our fancy spices, ingredients and cooking gear. After dinner we hang out on the couch and watch mostly shit movies, that happen to be aired on our subscription cable channel. This is how time is killed best till bed time around 9:30.

Usually around 3 in the night I wake up with a start. It is then that I see clearly what a joke my life is. My pathetic attempts to be a responsible, ecologically conscious, considerate human on this planet are just so futile, that it is beyond ridiculous. Maybe I should rather start to do things that contribute to rid the planet of this cancer that we humans are… But I am too scared of the consequences.

Usually on saturday i join some protest or other, occupy, anti-nuclear, what have you. I pretend that we can make a difference. But I am not a reformist. I am convinced things would need to change on a much more fundamental level. What needs to happen, and I don’t even know if I can call it a revolution, would involve such a deep questioning of our ways by each and everyone of us, that it seems impossible that it could ever happen. Everyone has so many blind spots. Even I do, and I am one who honestly tries to look at things and to question my ways. Or so I delude myself…

[weekly linkdump, somewhat edited]

#watch and

Sarah Palin: Bums Out With The Bath Water – “Sarah Palin drops dope rhymes, Obama eats a baby and Joe Biden dances like a ninny. And still, somewhere, someone will find a way to pin this on the Bush administration.”

2012 Scotch® Off The Roll Tape Sculpture Contest – mark jenkins stop motion, interesting to see how he works, but this really is just a commercial.

Peter Weyland in TED Talk Video – Guy Pearce as Peter Weyland in a Prometheus, TED talk 2023

Holes Of Happiness – “Holes Of Happiness is a short documentary looking at the reactions of the public to some pothole gardens that have been popping up around East London.”

#learn

▶ This Is What Crazy Looks Like Via Text Messaging… – “Vaughan acts out a woman’s crazy texting spree to a guy after 1 date.”

DJ Shadow @ Dachstock, Bern, Switzerland — April 5th, 2012 – DJ Shadow show in Bern, but I receive an error when I try to click I’m Going

Pixels and Polaroids – “Pixels and Polaroids is a series of images I’ve created combining pseudo-Polaroid photography and retro 80s era video game graphics. The concept behind Pixels and Polaroids was to blend these two elements into one world where pixelated characters live through the eye of a Polaroid camera.”

Media Fasting – “For the last year I’ve been trying, as an experiment, to see what it would be like to cut off the news. That means no newspaper, no Google news, no NPR, no broadcast television of any kind.” I did that several times in my life and can only recommend it.

China Miéville on Apocalyptic London – “The Olympics are slated to cost taxpayers $14.7 billion. In this time of “austerity,” youth clubs and libraries are being shut down as expendable fripperies; this expenditure, though, is not negotiable. The uprisen young of London, participants in extraordinary riots that shook the country last summer, do the math.”

Why shrinks diagnose anti-authoritarians with mental illness – “Bruce Levine, a clinical psychologist, has written on Mad in America about his colleagues’ propensity for diagnosing anti-authoritarians with mental illness. Levine says diagnoses like oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder and anxiety disorder are applied to people who question authority’s legitimacy by mental health practitioners who are, themselves, unconsciously deferential to authority.”

Spray Can Lamp – “Someone had to do it right? At least they the right idea using a vintage Krylon can”

floating cloud installation by berndnaut smilde – “beginning with the concept of a vacant or abandoned room and aspirations of enhancing this ominous environment, smilde introduced smoke, moisture and backlighting. the artist was able to create the entirely eerie and whimsical illusion of a cloud floating within the gallery space.”

Kraftwerk month on DJFood.org #1 – “I’ve decided to make March ‘Kraftwerk month’ on the site, which means I’ll be posting something Kraftwerk-related every day at least. This had been bought on by the recent news of the 8 night residency at MOMA in New York and the subsequent fact that no one I know has managed to get a ticket.”

Preserving Lemons – “The basic protocol is: wash & dry the lemons thoroughly (more emphasis on the wash). Slice the lemons in quarters, stopping before slicing all the way through. Put in a quart jar and mash down releasing the juice. Add just under a tablespoon of salt (I used Redmond’s & yes, that is tablespoon not teaspoon) on top of each lemon.”

25 Alleged Anons Arrested in International Crackdown – “Police in four nations arrested 25 alleged participants in the Anonymous collective Tuesday for attacks against websites in Columbia and Chile dating from the middle of 2011.”

Occupy London says St Paul’s Cathedral colluded with eviction effort – “I was shocked to see policemen on the balcony,” said Naomi Colvin, a spokeswoman for Occupy. “It seemed to be collusion.”

Der Baum hinter der Anzeige – the tree behind the advert, adbusting from russia

A Show with Ze Frank by Ze Frank – “If we get to $1 Billion I will buy Greece and install sea to sea carpeting!”

The Yes Men on Stratfor – WikiLeaks begins to publish today over five million e-mails obtained by Anonymous from “global intelligence” company Stratfor. The emails, which reveal everything from sinister spy tactics to an insider trading scheme with Goldman Sachs (see below), also include several discussions of the Yes Men and Bhopal activists.

Trotzdem Danke – Thanks Anyway – “Armed with only a pail of water, we took on the Germans “stick-up-their-ass” mentality, proving once again that Berlin may be poor but it is still damn “sexy”.” we saw the video in berlin, awesome urban intervention, sadly the video can’t be found online though.

[delicious.com/pieceoplastic or subscribe to this RSS feed - with all the typos]

[weekly linkdump, somewhat edited]

#watch and

THE SIMPSONS EPISODE 500 INTRO (SLOWED & Edited) EIPC Season 23 Episode 14 – “The Simpsons intro. Episode 500 episode, with music, and slowed to .125 so we can actually see it..”

Sean Taylor – Stand Up – “The song is called ‘Stand Up’ and the video was put together by Colm McCarthy. It is from my forthcoming album ‘Love Against Death’. This song is dedicated to the anti-cuts and Occupy Movements all over the world. The 99%.”

Cassetteboy vs The News – NSFW. Made from 15 editions of the BBC’s News at Six during January 2012.

Sound of Noise Official Trailer – movie about a music band that robs banks just to sample the sound of shredding money…

U900_Ben – “This is the music clip of ukulele duo U900. From the album “UKULELE MICHAEL”"

#learn

Studio porn fail – Jazz radio station hacked with gay porn

John Peel’s record collection to be made into online museum – “Peel’s collection, which contains 25,000 LPs, 40,000 singles and many thousands of CDs, will become part of The Space, a new experimental digital service organised and funded by the Arts Council and the BBC.”

Yo Momma is a Shitty Designer – “To be a little more passive aggresive, download the Desktop Wallpapers to use as a background or screensaver. All screen sizes and resolutions are in the right column.”

Is Rioting Revolutionary? – “Revolution is not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly, and modestly. A revolution is an insurrection…”

Listen to Mouse on Mars’ ‘Parastrophics’ LP Now – stream the new mouse on mars album

Recycled Technology Art – art created using recycled tech junk

Flying baby is – Flying

The Magnificent Map of Rap Names – “ridiculously detailed guide to the semantics of rap names, this widescreen edition print spans over seven square feet and contains 636 rapper names”

Feeling Frothy yet, Santorum? – That Santorum Portrait made with Gay Porn

Motörhead disavows new box set – “Unfortunately greed once again rears its yapping head. I would advise against it even for the most rabid completists!” more bands need to say stuff like this.

Volkswagen Imperial Walker – I so want one

An Itty Bitty Sad Keanu – 3D print your own Sad Keanu is Sad

GIMPRESSIONISM – fantastic nature paintings with bdsm persons

Tossers unite! – “And yes I am aware they all need butter as well.”

Congoloses wrestlers – “the “legends” of Congolese wrestling invent themselves on a daily basis in the outskirts of Kinshasa. 
 

Body-building, and even black magic enthusiasts fight for glory in makeshift rings.” great photos on shite flash interface.

Snow drawings leave a lasting impression – “I’m not so into making art that lasts,” she said. “The world is saturated with manmade projects. I don’t think I need to add more things to the planet.”

Boguslaw Sliwinski . . . Ceramics Plate BS Toy – “Play With Your Food Plates”

philippe starck: peugeot city bike for bordeaux, france – “french designer philippe starck in collaboration with french car brand peugeot has developed a bike for the city of bordeaux, france’s bike sharing program. considered a cross between a bicycle and a scooter, the design is set to promote and continue encouraging citizens to chose this mode of transportation within the city”

Kurt Perschke’s Red Ball Project – “Made of vinyl and touring different cities, The Red Ball Project is a project conceived by artist Kurt Perschke.”

Dota 2 – Are We Heroes Yet? – awesome looking online comic book

#lang:de

Papiere von US-Thinktank geleakt: Ölfirmen finanzieren Klimaskeptiker – “In den USA sind interne Papiere eines konservativen Thinktanks veröffentlicht worden. Demnach werden klimaskeptische Autoren verdeckt von großen Firmen finanziert.” was bisher bloss ein vermutung war, bewahrheitet sich…

[delicious.com/pieceoplastic or subscribe to this RSS feed - with all the typos]

[weekly linkdump, somewhat edited]

#watch and

stereo skifcha – dubstep kitteh [via b3ta]

Everything is a Remix Part 4 – and finally part 4

How to find your way home- the new google maps – “Listen carefully to her say “around someone’s yard” and “past the mango tree”.”

Plastic Snacks | My Strange Addiction – “Kailyn is only 18 but she consumes a huge amount of plastic objects every day.”

99ProblemsInFilm(EM) – “Jay Z’s “99 Problems” recreated with film clips by Eclectic Method”

#learn

Interview with Kultivator, an experimental cooperation of organic farming and visual art practice – “This cooperation of farming and visual art practice involves an organic farm with where pigs are raised, cows are milked, potatoes are harvested and linseed oil is pressed. But KULTIVATOR is also a space for artist residencies, exhibitions, performances, installations and screenings.”

Beauty and the Geek Jeans Embed Real Speakers, Keyboard & Mouse – “So I came up with the idea of putting a keyboard in your pants, and to make jeans with all the important computer stuff (like a mouse, keyboard and the speakers) in it. Besides the new look the jeans would get, there was some sort of freedom behind your computer screen. You didn’t have to be stiff behind your screen, but you can move in any position you want because the keyboard would be in the same place.”

Rem Koolhaas to Build Marina Abramovic’s New Museum of Performance Art – “Marina Abramovic signed a deal with architect Rem Koolhaus earlier this week to design and construct her Center for the Preservation of Performance Art in Hudson, New York.”

MOMA Kraftwerk – Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 – “Over eight consecutive nights, MoMA presents a chronological exploration of the sonic and visual experiments of Kraftwerk with a live presentation of their complete repertoire in the Museum’s Marron Atrium. Each evening consists of a live performance and 3-D visualization of one of Kraftwerk’s studio albums—Autobahn (1974), Radio-Activity (1975), Trans-Europe Express (1977), The Man-Machine (1978), Computer World (1981), Techno Pop (1986), The Mix (1991), and Tour de France (2003)—in the order of their release.”

Damien Hirst’s Latest (and Greatest?) Scheme: Saving the World Through Eco-Architecture – “Sustainable luxury flourishes like rooftop wind turbines, solar panels, and the most technologically advanced methods of insulation. He has made it clear the development wasn’t going to be a “retirement home” community, either.” ahh, devon. but I do wonder how they plan to make single homes like this eco-friendly.

Switzerland to Build ‘Janitor Satellite’ to Clean Up Space | Swiss Scientists Combat the Growing Space Junk Problem – “Swiss scientists and engineers have announced the launch of CleanSpace One, a project to build the first in a family of “janitor” satellites that will help clean up space.” this is so swiss, tidy but kinda cool

Shepard to guest star on The Simpsons TV Show on March 4th!! – “On March 4, 2012, Shepard will guest star on the 23rd Season of the iconic television series, The Simpsons. Episode 15 – “Exit Though The Kwik-E-Mart”, In order to get back at his dad, Bart goes undercover as a graffiti street artist and plasters Homer’s unflattering image all over Springfield. But one night, Bart and Milhouse get caught in the act by established street artists Shepard Fairey, Ron English, Kenny Scharf and Robbie Conal” do not read more, shepard pretty much manages to give the whole plot away. but this should be fun.

The Simpsons at 500: your top 10 episodes – “We asked you for your favourite Simpsons episode. Surprisingly the top 10 were made during the first decade of the show”

Anarchistic and self-trained, are street medics the future of first aid? – “Anarchistic, high-energy, and self- organized, street medics have been part of activist counterculture since the 1960s, with major presences at civil-rights protests, anti–Vietnam War actions, the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, anti-globalization protests in the 1990s and early aughts, and most recently, at Occupy encampments internationally.”

Penny Red: A love letter for London – “London is more than two cities. It is many cities. It is the city and the city and the city and the city, a delicate, dirty palimpsest of history layered on history. A city where kids with hoods and hopeless eyes can start burning police cars and looting the high streets and the question on the lips of the broadsheet writers and politicians who live and work a few streets away can still be: where the hell did these people come from?”

remove app deletes unwanted passersby from photos – “upon pressing the shutter button, the app actually snaps multiple pictures in a row in order to assess the ‘real’ background, without passersby. clicking ‘remove’ automatically displays the composited shot without the objects that the app has detected to be removable;”

The Transparency Grenade – “The Transparency Grenade fights against the lack of corporate and governmental transparency. It captures network traffic and audio at the site of closed meetings and anonymously streams the data to a dedicated server where email fragments, HTML pages, images and voice are extracted and displayed on an online map.”

‘Losing’ the world: American decline in perspective, part 1 – “US foreign policy ‘experts’ only ever provide an echo chamber for American imperial power. A longer, broader view is necessary”

Anarchism Is Not What You Think It Is — And There’s a Whole Lot We Can Learn from It – “The word anarchism has been so stripped of substance that it has come to be equated with chaos and nihilism. That’s not what it means.” Mostly on Kropotkin and his writing

I Love Architecture. | Architecture for Humanity – “Our work has the ability to effect the lives of billions and rather than cynically fighting with each other for the 1% lets work together to restore the pride of the profession and find ways to bring great design for the seven billion people that long for great spaces to live, work and play.”

plastic bottle carrier by ka-lai chan – “the flat rubber-like disk has a ten openings whereby one can easily slip the nozzles of the empty bottles through the holes. the lightweight design has a built-in handle making it user-friendly to carry around, encouraging green behavior.”

1% Art – “If we, as curators, critics, art historians and artists, withdraw our cultural capital from these markets, we have the potential to create a new art field where radical forms of autonomy can develop: not as secessionist “alternatives’ that exist only in the grandiose enactments and magical thinking of artists and theorists, but as fully institutionalized structures, which, with the “properly social magic of institutions,’ will be able to produce, reproduce and reward noncommercial values.”

Ana Tijoux: Addressing Global Unrest In Rhyme – “I live in Chile, with all those student protests, and this parallel situation that is happening with Indignados in Spain, or the crisis in Greece, or Occupy Wall Street or Occupy Oakland. When I was making [the album] I was reading a lot of news and talking about the world with friends, and in the end that totally influenced my work.”

Cindy Sherman as Hugh Hefner, or Is It Hugh Hefner-Esque? – “Perhaps the most remarkable shot is Cindy as Herself, sans make-up, wigs and facial locutions. The photographer as tabula rasa — blank, translucent, riddled with metaphysical tracks from decades of drag. ”

Cinemagram, An Animated Photo GIF Maker for iPhone – “Create a stunning hybrid between photo and video. Animate small portions of your photo to create a magical image that’s part-photo and part-video. Apply vintage / cross processing filters, and share your masterful creation.”

plastic bottle cap art by satoshi hirose – “the piece is formed from plastic– a heap comprised of caps from the recyclable tops of plastic bottles gathered by the artist over the course of nine years.”

The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde: It’s evolution, stupid – “We all know how evolution works, except one industry that refuses to evolve: the entertainment industry. Instead of looking at evolution as something inevitable, the industry has made it their business to refuse and/or sue change, by any necessary means.”

What Greek Austerity Looks Like – “Half-Greek and half-Indonesian, photojournalist Eirini Vourloumis moved back to her hometown of Athens, Greece, in 2010 to cover the economic crisis. She found her country unrecognizable.”

Mapping Stereotypes – the swiss perspective map scares me.

Long Term Unemployment Stories – I have been unemployed for so long, reading these stories made me cry and cringe.

The Orb to release album with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry – “The Orb’s Alex Paterson has revealed that he’ll be releasing a collaborative album with dub legend Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry this September.”

Him & Her Chairs, Anatomical Chairs from Designer Fabio Novembre – I ate at the Osha Thai restaurant, and not only the chairs are excellent.

Watchlist: Maria Anwander – “The Kiss 2007/2010″: “The Kiss” was given to the MoMA as a donation without asking for permission. I entered the museum as a regular visitor and gave an intense French kiss to the wall. Next to the invisible kiss I then fixed a fake label, which simulated the style of a regular MoMA caption.”

Oliver Schau: Guerilla-Bänke DN_100 – guerilla benches made with drainage pipes wrapped around bicycle racks and other objects

Luzinterruptus: “Drinking water running through the streets” – “In Madrid, in less than 30 years, more than 50% of the public fountains in service have been lost, which now are seen to be dismantled, broken, without a tap to drink from or simply dry. To criticize the indifference of the administration in regards to a necessary public service, we carried out our action”

Post-Crash Fascism – “Climate change is happening faster than initially predicted, and its impacts are already upon us in the form of more extreme weather events, desertification, ocean acidification, melting glaciers and incrementally rising sea levels.”

[delicious.com/pieceoplastic or subscribe to this RSS feed - with all the typos]

In 3 Stories:

^^^

Ana Tijoux: Addressing Global Unrest In Rhyme

“I live in Chile, with all those student protests, and this parallel situation that is happening with Indignados in Spain, or the crisis in Greece, or Occupy Wall Street or Occupy Oakland. When I was making [the album] I was reading a lot of news and talking about the world with friends, and in the end that totally influenced my work.”

After reading this article and listening to the podcast I really wanted to purchase Ana Tijou’s new album La Bala as an mp3 download. I don’t ever buy drm-crippled music, so iTunes is out of the question. amazon.com has the album but won’t let me purchase it where I live. amazon.de just has an import CD, but does not offer an mp3 version. further google searches didn’t give me any viable result. Ana Tijou’s official website does not have a shop.

So where am i going to turn?

This pisses me off, i really wanted to support this artist.
Ana, if you read this, can i paypal you some money?

^^^

The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde: It’s evolution, stupid

We all know how evolution works, except one industry that refuses to evolve: the entertainment industry.

Instead of looking at evolution as something inevitable, the industry has made it their business to refuse and/or sue change, by any necessary means.

[...]

“Today I urge everyone to make sure that the entertainment industry does not profit from them anymore. Stop seeing their movies. Stop listening to their music. Make sure that you find alternative ways to culture.

“Spread and participate in culture. Remix, reuse, use, abuse. Make sure no one controls your mind. Create new systems and technology that circumvent the corruption. Start a religion. Start your own nation, or buy one. Buy a bus. Crush it to pieces.”

After their appeal was refused by Swedish supreme court, the pirate bay guys face up to a year in prison. But of course this did not change their convictions. After all, the earth really is not flat.

I especially liked the suggestion to boycott the entertainment industry and to find new ways to culture. There’s something to contemplate…

^^^

[image source: b3ta]

Whitney Houston album price hike sparks controversy

The music giant is understood to have lifted the wholesale price of Houston’s greatest hits album, The Ultimate Collection, at about 4am California time on Sunday. This meant that the iTunes retail price of the album automatically increased from £4.99 to £7.99.

This just shows how deeply cynical the music industry is. And I have nothing else to add.

[weekly linkdump, somewhat edited]

occupy vs. black bloc controversy – or not

Chris Hedges: The Cancer in Occupy – “The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state.”

Hedging Our Bets on the Black Bloc: the Impotence of Mere Liberalism – “The black bloc is a tactic, not a group nor a movement. Its origins can be found in the Autonomism movement of 1970s Germany, where activists wore heavy black clothing, masks, and helmets to provide protection from the watchful eye of the authoritarian police state. Given the continued illegal actions of the Oakland Police Department – dealings deemed by the government has heinous enough to place the department under the oversight of a federal judge – it is no surprise that the residents of Oakland would want to protect themselves in this manner.”

Black Bloc – “On Feb 6, America author and Occupy activist Chris Hedges wrote a piece for Truthdig.com titled “The Cancer in Occupy.” In it he criticized the violent actions of Black Bloc operatives within the movement, saying they are the greatest threat to the future of Occupy. The article has generated a heated debate online about non-violence, political strategy and protest in America, and has garnered a response by Anarchist thinker Dr. Zakk Flash.”

#watch and

Every Apple Design Ever (ish) in 30 seconds – ish disclaimer, lol. nice music.

BDP > BPD – “Last week, Anonymous hackers modified the Boston police department’s website by replacing the homepage with the video for KRS-1 classic: “Sound of Da Police.” (Watch it above). In response, the cops made their very own YouTube clip.”

Russenkälte – streetarty adbusting, dressing up a nude model for winter.

oh yeah – this is what happens when david lynch makes a coffee ad

PressPausePlay – “The digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent in an unprecedented way, with unlimited opportunities.”

Tracking the Internet Trolls – “The BBC tracks down a notorious Internet troll.”

EARTHMOVING: A Sierra Zulu Prequel (by monochrom) – “Another day at the United Nations Offices in Vienna. The Austrian Foreign Affairs Ministry invited members of the European Protocol Service, the UN Strategic Command Center for Central Europe, the United States Air Forces and a regional politician from Lower Austria to talk about the future of Soviet Unter-WHAT?!”

WTF!? Living Mobs Clean UBS and Credit Suisse – video of the mop action in zurich

#learn

Pasta recipes – “The sweet and salty combination of currants and capers is a Sicilian mix that’s both interesting and scrumptious.” scrumptious. really? anyway, it will be our dinner tomorrow night.

The following advertisement force quit unexpectedly. Your mind, money and time will no longer be affected. – brilliant adbust in nyc.

Crafting Azeroth in Minecraft – “My pet project has been to recreate a full-scale version of World of Warcraft inside Minecraft. The creation of the world is largely automated by custom software which I’ve been developing over the last few weeks. It’s just now reached a point where I can release some quality screenshots!”

Rewile | Filewile – “Filewile Rewile is a collection of remixes by Friends and Artists Filewile met during the last years of touring around the World.”

In Spite of Elections and and Camping Bans, Revolutionary Wave Grows – “But we aren’t dormant; we’re escalating. The only lull has been in the media coverage of our continuing struggle to create a more just world for all.”

Breaded Cats | Cat Breading | Breading Cats – “Cat Breading How To: 1) Take a piece of bread 2) Cut a hole approximately 1 inch larger than your cat’s head. This trips some people up. Remember: the bread has to fit around not just the cat’s head, but it’s ears, too. 3) Gently place the bread around your cat’s head. 4) Take a picture & post it! We love Cat Breading!”

Instagram Founder’s Girlfriend Learns How To Code For V-Day, Builds Lovestagram – “Trigger decided she wanted to be able to talk to her boyfriend in depth about the stuff he was working on. So the Yale political science major who “never took any computer classes” covertly downloaded “Learn Python the Hard Way” and began the Odyssey into programming, deadline Valentines’ Day.”

@BarnabyEdwards: And they say that irony is … – nothing to add to that

Famous Explosions From History Recreated With Cauliflowers – “Artist Brock Davis used cauliflowers to recreate three famous explosions from history: The Hindenburg disaster, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and the Challenger disaster.”

Banksy in New Orleans – “I must not copy what I see on the Simpsons”

CRASS/MICHEY Tshirt – “Due to an overwhelming demand, the illegal CRASS/MICKEY t-shirt will now be available for a limited time (30 days to be exact) and will be removed from our store on March 9, 2012.”

What They Know – “Apps routinely send the information to marketing companies that use it to compile dossiers on phone users. This interactive database shows the behavior of these apps, and describes what each app told users about the information it gathered.”

bobby neel adams: agemaps – “new york-based photographer bobby neel adams addresses the affects of the passage of time with his recent project ‘agemaps’. a collection of photographs showing the same person at two points within their life demonstrates the affects of aging upon the human body, reminding us of our mortality.”

How to spot when someone lies – Lie detection guide – “Liars often maintain more eye contact than the average person “because they know it will help them ‘sell’ their story,” says Meyer. In a normal chat, people hold eye contact only 30-60 per cent of the time.”

Bungled attempts at bagging a Banksy – “the boutique hotel chain encouraged visitors to steal a work by Banksy from its walls. If anyone succeeded in pinching the work, No Ball Games, they could keep it”

All the Awesome Things You Can Do with a Long Press on Your iPhone, iPad, or iPad touch – “Long pressing—that is, tapping and holding down on a part of your screen—provides a lot of handy shortcuts on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.”

VW beetle from trash – “Indian artist haribaabu naatesan (hari) transforms over 2805 pieces of scrap metal in the lifesize ‘think blue beetle’, created for the like-titled ecological awareness campaign by volkswagen. the car utilizes 800 spark plugs, 200 bottle caps, 60 mother boards, audio cassettes, speakers, cans, keyboards, typewriters, and hundreds of other materials.”

Living Resistance – “these lovecrafty suckers are trying to turn you into a scrunched-up blood-drained pathetic crippled little cog in the death-machine of the human soul” hakim bey says it like it is.

Typewriter Boneyard: Hardback Book Lamps – lamps made from hardback books

http://www.xmarkjenkinsx.com/outside.html – mark jenkins website

Guy Fawkes mask stencil – “Here’s some handy, infringealicious clip art for the discriminating Anon who wants to make a statement without paying a royalty: a Guy Fawkes mask, suitable for urban art, dress-up, and silkscreening.”

bio solar power from grass clippings – “a team led by MIT researcher andreas mershin, continuing an 8-year research project of shuguang zhang, has developed a viable means by which agricultural waste– like grass clippings and leaves– can be used to create solar panels. within a few years, the technology could be used so that people in remote and developing regions can generate their own electricity with few materials and at low cost.”

Tyrannosaur / Out now on DVD & Blu Ray – “Paddy Considine’s award-winning debut feature, Tyrannosaur, has been released on DVD & Blu Ray from today.”

Whimsical Hidden Animal Teacups – “Product designer Ange-line Tetrault created the white ceramic fox, owl, and bear teacups to be “playful as well as thoughtful reflections of her life and surroundings.””

Reverend Billy Treibt UBS den Teufel Aus (4.2.2012) – “Reverend Billy, ein amerikanischer Aktionskünstler, treibt den Teufel bei der UBS aus — diese schützte ihren Eingang mit goldenen Holzverschlag, der nach der Aktion wieder abmontiert wurde.”

#lang:de

Im Selbstbedienungsladen – “Neininger und seine Zeitung haben letztlich nur das getan, was viele andere auch tun – egal ob Zeitungen oder Blogger. Zu einem Skandal taugt der Fall also schlecht. Die Kritiker sitzen selbst im Glashaus. Wer reinen Gewissens versichern kann, nie im Netz geklaut zu haben, werfe den ersten Stein.”

Vom Mythos des Realen – “Klar fände ich – und die ganze Kummer-Familie – es heute schön, wäre ich für irgendetwas Seriöses berühmt geworden, etwas, das die Menschheit weiterbringt. Aber ich bin berühmt, weil ich Interviews mit Stars teilweise inszeniert habe.” tom kummer

Interview mit dem Autor des Bio-Schmähs – “Wir alle haben romantisierte Vorstellungen, die zum Teil von unserem Bedürfnis nach einem „reinen Gewissen“ beim Einkaufen geprägt sind. Darüberhinaus kommen sie von der strategischen Selbst-Inszenierung der Konzerne in der Öffentlichkeit.”

[delicious.com/pieceoplastic or subscribe to this RSS feed - with all the typos]

[weekly linkdump, somewhat edited]

#watch and

Adblock AFK – swedish activists removing adverts in the subway

Sticky Rice’s Sushi in Space – “Six months of planning and testing went into this project as a lot of variables were at play: -60F in space, FAA regulations, overheating or freezing batteries, GPS issues, stabilization, and how to make the damn sushi stay together in high winds.” six months, really?

TRANSPORT – Reggie Watts / Noah Kalina, fantastic images over a mellow Reggie Watts track.

Texting While Walking by Casey Neistat – “i made this movie for the New York Times http://nyti.ms/zCjMEA as part of their OpDoc series”

CASSETTE: A Documentary Film about the Cassette Tape. by Zack Taylor and Seth Smoot – “We’ll look at all parts of popular culture influenced by the cassette, including hip-hop and B-Boy culture, indie rock, home recording, and beyond.”

ooh aah – the when harry met sally fake orgasm scene with bonus bits

Yosemite HD
“The two of us became friends through Vimeo and explored a shared interest in timelapsing Yosemite National Park over an extended period of time.”

#learn

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart Moshing at a 1982 Dead Kennedys Show – “Here’s a photo taken by Irish Willis Peele of a young Jon Stewart (center) moshing at a Dead Kennedys and Front Line punk show at the Casablanca club in Richmond, Virginia. When the photo was snapped in July 1982, he was a student at William & Mary and went by his given name, Jon Leibowitz.” post-punks rule.

The Swap-O-Matic – “The Swap-o-matic is a vending machine which playfully tries to remind us that reusing and recycling can be just as fun as buying something new. The machine allows users to donate and receive items, instantly and for free!” i want to make one for bern.

Chinese artist Zhang Huan created the torsos of Jesus and Buddha – “Chinese artist Zhang Huan created the torsos of two of the most prominent religious figures in the world using the ashes from temple incense in Shanghai.”

MPAA Wins the Oscar Screener Battle, but Loses the War – “For the last 10 years, I’ve tracked the online distribution of Oscar-nominated films, going back to 2003. Using a number of sources (see below for methodology), I’ve compiled a massive spreadsheet, now updated to include 310 films. This year, for the first time, I’m calling it: The MPAA is winning the battle to stop screener leaks. A record 37 films were nominated this year, and the studios sent out screeners for all but four of them. But, so far, only eight of those 33 screeners have leaked online, a record low that continues the downward trend from last year.”

Mega-man: The fast, fabulous, fraudulent life of Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom – “Dotcom has gone out of his way since the early 1990s to put himself at the center of media attention. He’s certainly got it now. But who, really, is this guy?”

Bloomberg’s amazing — and rejected — Mitt Romney cover – “Bloomberg Businessweek chose not to run with this remarkable illustration of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.” it’s all fun and games in politics until someone gets a bloody nose

WordPress Plugin Unblocks Censored Sites, Including The Pirate Bay – “A new WordPress plugin makes it dead easy to uncensor blocked websites. In just a few clicks people can setup their own proxy site with the popular blogging software. An essential tool for people whose speech is restricted by oppressive regimes, and handy for downloaders in The Netherlands, Italy, Finland and other countries where ISPs are blocking The Pirate Bay. ”

Author Alain de Botton Plans to Build Temples for Godless Londoners – “For de Botton, temples don’t need religions to be built. “You can build a temple to anything that’s positive and good,” he said. “That could mean: a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective. Why should religious people have the most beautiful buildings in the land?”"

Cyclists: What do you do when someone yells at you from their car? – creative tipps on how to avoid road rage

Girl Band ‘Pussy Riot’ Arrested for Anti-Putin Song in Kremlin – “Moscow’s self-proclaimed “Feminist punk group” Pussy Riot terrorized the Red Square by blasting their protest song “Putin Pissed Himself” (alternatively, “Putin Is Chickenshit”) in front of Saint Basil’s Cathedral, before being hauled away by the Russian version of the Secret Service.”

Marina Abramovic Throws Latest Bizarre Party at Sundance – “All guests wore white labcoats (ring a bell?) and noise canceling headphones; they were forbidden to speak for an hour. (The silence was supposed to echo Marina’s own during her MoMA retrospective performance.)”

DJ Food | A couple of reviews – “Sometimes with a release, gig or event, there are reviews that stand out, where the person has delved a little deeper than the first impression or copied the press release. Here are two” the new album is fantastic.

Infographics: The European Parliament vote on ACTA – “ACTA is the Anto Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Disguised as a Trade Agreement, ACTA goes much, much further than that …”

Radiohead Switzerland 2012 – July 9 2012 st. triphon in a quarry, tickets go on sale on january 31.

COOKIES CREAM – wow, what a great vegetarian restaurant in berlin, we will eat there thursday.

One Page Graphic Novel – “Welcome to a new story telling medium… the One Page Graphic Novel. Is this a gimmick? Yes, probably.” Henry Flint invented it… hope it catches on

#lang:de

Bern: Mani Matter bröckelt von der Wand ab – “Die BDP will das Bild von Mani Matter neben dem Rathaus erhalten. Dies sei nicht möglich, sagt der Gemeinderat.” Die BDP zeigt sich pro streetart, in diesem fall…

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[weekly linkdump, somewhat edited]

#watch and

Time is Nothing // Around The World Time Lapse – “After I quit my job last year, I packed a bag, grabbed my camera and bought a one way ticket to London. 17 countries later, I put together this time lapse video of the many amazing places I came across.”

Pingu’s THE THING – “Pingu remake of John Carpenter masterpiece THE THING (1982) This is the 2 minute extended cut.”

Fishing under ice – “Some under ice views from beautiful lake Saarijärvi in Vaala, Finland.”

never a dull moment on the nyc subway – “An awesome performance by two people who have never met before.”

Cat attacks singing card. – this cat has good taste, of course she would attack this card

#learn

How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? – “Here is this fictional character who is now suddenly interacting in the real world. It’s so far up its own rear end”

Raoul Vaneigem Interview – “But indignation isn’t enough. It is less a matter of struggling against a system that is collapsing than in favor of new social structures founded upon direct democracy.”

Global unrest: how the revolution went viral – “The past 18 months have seen extraordinary outpourings of discontent. But what links them? In this extract from his new book, Paul Mason examines how technology has been at the heart of the global unrest, and finds parallels less with 1968, and more with 1914″

Former Homeless Woman Becomes Twitter Celebrity – “The 41-year-old tweets to her more than 4,800 followers about what it was like to be homeless and also advocates for homeless people. When she was homeless, Walsh would tweet from her cell phone or use computers at her local library.”

Peeing out the window of a moving Muni bus – “HAPPY FUCKING NEW YEARS ASSHOLES, I JUST PEED OUT THE WINDOW OF A MOVING BUS.” classy.

The WELL: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky: State of the World 2012 – “we see persistent focus on the politics of the various nation-states, yet those entities are increasingly broke and powerless, their poetical and economic force is waning.” as visionary as ever.

get a free occupy sticker, designed by shepard fairey – one per household is free, but still …

Exhibition – Corporations Are People Too – “In a time where protesters across the country, and the world, are objecting to the influence corporations have over democratically elected governments and one leading candidate for the Republican nomination for President, Mitt Romney, was roundly criticized for claiming during a campaign stop that “Corporations are people too,” a bright spotlight is being shined on the complicated role they play in contemporary life.”

Sweden recognises church of file sharing as a religion – “A group of 3,000 Swedish file sharers have succeeded in getting their organisation, called the Church of Kopimism, recognised as a religion by the Swedish authorities.”

Plan to create Central Park on the roofs of Beirut – “The hanging gardens of Babylon were the inspiration for an architect’s ambition to turn the city of Beirut into a “wonder forest”.”

Mogees – “Through gesture recognition techniques we detect different kind of fingers-touch and associate them with different sounds.”

Paperback Q&A: Jon Ronson on The Psychopath Test – “This struck me as such a huge thought, I kept wondering if I could verify it. Could I become a professional psychopath spotter and journey into the corridors of power?”

Tell Congress To Undo The NDAA, Ban Indefinite Military Detention Of Americans – “President Obama just signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law despite startling provisions that will allow the military to indefinitely detain American citizens.”

Lost ring found on carrot – “Lena Paahlsson, who lives on a farm near Mora, Sweden, says that she found her wedding ring, lost for 16 years, on a carrot in her garden.”

Record mp3: record live audio and get an mp3 – “Just click the button above to start recording. We will give you an mp3 you can save, and a link you can share with anyone. If you want better sound quality, connect a headset”

Bubble Calendar, a poster-sized calendar with a bubble to pop every day. – huge bubbles you can pop every day

The Obliteration Room, Kids Cover All White Room in Polka Dots – “Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama created obliteration room, an art work where she gathered used furniture, recreated a typical Australian home all in white and then allowed children to sticker it in colorful polka dots.”

“Blindside” can’t be seen to be believed. – “It’s called BlindSide, and it’s one of the first games to bring a brand new gaming experience to sighted players, that can also be fully enjoyed by visually impaired gamers. So far we’ve completed 10 minutes of gameplay to prove out the technology, and demonstrate that our core mechanic is fun.” game play by audio cues

Turn Any WordPress Site Into A BitTorrent Tracker – “A new plugin for WordPress allows anyone to set up a fully functioning BitTorrent site in just a few minutes.”

My Top Ten Top Ten Top Ten list – this is so meta, it almost hurts

Cory Doctorow: A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future – “The future isn’t pre-ordained. It is contested and contestable. Science fiction isn’t a literature that tells you what will happen tomorrow.”

Guerrilla Grafters: Splicing Fruit-Bearing Branches Onto City Trees – “In San Francisco, a new form of covert agriculture is taking root: making fruit trees out of trees that normally don’t bear fruit, and turning an entire city into an orchard.”

Anonymous 101 Part Deux: Morals Triumph Over Lulz – “In the beginning, there were lulz, pranks and a culture of trolling just to get a rise out of anyone. But despite many original Anons best efforts, Anonymous has grown up to become the net’s immune system, striking back whenever the hive mind perceived that the institutions that run the world crossed the line into hypocrisy.”

25 best Occupy photos of 2011 – “Below, the best photos of the Occupy movement from the past year.”

In Photo Series, Photographer Defies Gravity And Reality – “Paris-based artist and photographer Philippe Ramette has a passion of defying gravity and reality.”

Morrissey Hacked Into Google Earth – “The Google hack insert is a pixeled replica of Morrissey’s pose on the 1986 The Queen Is Dead LP, right at the virtual replica of the location at St Ignatius Walk in Salford, M5 3RX, United Kingdom” sweet

#lang:de

PK-Training2012 – “Permakultur-Training 2012 – inklusive 72 Stunden-Kurs nach Bill Mollison – März bis Nov. 2012 an 12 verschiedenen Orten neu mit Josef Holzer, Sohn von Sepp Holzer und Margit Rusch Autorin des Buches anders Gärtnern Permakultur Elemente im Hausgarten”

Kevinismus – “Als Kevinismus (auch: Chantalismus) bezeichnet man die krankhafte Unfähigkeit, menschlichem Nachwuchs menschliche Namen zu geben.”

Press Pause Play – “Ein­er­seits bietet die heutige Zeit sicher grandiose Möglichkeiten, der Welt sein Schaf­fen mitzuteilen und so wie z.B. Seth Godin ein Buch kosten­los zu veröf­fentlichen und dabei noch Geld zu ver­di­enen, ander­er­seits besteht angesichts der schieren Masse von uhuere geilem Züg prak­tisch keine Möglichkeit aus diese Masse her­auszustechen, wenn men­sch erst beginnt, Küstler zu sein.”

DMZ is no more – a sad day in comic history, the best graphic novel of the last years ends its run.

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[weekly linkdump, somewhat edited]

#watch and

Reggie Watts: Humor in music – “Watts knows this audience well”

Poetic Terror 3: The Final Detonation (Terrorismo Poético 3: O Desembesto Final) – “Short film about urban intervention and street art.”

2012 & The End Of The World – “Why (some) people think the world will come to an end during 2012.”

TotalRandomness512′s Channel – silent video by a kid with a serious heart condition who died a few days after posting this. very moving.

NextLevel Squad – gasmasks! and wicked next generation dance moves

Riley on Marketing – riley has already figured this out

TateShots: Maurice Sendak – “Maurice Sendak, the creative genius behind books such as ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ and ‘In the Night Kitchen’, is an illustrator whose work has been seen by millions of people all over the world.”

How to Film a Revolution – a tutorial – Occupy the Movie – “Big brother, we are watching you. Part of OCCUPY THE MOVIE, an indy film series aiming to be entirely funded by the 99%. Join us, become a crowd funding produce”

robotarm scratch – created by daito manabe and motoi ishibashi

#learn

Richard Prince Lawsuit Focuses on Limits of Appropriation – “recycle and remix culture is gaining speed so rapidly that trying to bring order to it was, even now, like trying to hit a moving target.” well… if then NYT starts to say so…

A break a day, every day, all year. – steinski did a mix for “a break a day” soundcloud.com/365breaks

Kyle Bean: “Soft Guerilla” – “A series of weapons made from harmless materials for a feature article centred around the topic of ‘Guerilla Gardening’ and ‘Yarn Bombing’.”

Fireplace – fireplace software. yup. interactive as well.

Book Review – Art & Activism in the Age of Globalization – “The quality of the book extends way beyond its premise. Art & Activism in the Age of Globalization is composed of 30 essays by artists, art historians, philosophers, cultural critics, social scientists, curators, theatre directors, etc. I expected at least one or two of these texts to be bland, too scholarly, or cliché.” thank you regine.

Occupy Geeks Are Building a Facebook for the 99% – I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook”

WonderLand – “a unique but rather simple and elegant artificial lighting and household objects (from vegetables to plastic bags)”

Drexciya: Journey Of The Deep Sea Dweller I – “You’ve heard bits and pieces of Drexciya, you grasp their importance, but you feel guilty: you don’t really know Drexciya’s music, and you should. But where on earth do you begin?” the electro gods lineage is clear – kraftwerk, drexciya, aphex twin, boards of canada

In Caffeine We Trust: Infographic Print For Tracking Your Coffee Consumption Data – “In Caffeine We Trust: Infographic Print For Tracking Your Coffee Consumption Data”

Car Atlas – Rainbow, 2,500 Toy Cars Arranged in a Circular Rainbow – “London-based artist David T Waller created Car Atlas – Rainbow, a beautiful art installation using nearly 2,500 toy cars arranged in a giant circular rainbow pattern.”

The Boombox Project, A Photobook of Vintage Boomboxes – “The Boombox Project: The Machines, the Music, and the Urban Underground is a photo book by photographer Lyle Owerko featuring fine art photographs of vintage boomboxes.”

Wormworldsaga.com – Part 2 – part 2 is out

Illustrated Map of Argentina’s Primera División Stadiums and Clubs – “all the details you could possibly want on Argentina’s Primera División for the 2012 Clausura”

The Family – “Over 10 years ago, Jocelyn Bain Hogg followed and portrayed the protagonists of organised crime in South London. Gangsters, funerals, big rings, big cigars, diamond-encrusted knuckle duster, more funerals, pimps and prostitutes”

be afraid be very afraid – this graphic gave me a fou rire this morning …

#Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts—Coming to a City Near You – “On those rare occasions when we want to form a crowd, our tech can work a strange, dark magic.”

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[weekly linkdump, somewhat edited]

Happy Flying Spaghetti Monster Day

Terry Gilliam – The Christmas Card – animation by terry gilliam from the 60s

Evil marzipan pig is evil – “This was meant as a Christmas present for two girls I know who are 5 and 7, but I don’t think I’ll give it to them actually. It turned out a bit too evil-demon-pig-from-hell-y for that”

Hey! Look at My Toys!: The 2011 Action Figure Nativity Contest is HERE! – “Action Figure Nativity contest and the call out to my dork horde brethren did not go unheard, with so many of you stepping up and really delivering some incredible, zany, original, brilliant and all-around awesome nativity scenes”

Braun-Weiße Weihnachtsgrüße 2011 – “Der FC St. Pauli wünscht fröhliche Weihnachten und einen guten Start ins neue Jahr”

Gingerbread Yoga Cookies – “Our best-selling yoga cookies, featured in “O” Magazine, come in a set of 10 different poses:”

Silent Night – festive greetings indeed

#watch and

Bradley Manning Had Secrets – “The story of Bradley Manning, not as a Wikileaks ‘hacktivist’, but as a young American soldier simultaneously going through a crisis-of-conscious and a crisis-of-identity.”

constant creak – try not to scream while watching putin’s uhm mashup

WTF IS A DDP? – Decentralized Dance Party

Crowdsourced anti-SOPA rap – “After I finished writing the song, I put a post on my Facebook wall asking people to take photographs of themselves presenting lines from the song.”

Official Occupy Wall Street Thank You Video – “This it the official OWS video to thank our supporters. This video was passed by consensus through the New York City GA on Tuesday, December 20.”

shitgirlssay’s Channel – “Shit Girls Say, Web Comedy Series Created From One-Liner Tweets”

Taxi Driver suédé par Michel Gondry – “Gondry has decided to join in the fun by creating his own “swede” version of Martin Scorsese’s classic film “Taxi Driver.”"

#learn

“Sneak Preview” of Mr. Brainwash’s Art Show 2011 – “The very hyped Mr. Brainwash show opens tomorrow at 1pm at his huge warehouse/studio on La Brea and Lexington in Los Angeles.”

Writers and artists design money fit for modern times – in pictures – “Global economic meltdown, the euro crisis and Occupy protests – this year has been dominated by financial issues. But what is money anyway? We invited writers and artists including Jonathan Franzen, Margaret Atwood and Naomi Klein to invent new currencies and banknotes for a changed world”

Eco-Friendly Battery Runs on Old Newspapers – “This new tech relies on turning cellulose products (including, lest we forget, the paper greeting cards all you Earth-hating monsters are exchanging this time of year) into glucose sugar.”

Skull Style Trade Edition – “Formerly an emblem of evil and mortality, the skull has been transformed into an avant-garde design element used in the most cutting-edge art, chic interiors and vanguard style of the moment.”

Banksy – Inside – Caution Sir Wet Floor

Tetrahedral kite ‘Little Shining Man’ doubles as flying sculpture – “Little Shining Man is a kite which will reside in the atrium of a building in Jersey all year, except for one day where it will be taken down and flown in St. Aubin’s Bay.”

Occupy Wall Street: The Lego Set – “After months of demonstrations by the Occupy Wall Street movement, Slate V imagines a special edition Lego set just in time for the holidays.”

In WikiLeaks case, Bradley Manning faces the hacker who turned him in – “Lamo, who turned Bradley Manning into the FBI and Army for allegedly leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive government documents to WikiLeaks, denied in his testimony that he’d violated a journalistic or ministerial promise of confidentiality”

kim jong-il dropping the bass – i loled

Zeitgeist 2011: How the world searched – “When looking at the data, it is fascinating to see the cultural fads and trends that took over the globe, from cupcakes (making top food lists in over a dozen countries) to the Dukan diet and high-profile weddings, but Google was used for much more than staying up to date on the sisters Middleton and Kardashian” I rather enjoyed the companion video

Occupy Everywhere, Tiny Protest Camps in San Francisco – Last night a group of prankster-activists installed miniature Occupy protest encampments around San Francisco. The encampments were made up of soft camping tent stress toys imprinted with the words “Support Your 99%,” and tiny cartoon protesters carrying miniature placards.

Armament, Human Heart-Shaped Glass Molotov Cocktails – “I created this work, inspired by the Egyptians and the so called Arab spring. The visual starting point is the molotov cocktail that has been the weapon of choice for the protesters. There is a connection in any conflict between the combatants.”

The return of the Radical Chic evening – Occupy Wall Street – “The Occupy movement seemed like it was doing just fine before the celebrity bandwagon showed up. So what do these people have to gain from association with the first genuine counter-culture to show up in a generation?”

What are you doing after the apocalypse? – Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel – “Tandis que les médias charrient un flot ininter-rompu de nouvelles apoca-lyptiques, l’équipe du MEN invite à se pencher sur la question de l’après, en colla-boration avec des artistes et des chercheurs en sciences sociales.”

Occupy Hand Signs Cheatsheet – “If these aren’t correct, let me know.”

target bookshelf by mebrure oral – “each ‘target books’ shelf is produced in three pieces via injection molding of recyclable ABS plastic”

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Playlist on Youtube

plus one to make you cry:

Youtube Link

Twenty six years ago today my sister Sabin committed suicide. It is a sad day still for us, her family, and maybe some of her friends. But at the same time I still fully respect her decision to end her life young, she was twenty one at the time. She went out with dignity, with her ideals in tact, before life could corrupt her into heavy compromise and jaded routine.

Today in these harsh times with an uncertain future I more than ever stand in favor of every persons right to commit suicide. Over the years I flipflopped several times on the issue. Doubts about the ethical implications of such an act, influenced by some religious and spiritual reflections, made me hesitate. Then the violence and aggression involved made me turn against it. But now I am back and fully convinced, every person has the unquestionable right to end their life at the time they deem right. Of course this should not happen as a rash decision, as is often the case in teenage suicides. With teenagers it may most often not be the right decision and everything has to be done to prevent it. But if an adult takes the educated decision to end their life, for whatever reason really, they should be allowed to do so.

In recent times, with the #Occupy Movement turning me back into the political animal that I have always been, I have consulted my old favorite utopian model again, bolo’bolo. One central element in that book is called “nugo”, a gold capsule, protected by a combination lock, that contains a deadly poison. Every Individual can wear one of these around their neck and use it when they need to. The sentence that sticks out: Life is a fatal error to begin with and there is no greater horror than not being able to die [translation mine]. Ignore the 80s pathos for a moment, if you can, but this really does say it all, we are just trying to do our best here, but the nightmare that is our existence can become so overwhelming, that no one can be blamed for wanting to take a sexy exit.

R.I.P. Sabin

nagu: “Every ibu gets a capsule with a deadly poison, and can commit suicide whenever it wants. It can also demand aid for this purpose.”

nugo

Das nugo ist eine Goldkapsel, 3,7 cm lang und 0,9 cm im Durchmesser, die mit einem Drehkombinationsschloss gesichert ist, dessen siebenstellige Code-Zahl nur das betreffende ibu selbst kennt, und die eine bei Einnahme sofort tödliche Substanz enthält. Jedes ibu kann sein nugo von seinem bolo jederzeit beziehen, ähnlich wie das taku. Das ibu kann das nugo zusammen mit den taku-Schlüsseln an einer Halskette tragen, damit es sofort erreichbar ist, wenn es aus bolo’bolo aussteigen möchte. Wenn das ibu wegen einer Lähmung oder Verletzung sein nugo nicht selbst einnehmen kann, sind die ibus verpflichtet (siehe: sila), ihm dabei zu helfen.

Wenn das ibu genug von bolo’bolo, nima, yalu, fasi, yaka und anderem hat, dann hat es immer die Möglichkeit, endgültig zu verschwinden und dem (Reform-)Alptraum zu entkommen. Es soll nicht die Ausrede haben, dass es zum Leben verpflichtet sei, weil es Verantwortung für bolo’bolo oder andere ibus trage.

Das nugo erinnert das ibu daran, dass auch bolo’ bolo keinen Sinn hat, dass niemand und keine Gesellschaftsform dem ibu in seiner Verlassenheit und Verzweiflung helfen kann. Das Leben ist zum vorneherein ein fataler Fehler und es gibt keinen grösseren Schrecken als nicht sterben zu können.

Guys. The end is nigh … Unless the revolution starts now. No wait. It should have started yesterday! … There I go again, falling into my pessimistic outlook.

But really, is it already too late to save the world?
We can only speculate, only time will tell.
At any rate, profound change needs to happen and fast, now, yesterday, or it will certainly be too late.

So what do I think is wrong? What needs to change?

Well, where do I start? We managed to create such a mess on this planet, that it’s quite difficult to decide where to begin.

We are the 99 %

The deregulated financial market has gone out of hand years ago. It is a miracle, that it has not collapsed yet. The gap between the super rich and the poor has increased to perverse levels. The greed of some of the super rich seems to know no limits.

Any economy that declares certain companies “too big too fail” will sooner or later be in real trouble. At that point the power shifts from the state to the corporations and we no longer live in a democracy. The super rich and their companies hold all governmental bodies by the balls. Democracy has turned into a de facto oligarchy.

While most of the super rich stay in the background and influence politics through lobbies and campaign support, some of them get openly involved in politics. In Switzerland, just as an example, one of the richest guys in the country, also runs and probably pretty much finances – we don’t know for sure, since there is no obligation for transparency – the Swiss People’s Party, running on a populist and xenophobic agenda that is about as right wing as it can get before turning brown. His main goals, deregulation and social cuts, typical neo con fair, thinly disguised underneath the immigration issues and xenophobia that he uses to scare and mobilize the masses. Who profits from his politics? The rich and super rich? Yet who supports Blocher and his party in Switzerland? The farmers and socially disadvantaged. It is so frustrating to watch and rarely so obvious, but in Switzerland money really does buy political influence.

In Switzerland 1% of the population own 59 % of the wealth. That is an even more extreme ratio than say in Germany or the US. This ratio is as extreme as the one in Columbia. The problem in this country, the “poor” people here are still pretty well off, unemployment is low, social services function, the wealth somehow seems to trickle down. But even worse, we are all collectively responsible for this situation. In a sense all Swiss citizens profit from big business and the banks, these same banks that generate their blood money by offering tax haven and banking secret to the super rich from around the world. Name one of the recently toppled dictators who didn’t have a Swiss bank account … The Swiss are collectively caught in this scheme, which leads to reactions from shame to cynical boasting.

Meanwhile a mixture of guilt and outrage over deregulation and social cuts has finally brought a timid group of people here in Switzerland to join the international occupy movement in protest.

But will we be able to reach a critical mass and motivate any real change? It’s late in the game … We are already in extra time.

We are a cry from the heart of the World

Even more grave, and of course totally related to corporate greed is our environmental situation. Our planet is overpopulated and it’s not looking as if population growth will slow down anytime soon – sauf catastrophe.

Human population was able to grow out of proportion, because of medical advances and industrial agriculture. Big agriculture relies on fertilizers made from and produced with fossil fuels as well as a distribution system that relies on oil. Most areas where Big Agriculture grows corn and wheat would no longer yield anything, unless more and stronger fertilizer keeps getting added. The top soil is pretty much depleted, should we stop to add these fertilizers in these areas, we would be left with a pile of dust that would blow away in the wind.

Meanwhile many scientists claim, that we have already moved beyond Peak Oil, meaning our oil reserves will start to run out soon, with the immediate effect that fuel will get more expensive. Fossil fuels also contribute heavily to global warming and other potential ecological catastrophes. We look at overpopulation made possible by a resource about to be depleted, and at the same time this is just one of the mechanisms, that might well lead to the demise of our species.

We poison our food with chemical agents to preserve it, make it look better, fluffy, shiny, white or what not. On the markets we speculate on food, pushing the price of corn and wheat to record levels, which in turn contributes in large part to world hunger. Of the 7 billion people on this planet 1 billion are poor, which means they can experience catastrophic famine at any moment.

As if these potential disasters were not grave enough add to these nuclear waste, water scarcity, and the many more toxic and poisonous materials humans have produced and discarded into landfills, and all this why? To satisfy our greedy consumerist lifestyle …

Nature is pretty much fucked. We should have started to unfuck it years ago. The timid attempts to protect nature that were initiated over these last years just did not go far enough. Is there still time to save the planet?

This is the beginning of the beginning

The past few years I have been compulsively checking my Twitter feed for messages announcing impending doom. I had pretty much lost all hope that we can turn this mess around. Ask me then, I would have answered, it is too late, we have let things go too far.

But instead last winter and spring I read about the arab spring, then spain, and in summer I found #occupywallstreet, and all this has given me hope. I might project too much on it, but here finally are people who are saying enough is enough and doing so in a non-violent, creative, constructive ways. It took off in the US and when it came to Switzerland naturally I joined. It’s been fun and constructive, but I keep wondering why there are not more people getting involved.

I am grateful to see the occupy movement taking a stand and I fully support it. But how can we affect real change? We are looking at such profound changes that need to happen, many of us, even some protesters, will have trouble to accept them. Consumerism is everywhere and some of the stuff money buys is so fucking cool.

Create the Change You wish to see in the World

The deregulated global economy? It needs to collapse.
Corporations effectively running our governments? That needs to stop.
Or their greed will simply kill us all.
But every single one of us need to be willing to make huge sacrifices individually and change our ways.

In my own life I have tried to change to a very careful and respectful life style. But there is only so much I can do, and, if I am perfectly honest, so much I am willing to do. I grow my own vegetables, eat only organic vegetarian food, use public transport, no longer own a car, we even moved to a so called ecological development, that turned out to be one huge disappointment, but that’s another story. But so much is wrong with all the things i currently do, much of it does serve not much more of a purpose, than to appease my own guilt. For instance, I can only grow food because I got lucky and happen to live in the small area on the earth, where that is even possible, right climate, enough water, good topsoil. Move me to central Spain or Africa, and my project goes bust. In other words, I am privileged on so many levels. And then I still love my gadgets, my plasma TV and my hip clothing way too much. Just last week I bought some winter boots “Made in China”, knowingly. Yes. i felt guilty, but I still bought them.

The annoying demand for demands

Some people will read this and say “duh”. Others will reject it with violent denial. Most won’t ever read it, since I am just one small voice on the huge internetz adding to the noise. Even I wonder, why I would suddenly feel the need to state the obvious here?

Everybody, the press and everyone else, keeps pointing out that the Occupy Movement does not have a list of clear demands. We are confronted with a ferocious demand for demands. But look at the state the world is in, look at all the problems we have to address, so much is going wrong. If anything, we have too many demands. And as naive as this may sound, we mainly just want a better world.

And this quote might also explain it:

you can’t just say, we demand a world of peace, demands have to be specific. [yet] anything that people can articulate can only be articulated within the language of the current political discourse. and that entire political discourse is already too small. and that’s why making explicit demands kind of reduces the movement and takes the heart out of it. that’s a real paradox, but I think the movement understands that [source: the revolution is love]

Here’s how I would say it: If humanity is running straight into the open knife, do we need to stop humanity from running or do we have to take down the knife? Probably both, and that is why this task feels sooooo enormous… It feels overwhelming. I am confused and I don’t have the solution. But I am willing and exited to start the process and to look into possible ways, and to learn how to find consensus and interact with others in a non-violent, democratic way. Let the change we want to see in the world be the guideline of how we go about it.

Only tribes will survive

Food, Energy and Finance are the three main areas where huge shifts need to happen fast. However we could get there faster by starting at the other end, by building tribes, by organizing ourselves in our neighborhoods, to grow our own food, share our resources, our fridge space, our kitchens, to reduce our collective carbon footprint, etc. asf.

Maybe the shit really does need to hit the fan before things start to change. Some of the solutions we now develop might well have to be for post-apocalyptic times. It might well have to be the end of the nation state as we know it and the dawn of a new way to organize humans into smaller, localized communities and tribes. “Small is beautiful”. “Bolo’Bolo”. Localized, regional economies and live-work units interwoven with each other, in touch with nature and socially responsible must replace the nation state.

[weekly linkdump, somewhat edited]

#watch and

Midget Parkour – Finger Parkour seems *gasp* dangerous

Occupy Wall Street teach-in with Douglas Rushkoff – - “They say the Occupy movement has no leaders. They are wrong. YOU are the leaders! The rest of us are your followers! What you do here shows us what we can do out there.”

Timelapse-icus Maximus HD Burning Man 2011 by James Cole, Music by Elite Force/DISTRIK – “Burning Man 2011 Tilt Shift Time-lapse by James Cole”

Occupy Your Mind: An Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky – “Topics include Occupy Wall Street, why revolutions fail but mutation succeeds, the magical side of reality, the search for gurus and wisdom and why Twitter is the haiku of this century!”

Something Inspirational – “Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security.” yes, it’s a good time to re-listen the charlie chaplin in the great dictator, video and transcript

Welcome to Kitty City – Strange Brilliant Kitteh Animation by Cyriak

Roger Doiron – A Subversive Plot: How to Grow a Revolution in Your Own Backyard – “Roger Doiron is founding director of Kitchen Gardeners International, a network of people taking a hands-on approach to re-localizing the global food supply.”

#learn

This 28-Year-Old’s Startup Is Moving $350 Million And Wants To Completely Kill Credit Cards – “Unlike PayPal, Dwolla doesn’t take a percentage of the transaction. It only asks for $0.25 whether it’s moving $1 or $1,000.”

Metrics used to track tweets, Elven – “The intelligence analysts… are tasked with sifting through millions of tweets, Facebook messages, online chat logs, and other public data on the World Wide Web to glean insights into the collective moods of regions or groups abroad.”

Polar bears pushing blocks of ice – It’s the Polar Bears! melting all our ice. we finally found the culprit.

Marina Abramović’s Allegedly Kinky, “Criminal” MOCA Gala – “I hope the performance itself will bring some kind of dignity, serenity, and concentration to the normal situation of a gala, and actually change the energy of the space and bring the performance into an everyday life situation.”

Arthur Recreates Scenes from Classic Movies – a rather irritated baby used to recreate famous movie scenes? great parenting 2.0 [via b3ta]

decagon tent by logos: japan good design award 2011 – “japanese outdoor equipment company logos has created ‘decagon tent’, a series of outdoor structures that can be used separately or linked together to create larger, more complex spaces.”

Artist creates volcanic rupture in wall – “If you came into a room and saw a crack in a wall that seemed to be filled with fire or bubbling with lava, would you go any closer? French designer Thierry Dreyfus says of his installation “Wall Rupture for Flos” that most people do.”

MOUSTAIR – “Where men meets moustaches meets hair meets moustaches meets hair meets MOUSTAIR.”

Anonymous 101: Introduction to the lulz – “Anonymous is a nascent and small culture, but one with its own aesthetics and values, art and literature, social norms and ways of production, and even its own dialectic language.”

Guardian Weekly hangman game – “Guess the city by using the letters below, remember it could be anywhere in the world.”

BLOOD RICE: CHINESE MUTANT HUMAN-RICE HYBRID MAY SAVE LIVES, FREAK PEOPLE OUT – “No, this is not some neo-communist plot conceived to create a 21st century “red army” of genetically superior mutant rice-soldiers intent on securing China’s world-dominance. China is well on its way without a mutant army.” as eww as hmm

1st challenge winners – The challenge was to create a datavisualisation to illustrate the end of some relevant natural resources, if our consumption stays the same.

Which is the greenest football club? – “Following a football team can involve lots of travel – but some clubs are now starting to think about their carbon footprints”

Plastic bullets available to police for Wednesday’s student protests – “Scotland Yard says officers are free to use baton rounds in extreme cases but critics say tactic is ‘appalling and un-British’”

The Kitten Covers – Album Covers redone with Kittehs

Earth fail wale – lol

US entrepreneurs cash in on Occupy movement – “T-shirts, coffee mugs and other merchandise being offered on campsites that have sprung up in cities across country” how rather cynical

Data Points: An Overview of the Euro Crisis – “Charting the web of debt exposure among sagging economies”

Tweet Like Don Draper With This Retro Rotary Phone – “Russia-based firms UP Digital Bureau and Unteleported Tech Agency collaborated to produce the world’s first analogue Twitter client: Tweephone.”

Occupationalist / Covering the Occupy movement as it unfolds. No filters. No delays. – Interesting approach, but so far focused soley on US cities

Great but fairly strange Russian Photos – By a guy named Petros

Laurie Penny: A woman’s opinion is the mini-skirt of the internet – “I believe the time for silence is over. If we want to build a truly fair and vibrant community of political debate and social exchange, online and offline, it’s not enough to ignore harassment of women, LGBT people or people of colour who dare to have opinions. Free speech means being free to use technology and participate in public life without fear of abuse – and if the only people who can do so are white, straight men, the internet is not as free as we’d like to believe.”

#lang:de

Statement von Sven Väth 1993 zur Berliner Mayday – “Ein intellektuell forderndes, spannendes, ausführliches – ja, beinahe schon ausuferndes! – Statement von Sven Väth 1993 auf der Berliner Mayday, das in seiner epischen Breite fast schon das gesamte Spektrum der Partykultur der Neunziger schlüssig aufbereitet, selbst die kleinsten Details berücksichtigt und dabei im Subtext selbst vor Gesellschaftskritik nicht zurückschreckt. So war das damals.”

Distanzlos gegen Fangewalt – “Die Berichterstattung über «Fussballfans ausser Rand und Band» (Blick) gerät zunehmend selber ausser Kontrolle.”

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[weekly linkdump, somewhat edited]

#watch and

Boom! [all about Steve Jobs.com] – And Boom!

Tank Dog – “The costume is made from cardboard and paper clips (for the tracks). The dog is well rewarded with treats.” costume? ahhh, tis all good, dog gets treats… sigh [via b3ta]

OBEY COPENHAGEN PT. 1 – Shepard Faireys (OBEY) adventures in Copenhagen, in 3 short documentaries

Murmuration – “A chance encounter and shared moment with one of natures greatest and most fleeting phenomena.”

Bad Lip Reading — “HERMAN CAIN” – The best yet … but I say that with every one they release. Cain has such comedy value omg omg.

Deputy Michael D Higgins speaking on reducing the minimum wage during the Labour PMM – a speech by the new irish prime minister given back in december 2010, seems like ireland has chosen well

We Are The 1% – “Minorities have it rough in this country.” this type of joke is getting a little old. but ok

ADAM & JOE WITH LOUIS THEROUX DANCING TO GROOVE IS IN THE HEART IN 1990 – “Louis Theroux, Adam Buxton & Joe Cornish do some authentic hip-hop style dancing to Deee-Lite’s classic Groove Is In The Heart”

soulwax ‘machine’ – “The result is a breathtaking film that perfectly encapsulates the audio visual obsession of Radio Soulwax.”

#learn

Supercut: Anatomy of a Meme – “For the last few years, I’ve tracked a particular flavor of remix culture that I called “supercuts” — fast-paced video montages that assemble dozens or hundreds of short clips on a common theme.”

HMP – A Survival Guide – “up to date and practical guide to prison in the UK and how to best cope with it.” handy stuff [via b3ta]

Occupy the Future – “This article is adapted from Noam Chomsky’s talk at the Occupy Boston encampment on Dewey Square on Oct. 22.” sharp and concise
Maurizio Cattelan: genius or joker? – “He is stepping down from the art world the day his Guggenheim show opens. But is it just another prank?”

What Sting could teach Facebook – “It says something very clear about the ethics of a site in the ease of letting you leave. These things should be fun, not prisons.”

air quote mittens – I still use that gesture too much, so don’t get me these

Hear Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, and DOOM: – “Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood have collaborated on a track with DOOM (formerly MF DOOM), for a compilation celebrating the tenth anniversary of Lex Records. The song, the unfortunately titled “Retarded Fren”, is streaming below.”

senseless drawing bot – “so kanno and takahiro yamaguchi have created ‘senseless drawing bot’, a self-propelling device on a skateboard that sprays abstract linework on a stretch of wall using a double pendulum.”

Famous last words – the steve jobs version

Search Instagram – allows instagram searches for hashtags and titles

Are Occupy Wall Street Protesters Their Own Worst Enemies? – a very disillusioning read, as matt describes the occupy wallstreet camp’s darker sides.

Is society even more unjust than we think it is? – “The consistent correlations that would indicate differences in skill were not to be found. The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.”

7 SKIES H3 – “Flaming Lips 24 Hour Song Skull $5000 USD (includes shipping worldwide) 13 qty” ships inside a real human skull

Met police using surveillance system to monitor mobile phones – “Britain’s largest police force is operating covert surveillance technology that can masquerade as a mobile phone network, transmitting a signal that allows authorities to shut off phones remotely, intercept communications and gather data about thousands of users in a targeted area.”

The Pirate Store | San Francisco’s Only Independent Pirate Supply Store – “The new website has everything to reinvigorate your childhood aspirations of setting sail and exploring the seven seas, especially if your plans for exploring the seven seas involve marauding and swords and eye-patches and scurvy.”

Forget the “baby boomer” debate, this is about cuts and class – “My speech in a debate on inter-generational conflict, attacking team mate David Willetts. We lost.”

Halloween Mini Mix – 28.10.11 by KraftyKuts – “Halloween Special – 28.10.11″

What Kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs, Really? – “I’ve never forgotten something else Jobs told me that day: “If you want to know what I think, just look at our products.” At the time, it seemed like a crabby, dismissive, “bad Steve” response. But it was the most Zen thing he could have said.”

Flier to OWS Protesters: – “Maalox is a must.” That’s one of the many tips to be found in “Defending Against Tear Gas,” a fascinating flier making the rounds on the internet”

Enacting the Impossible (On Consensus Decision Making) – “According to conventional wisdom this shouldn’t be possible, but it is happening  —  in much the same way that other inexplicable phenomena like love, revolution, or life itself (from the perspective of, say, particle physics) happen.”

#lang:de

*** DINI MUETER – BAR – geil! tsüri!

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[weekly linkdump, somewhat edited]

#occupy resources

The San Francisco Sheriff That Shot Scott Olsen – the photo is so obviously photoshopped that I reserve some doubts.

If I can’t wear a short skirt, I don’t want your revolution – “Advising women to avoid arousing potential rapists is a gross misunderstanding of the nature of sexual violence.”

Wall Street Isn’t Winning It’s Cheating – “People don’t want handouts. It’s not a class uprising and they don’t want civil war — they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It’s amazing that some people think that that’s asking a lot.”

Occupy Wall Street is not a Protest but a Prototype – “That’s what makes Occupy so very scary and so very promising. It is not a protest, but a prototype for a new way of living.”

The Occupied Wall Street Journal | – It now has a website. Great Job

L.I. Couple Seeks Trademark For – “Citing the potential of “Occupy Wall Street” to become a “global brand,” a Long Island couple has filed to trademark the name of the amorphous organization responsible for the protests and encampments in lower Manhattan and other U.S. cities” so cynical

OCCUPIED! PieceOPlastic – The Revolution Will Be Blogged | – occupy the interweb, one website at a time

I’m Getting Arrested – Android One-Click App That Lets People Know You’ve Been Arrested

Banksy Artwork for Occupy London Movement – “The Occupy London Movement has received a nice gift in the form of a sculpture from none other than artist Banksy it seems. The artist presents his take on the Monopoly game with Uncle Pennybags looking for a handout.”

Drumming and the Occupation – “Drumming has a loud voice in Liberty Square. Pulse is an important piece of our movement – they are integral to marches, morale, and the general mood of energy we have created. But many within Liberty Square feel as though their voice is being drowned out by the drumming, that it has become difficult to have the conversations that they think are important.”

Anonymous_-_ Survival_Guide_for_Citizens_in_a_Revolution – time to go shopping supplies yet?

A cultural thought experiment – “The diminishing marginal utility law dictates that the more money we have, the less utility we get from any additional incremental gain. And this bites the top 1% very hard indeed.”

An Overview of the Euro Crisis – “European leaders are meeting this week to deal with growing debt problems rattling investors worldwide. Here is a visual guide to the crisis.” The infographic of infographics, precise, clear, informative.

#watch and

“Lord Cain,” by Tim Heidecker (music) – “Because Herman Cain’s actual campaign ads just aren’t weird enough: “Lord Cain,” an opus by Tim Heidecker”

War Costs – “we want to introduce you to the elite among the gang of superrich: the war profiteers. War industry CEOs make tens of millions of dollars a year, putting them in the top 0.01 percent of income earners in the U.S.”

Fox News UK at the Occupy LSX – “Fox News UK’s Don Ronson reporting from the front line at the Occupy London Stock Exchange protest and meeting the proto-fascist hippy-sludge head on.” good fox mock [via b3ta]

Eclectic Method – Zombies – “Zombies mashup for the halloweenin’” ffffffffssssspoooky

android dreams – “A tribute to Ridley Scott and Vangelis, whose atmospheric work on Blade Runner has been a huge source of inspiration in my shooting time lapses”

Steve Jobs’ iBiography flies off the shelves – “Will Apple carry out Jobs’ goal of waging “thermonuclear war” on Android?” the korean animation version of the steve jobs biography

RAW VIDEO: Ground footage of Occupy Oakland march and crowd dispersal – coverage from Oakland, towards the end of the clip you can see protesters trying to help an injured person on the ground, the group are shot with teargas.

#learn

Let’s not make money – “a few great films that bring context to the current uprising and related issues.” list of 10 films/documentaries addressing the issues the occupy movement is about.

50 of the World’s Best Breakfasts – I tortured myself and watched through all these. Had a flare up from just watching, I think

Google Kills Its Other Plus, and How to Bring It Back – “There’s no easy solution. Should a company be expected to maintain features indefinitely because a tiny fraction of their base loves them? There are tangible costs to maintaining old code, and fringe features can clutter an interface, making user experience worse for those that don’t use them.”

Submarine Cable Map – who owns the submarine cables?

Visual Trace Route Tool – Find, Track, and Map the Route to an IP Address – trace route tool

Artist Keiichi Matsuda assigns people fake personalities via Kinect – “The installation explores the construction and broadcast of identity online,” Matsuda told Wired.co.uk. “With social media, we create virtual personas through posting updates, keywords, links, and also by our connections and associations. We wanted to expose this digital aura, while questioning how this new way of defining ourselves may start to trap and enmesh us.”

energy efficient smart thermostat: nest – “‘nest’ is a sensing, automatic energy-saving thermostat, developed by the california-based nest labs company
founded by tony fadell and matt rogers.” it also learns your preferences. and it looks goddamn great.

Performance Artist Gives Birth at Brooklyn Gallery – “While she was expecting, about twenty people a day stopped by for a visit. The gallery won’t say how many actually witnessed the creation of the 9-pound, 2-ounce, 21-inch, flesh and blood work, nor will they release photos and video… yet.”

Kick Other Devices off a Wi-Fi Network with WiFiKill on Android – “The app disables the connection of other devices on the same Wi-Fi network” sounds evil.

Triticum Fever, by Dr. William Davis, author of Wheat Belly – “Modern wheat is the altered offspring of thousands of genetic manipulations, crude and sometimes bizarre techniques that pre-date the age of genetic modification.” Literally all my favorite food items contain weat, pasta, pizza, cookies, pies … this diet would kill me

Giant Lego Man washes ashore in Florida – “”No real than you are.” This suggests it has the same origin as Lego men who washed ashore in Zandvoort, Holland, three years ago, and then in Brighton, England.”

She Was A Camera – “As an early online community, camgirls learned to both live on and produce the web together. We were our own audience.”

Channel Four livestreams the devouring of a hippo – “If you’re looking for a video to watch while munching your sandwiches at lunchtime, why not head over to Channel Four to watch a live feed of a maggoty hippo being devoured?” No thank you

The building that will take 80 years to grow – “A Swedish design firm has created a two-storey retreat for students at a campus in Milan, but it will take 80 years to grow.”

I’M BANKSY – photographer Kim Guthrie portraits people wearing “i’m Banksy” tshirts

Prune Nourry’s Cow Humanoid Takes the Ganges – “Nourry continues to remix cultural mythology for Holy River by working with local artisans to build an 18-foot-high sculpture out of the clay from the Ganges, traditional trimmings and one hefty guilt trip.” can’t resist to say holy cow to that.

You are the Power of Open: 2011 Creative Commons Annual Campaign – It’s that time of the year again, yay, another CC tshirt soon

Update: Florian Rivière – More awesome Guerilla urbaine interventions

SKANDAL! BRONCO NACKT! – Berlin street artist Bronco pastes a stencil while he was naked. The stencil says he was naked while he did this. See what he did there?

Authors on Anarchism – an Interview with Alan Moore – “It was later, as I went into my twenties and started to think about things more seriously that I came to a conclusion that basically the only political standpoint that I could possibly adhere to would be an anarchist one.”

USA vs. The Rest of the World – “Dear, United States. This is how the rest of us see your measurement system.”

KALIBER10000 – “Having gratefully enjoyed every millisecond of that fifteen year run, its time has come and so we must bid adieu to Barney and the clan.” k10k pulls the plug

Miranda July: ‘Take a moment to connect with a stranger’ – “Sigh now in preparation”

The deification of Steve Jobs is Apple’s greatest marketing triumph to date – “Apple pays just £3.99 for the production of your £600 iPhone, and it is the workers who pay for their – and our – greed, so we can tweet and be moving dots on a map. As Mike Daisey said, also in the New York Times, Jobs could have done something about this. He could have really changed the world. He chose not to.”

#lang:de

Jetzt kann sich jeder einen Wasserwerfer bauen – “Die Zürcher Stadtpolizei verkauft neuerdings Wasserwerfer. Die Endmontage erweist sich als Herausforderung für Bastler.”

Petition Reitschule: Bleib, wie du bist! – “Ich sage «JA» zu einer lebendigen, alternativen und einzigartigen Reitschule, wie ich sie heute kenne und schätze. Reitschule: Bleib, wie du bist!”

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The world at seven billion

Here’s my stats:

You were the 3,140,950,418th person

Your country’s population is 7,664,318

Average life expectancy is 79.3 years

What’s next? The global population will continue to increase during your lifetime and beyond, reaching 10 billion by 2083. However, the rate of growth is expected to slow. Little of the current growth is happening in developed countries like yours.

Longer lives: Working-age people like you will be supporting increasing numbers of older people during the next decades. By 2050, there will be just 2.2 people of working age supporting every person aged 65 or older in the developed world. In Europe, this will drop to just two.

Battle for resources: It is estimated that your group of the richest countries consumes double the resources used by the rest of the world. The UN estimates that if current population and consumption trends continue, by the 2030s we will need the equivalent of two Earths to support us.

Did you know? The average family size globally has declined by half since 1950 – from five children to the current 2.5.

the amount the population has grown while you’ve been on this site

3,904 people

A friend of a friend pointed me to this very cool .pdf with instructions on how to print an infographic visualizing the distribution of wealth in Switzerland onto Swiss 10.- Franc banknotes, the Swiss version of OccupyGeorge.com.

As is turns out things are even more extreme in Switzerland than say in the USA or in Germany. While in the US 1 % of the population own 40% of the wealth, here in Switzerland this figure is 59%. Things get even more extreme when you look at the richest 10%, they own 71% of the wealth.

Any way you cut it, there is neither much left for the 99% nor the 90%.

These numbers are according to Hans Kippling’s Book “Reichtum ohne Leistung” as quoted here and here [german language articles].

Download the PDFs here:
Print-Instructions
Sample-Print

Feel free to spread the idea ;p

[weekly linkdump, somewhat edited]

#occupymyhead

Occupy George – “Money talks, but not loud enough for the 99%. By circulating dollar bills stamped with fact-based infographics”

Anonymous Hacks Police Websites and Data to Support Occupy Wall Street – “In solidarity with the Occupation Movement and the International Day of Action Against Police Brutality, allied #anonymous and #antisec vessels took aim at the corrupt bootboys of the 1%: the police. We hacked, defaced, and destroyed several law enforcement targets, leaking over 600MB of private information including internal documents, membership rosters, addresses, passwords, social security numbers, and other confidential data”

Occupy The Internet – “Are you interested in taking part in the recent global wave of revolution from the comfort of your home computer? Occupy the Internet!”

Occupying www.bekb.ch – Occupy your bank! ha ha, excellent occupy generator [via b3ta]

The Real Role Of Anonymous In Occupy Wall Street – “So far, the hacker collective known as Anonymous–or those claiming the name–has failed to live up to threats made via YouTube and social media. But they have brought a lot of buzz to the Occupy Wall Street movement.”

Rome Burns – “It’ s a sad end of an attempt in Rome of the globalized protest starting from Madrid through Occupy Wall street in NY and other 80 cities which managed a peaceful protest.”

Occupy protests around the world: full list visualised – “The Occupy protests have spread from Wall Street to London to Bogota. See the full list – and help us add more”

#RobinHood Global March – “We take from the rich and give to the poor.”

Protest by consensus – “This is a global protest, and it seeks to address a global problem: the monopolisation of wealth by the elite and the failure of free-market capitalism to create a liveable future for humanity.”

Meet the Guy Who Snitched on Occupy Wall Street to the FBI and NYPD – “The Occupy Wall Street protests have been going on for a month. And it seems the FBI and NYPD have had help tracking protesters’ moves thanks to a conservative computer security expert who gained access to one of the group’s internal mailing lists, and then handed over information on the group’s plans to authorities and corporations targeted by protesters.”

#watch and

Mourir Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side) – Spike Jonez and Olympia Le-Tan produced stop motion

Occupy Wall Street in Times Square, 15 October 2011 – “This is a time lapse movie made from images from a public webcam overlooking Times Square in New York City.” time lapse video of occupy times square

Bill Clinton’s ‘hilarious’ Funny or Die video – alright, i did have quite a chuckle.

“Sound” – “Hear from sound experts and friends of SoundCloud why sound is so important to the way we connect with the world.”

I AM NOT MOVING – Short Film – Occupy Wall Street – nice juxtaposition of the US sympathy for the middle-eastern uprisings vs. occupywallstreet

#learn

9 Essential Geek Books You Must Read Right Now – “Over the next nine weeks, Wired.com is presenting a collection of galleries intended to help people become better geeks, nine items at a time. This is the first of the series.”

Google Street View takes to the tracks for Swiss Alps railways – “The global mapping giant teamed up with Rhaetian Railway to put a Street View trike on a train car and push it through the picturesque Albula-Bernina line in the Swiss Alps, between snow-capped mountains and narrow valleys.”

Interactive Periodic Table of Swearing Extends Your Rude Vocabulary – “Artistic duo Modern Toss (aka Jon Link and Mick Bunnage) have turned their illustrated Periodic Table of Swearing into a physical, interactive machine.”

Cheese: The Most Stolen Food On The Planet – “A new report from the Center for Retail Research claims that cheese is the world’s most frequently stolen food, and as such, it has been labeled a “high risk food.”

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world – 2 swiss banks in the top 15 of the 147 companies who control 40% of global wealth, UBS 9. CS 14.

Densely-linked cluster of 147 companies control 40% of world’s total wealth – “a study published in PLOS One, analyzes the ownership structures of the world’s corporations and finds a tightly-knit cluster of 147 entities control 40 percent of the world’s wealth.”

Security Flaw Links BitTorrent Users to Skype Accounts – “Researchers have uncovered a major security flaw which allows outsiders to link a Skype account to a user’s download activity on BitTorrent. The exploit works without the knowledge of the victims and also allows outsiders to see the travel patterns of Skype users.”

Good to Know – Google – “Advice for staying more secure on the web and an overview of some of the security tools that Google offers.”

9-9-9 in One (Really Long) Graph – visualization of just how incredibly much cain’s 9-9-9 would favor the super rich

Peter Gronquist “The Evolution Will Be Fabulous” – “mix of gilded luxe brands, weaponry, skeletons and taxidermy”

occupy antartica – “I guess we did reach all seven continents”

Famous Capsules – pop culture icons created by gregory guillemin

Most relaxing song made by UK band Boffins – “So effective at inducing sleep, motorists warned not to listen to it Study says song was even more relaxing than a massage, walk or cup of tea”

Nasty Set – Tea Set by José Paulo Alves Corceiro – angry tea pot and cup

BOSCO VERTICALE « stefano boeri – “On flat land, each Bosco Verticale equals, in amount of trees, an area equal to 10.000 sqm of forest. In terms of urban densification the equivalent of an area of single family dwellings of nearly 50.000 sqm.”

Seven monks self-immolate – many more ready to die – “In the past seven months, eight current and formal monks and a nun have set themselves on fire in eastern Tibet. Four have died. For details of each self-immolation please see below.”

Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore And Kim Gordon Separate After 27 Years – “It’s a dark day for Sonic Youth fans. Bandmates Thurston Moore, 53, and Kim Gordon, 58, have decided to separate about 27 years of marriage, their label, Matador Records, announced in a statement Friday.” sad day indeed

10 million bees deaths reported in Florida – “Experts are saying that the massive amount of bee deaths display signs of pesticide poisoning, and state officials are currently testing the dead bees to determine if the pesticides were responsible for the mass deaths.”

#lang:de

Occupy Paradeplatz: Die O-Töne – “Porträt einer Bewegung ohne Kopf und Führung, montiert aus Gesprächen mit Bewegten.”

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