America Everywhere

We're all living in Duhmerica...Duhmerica ist wunderbar

 

Worldwide American troop deployment is a reality. The U.S. truly does “police” the globe through fronts such as a War on Terror and a War on Drugs…

 

Click here to visit Mother Jones and see for yourself.

 

“The map animation that opens this package uses Pentagon worldwide troop data from every half-decade since 1950, plus 2007, the latest year for which the data is available. These numbers are often fuzzy: Some deployments are classified, others are temporary, and just because the Defense Department claims 30 US troops in Indonesia last year doesn’t mean 1,500 didn’t pass through on training missions. Even so, the map, and the associated research, should give you a good feel for what the Pentagon is up to around the world.”

 

Scary.

 

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/s/system+of+a+down/prison+song_20134833.html

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/r/rammstein/amerika_10238394.html

39 years ago today…

Why did we ever give up on peace?

 

We thought we were all individual, scattered hippies,” says David Crosby. “When we got there, we said, ‘Wait a minute, this is a lot bigger than we thought.’ We flew in there by helicopter and saw the New York State Thruway at a dead stop for twenty miles and a gigantic crowd of at least half a million people. You couldn’t really wrap your mind around how many people were there. It had never happened before, and it was sort of like having aliens land.”

 

On the weekend of August 15th, 1969, an estimated 400,000 people from all over America descended on the 600-acre dairy farm of Max Yasgur, in Bethel, New York, for a three-day concert, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. On Monday, August 18th, they all melted back into America after witnessing legendary performances by, among others, the Who, Santana, Janis Joplin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Joe Cocker, Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix and, in only their second live show together, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

 

“It was a hectic scene, and we were all kind of winging it,” says Crosby. “Behind us were Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone – all these bands – and we really wanted to be good in front of them. For me, the high point was us going out and singing ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ and getting all the way through it and not screwing up. It was stoned and funny and fine.”

 

Despite delays, the danger of electrical shocks and general backstage anarchy, Woodstock pulled off the ultimate magic act of the 1960s: turning utter rain-soaked chaos into the greatest rock festival ever and the decade’s most famous and successful experiment in peace and community.

 

“It was incredible,” said Carlos Santana. “I’ll never forget the way the music sounded bouncing up against a field of bodies.” Cocker took British R&B to church with his version of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends,” and Hendrix sent the remaining stragglers home on Monday morning with his immortal recasting of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As Wavy Gravy, one of the show’s MCs, says, “The whole world was watching us, and we had a chance to show the world how it could be if we ran things.”

 

From Rolling Stone’s “50 moments that changed the history of rock & roll” - check out the rest here.

Beijing Olympic Logo Design…

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Step 4:

Beijing behind the dazzle…

Reality...difficult to hide.

Karl Bushby is going for a stroll

Bye Mum, I'm going for a walk...

 

One of my heroes, a chap named Karl Bushby, is having a little stroll. Heroes know the importance of regular exercise you see.

Being well, a legend and something of a crazy bastard however, the stroll is from Punta Arenas, the southermost point of South America, all the way back to his home, in Hull. In other terms, that means the amble we’re talking about here will take 12 years, cover 36,000 miles, 4 continents and 25 countries and involve crossing a frozen sea, 6 deserts and 7 mountain ranges…

 

Fuck me, you might say.

 

Karl was born in 1969 in Hull in East Yorkshire (this whole story actually just goes to show that the English will endure almost anything to get off that godforsaken mudpile) where he attended a local comprehensive school before joining the British Army at the age of 16 to serve with the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment for 11 years. Given his military training and experience he was then in an ideal position to undertake a challenging and committed test of human endurance and strength and so decided to leave the Army in 1998 and go for a walk. Around the world. As one does. He set off on 1st November 1998, and has completed over 17000 miles to date.  With over 19000 more miles to walk, maintaining his current speed, he should return home to Hull in 2012. Now that friends, takes iron clad balls the size of rocketships (which must make walking down to the local pub a John Waynesque agony, nevermind plodding around the globe). 

 

Oh and he’s crossed the Bering Strait, which is a 85km stretch of sea between Cape Dezhnev, Russia, the easternmost point of the Asian continent and Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska, the westernmost point of the North American continent. Now remember folks, this man is not out on an icebreaker, he’s walking. A common misconception is that the strait freezes in the winter time and it is easy to walk across the ice.  In reality its more a churning, slushy, icy, frozen watery hell with a strong current flowing north through the strait which creates large channels of open water.  On occasion these open channels become clogged with moving chunks of pan ice, so it is theoretically possible to jump from chunk to chunk, along with some swimming across the open leads.  Oh and a little luck is also required in having favourable currents. Strangely enough its only been done twice. Ever.

 

Now aside from the fact that this little stroll could be described as quite tough going (much as you could describe the war in Iraq as moderately unjust), can you actually imagine a better way to see the world? Really see and experience all the places he is passing through? A better way to test yourself. Or a more thorough way to know yourself? Yeah me neither, and, that is why Karl Bushby is a hero. Plain and simple.

 

Get a copy of his book Giant Steps (see I told you John Waynesque) here and follow his progres online here.

George Orwell’s Blog!

Sound familiar?

  

Ooh this is very cool! From the 9th August 2008, the Orwell Prize will be publishing on their blog, the exact diary entries Orwell wrote on those particular days, precisely seventy years ago.

 

Orwell was in Morocco at the start of the diaries recovering from a life threatening lung haemorrhage. His diaries, at least initially are concerned with how shitty he found Morocco and how many eggs his chickens had laid. Ah yes well, even pillars of resistance against behaviour controlled society need a day or so off. And besides how many life threatening lung haemorrhages have you had wise ass?

 

In any event from the 7th September Orwell begins his political diaries continuing for 3 years following his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into World War II, up until 1942.

 

Orwell has inspired generations of free thinkers, and honestly if he was alive today he would be known as “a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls” (He wrote that himself about Dickens) and probably have the entire CIA & FBI and the rest of the alphabet soup all over his skanky ‘lil ass.

 

But love him or hate him, Orwell was all about free thought and free speech. He deplored control of the mind from any quarter, even going so far as to say, “The enemy is the gramaphone mind”, and then proceeded to write a pretty damn scary account of a society where precisely that type of mind control is exercised in his masterpiece, 1984.

 

In the spirit of all things Orwellian then, my friends lets answer his rousing call to throw off the shackles of brain-rot and start questioning and forming our own informed opinions about current events. Pertinent when considering our rapid descent into something akin to another great war.

 

Read the diaries at http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/

Phil Hansen

This Phil Hansen piece is called Che and was made by painting the quote "Words that do not match deeds are unimportant".

Art has a reputation of being rather stuck up its own arse really. Phil Hansen blows such a massively healthy breath of fresh air around the establishment, with artworks that challenge so many of the dictums of traditional artistic endevaour, that the National Gallery have reported a hurricane.

 

First there is the medium. How many artists do you know what use such diverse media as their own blood to protest nuclear proliferation or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to paint the Virgin Mary. Yeah, me neither. Then there is the method. Hansen tricycles around his portrait of Lance Armstrong, uses bits of the bible to make pictures of the KKK and er karate chops Bruce Lee portraits. And in case you thought, (you ‘orrible smarmy bastard) that this all just sounded like art for art’s sake, you’ll do well to note that 100% of the proceeds from sales of his image of Daudi, a boy living in Uganda, will go to helping poverty in Africa through World Vision. Oh and finally, instead of being hung in stuffy galleries, Hansen works are freely available to view over the net at his website www.philinthecircle.com and you really should go have a squizz because lets be honest, this guy is the shit.