There are a lot of tears in the BME movie. It's an emotionally heavy film, to say nothing of the many moments that would enduce tears for purely physical reasons even in the absence of emotion. This frame capture is one of my favorites from the movie.
Since I'm guessing the average reader doesn't know the backstory, I'm going to very quickly fill it in. My apologies to those who are bored by it.
Spain has a region (sort of like Canada has Quebec) where the people are culturally unique from the rest of Europe, and speak a different language. This region wants to be its own country, hence Basque Separatism. These separatist groups have at times, including recently, launched terrorist attacks of various sizes against Spain. Probably in part due to those sympathies, Spain agreed to become involved in America's war on terror and got involved in the Iraq War.
Additionally, Spain agreed to become involved in what appears to be a UK/US backed coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea, a West African nation just south of Cameroon that the Spanish ruled until quite recently. Equatorial Guinea is a mineral-rich nation with good deposits of oil, and it has been led by questionable democracy since its independence was declared. Recently a coup, similar to the one in Haiti, was nearly staged. Rebel groups were going to seize the President and take him to exile in Spain, with funding said to be coming from the US and UK war chests.
Then, a few days later, massive explosions rocked Madrid, killing about 200 people and injuring well over a thousand more, in one of the most brutal attacks on Western civilians since WWII. Initially all fingers in Spain pointed at the separtists, but outside the country people pointed at Spain's actions in Africa and the Middle East as the trigger. However, what makes this event especially important though is that it happened right before a federal election (thanks to Bear for the tip; check his page for his comments).
With al Qaeda taking credit for the attacks, and the election clearly handing power away from the pro-American pro-war centrist and to the leftist party promising to pull Spain from the war, al Qaeda has gone a long way to have proved something very terrifying: Terrorist attacks work, and they are dollar-for-dollar the most effective way of instituting political change in a democracy.
I've posted about a thousand new images to BME. Just a teaser really — the rest will go up on Tuesday, and for tomorrow there will be an amazing column by Jim Ward about the history of Doug Malloy. Enjoy this update, and expect more shortly…
I also wanted to share with you an excerpt from a letter from the BME movie's one-man shooting team over in Thailand (and more places too), an old friend and old teacher, Jon Cobb.
The Thai have superior kindness, beauty and patience despite abhorrent poverty. I saw a woman with her arms amputated above the elbow that had the bone still extending several inches beyond the muscles, badly grown over with keloided flesh, rocking for change. You don't get it, the arms looked like running, dripping, melting wax.I didn't have change, couldn't search my bags in the crowd without getting pickpocketed (late in the night markets, not wise alone) but I leaned in, greeted her as a Thai (“sawasdee ka”, like swastika) and she lit up like God had been inside her testing me right then and there. Amazing people.
Sadly, I saw a blind deformed boy of maybe ten being led around on a chain by a blind man playing a monkey organ (like the street people with a trained monkey used to do). The boy was walking on his heels, arms grotesquely postured like I can't describe, and the calliope sounds of the organ were making the spectacle of poverty and handicap horrific and colorful in the extreme. I'll never forget that.
I would move here if I could though, I'll explain the wonders when there's more time. The food is the best.
Off to Mynmar right now, if the Buddhists don't take extreme offense to the Jaina crosses on my feet I will have a superior time. They take Buddhism extremely seriously, any hint of disrespect is serious. You cannot even take a representation out of the country at any price now…
Love to all,
Jon
The photo below (of the Mekong River) was taken by Ferg of course (check out his page for more from his travels)… I realize it's not quite the same place, but I hope it illustrates at least a little of the magic.
So it looks like they're finally going to announce what we've known at least since Babylonian and Sumerian times — that there's still another planet in our solar system. The proper name (if it's the planet we think it is) in my opinion is Marduk or Nibiru, but I guess we're going with Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the sea.
For those of you who know much about the history of the beings that live on this planet (”Sedna”, not Earth), you will definitely appreciate the naming being a sea goddess.
I've been trying to work on an image update all afternoon and my laptop keeps crashing. It goes slower and slower and then bluescreens. I'm not sure what's up and honestly I don't care what's up right now. Thankfully because of the BME maintenance software's design, it was really easy to just devolve to my old desktop (and in the process of doing so I figured out the things I need to do to perfect the process). Because it's built around external hardware now, it was almost as easy as unplugging from one CPU-box and plugging into the next.
I was going to go to the carnival tonight, but we don't have a baby sitter (so I'd have to ditch Rachel to go) and she brought me a whack of yummy food. Priorities!
Other than that I had some conversations about the Todd Bertrang case with people a bit closer to the facts. The more I learn about this, the more I get angry about them basically framing Todd for a crime that never happened and doing everything they could — including dangling $20,000,000 in front of his nose as an incentive — to make him even consider talking to them.
I know a lot of you don't like Todd because of his sexuality. Some of your might even believe that he's a sexual predator. But even if that's true, the simple fact of the matter is that Todd is not guilty of this crime. This really is a witchhunt, and if they win this the way they're trying to win it, it won't end with Todd. I think a lot of us thought that it might be limited to him but I'm no longer convinced of that.
He's committed no crime and there is no evidence against him and there are no victims. But still, he's in prison — being denied bail no less — and his assets are being seized and liquidated against his will. They've added patently false “child porn” charges (which I know the details of and can personally vouch for being total BS), which has meant that no lawyer will touch him without a major retainer, and all his old friends are staying away. Oh, and he's being denied a public defender (although they've given his girlfriend a public defender who's done nothing but try and trick her into giving “evidence” against Todd)…
In any case, it's incredibly messed up and — no matter what you may think of Todd — fundamentally unjust. If you think you can help, drop Connect a line, as she's probably the best contact for Todd on IAM right now.
This last column has generated more positive feedback than anything I've ever written. Thank you so much to everyone who's written me about it, it was really wonderful to get such a nice response.
The photo above is from La Negra's page from her recent vacation.
I was really disillusioned about it for some time, but I've been getting inspired again lately about Project Drop Out, Tune In… Some things financially have gone alright for me, and I really think that raising the capital for aquiring a large piece of ranchland is possible… Think what we could do with 200,000 acres.
The question I suppose is exactly how many people would be interested in getting involved… Would you spend $2,500 for a 50 acre parcel of private land with fresh running water, and with access to a 100,000 acres of shared land? That's sort of the set up I'm thinking about. I have zero interest in a commune. I'm too much of a sociopath for that. But I have a lot of interest in a community where people live free and independent, but support their neighbors.
The tentative plan right now is to do a whirlwind South American tour within the next months (my business partner is down there right now on related work), and then probably get a nice place in Buenos Aires for a year when our lease here expires. That would give us time to do the visas and everything legit (and get my Spanish solid)… And even if it doesn't pan out, it'll cost us less money to live in Buenos Aires for a year than living in Toronto, even factoring in travel.
Below is a (really bad taken-in-the-mirror) picture of some of the work I had done yesterday; filling on the top section. The blue background is roughly what will be there in the end but isn't actually there yet. The unfilled circles above the mouth/gateway are going to be eyes as well. Most of what you're seeing here is about six years old and needs to be hit again to make it perfect…
