Mindchatter - 'Corporate Shakespeare (Azzecca Remix)

A Little Sound & Disrupta - Escape The Lights

5:20 / 6:39 FOALS - Exits [Official Music Video]

The Decline of Architecture - Amnesia of the Human Species?

An interesting subject. 

If it's any good the information will be censored.

Updates, all images and video, censored. (January 2022).

Eleanor Rigby, Wigan Pier

What's the difference between Motown and Tamala

How The Byzantine Empire Was Built

Usually the History Channel talks down to viewers like they're five year old imbeciles who can't understand a timeline unless there's men in costumes, hacking and slashing their way through enemies. 

It isn't hacking and slashing free, but this documentary of the history of Byzantium through its building projects is damn good for the History Channel and connected up a few timelines for me. I also recommend Professor Paul Freedman's Yale Lecture on the subject (posted below) and the excellent In Our Time episode on the topic.

Drone operator who killed 1626 Doesn't Want To Do It Any More

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A former Air Force drone operator who says he participated in missions that killed more than 1,600 people remembers watching one of the first victims bleed to death Brandon Bryant says he was sitting in a chair at a Nevada Air Force base operating the camera when his team fired two missiles from their drone at three men walking down a road halfway around the world in Afghanistan. The missiles hit all three targets, and Bryant says he could see the aftermath on his computer screen -- including thermal images of a growing puddle of hot blood.

"The guy that was running forward, he's missing his right leg," he recalled. "And I watch this guy bleed out and, I mean, the blood is hot." As the man died his body grew cold, said Bryant, and his thermal image changed until he became the same color as the ground.

"I can see every little pixel," said Bryant, who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, "if I just close my eyes."

Bryant, now 27, served as a drone operator from 2006 to 2011, at bases in Nevada, New Mexico and in Iraq, guiding unmanned drones over Iraq and Afghanistan and taking part in missions that he was told led to the deaths of an estimated 1,626 individuals. .In an interview with NBC News, he provided a rare first-person glimpse into what it's like to control the controversial machines that have become central to the U.S. effort to kill terrorists.

He says that as an operator he was troubled by the physical disconnect between his daily routine and the violence and power of the faraway drones. "You don't feel the aircraft turn," he said. "You don't feel the hum of the engine. You hear the hum of the computers, but that's definitely not the same thing."

At the same time, the images coming back from the drones were very real and very graphic.

"People say that drone strikes are like mortar attacks," Bryant said. "Well, artillery doesn't see this. Artillery doesn't see the results of their actions. It's really more intimate for us, because we see everything."

A self-described "naïve" kid from a small Montana town, Bryant joined the Air Force in 2005 at age 19. After he scored well on tests, he said a recruiter told him that as a drone operator he would be like the smart guys in the control room in a James Bond movie, the ones who feed the agent the information he needs to complete his mission.

He trained for three and a half months before participating in his first drone mission. Bryant operated the drone's cameras from his perch at Nellis Air Force base in Nevada as the drone rose into the air just north of Baghdad.Bryant and the rest of his team were supposed to use their drone to provide support and protection to patrolling U.S. troops. But he recalls watching helplessly as insurgents buried an IED in a road and a U.S. Humvee drove over it.

"We had no way to warn the troops," he said. He later learned that three soldiers died.

My Spidey Sense Is Tingling

Jan Irvin of Gnostic Media has generously assembled all 23 parts of Scott Onstott's Secrets In Plain Sight videos into one Youtube documentary. All we have to do is figure out why the Pentagon, Vatican, Washington D.C., City of London and Buckingham Palace are completely obsessed with occult symbolism while all the time proselytizing a message of scientific materialism for an unwitting population. They've pulled the wool over our eyes for centuries if not millennia.

DreamHub - Korean Architecture

I think most people who are informed by what happened on 9/11 would gladly see the DreamHub Korean high-rises project secure the green light and financing required if it encouraged those who willingly choke on their ignorance to do a couple of hours research into the false flag attack nature of the twin towers attack. 

The architecture is by Dutch firm MVRDV and the DreamHub website is so data intensive I'm rudely reminded of the extraordinarily fast broadband capabilities of the Korean internet.

Is this a good excuse to remind you to take a look at Dr Judy Wood's explanation for how the towers were reduced to a dust cloud? You bet. Click on the appropriate tag below.

The Bird's Nest

One of the great experiences of Beijing is the sheer velocity of construction which has had me pondering for quite some time on the implications of whole neighbourhoods flattened overnight with new superstructures going up faster than I've ever seen in my life. I've already talked about the CCTV building by Rem Koolhaas which we will never see its like again (and he knows it) but the other supermodel on the catwalk is the Birds Nest, or the Olympic Stadium. It's awesome. Period.

Here it is from some photography I took the other day. Notice the traditional peasant (migrant worker) in the foreground. I chose this pic out of the 30 or so I took because like the washing below it represents something about modern China that Noam Chomsky talks about a lot in this podcast here; the human development index for China is still quite low, around 70th if I'm not mistaken. 

There's a lot of people still running around on loose chained tricycles shifting bricks from one place to another. 

Wait till all those have offspring that want to go to college, drive a car and double China's GDP with the 'Chinese Dream' (One World One Dream).........Yeah, we need to rewire our economies and the answer might be most candid in Asian economies today. 

Not tomorrow.

I live only a stones throw from the Forbidden City and a short walk from Tiananman Square. Beijing is often a sooty and polluted overcast metropolis. It's also, in its own way the most tidy I've ever come across for its size. I've never seen a broken glass, a crisp packet or an empty packet of cigarettes on the road and that's because there is no litter. But still there are quaint signs of a rapidly disappearing life, and though I live amongst the political elite (and those who did them favours) The washing is still out on the road drying in the occasional spell of glorious sunshine. For when Beijing shines. It really does shine beautifully.

 

Sorry about the lack of links and layout at the moment as I'm using the new version of blogger and playing with new features.

798

I paid a visit to the 798 'Art District' of Beijing on Friday for the 'Affordable Art Beijing' exhibition run by Tamsin Roberts of Red T Art.

The last time I was last in the area, it was for the Yen Countdown on New Years Eve. This time had a chance to walk about in the daylight and get a feel for the Bauhaus architecture and general post war 50's East German industrial influence.

Its pretty neat, in that way that only proper industry can do and the industrial estates of Basingstoke fail at miserably don't you think? Anyway here's some art.

I just liked the comical feel to these. We've been having a discussion on Facebook about art which could go on forever but I think good art should just send people up a bit as much as possible.


This one though in the green was just the right amount of sinister and beauty I like. I was really disappointed not to bag, it as it had been bought by the time I arrived, although I may be able to see the artist at his studio at some point.


I really loved this fading and aging Commie girl complete with pigtails from whatever revolution was being espoused at the time. She's just the wrong side of 50 and a little too old to be putting it about. Its the breasts and neckline that give it away. Brilliant.


Like most of the paintings this was part of a set and the eyes were amazing. Magnetic, hypnotic a little bit attractive, a little bit scary and very sexual.