Saturday, March 17, 2012
Friday, March 16, 2012
Thursday, March 15, 2012
god and evil-lution
Dawn
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
second class citizen
"The Female Eunuch"
Germaine Greer argues that scaring women is
"big business and hugely profitable."
It is fear, she wrote, that "makes women comply
with schemes and policies that work against their interest".
Sexism is indeed creating a second class citizen,
and fear works equally well on men,
don't be a slave to either.
(art by John Holmes)
Monday, March 12, 2012
Return Of Godzilla: Japan's Nuclear Meltdown
Godzilla (ゴジラ, Gojira?) is a daikaijū, a Japanese movie monster, first appearing in Ishirō Honda's 1954 film Godzilla. With the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still fresh in the Japanese consciousness, Godzilla was conceived as a monster created by nuclear detonations and a metaphor for nuclear weapons in general.
Although his origins vary somewhat from film to film, he is always described as a prehistoric creature, who first appeared and attacked Japan at the beginning of the Atomic Age. In particular, mutation due to atomic radiation is presented as an explanation for his size and powers. The most notable of Godzilla's resulting abilities is his atomic breath: a powerful heat ray of fire from his mouth.
Godzilla is one of the most recognizable symbols of Japanese popular culture worldwide and remains an important facet of Japanese films, embodying the kaiju subset of the tokusatsu genre. He has been considered a filmographic metaphor for the United States, as well as an allegory of nuclear weapons in general. The earlier Godzilla films, especially the original, portrayed Godzilla as a frightening, nuclear monster. Godzilla represented the fears that many Japanese held about the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the possibility of recurrence. (read more)
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Friday, March 9, 2012
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Three Lessons of Fukushima, One Year Later
As we approach on March 11 the one-year anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, it’s a good time to take heed of the lessons from that tragic event.
Lesson one: Governments lie.
Three Lessons of Fukushima, One Year Later | The Progressive
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Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Ishtar
The Sumerian Inanna/Ishtar, praising her "honey-man"
He has sprouted; he has burgeoned;
He is lettuce planted by the water.
He is the one my womb loves best.
My well-stocked garden of the plain,
My barley growing high in its furrow,
My apple tree which bears fruit up to its crown,
He is lettuce planted by the water.
My honey-man, my honey-man sweetens me always.
My lord, the honey-man of the gods,
He is the one my womb loves best.
His hand is honey, his foot is honey,
He sweetens me always.
My eager impetuous caresser of the navel,
My caresser of the soft thighs,
He is the one my womb loves best
He is lettuce planted by the water.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Criminals In Action
Monday, March 5, 2012
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Friday, March 2, 2012
the human animal
The Nanking Massacre or Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, was a mass murder, and war rape that occurred during the six-week period following the Japanese capture of the city of Nanjing (Nanking), the former capital of the Republic of China, on December 13, 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. During this period hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers were murdered by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army. Widespread rape and looting also occurred. Historians and witnesses have estimated that 250,000 to 300,000 people were killed. Several of the key perpetrators of the atrocities, at the time labelled as war crimes, were later tried and found guilty at the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, and were subsequently executed. Another key perpetrator, Prince Asaka, a member of the Imperial Family, escaped prosecution by having earlier been granted immunity by the Allies.
Eyewitness accounts of Westerners and Chinese present at Nanking in the weeks after the fall of the city state that over the course of six weeks following the fall of Nanking, Japanese troops engaged in rape, murder, theft, arson, and other war crimes. Some of these accounts came from foreigners who opted to stay behind in order to protect Chinese civilians from harm, including the diaries of John Rabe and American Minnie Vautrin. Other accounts include first-person testimonies of the Nanking Massacre survivors, eyewitness reports of journalists (both Western and Japanese), as well as the field diaries of military personnel. American missionary John Magee stayed behind to provide a 16 mm film documentary and first-hand photographs of the Nanking Massacre.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated that 20,000 women were raped, including infants and the elderly. A large portion of these rapes were systematized in a process where soldiers would search door-to-door for young girls, with many women taken captive and gang raped. The women were often killed immediately after being raped, often through explicit mutilation or by stabbing a bayonet, long stick of bamboo, or other objects into the vagina. Young children were not exempt from these atrocities, and were cut open to allow Japanese soldiers to rape them.
On 19 December 1937, Reverend James M. McCallum wrote in his diary:
I know not where to end. Never I have heard or read such brutality. Rape! Rape! Rape! We estimate at least 1,000 cases a night, and many by day. In case of resistance or anything that seems like disapproval, there is a bayonet stab or a bullet ... People are hysterical ... Women are being carried off every morning, afternoon and evening. The whole Japanese army seems to be free to go and come as it pleases, and to do whatever it pleases.
Pregnant women were a target of murder, as they would often be bayoneted in the stomach, sometimes after rape. Tang Junshan, survivor and witness to one of the Japanese army’s systematic mass killings, testified:
The seventh and last person in the first row was a pregnant woman. The soldier thought he might as well rape her before killing her, so he pulled her out of the group to a spot about ten meters away. As he was trying to rape her, the woman resisted fiercely ... The soldier abruptly stabbed her in the belly with a bayonet. She gave a final scream as her intestines spilled out. Then the soldier stabbed the fetus, with its umbilical cord clearly visible, and tossed it aside. (read more)
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Monday, February 27, 2012
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Syrian Revolution
Assad massacres
while the West fiddles.
The Syrian regime will commit genocide to survive, while the international community amuses itself with sanctions. If it were not so sad, it would be funny.
Their death was sad and unnecessary, as was the task they went out to perform. There are blood-drenched locations, where the presence of war journalists reveals to an indifferent world, atrocities that they did not know about. Syria is not such a place. Syrian bloggers, iPhone photographers, and human rights activists tell the stories themselves. If there is a journalistic story that is worth getting killed for, they are not the ones that brought Ochlik and Colvin to Syria. Granted, people around the world have done little for the wretched citizens in Syria, but it was well aware of their hardships before Western journalists arrived on the scene. (read more)
Poor America - P a n o r a m a [B B C] - Broadcast Date: 13th February 2012
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Nude Woman in a Red Armchair
Nude Woman in a Red Armchair
Pablo Picasso 1932
Dated 27 July 1932, this work belongs to the remarkable sequence of portraits that Picasso made of Marie-Thérèse Walter in his studio at the Chateau de Boisgeloup. Marie-Thérèse is presented here – as in almost her portraits – as a series of sensuous curves. Even the scrolling arms of the chair have been heightened and exaggerated to echo the rounded forms of her body. The face is a double or metamorphic image: the right side can also be seen as the face of a lover in profile, kissing her on the lips.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Shadowlands - photographs & stories from Fukushima
Shadowlands - photographs & stories from Fukushima
Robert Knoth and Antoinette de Jong visited the Fukushima region with Greenpeace in the autumn of 2011 to bear witness to the effects wrought on the region by the nuclear fallout from the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
The shadow of radiation now looms over the people, the animals, and the environment of this area of Japan. Well-kept agricultural land is now becoming wild, children's play areas and petrol stations are contaminated and abandoned, and nature is taking back roads. Each photo captures the eerie beauty of a region left in limbo as radioactive fallout permeates all aspects of life.
This video was produced to accompany the exhibition. The interactive exhibition can be found at www.greenpeace.org/shadowlands.
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