global Archives | Technoccult

Tagglobal

Major Water Shortage in São Paulo, Brazil

February 18, 2015 / Klint Finley

The New York Times reports:

As southeast Brazil grapples with its worst drought in nearly a century, a problem worsened by polluted rivers, deforestation and population growth, the largest reservoir system serving São Paulo is near depletion. Many residents are already enduring sporadic water cutoffs, some going days without it. Officials say that drastic rationing may be needed, with water service provided only two days a week.

Full Story: The New York Times: Taps Start to Run Dry in Brazil’s Largest City

(via Abe)

Seeing Like a Supply Chain

December 17, 2014 / Klint Finley

Emily Horne and Tim Maly on the origins of the modern shipping industry and its puzzling lack of security:

At a 2005 hearing before the Subcommittee on Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attack, witnesses raised a nightmare scenario: the Poor Man’s ICBM.

The theory is that you could load a shipping container with a nuclear weapon, or some other WMD, and watch it sail into somewhere like Port Newark, where it would explode while awaiting inspection. […]

100% scanning was meant to be implemented by 2012. When the law was passed, roughly 4% of shipping container cargo was being inspected. As of today, scanning has reached… 4%. The compliance deadline has been moved to 2016. It probably won’t happen then either.

Full Story: Primer: Seeing Like a Supply Chain

Yazidi Brace for 74th Attempted Genocide in Iraq

August 11, 2014 / Klint Finley

Vox reports:

The last night Salam Sheikh could sleep was Sunday. That was before Islamic State fighters marched into his home city of Sinjar, in northern Iraq, defeated 5,000 Kurdish fighters within an hour, and made Cheikh’s family prisoners in their own home.

Now when the 28-year-old calls his three sisters and his disabled mother, more than 6,400 miles away in Iraq, they speak only in whispers. Speak any louder, they fear, and ISIS fighters might overhear and realize they are still in the city.

Sheikh and his family are Yazidi, part of an ancient religion with about 600,000 adherents around the world, mostly in Iraq. About 200 Yazidi families live in the United States, half of them here in Lincoln, Nebraska, where they began settling after the first Gulf War.

[…]

The Yazidi, who have been persecuted for centuries, say their cultural memory includes 73 attempted genocides. The Nebraska-based Yazidi fear they are watching the 74th from thousands of miles away.

“It’s worse than the war,” Sheikh says.

Full Story: Vox: The genocide 6,000 miles away: America’s Yazidis watch and wait, fearing the worst

Genesis P-Orridge Kickstarts New Vodun Documentary

July 7, 2014 / Klint Finley

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Bight of the Twins

The Quietus reports:

Last December, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Los Angeles-based artist and film-maker Hazel Hill McCarthy III visited Ouidah in Benin to make a documentary exploring the origins of the religion Vodun. While there, P-Orridge was initiated into the Twin Fetish, a Vodun practice that celebrates twins – particularly resonant in Benin, which has the highest national average of twins per birth and where they carry a sacred meaning – honouring her relationship with h/er late wife and pandrogyne partner Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. As McCarthy writes of the film: “In this story we begin to see the link between pandrogyny and the Twin Fetish, an activation of a complete state and in fact the true fundamentals of Vodun religion.”

Full Story: The Quietus: Genesis P-Orridge Vodun Film: Kickstarter

The Kickstarter is here

Muslim Punks vs. Sharia Law in Indonesia

May 14, 2014 / Klint Finley

Short Vice documentary about the actively suppressed Muslim punk scene in Indonesia’s only Sharia province:

Update: I hadn’t noticed before, but the damned embed auto-plays the video. If you want to watch the video visit the site.

More Masked Monkeys of Indonesia

October 23, 2013 / Klint Finley

Pertu-Saska-a-kind-of-you-1

A couple years ago I linke to a collection of photos of the deplorable living conditions of leashed begger-monkeys in Jakarta. Here’s another photo gallery on the monkeys, with an emphasis on how creepy they look, rather than how they are abused.

ufunk: The Disturbing World of Street Apes in Jakarta

(Thanks Hautepop)

The 10 Stealth Trends That Rule the World Today

October 9, 2013 / Klint Finley

Interesting. Here are the trends, the full article has more details:

1) Old Trend: Expensive solar, surviving only on subsidies.
New Trend: Cheap solar, disrupting old industries.

2. Old Trend: The Latinization of America.
New Trend: The Asiafication of America.

3. Old Trend: The Chinese population bomb.
New Trend: The Chinese population bust.

4. Old Trend: Soaring U.S. CO2 emissions.
New Trend: Plummeting U.S. CO2 emissions.

5. Old Trend: College is becoming more and more important.
New Trend: College is no more important than before.

6. Old Trend: Americans drive more and more.
New Trend: Americans drive less and less.

7. Old Trend: Skyrocketing health care costs, skyrocketing deficits.
New Trend: Creeping health care costs, creeping deficits.

8. Old Trend: The BRICs are conquering the world.
New Trend: China is the only BRIC in the wall.

9. Old Trend: Active management rules the finance universe.
New Trend: Passive investment rules the finance universe.

10) Old Trend: China is buying up all our debt.
New Trend: China is selling off our debt.

Full Story: The Atlantic: The 10 Stealth Economic Trends That Rule the World Today

(Thanks Tim)

Kowloon Walled City Rebuilt in Japan As Video Arcade

September 9, 2013 / Klint Finley

kowloon-arcade1

kowloon-arcade3

kowloon-arcade2

The famous Kowloon Walled City has been painstakingly recreated in Japan as a video arcade.

Full Story and Many More Photos: Randomwire: Kowloon Walled City Rebuilt in Japan

(via Tim Maughan)

Kowloon Walled City Infographic

TAZ History: Kowloon Walled City

Video: Kowloon Walled City Documentary

Scandanavian Cities Importing Garbage to Burn as Fuel

August 10, 2013 / Klint Finley

OSLO-1-articleLarge

The New York Times on Oslo, Norway’s garbage problem:

This is a city that imports garbage. Some comes from England, some from Ireland. Some is from neighboring Sweden. It even has designs on the American market.

“I’d like to take some from the United States,” said Pal Mikkelsen, in his office at a huge plant on the edge of town that turns garbage into heat and electricity. “Sea transport is cheap.”

Oslo, a recycling-friendly place where roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by burning garbage — household trash, industrial waste, even toxic and dangerous waste from hospitals and drug arrests — has a problem: it has literally run out of garbage to burn.

The problem is not unique to Oslo, a city of 1.4 million people. Across Northern Europe, where the practice of burning garbage to generate heat and electricity has exploded in recent decades, demand for trash far outstrips supply. “Northern Europe has a huge generating capacity,” said Mr. Mikkelsen, 50, a mechanical engineer who for the last year has been the managing director of Oslo’s waste-to-energy agency.

Full Story: The New York Times: A City That Turns Garbage Into Energy Copes With a Shortage

Some cities in Sweden are selling garbage to Oslo, but Sweden is also importing garbage from Norway.

(via Metafilter)

Pre-Emptive Counter-Revolution

August 2, 2013 / Klint Finley

Charlie Stross on what’s going on in the world today:

The over-arching reason for the clamp-down on dissent, migration, and freedom of expression, and the concurrent emphasis on security in the developed world, constitutes the visible expression of a pre-emptive counter-revolution. […]

I believe what we’re seeing is a move towards the global imposition of a police state in the developed world, leveraging the xenophobia that naturally emerges during insecure times, by a ruling elite who are themselves feeling threatened by a spectre. Controls on movement, freedom of association, and speech are all key tools in the classic police state’s arsenal. What’s new about this cycle is that the police state machinery is imposed locally, within national boundaries, but applies everywhere: the economic system it is intended to protect is transnational and unconstrained. Which is why even places that were largely exempt during the cold war are having a common police state agenda quietly imposed. There is to be no refuge, other than destabilized “failed states” where the conditions of life make a police state look utopian in comparison.

This system has emerged organically, from the bottom up, and is not the result of any conspiracy; it’s just individuals and groups moving to protect their shareholdings in the Martian invaders, by creating an environment that is safe for the hive intelligences to operate in.

Full Story: Charlie Stross: Who ordered *that*?

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑

Technoccult

Mutate Your Mind