Tune in here for updates on Libya and other flashpoints -
… and get involved!
This is a valuable TUMBLR site for updates on Libya and other Arab flashpoints (in English).
It is from Telecomix, the network that provides work-arounds and resources for keeping the info flowing where it has been shut down. It consists mostly of a feed of relevant Twitter and news updates.
Skarabokki = Kokkomedia = here
Four photos from the urbex master of Benelux and France - Bousure. See his Flickr collections @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/30430801@N06/collections/
This activist blog uses Tumblr very effectively for getting info across w/o demanding too much reading and time commitment.
The blogger simply shows maps and screenshots from websites that bring home how Palestine and Palestinians are excluded from so much we take for granted … as if they didn’t exist.
Existence Denied: Apartheid on Google Maps -
Existence Denied: Apartheid on Google Maps
If you are trying to drive from Ramallah to Bethlehem — Palestinian towns in the West Bank (which Google automatically labels as “Israel”) — Google Maps won’t help you find your way.
But if you are in an illegal Israeli settlement right next to Ramallah and you want to drive to an illegal Israeli settlement right next to Ramallah and you want to drive to an illegal settlement right next to Bethlehem, your route pops right up — on roads that Palestinian cars are forbidden to drive.
Palestinians have cobbled together a winding, nauseating, dusty and dangerous route that forces them to drive around the ever-expanding land in the West Bank that Israel claims for their illegal settlements. (See AP story, “Separate Roads Push West Bank Arabs to the Byways.”)
Artists - a miscellany
Collection loosely inspired by Banksy and RomanyWG’s photos of street art
Click to turn thumbnails into viewable pix in a Flickr gallery, linked to the artists
and see www.flickriver.com/photos/romanywg/tags/art/ for some of RomanyWG’s pix documenting street art
Abandoned - the gallery
My Flickr collection inspired by RomanyWG (Jeremy Gibbs), who published the urbex photography book Beauty In Decay in 2010
Click above pic to see them properly, with links to originals
And for more on the book and this way of looking at the unloved and obsolete, see http://www.talkurbex.com/2010/09/beauty-in-decay-interview-with-mr-romanywgjeremy-gibbs-%E2%80%94-guest-of-the-month/
Dear Cloggo, could you please customise a time machine for me and program it for 1870.
I should like to begin in London, visiting Dickens before he dies in June, then travel by train across northern Europe in the summer and arrive in Germany in time for Wagner’s wedding to Cosima in August. Of course I will attend performances of Das Rheingold and Die Walkure (newly completed) in Munich as well. I may also get a handle on his (and Germany’s) anti-Semitism during a few months’ there, and meet Nietzsche.
From there I would like to fly - oops, sail from Hamburg, I guess - to New York and visit Mark Twain while he’s still editing the Buffalo Express and staying in one place.
Then I plan to sail to Dublin, and see if I can spot the young Oscar Wilde at Trinity College (he’s bound to stand out).
Just need to be back in England by late 1871 for the launch of Through the Looking Glass and a meeting with Charles Dodgson, where he can sign a first edition of the book.
After that it will be home to the antipodes for about 50 80 years’ rest so I can be born into challenging circumstances in suburbia, New Zealand. (Different time machine for the return home?)
Thanks, Cloggo. I know you will deliver on this.
We once drove from an island SW of Greece all the way to Latvia via five other communist countries.
No work there so we decided to drive SW till we ran out of land.
Got some domestic and restaurant work at an outpost in Spain - till we were sacked for incompetence - and drove on down to an island SW of Portugal.
Ahhh, no work there either so back via Spain and France and up to Scotland this time.
From John O’Groats we caught a flight to London, and that was the start of my love affair with Europe - real Europe.
cloggo: Must try and post something sensible soon, something deep and philosophical like Jude does. Still if I did folk would think someone had hacked my blog.
How about we swap passwords and blogs for a day, Cloggo, to get a real appreciation of each other’s “work” on here? I would find it almost impossible to be you; in fact I’d never pull it off … so vive la difference, as the Normans used to say.
“I didn’t fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover” - Germaine Greer
Find me on Facebook
Check my Flickr galleries: 
Find good sites on ISRAEL, WIKILEAKS, JULIAN ASSANGE and URBEX PHOTOGRAPHY
I also keep a file of columns and videos by GLENN GREENWALD
This Q&A with a Swedish lawyer who “has authored a book on cross examination techniques and is noted for his concern for the rule of law” contains insights about what Assange faces in Sweden - the might of a very feminist-dominated legal attitude towards sex.
Samuelson: “He has to turn himself in. Otherwise the perception that he is guilty will win here. I am also sorry that he as a defendant is abused like this by the Swedish legal system.”
Well now I’ve finally got it. Julian Assange was brought up in an Aryan supremacist cult — the snow-white hair is no accident! The cult (“The Family”) was set up by a theosophist along the lines of the Nazi “Lebensborn” breeding program; and the Pirate Bay also has Nazi connections. Anna Ardin is a double agent. Join the dots and you end up in Illuminati territory; Assange DOES equal Saddam, or Satan, as American TV has been saying all along!
I have spent a good couple of hours trying to make sense of the logic and theories here, since these and similar ones have done the rounds of crackpot conspiracy sites and forums, and appear to be believed by many.
Well … at least this line of inquiry from Assange to Illuminati balances, or maybe neutralises, the other theory doing the rounds — among 911 “truthers” and some pro-Palestinian groups — that WikiLeaks is an Israeli PsyOps project.
Mainstream Australian papers — which have no interest in defending or protecting Assange — have mentioned two facts that the conspiracists ran with. Julian’s stepfather was thought to have had a relative who was in The Family, and his parents broke up acrimoniously three years after they married.
Maybe mum Christine will say more at some stage but really we don’t know. All *I* know is that Julian is extraordinarily intelligent and well read. The pseudo-scholars and academics with PhDs and crackpot websites and radio shows can safely be disregarded.
As can Fox News, which also spreads the idea that he’s disturbed and deranged. Here’s “Dr Keith Ablow” of Fox’s “Medical A-Team”: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/12/14/dr-keith-ablow-inside-mind-julian-assange/
Dear Cloggo, I thought for your birthday we’d do a bit of time travel.
I nipped up to the attic while you were asleep and brought these pix back down - all surely full of memories for you, ancient or more recent.
So get into the driver’s seat and off you go.
Start where you want; I will be your amanuensis.
And Happiest of birthdays and New Years to a living treasure!
xoxo
Pic sources:
1. Carpark Austin Seven Cockpit, 2. brothers in arms, 3. Dutch winter carpet, 4. Snow House, 5. www.flickr.com/photos/photimages/5229941708/, 6. Kahlila with Dragline, 7. Piping, 8. Beamish Tramways - in action no matter what the weather!, 9. Waiting for the End., 10. The command post, 11. Thomson Boeing 767-200, 12. Similarity, 13. Journalism BC: Before Computers