Saul Bass- Why Man Creates

R.I.P. Trish Keenan

Only a month or so after Broadcast delighted the Melbourne audience at the Corner comes the tragic and quite unbelievable news that their singer and poetess, Trish Keenan has passed away. Though having been around for years with an ardent following and an impressive back catalogue, Broadcast seemed to be really gathering momentum and breaking through to wider audiences and the terrible news has rippled through the community of music lovers around the world.
She had been battling the H1N1 flu and pneumonia and had been battling in intensive care for two weeks before she sadly died of complications on 14/1/2011. She was 41. It has been said that she had contracted the H1N1 flu while in Australia.
This is the statement that was released by Warp on the morning of her death:

"It is with great sadness we announce that Trish Keenan from Broadcast passed away at 9am this morning in hospital. She died from complications with pneumonia after battling the illness for two weeks in intensive care.

Our thoughts go out to James, Martin, her friends and her family and we request that the public respect their wishes for privacy at this time.

This is an untimely tragic loss and we will miss Trish dearly - a unique voice, an extraordinary talent and a beautiful human being. Rest in Peace."

The shadow defines the light

While there may be a litany of lies, manipulation and distortion of the truth and horrors in existence in the world, I believe that it imperative to keep a balanced perspective. These things are abhorrent because they exist in sharp contrast to what we value. War is terrible because we want peace; lies are terrible because we prize truth; manipulation is terrible because we prize freedom and so on and so forth.
I think it's important to be reminded of this, and when surveying the problems that exist in our society, seek to see the solutions delineated by the problems and of greater importance to them. It's easy to become overwhelmed and powerless in the face of global world issues, and unfortunately many cognizant people who would like to be able to effect change switch off and become apathetic.
However, I believe that by allowing awareness of the issues that we face to illustrate the positive qualities and actions that need to be be strengthened, it becomes a motivating fuel for action and the impetus for affirming higher values and outcomes.
Don't buy into the fear and allow it to colour your world. Let the shadows define the light.

The Century of the Self- documentary series

Watch this incredibly interesting documentary series about the history of the development of psychology, capitalism and politics made by the BBC which gives potent understanding to our current societal climate.
"This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy." - Adam Curtis

"Help us prescribe the solution" for Sarah Palin

There is nothing subtle or clever about these health care reform campaign posters put out by Sarah Palin. The states and names of rival politicians that the trigger happy, bear shooting ex-governor has a beef with marked with the cross-hatch targets of gun sights. The cursory glance of a nutjob and an in-depth intellectual inquiry would derive the same meaning and implication.
And it just so happened that a nutjob did decide to 'help prescribe a solution' and opened fire at a "Congress On The Corner" event organised by Representative Gabrielle Gifford and her staff, killing 6 and injuring 14. Go figure..
Sarah Palin quickly withdrew these posters from her website and made a public statement offering condolences to the families..yada yada yada.. and, clearly feeling a bit self-conscious being implicated, bit back at finger pointers;
"If you don’t like a person’s vision for the country you’re free to debate that vision. If you don’t like their ideas, you’re free to propose better ideas. But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn. That, is reprehensible."
Critics of Palin are certainly not drawing a long bow to see a clear connection between her hair-brained, hateful rhetoric [ she urged her supporters with the rhetoric "Reload, not retreat" ] and the heinous event , so to accuse journalists of "manufacturing a blood libel" is a clear continuation of the same kind of inflammatory, idiotic vitriol.
A blood libel, if you aren't already aware, is a slur and accusation against Jewish people by Christians who believed that Jews used human blood, especially that of children, in sacrifices and as an essential ingredient for matzos bread made at Passover..This belief has been behind the long history of persecution of the Jewish people, and for Palin to use it so glibly to illustrate her victimhood is cultural insensitivity and ignorance in the extreme.
But never missing the opportunity to capitalize on a crisis, No Labels lobbyists [particularly speaker of the house John Boehner, and the minority leader, Nancy Pelosi ] are utilizing the situation to call for people to rise above partisanship [ and ..erm.. support their parties agenda to do away with the 'lunatic fringe' a.k.a. any voices of dissent. ]

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/370861/january-12-2011/the-word---life--liberty-and-the-pursuit-of-angriness

Bank of America Suck

http://bankofamericasuck.com/

Don't be evil

Making an art out of recycling.

These are a few fine examples of redesigning, or taking a resource which is typically used once and then considered rubbish, and using it to make something new, unique, beautiful and desirable. Essentially eliminating the concept of waste and looking at the materials used in a way that has a broader scope to envision as many life cycles as possible. I hope to see more of this trend emerging and to see more and more people being inspired by this concept.

 

 

These recycled rubber band bracelet, made by Christiane Diehl are more interesting, creative and beautiful than I'd previously imagined that rubber bands could be.

[Source: ecofriend.org ]

Little Fly, a.k.a Jeremy Mays makes gorgeous one-off jewellery pieces out of old books.

http://littlefly.co.uk/

[Source: ecouterre.com/ ]

These funky bracelets are made by a crew from Brooklyn call Wrecord. They're made from recycled vinyl records that are donated by DJ's, and 10% of the proceeds are donated to local schools. The artists get a fair cut of the deal and everyone is happy.
[Source: keetsa.com ]

Believe strongly in what you're, like, saying.

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Word!

Check out the brilliant play of words in this animated typography video based on a poem by Taylor Mali which is a call to speak words with meaning, conviction and clarity.


http://www.taylormali.com/

Animation [for a class] by Ronnie Bruce
http://vimeo.com/ronniebruce

Facebook, Goldman Sachs and Giant Squid.

When Mark Zuckerberg, the 26 year old founder of Facebook was named Time Magazine's Person of the Year in mid December 2010, it came as quite a suprise to most people. Ok, so Facebook has spread rampantly around the world and become the most powerful social media platform and "The Social Media" film loosely based on the story of Facebook has been a box office hit this year, but there still wasn't much of a sense of strong feeling towards Zuckerberg
In the Time:Person of The Year readers poll, Zuckerberg came in at 10th, with Julian Assange getting far and away the most votes, beating Zuckerberg by many orders of magnitude.

Time: Person Of The Year Readers Poll Top 10
Julian Assange
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Lady Gaga
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert
Glenn Beck
Barack Obama
Steve Jobs
The Chilean Miners
The Unemployed American
Mark Zuckerberg



But it started to make a little more sense after yesterdays announcement [3/1/11] that Goldman Sachs had invested in Facebook to the tune of $45Billion, valuing Facebook now at a cool $50Billion and overtaking Google in its reach.
So why exactly is Facebook worth so much to Goldman Sachs, the most profitable investment banking organisation, [or "vulture capitalists" as they're called by numerous politicians and commentators] ?? Surely it's not because they're interested in watching people play Farmville or seeing their messy drunk photos..

Goldman Sachs have been described by The Rolling Stone as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money". Their $1Trillion portfolio broadly comprises Investment Banking [ Financial Advisory (mergers and acquisitions, investitures, corporate defence activities, restructuring and spin-offs) and Underwriting (public offerings and private placements of equity, equity-related and debt instruments)], Trading and Principal Investments [ [interest rate and credit products, mortgage-backed securities and loans, currencies and commodities, structured and derivative products, trading in equities, equity-related products, equity derivatives, structured products and executing client trades in equities, options, and futures contracts on world markets, merchant banking investments and funds ], and Asset Management and Securities Services [investment advisory and financial planning services, investment products, clearing, financing, custody, securities lending, reporting services to institutional clients, hedge funds, mutual funds, and pension funds. The division generates revenues primarily in the form of interest rate spreads or fees ] Their assets include major power and gas utilities, oil companies, health care, casino, insurance, financial trading and debt consolidation companies, meat processing factories, hotel chains amongst others, and they are involved in advising and brokering on in such deals as the privatization of major highways in Indiana, Texas and Chicago and selling them to foreign investors. A significant sector of their profit share comes from controlling financial interest in trading and principal investments on things like interest rates, credit products, mortgage-backed securities and loans- many of which were the kind of high risk, high return sub-prime loans that brought about the advent of the global financial crisis. So culpable were Goldman Sachs in promoting unfair home loans that they were investigated by the Massachusetts attorney general’s office. As there are a significant number of former Goldman Sachs employees who have gone on to hold key position in the U.S. administration, notably including Henry Paulson who was the Treasury Secretary from 2006-2009, some noses could have been put out of joint and so on May 10, 2009, Goldman Sachs paid $60Million to end the investigation.
It was the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the global financial services company that had greedily relied too heavily on the high risk sub-prime mortgages, that had brought the global financial crisis into effect, bringing the financial world to it's knees. When asked whether the U.S. treasury should have stepped forward to save the bank, Henry Paulson, [yes the same Henry Paulson who is former CEO, significant share holder, and hedge fund controller of Goldman Sachs.. responded saying,"I never once considered that it was appropriate to put taxpayer money on the line [in resolving Lehman Brothers]". This was on the 15th of Sept 2008.

However on the evening of the 16th of September 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank announced that the New York division were to bail out A.I.G. [The American International Group, the American Insurance Corporation]. Even though Goldman Sachs had seen the crisis coming and had off-loaded a lot of their junk-loans, doing quite well for themselves in the process, and were well insured they could have 'potentially' lost billions. Lucky for them, they had their good friend Stephen Friedman, a shareholder and former director of Goldman Sachs on their side as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, Robert Rubin [who was employed at Goldman Sachs for 26 years ] working as Barak Obama's economic advisor as well, of course, as their homie US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson [ the same Henry Paulson who was named runner up Time: Person Of The Year in regards to the global financial crisis. Time commented, ""if there is a face to this financial debacle, it is now his."] Apparently he and BFF Lloyd Blankfein, current CEO of Goldman Sachs, were on the phone in the order of 24 times a day when the AIG deal was being negotiated. The list of former Goldman Sachs executives that have gone on to hold key positions in the U.S.administration and other powerful global institutions is long and exhaustive and has earned them the nickname "Government Sachs".

But so that it didn't seem SO flagrantly corrupt, the crafty devils at Goldman Sachs cooked the books in December 2008, shifting large write-downs to create an "orphan month'- reporting a net loss of USD $780Million for the month along with net profit of USD $ 1.81Billion for Jan-March. Boo hoo.. But miraculously the next quarter was significantly higher than average, and with the millions of dollars worth of taxpayers money that they got through the AIG deal, they paid themselves million dollar bonuses and at the end of 2009 reported it's most profitable year ever.

Naturally this enraged the American people who had lost their homes, jobs, pension funds and investments and were going to suffer the effects of cutbacks on social services that stem from the governments USD $12 Trillion [yes, that's trillion with a "T"] bail out package for greedy bankers who had recklessly gambled with their money.

Michael Moore lead a protest outside the Goldman Sachs headquarters, demanding that the bailout money be put back in the American Trust. Goldman Sachs were non-responsive.

Lloyd C. Blankfein [who takes home at least USD $68 Million per annum, not to speak of bonuses..] is aware that people would jump for joy if he were to slit his wrists, though remains self-righteous. “We’re very important,” he chortled in an interview with The Times of London. “We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle.”
"We're just doing God's work", he glibly remarks.
While this apparently was his idea of a joke, it is even more of a joke that Goldman Sachs representatives endeavour to convince people that this is true. Speaking at a discussion about morality and markets [and I haven't even gotten to the punch line..] at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, Brian Griffiths [ Goldman Sachs' international vice chairman and former advisor to Margaret Thatcher ] sermonised that giant paychecks for bankers were an 'economic necessity', saying, “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,”.
Excuse me?? We have to ...tolerate the inequality... as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all??
That sounds like the biggest load of nonsensical, hypocritical bollocks to me.
Goldman Sachs is the sort of company that has artificially fixed food trading prices for increased profit, resulting in starvation amongst many, and it has proven it's track record of moral bankruptcy on scores of occasions.
This is why people ought to be very concerned about the fact that they now have a major controlling interest in Facebook. There has been a steady erosion of civic legal rights to privacy and protection since 9/11, and social media platforms have lured millions of people around the world to give over access to their personal information, essentially making the line between public and private disappear. Facebook have already demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to protect your personal information, and profit from data-mining, surveillance, and tracking the data-trail of your every move online.
To hand this kind of power over to an enormous company that already has the world over a barrel in almost as many ways as possible has terrible implications. It is simply too much power for one entity to have, and there is too much likelihood that this power will be abused.
People can take that power back by choosing to disengage from their enterprises, and realising that they have a choice.
I personally will be committing Facebook suicide and suggest that you think about doing so as well.

Peace

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/255237/november-11-2009/goldman-sachs-does-god-s-work

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6907681.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1
http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2009/03/11/98586.htm
http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2009/03/16/98729.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/business/28melt.html?_r=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goldman_Sachs_Group,_Inc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Paulson
http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/12/13/julian-assange-readers-choice-for-times-person-of-the-year-2010/#ixzz1A84MEZ5a
http://www.pcworld.com/article/213763/facebooks_zuckerberg_is_times_person_of_the_year.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_International_Group
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goldman_Sachs_Group,_Inc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80%932010
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/lloyd-blankfein-still-doi_b_551301.html
http://onlinedocumentaries.softarchive.net/bbc_two_the_love_of_money_part_back_from_the_brink_dvdrip_documentary.105212.html

No Labels? I can think of a few..

New World Order with Liberal packaging.. Do some reading about who is behind this movement so that you can appreciate the full spectre of manipulation and deceit expressed in this video.
While the supposed aim of the movement is to end hyper-partisanship in politics [As their slogan reads,"Not Left. Not Right. Forward"], this seemingly reasonable standpoint of the middle way is simply impossible given the blatantly gross agenda and vested interests of it's proponents. In effect, the 'No labels' movement really intend to do away with debate and dissent, and allow the cabal of large corporate entities to have unfettered power and ability to manipulate the world to further their interests in essentially every sphere of industry.
Google: James Tisch [ CBS media moghul and outspoken Zionist, founding chairman of the Jewish Leadership Forum, executive committee member of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and a president of the Jewish Communal Fund, director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York ], David Frum, The Council of Foreign Relations, Goldman Sachs and see which interests are really at play here.

http://nolabels.org/
http://www.examiner.com/political-buzz-in-new-york/no-label-the-new-false-flag
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2010/12/13/132033081/new-no-labels-movement-seeks-bipartisanship
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-turn/2010/12/the_no_labels_crowd_has.html
http://www.nhbr.com/businessnewsopinion/903826-290/no-labels-no-thanks.html