I’m a huge fan of the EA Skate game on the PS3. You can play it like you play the Tony Hawk games – totally over the top, or you can play it like you’re actually skating for real. It’s that good. Checking replays in slow motion shows how amazingly realistic this game really is, and it’s almost trance inducing watching a simple kickflip in super slomo.
I made this little movie to show some (kind of) realistic skateboarding. There are more realistic stuff than this, but most of the crap out there is just insane shit that makes me wanna puke – obviously made by people who are not into skateboarding at all. Hope you like this one!
>Modern Apartheid
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This is really old news, but we constantly need to be reminded. Lest we forget…
And I really want to stress this:
As with everything you read, this is one side of the story. You’ll find thousands of articles contradicting whatever I say here. The reason I write that is because I get anonymous emails from jerks who don’t seem to get that…
Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian Christian with an Israeli citizenship, former member of the Knesset, is being accused of treason and espionage during wartime (the Lebanon war). I found this article in Los Angeles Times, written by Bishara himself, entitled Why Israel is after me. The full article is right here.
I don’t know anything about him being guilty or not. That’s not the point here. What Bishara writes in this article is just what we need to be reminded of, the sickening Israeli Apartheid.
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These trumped-up charges, which I firmly reject and deny, are only the latest in a series of attempts to silence me and others involved in the struggle of the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel to live in a state of all its citizens, not one that grants rights and privileges to Jews that it denies to non-Jews.
When Israel was established in 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled in fear. My family was among the minority that escaped that fate, remaining instead on the land where we had long lived. The Israeli state, established exclusively for Jews, embarked immediately on transforming us into foreigners in our own country.
For the first 18 years of Israeli statehood, we, as Israeli citizens, lived under military rule with pass laws that controlled our every movement. We watched Jewish Israeli towns spring up over destroyed Palestinian villages.
…
More than 20 Israeli laws explicitly privilege Jews over non-Jews. The Law of Return, for example, grants automatic citizenship to Jews from anywhere in the world. Yet Palestinian refugees are denied the right to return to the country they were forced to leave in 1948. The Basic Law of Human Dignity and Liberty — Israel’s “Bill of Rights” — defines the state as “Jewish” rather than a state for all its citizens. Thus Israel is more for Jews living in Los Angeles or Paris than it is for native Palestinians.
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The Israeli authorities are trying to intimidate not just me but all Palestinian citizens of Israel. But we will not be intimidated. We will not bow to permanent servitude in the land of our ancestors or to being severed from our natural connections to the Arab world. Our community leaders joined together recently to issue a blueprint for a state free of ethnic and religious discrimination in all spheres. If we turn back from our path to freedom now, we will consign future generations to the discrimination we have faced for six decades.
Americans know from their own history of institutional discrimination the tactics that have been used against civil rights leaders. These include telephone bugging, police surveillance, political delegitimization and criminalization of dissent through false accusations. Israel is continuing to use these tactics at a time when the world no longer tolerates such practices as compatible with democracy.
Why then does the U.S. government continue to fully support a country whose very identity and institutions are based on ethnic and religious discrimination that victimize its own citizens?
By Azmi Bishara
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“Israel fears my ideas endanger Zionism.”
This is Azmi Bishara speaking about Israeli Apartheid in March 2008.
>The (Oval) Office
>Television – the drug of the nation. I’m with that, but occasionally I hear from people I trust (die hard TV series professionals who watch every fuckin’ show there is) about some new amazing TV series and I download them and then watch with intense intensity.
I’ve come to worship Twin Peaks, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Epitafios, Riget and Carnivàle thanks to these die hards. As for The Office (UK) I’m just speechless. It’s just perfect in every sense. Still haven’t had the time to watch the American version, but I hear it’s damn good as well.
If you’re a fan of The Office you’ll hopefully enjoy this brilliant satire, featuring George W Bush, Tony Blair and the rest of the elite. All hail Supernews!
“Has U.S. politics become so absurd that it deserves it’s own cartoon show? Evidently, it has.”
>The Israeli and US warmongers
>They’re at it again, backed up by the massmedia (“Iran launch new missile!”), provoking Iran trying to get them to attack first. Hopefully Iran will keep its cool, because this war, if executed, will probably be one of the worst ever for the present world to deal with.
On May 1, 2003, George W Bush made his famous speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln:
“Thank you all very much. Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
As one YouTube fellow below writes: “This will no doubt go down in history the most elaborate and misleading presidential re-election publicity stunt in US history.”
I know this Bush-hating is tiresome, he’s a just a puppet on a string and so on, but do check out this interview. This is Bush three years later with arguments worthy of a ten year old…
Seymour M. Hersh writes about The Bush Administration’s moves against Iran.
Muhammad Sahimi’s article Deconstructing the Anti-Iran resolutions.
>Together we can change the world…
>Humanism without humans
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Peter Sotos – controversial writer, thinker and musician, probably most famous for being arrested for obscenity because of his fanzine Pure (1984), as well as being a member of the power electronics group Whitehouse – is a man I’ve taken great interest in, pretty much because of what he says in interviews and what you can read between the lines in his explicit works.
Total Abuse is a collection of nearly all of Sotos’ texts between 1984-1995 (including Pure, Tool. and Parasite), and what I find most interesting with this book is the interview and introduction made by Jim Goad. I wrote about this in the paper issue of Ny Moral #1.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview where he talks about humanism and humanity.
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Jim Goad: I’d like you to comment on this [line] from PARASITE #5: “Like most humanism, it conveniently doesn’t include humans.” Where has humanism gone astray? What are they not understanding about humanity?
Peter Sotos: Well, I think we’ve been talking about it, really. These people have these dreams and fantasies, it’s like people who decide when they’re two, or when they’re going to their first prom, they decide, “You know, mom, I wanna have a really high-paying job, and I want to have two kids, and someone who loves me, and go out on Friday nights to balls and dances”, whatever they think, I don’t know. And just their whole life shows you that that’s not gonna happen… And they still cling to these things, not as sort of dreams or fantasies, by the end they’re just these sorts of religious beliefs… And humanists, people who are just so concerned with the human element, with others and everyone’s care and concern, so boggled by the actual information that exists. But once again, you say this sort of stuff, and you sound as if you’re – as if I’m – upset. When, you know, the opposite is true. I’ve come to this from – it just seems obvious to me… People aren’t going to have these rosy little lives.
It seems like it’s wishful thinking that gets misunderstood as some kind of ontological verity.
Yeah, right. They’re dedicated to, you know, “Well, this was promised to me.” And they drive themselves crazy. But the thing is, I do like what life has to offer. I don’t want to sound like, “Nah, this is terrible. Why don’t these people wake up?” I mean, it really isn’t like that. I just think it’s a much more realistic viewpoint.
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Read more about what Peter Sotos has to say right here.
And then read some more on the Fanzine site.
>Religion and its influence on society
You probably know this one already: Tom Cruise, famous Scientologist, is quite scary in this clip – and he’s not acting… It pretty much shows how indoctrination rules in religion. Nothing new, but it seems like a lot of us need to be reminded about this blemish on humanity every once in a while. I’m not saying all religions are crap, they might be of good use to a lot of people, but when religion and faith becomes business and tools for power we’ve failed once again.
A pretty good documentary on the subject of religion and faith is The Root of All Evil? where biologist Richard Dawkins, author of the very readable book The God Delusion, takes on religion and its influence on society.