Paul Neave, a British flash designer, has made my day with Neave TV. He recommends a "deep-seated urge to be totally bewildered", which fortunately I possess, and I was not disappointed. Random clips from shows and movies from around the world, switching channels with every click.
I was subjected first to some Russian talkshow with a dancer in an electronic suit that played electronic music with every move of his body; then a clip from a Godzilla film; then Dave talking to HAL in 2001; then the ever-wonderful Rejected animation. I had to stop there, because I could see this seriously eating into my work productivity.
Nice work, Paul Neave.
A quick note - there's no obvious way to stop it besides navigating away from the page or closing the tab, but Neave's included a "back to the intro page" option on the TV's right-click menu.
It's important to occasionally rail off some statistics to put things in perspective. For example, how many children would you say were killed in the Israel-Palestine conflict last year? If you guessed 60, you're hella right. 60 kids. That's pretty fucked.
Here are a few things to remember. When the news (and that includes mainstream New Zealand media) talks about Hamas "taking control of Gaza", they were actually democratically elected by the Palestinian people. They are the democratically elected government. That's important to remember. Also, "Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas" refers to "unelected Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas".
Here's another interesting point. What's going on in Gaza at the moment is FUCKED. For those who don't know, essential supplies have been blocked from getting into Gaza, including food and fuel. The fuel is used for generators. The generators are used for the hospitals. The hospitals are used for keeping people alive. This is collective punishment. Blatant collective punishment.
So, punishment implies a crime. What is the crime for which 1.5 million people are being punished? Rockets being fired at Sderot, an Israeli town. You can read the LA Times article here , about how hard life is in Sderot:They take quick showers, afraid to miss an alert, no longer sleep in upstairs bedrooms and avoid public places at what are considered peak Qassam times. And when the alert sounds, people drop everything, including their unpaid groceries in the aisles, costing Daniel Dahan more than $100 a day, he said. He owns Super Dahan, the grocery his father started. They run to one of the square concrete shelters, known as betonadas, after the word for cement, that increasingly dot the town. Then they pull out their phones, to check on their children.
And let's face it, that's pretty terrible. Living with that kind of fear must suck. Dropping your groceries, phoning your kids... Hell, it's going to cost US$25,000 per house to add safe rooms to protect people. Who can afford that?
Well, presumably the people of Sderot can afford that. And apparently they have groceries and phones. Yes, it's a tough life there. And their kids! I mean, as I said above, 60 children died in the conflict last year. Some of them must have come from Sderot, right?
No?
Well, some of them must have come from Israel, right?
Yes! Yes, one child out of 60 who died last year from violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict was Israeli. His name was Mahmoud Ibrahim Mahmoud al-Krenawi, 11, of Rahat, near Beersheba. He was a Bedouin with Israeli citizenship, and he was shot by the Israeli Defence Force, in his head and pelvis, while picking figs.
Oh, wait. Even the Israeli kid wasn't killed by Palestinians. He was killed by the Israeli Defence Force too. This is very disconcerting. So, basically, hospitals are being shut down, 1.5 million people have had their vital supplies cut off, who are living in shit anyway, because they democratically elected the wrong people and include some minority who fire unguided rockets into a town 1km away, disrupting grocery shopping and killing one Israeli child every two years, on average, since they began being fired in 2001.
There's another statistic for you. On average, since 2001, Qassam rockets fired into Sderot have killed 1 child every two years. Four children since 2001. THREE KIDS HAVE BEEN KILLED IN GAZA BY THE IDF IN THE LAST MONTH! NO CHILDREN HAVE BEEN KILLED IN SDEROT IN THE LAST YEAR! This is not a proportionate response.
It's just fucked. And the media's attempts to "show both sides" and "be objective" just results in a ridiculous presentation of the affair as being roughly equal, with equal accountability and equal power to resolve the situation.
Anyway, according to Tom Feeley, here is how to donate food directly to Palestinian kids. No political, religious or militant groups involved.
PS. Statistics from Remember These Children.
PPS. Yes, life in Sderot is fucked, and it shouldn't be. Missile attacks on civilians are by definition terrorism. It's just fucking paradise compared to what the IDF do to Gazans.
Paris Hilton just got out of half her prison sentence for driving drunk. Double entendre there. Jesus, I'm witty. Anyway, it's a serious charge, driving drunk - she could have killed someone. They could have ended up in hospital. How would that have worked out for them? Well, Michael Moore's new documentary, SiCKO, which got a standard ovulation at Cannes, is out in theatres in the States.
The film looks at the effects of privatised health insurance and the nature of the pharmaceutical industry on the American health system. Among other things, Michael Moore looks at the stories of people suffering from dust inhalation at the World Trade Center site. The harm done to locals, especially after they were told it was safe to go back to their homes (how else do you get Wall Street up and running again?), is the topic of yesterday's excellent Democracy Now feature. In typical Moore fashion, noting that detainees in Guantanamo Bay are provided full healthcare by the Government while average New Yorkers can't afford any themselves, he piles a bunch of them in a boat and takes them to Gitmo, asking for medical help.
That little stunt got Mr Moore in trouble with the US Treasury Department, saying that he broke the (idiotic) US embargo of Cuba.
Um.
Paris Hilton! Just out of jail! Yes, Paris, whose vagina is less aesthetically pleasing than Britney's and I'll have words with any who disagree, has been snatched up by CNN in her first post-jail interview. Who did they dump at this late hour when the golden opportunity arose? Yes, that's right, they cancelled an interview with Michael Moore. That's some good prioritising, in a country where lack of healthcare is killing more people than 9/11 every year.
On Close-Up on TV One last night, there was a discussion panel about the
They asked for feedback, and I gave them some.
Why on earth is Simon Barnett present in a discussion about legal matters? Does he have any relevant qualification to weigh in, or does having been on television for a while count as some kind of expert degree these days? I look forward to Miss New Zealand's take on our military presence in Afghanistan.
It didn't occur to me that they might respond, or I would have said something a bit clearer about Simon Barnett's hardcore evangelical Christian views making him unrepresentative of most parents in New Zealand. But, to Close-Up's credit, they did respond:
Simon Barnett was on the show as a parent not an expert in legal matters. This bill affects many New Zealanders and all parents and he was chosen as a mainstream voice and a parent, not as a lawyer. His "qualification" was that he's a parent of four and has spoken out about the issue over recent weeks.
I was too shocked by their good manners to say anything intelligent in response, and told them so. They replied that there were another 523 mails about the discussion left to deal with, and even though they declined my offer to reply to a few of them myself, I asked another question:
If you can spare a moment more, whose decision was it for Mark to call it "the anti-smacking bill"? It's not the name of the legislation, and it sort of immediately frames the discussion in a way that's going to obfuscate what the bill actually does. I know that Close-Up is hardly the first to call it that - in fact, it's hard to find a news or discussion source in New Zealand that calls it anything else. But Bradford, Clark and others have all repeatedly said that it's not a ban on smacking. Anyone trying to clearly put forward arguments in favour of the repeal are immediately on the back foot, having to explain that the bill everyone knows as the "anti-smacking bill" is not, in fact, an anti-smacking bill.
To which they replied...
This may interest you. It’s a Green Party Press Release from 2003 in which they labelled it just that themselves.
http://www.greens.org.nz/searchdocs/PR6778.html
And so they did. The stupid bastards. Though the press release does make clear that the concern is that Section 59 has been used to get parents off assault charges that involved hitting their kids with bits of wood, the title is there for all to see: "anti-smacking bill".
While I hope the legislation goes through, it would appear the Green Party may have brought some of this shit on themselves, through lack of foresight.
Coverage of party pills is interesting. The police currently talking about illegal drugs, like MDMA, being found in small amounts in BZP pills will be interpreted by the average citizen (by which I mean, the average consumer of The Herald, who is by no means the average Kiwi) in predictable ways. Predictable, vague ways. Party pills have made a progression from being a "herbal high" - which they never were - to being a "legal high" to now being a vaguely illegal high. The vague illegality is not a matter of illegal additives in some pills (which, if it is a concern, is a matter for quality assurance), but rather the association in the minds of the public. It would not be insane to suggest that "party" and "pill" beginning with a certain letter of the alphabet contributes in some way to a sporadically whipped up public imagination. Nor is their association with raves and dance parties - ironic, considering their creator was looking for an alternative to illegal drugs he considered dangerous.
It's also interesting to note that BZP is often referred to as a cattle-worming agent, in the same way that tasers are referred to as delivering 50,000 volts. It appeals to the public imagination, being able to say, "You know what they put in those things? Cattle-worming agents!" As if alcoholic drinks don't include a topical antiseptic and cigarettes don't contain rat poison.
But what's most interesting of all is the fact that the matter has received any attention at all. To whom is it a matter of concern? A small fragment of generally middle-class kids use party pills - they mostly want to keep them legal. Their parents, I suppose, are the other concerned parties. The public is not put at risk by the drugs, and the number of people who died from alcohol-related causes in the last week is many times more than the number of people who allegedly died from taking party pills... ever.
But those middle-class parents make up a sizeable portion of the "average citizen" mentioned above - the demographic that provides numbers to the news sources of TVOne, TV3, the Herald, the Post, etc.
The vicious cycle of commodified news is frustrating. People are increasingly shown what they want to see, and they increasingly see what they have seen in the past. So it is that Anna Nicole Smith's death belongs not in the human-interest slot after the weather, but rather as international news - not just a mention, but an actual whole story from CNN or the BBC. So it is that the classification of BZP is headline news.
What is importance in news? If it was measured in the potential for human suffering found in a particular issue, every night of 6pm news would begin with a piece about alcohol, or about working conditions and pay rates. That's for national news. For international news, Iraq would still feature strongly, but Palestine would drop down the ranks, replaced by African countries we've never heard of.
Instead, we are given Anna Nicole Smith and the placement of a stadium. Speaking of the stadium, 6pm news shows happily provide us with 20 minutes of sports "news" each night. This goes unquestioned.
And of course it does. It would be suicidal for either TVOne or TV3 to replace their sports news with real news, because half the viewers would switch to the competition. Because they want to see sports news. If they see one "tonight on 3 News/One News" segment promising a story about killer party pills and the other about No Child Left Behind legislation in the States, they're going with the party pills.
Where does the responsibility lie? Tricky for me, being an anarchist. People should choose for themselves, I might say, but then, they already have, and here I am complaining about it. So should the government legislate requirements for news sources to provide actual news? Sure, Ryan, no problem there - just the government deciding what is and is not news. So we need more critically thinking viewers to come out of a situation where they're being systematically (though not intentionally) dumbed down and numbed down by news shows that compete with their rivals in a manner identical to competition between Sticky TV and Studio 2.
And once again, who am I to say that these things are or are not news? Do I profess access to some Platonic standard of importance against which I can measure Anna Nicole Smith's death or the stadium placement or the All Blacks' latest training schedule?
No, God is dead and value is relative. The consequence is that the only value is consistency with one's own values, whatever they are: the only sin is hypocrisy. The only ground for argument is values held in common. So all that's left to say is: come on, New Zealand, you don't really care about this bullshit.
Graffiti depicting Mogadishu's roving militias. As we all know, news has become commodified, is sold in a market of competition, where "appealing" beats "informative" in the same way that "tasty" beats "nutritious". The places we hear about - Iraq, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iraq - while being pretty fucked up situations themselves, are really only a fraction of the terrible fuckedupitude of the world. As terrible as Iraqis have it, media attention means they're more likely to get assistance than not.
Enter Doctors Without Borders' top 10 fucked up situations that no one's talking about. Here's a quick rundown.
15 years of internal conflict dropped a little last year, when the Islamic Court Union formed and took control of the capital, Mogadishu. Previously, Mogadishu was... Well, some people would say anarchic, but I know better. It was ruled by militias who "preyed on the local population". The ICU claimed its intention was to "ensure that Somali people suffering for 15 years would gain peace and full justice and freedom from the anarchic rule of warlords who refuted their people to no direction." See that? "Anarchic rule". I mean, come on.
Anyway, once in power, they allegedly were more about imposing Sharia law. Or something. The West intervened, along with Ethiopia, backing the "Transitional National Government" in taking Somalia from the ICU. The ICU eventually resigned, listing some pretty sensible reasons, and oh yeah, there were also a bunch of natural disasters. Somalia is fucked.
More coups and violence. The CAR used to be a French colony, but since its independence in 1960, it's had a pretty shitty time. For three decade, it was ruled by a series of unelected leaders who often took office by force. In '93, with help from the UN Office for Electoral Affairs, they had their first democratic election. This hasn't stopped some rebel forces from causing trouble, however, and violence has caused 100,000 civilians to flee across the border to Chad - a country named after Midwestern high-school quarterbacks. Malaria and other diseases abound throughout the refugees, many of whom are young children. The Central African Republic is fucked.
TB isn't something you catch in nice white countries like our own, but apparently in Oogabooga Land and such, the coloureds are quite prone to it. Almost 2 million people a year die from TB, and often both prevention and cure would be possible if the world wasn't so fucked. Worse than that, the Miracle of Evolution has occurred, and there are now prevalent strains of TB that are resistant to both first-line and second-line antibiotics. Superbugs, we used to call them, back in the day. More preventable deaths every minute of the day, tuberculosis is fucked.
I'm surprised we've even heard of Chechnya's existence, there's so much of a media blackout on coverage of the war-torn country. Even though many refugees are now returning to their homes, the society has been shattered by Russia's refusal to let Chechnya out of its grip, and while responsibility is ostensibly handed on to an ostensibly Chechen government, abductions and violence continue daily.
The war between the official Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers continues, with civilians being caught in the crossfire. The Tigers want a separate state for Sri Lanka's Tamil population, and the Sri Lankan government doesn't want to give up large sections of its state. Odd. Doctors Without Borders continue their work there as best they can, faced with obstacles like the murders of aid workers and suspicion of international agencies from all sides. Sri Lanka is fucked.
Acute Malnutrition
I read this poem once, about a butterfly that emerged while it was raining, and it rained for all of its two-day life, and then it died. Meanwhile, right this minute, 60 million children around the world suffer from acute malnutrition. That's some seriously preventable shit right there. You don't have to have wars to have malnutrition, you just have to live in a world that pours resources into making iPods and superyachts while children starve to death. Doctors Without Borders have had some success with feeding malnourished kids a milk/peanut-butter paste. Gaining weight and not dying is an improvement, but come on, humanity, you can do better. Acute malnutrition is fucked.
I read this poem once, about a butterfly that emerged while it was raining, and it rained for all of its two-day life, and then it died. Meanwhile, right this minute, 60 million children around the world suffer from acute malnutrition. That's some seriously preventable shit right there. You don't have to have wars to have malnutrition, you just have to live in a world that pours resources into making iPods and superyachts while children starve to death. Doctors Without Borders have had some success with feeding malnourished kids a milk/peanut-butter paste. Gaining weight and not dying is an improvement, but come on, humanity, you can do better. Acute malnutrition is fucked.
The Democratic Republic of Congo
Once again, rebels versus governments equals fucked civilians. Count 'em: measles, malaria, rape, meningitis, cholera, no clean water... 50,000 displaced civilians. In the last 10 years, 4 million people have died from violence in the former Belgian colony. The UN says 1000 people are dying a day. It's just fucked.
Colombia
Second only to the Sudan in terms of internally displaced people, 3 million people have fled their homes in Colombia. The conflict between the capitalist government plus associated paramilitary groups and rebel groups like FARC have, surprise surprise, resulted in massive trouble for the civilian populace. To fund their struggle, the FARC fall back on the drugs trade and kidnappings, which gives them a bad rap, but Phil Rees' interviews and encounters with them in his excellent book Dining with Terrorists is worth a read for a different perspective.
Haiti
Haiti, a special favourite of being fucked over by the West, some great information is available from Democracy Now!. Haiti was the home of Emmanuel Constant, a CIA-backed murderous terrorist who for years lived happily in Queens, New York, secure in the knowledge that both Clinton and Bush II would dismiss extradition claims. Yes, the US harbours wanted terrorists. Constant's now in prison for rape, but still won't be extradited. Who'd have thought. Chomsky on Haiti, though written in 2004, still relevant.
Central India
"In central India's Chhattisgarh state, clashes between Maoist insurgents, Indian security forces and anti-Maoist militias, also known as Salwa Judum, has been occurring for more than 25 years, resulting in the displacement, sometimes reportedly forced, of more than 50,000 civilians. Others flee into neighboring states while thousands of people have lost their livelihoods and have little access to their land, food, essential health care, or emergency medical services."