(click on the image if you want to read the article)
Again, not taking any sides, I just hate war.

Rudkowski’s Arrest

So one of my favorite "journalists" was arrested last week for asking tough questions. Why am I using quotation marks? Well, he is not considered to be a "professional journalist". That term was made up by Bernays (Freud's nephew) almost 80 years ago. No, Luke Rudkowski is considered to be a real journalist, apparently there is a difference.

I think his arrest is significant because it establishes the difference between these two types of journalism. I'd like to refer you to an article posted on the georgewashingtonblog, you can read the article here.

Upcoming cinema events

What a shame for those of you who don't live in the netherlands and love cinema. Lately the filmmuseum in amsterdam is putting out some old/great/classic stuff again on the bigscreen.

'Italian Cinema 1959'

"For more than 15 years now, the New Italian Cinema Events (N.I.C.E.) festival has brought contemporary Italian films to audiences outside Italy. From 2 - 9 April the latest selection of new Italian films can be seen at the Filmmuseum, one of the main venues of this traveling festival, which also visits San Francisco, Berlin, St. Petersburg and Moscow every year. Complementing the selection of New Italian films, the Filmmuseum has programmed from 10 - 14 April a series, titled 'Italian Cinema 1959', of classic films from half a century ago, such as La Dolce Vita and Generale della Rovere. The intent is to celebrate the intense creativity of the Italian cinema that 50 years ago contributed to the greatness of this art."

Checkout the entire program on their website

There is a real danger that I will be hanging around there each and every night. Oh well..
Nicefestival.org

The VU (Vrije Universiteit) is also going to be showing some classic psychological movies and will have a professor there present to explain ! Kickin' of with one of my favorite directors, David Lynch !

31 March 09 - Lost Highway

7 april 2009 - Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

14 april 2009 - Wilde aardbeien

21 april 2009 - Donnie Darko

Thank god there is a professor there because David Lynch's masterpieces are always so hard to grasp.

I'm Definitely going !

Teddy Robin and the Playboys

With that sucky announcement by last.fm the other day I guess it's up to me now to recommend you some great music.

With this post I take you back to the hong-kong 1960ies music scene (yes there was one). I've just discovered these guys. I am like that Hubble telescope. For some reason all the music I discover is from people who are long gone, they have retired or have died and who don't even have a decent wikipedia page written about them! It's my job to make sure that these people are not forgotten.

Here is one song in particular of theirs that I have taking a liking to, I'm thinking of covering it somehow, someday. Perhaps with an organ and some bagpipes on it, don't know , haven't decided yet. Besides, bagpipes are surprisingly expensive.

Teddy Robin and the Playboys - Magic Colours
From the rare album "Love, Peace & Poetry:Asian Psychedelic Music"

Also I would like to experiment with a female vocalist (in a music kind of way...) if I ever decide to cover this one. For some reason I never really liked female singers. Listened to a lot of Aretha Franklin and Nico & The Velvet underground recently, and I can't deny that Janis Joplin kicked ass so maybe I should be more open to it.

last.fm page

Weekend dreaming

This weekend they are going to be starting again. They who ? The Formula one circus! I will not sleep Saturday night because the race starts very early on Sunday morning and I feel to passionate about it to NOT watch it live.
It's on the other side of the planet, that's why I have to get up early. But people ask me; "why do you watch it Daniel ? It's so boring, no one overtakes, no one crashes anymore, no one burns or even gets injured." That may be true but it's still magic to me.

I don't know why my parents did this, but instead of leaving me infront of the tv watching stupidchildrenscartoons they left me infront of the tv with the motorracingchannel constantly on.

As I wrote in my poem on my old dutch blog; When we are young, girls dream about getting married and having kids. Often, their childhood dreams come true. Good for them.
Us guys fantasize about becoming racing drivers, football players, Rock Stars, but our dreams instead hardly ever come true. That's why we are so horribly attached to our tv sets, watching football matches, at night or at work we go to youtube and spend hours watching other guys who are crashing their cars, doing backflips on motorbikes that are on fire and we seemingly endlessly play videogames.

Women seem to think that it's cute that guys can act so childlike. All I see is sadness and un-achieved dreams.

I feel very passionate about some of the stuff I write about on this little blog, especially the political/conspiracy stuff (hence my infuriated rants). But If the establishment ever decides to try to shut me up, please, don't kill me. My ideas are going to live on anyway, and you are not going to shut me up by killing me, my message only becomes more powerful. Instead, give me my own formula one team and you will never hear from me again !
I will forget about poverty, stop wining about ruthless banker families taking over governments, I will eat all the shit they put in our food, I will embrace the end of net neutrality, loss of civil liberties and the stripping away of all our rights, honestly, I will ! If I would be a Formula one driver I wouldn't mind any of those things. I wouldn't even mind being famous, just let me do a couple of laps a year and I'm good!

I'm not joking either. Going trough the pictures of me growing up, I always seem to be around something with wheels.
Here is my facebookfotoalbum, all racing related pictures I found. When as kids we went to the library, because school made us take out one book each week, I would always end up in the small motorracing section while the rest of my class was fighting over comics like WHERE IS WALLY? The teachers would always forgot me and had to come back to pick me up. To this day I know all of the stories about the Formula one world championship in 1958 for example. Later youtube came around and I probably saw every interesting bit of motorracing history on it.

I'm not going to be a world champion anymore, the sad truth is that I realized this when I was about 9 years old so I stopped dreaming a long time ago.

Here I am, 7 years old ? alongside Ayrton Senna's McLaren, it looks hudge. The dream was alive however.

Last.fm Announcement

Yesterday one of my favorite websites announced the following.

Today we’re announcing an upcoming change to the way Last.fm Radio works in some parts of the world. In the United States, United Kingdom and Germany, nothing will change.

In all other countries, listening to Last.fm Radio will soon require a subscription of €3.00 per month. There will be a 30 track free trial, and we hope this will convince people to subscribe and keep listening to the radio. Everything else on Last.fm (scrobbling, recommendations, charts, biographies, events, videos etc.) will remain free in all countries, like it is now.

read more/source

This is so sucky !

How did we ever get in this mess ? Derivatives in a nutshell

One of my favorite songwriters -Noel Gallagher (woah, this is my 3rd oasis related post this year!) - has a blog and yesterday he wrote: ...Just done a round of interviews in which I was asked to explain what I thought has gone wrong with the global economy!! Apart from the fact that the global conspiracy theorists have seemingly been right all along, we managed to trace back the actual moment the storms clouds started to gather to when Franz Ferdinand won the Mercury Muzak Prize. THINK ABOUT IT... (Noel's 'Tales From The Middle Of Nowhere' 20/03/09 )

Thanks for the credit Noel ! But why was it so easy for scruffy little conspiracy theorists (somewhat like me) to figure this scheme out ? Well, here it goes, my first attempt to describe to you part of the current economic crisis in a nutshell..

Derivatives
The proprietor of a bar decides - in order to increase sales- to allow loyal customers - most of whom are unemployed alcoholics - to drink now but pay later. He keeps track of the drinks consumed, thereby granting the customers loans.

The word gets around about this drink-now-pay-later-marketing-strategy and as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into the bar and soon it has the largest sale volume for any bar in the city.

By providing the customers freedom from immediate payment, there is no resistance when he substantially increases the prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. The sales increase massively.

A young (and perhaps naive) vice-president at the local bank recognizes these customer debts as valuable future assets and increases the borrowing limit for the bar. He sees no reason for concern since he has the debts of the alcoholics as collateral. At the banks corporate headquarters, expert traders transform these customer loans into bonds.

These securities are then traded on securities markets worldwide. Naive investors don’t really understand the securities, being sold to them as AAA secured bonds they are really the debts of unemployed alcoholics. Who cares ? Their prices continuously climb, and the securities become the top-selling items for some of the nations leading brokerage houses.

One day, although the bond prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the bank (subsequently fired due to his negativity), decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at the bar. The bar proprietor demands payment from the alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Therefore, the bar owner cannot fulfill his loan obligations and claims bankruptcy. The bonds drop in price, massively.

The decreased bond asset value destroys the banks liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans. The suppliers of the bar, having granted generous payment extensions and having invested in the securities are faced with writing off her debt and losing over 80% on the bonds.. The wine supplier claims bankruptcy, the beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 50 workers. The bank and brokerage houses are saved by the Government following dramatic round-the-clock negotiations by leaders from several political parties. The funds required for this bailout are obtained by a tax levied on employed middle-class non-drinkers.

The first casualty of war is innocence

Rashid is 11 years old, but he has grown up a lot since his country was invaded illegally six years ago.

I read up on some articles about the war before posting and it fueled my anger and rage towards the whole operation again. Because today is the 6th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war.
Fortunately I managed to find a picture with a cool story behind it in the midst of all the photographs of carnage.

Chief Master Sgt. John Gebhardt cradles a young Iraqi girl as they both sleep in the hospital. The girl's entire family was executed by insurgents. The killers shot her in the head but she survived. The girl received treatment at the U.S. military hospital in Balad, but cries often. According to nurses at the facility, Chief Gebhardt is the only one who can calm down the girl, so he holds her at night while they both sleep in a chair.
ahhh..

Pretty green

Hilarious.

The world's most exciting front man is ready to give the world of fashion a rework. Liam Gallagher of Brit rock legend's Oasis announced that he is set to launch a clothing line of his own called Pretty Green and proclaims:"I'm not gonna be putting anything out unless I'd wear it... ".

Preview of Liam Gallagher's mens clothing line

Pretty Green is an up-front, straight talking, classic clothing range owned, founded and designed by Liam Gallagher. The clothing range, which is entirely 'limited edition', will include classic designs across footwear, denim, jackets, trench coats, parkas, t-shirts, knitwear, hats, scarves and accessories; all subject to Liam's final approval.

Not only will Liam's company offer cool new clothing but his website Prettygreen.com will also run wicked competitions for members around launch time. According to site spokes person Denise, fans can submit questions ,which if picked, Liam will answer by video...and you can comment on his blog too!

here is Liam answering a question from a fan(?) behind a computer

Liam will also be twittering when he returns to touring giving his brother Noel a run for his money. The older Gallagher brothers' "Tales from the middle of Nowhere" which is a humorous tour diary Noel writes via his cell phone recently won best Band Blog at the Shockwave NME Awards.

Money, what does it look like ?

A billion dollars...

A hundred billion dollars...

Eight hundred billion dollars...

One TRILLION dollars...

We are talking and writing a lot about money lately, but it seems that talking about these enormous sums of money that they loose their value and that we lose track of what it all means. To put things into perspective here is what a lot of money looks like. Central banks are starting to print shitloads of money again through fractional reserve banking and Hyperinflation might be just around the corner, So this is the perfect time to introduce you to money.

We'll start with a $100 dollar bill. Currently the largest U.S. denomination in general circulation. Almost everyone has seen them, slightly fewer have owned them. Guaranteed to make friends wherever they go.

A packet of one hundred $100 bills is less than 1/2" thick and contains $10,000. Fits in your pocket easily and is more than enough for week or two of shamefully decadent fun.

Believe it or not, this next little pile is $1 million dollars (100 packets of $10,000). You could stuff that into a grocery bag and walk around with it.

While a measly $1 million looked a little unimpressive, $100 million is a little more respectable. It fits neatly on a standard pallet...

And $1 BILLION dollars... now we're really getting somewhere...

Next we'll look at ONE TRILLION dollars. This is that number we've been hearing so much about. What is a trillion dollars? Well, it's a million million. It's a thousand billion. It's a one followed by 12 zeros.

Ladies and gentlemen... I give you $1 trillion dollars...

(notice those pallets are double stacked.)

So the next time you hear someone toss around the phrase "trillion dollars"... that's what they're talking about.

Ding dong and knock knock jokes

I love the office, so I cut up their latest episode (s5e17 - the gold ticket) and made a small clip filled with knock knock and ding dong jokes. Hope you like it !

To see all of the office episodes for free online go to officeepisodesonline.com

Inside Kubrick's cube (the river of blood)

Stanley Kubrick. Recently I read in the papers that this hero of mine died 10 years ago. Unfortunately there was no time to blog about him on the day itself but here is my tribute to him anyway. This post is useless if you have never seen a Kubrick film (shame on you..).

I was reminded to write about him because today I came across this video, it's an analysis on a particular part of his movie The Shining. I have never understood this particular scene. I am talking about the river of blood scene. Knowing Kubrick there has got to be some meaning behind that single shot. But what is it ? Apparently it took Kubrick DAYS/WEEKS to film this single shot to meet his exact specifications. Ludacris right ? That's Kubrick for ya, a real artist of cinema if you ask me. Stanley Kubrick was a master of subliminal encoding and, as always, he's crammed enough detail into this one shot to justify a video analysis in itself. If we want to understand the Shining to its fullest we need to get to grips with the meaning of this shot.


However, I'm still not convinced. But it definitely means something and its worth to give this shot some thought.

The guy who spends all of his time doing these analysis is Rob Ager (check out his website).
Very interesting analysis
2001: A space odyssee - part 1 - part 2
A clockwork orange - part 1 - part 2 - part 3
The Shining - part 1 - part 2 - part 3
Eyes wide shut - part 1 - part 2 - part 3

Rob Ager also analysed other movies, check out his youtube account or his website - http://www.collativelearning.com/ and unveil Kubrick's cube !

I guess it's clear, I'm a big fan

Wally Wallington's Stonehenge

Stonehenge. An amazing and historic structure, but how was it built ? Some say aliens did it. Others say it was Michael Jordan together with Shaquil O'Neil who traveled back in time to put those enormous rocks there.

Wally Wallington is recreating stonehenge. And he is doing it all by himself without the use of modern equipment !



you go Wally !

Anthrax attacks, an inside job ?

The History channel says yes. And normally they do only hitpieces on conspiracies.

Watch their whole documentary below
History Channel Conspiracies: Anthrax Attacks part 1 of 4

So history channel believes it. Well, i'm sorry but so do I ! Why was the entire whitehouse staff put on CIPRO (a medicine for anthrax) weeks before the 9-11 attacks happened ?
Why did mostly opposers and enemies (journalists, politicians) of the Bush administration receive those letters ?
That's what I want to know.

Ask questions, demand answers.

Quote of the day

This quote popped into my head today, it is a quote from years ago but every time I read it it amazes me, the nerve !

“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the light of publicity during those years. But now the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supra-national sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”
-David Rockefeller in his autobiography

Apparently that's just how the elite rolls with it. Basically saying; fuck you slaves !

No excuses

Get of your ass and do something today !

Cruel fuel

Biofuel was introduced in Europe to halt co2 emissions by not burning anymore fossil fuels. This seemed like the right solution after we all saw "an inconvenient truth" by Al Gore and we were all so convinced and determined to fight climate change.

Other countries started to use Biofuel before we did in Europe but not because they wanted to do something about their climate, but because they wanted to decrease dependency on foreign oil producers. For example in Brazil fuel for years contained over 60% of Biofuel when you filled your car up. The European commission thought it was a good idea to order that all regular fuels within the European Union contained at least 2% Biofuel, as an effort to fight climate change.
THIS IS CRUEL.

Allow me to elaborate on that.

What do you need to produce a Biofuel ? A bit of land which you would normally use for the production of food. But when you decide not produce food is means that there will be less of it.
Basic economics: When supply falls prices rise.

Guess what, not everyone in the world can afford a change in food price! People were already starving on a massive scale before and with prices rising these people are eating less and less and this will end up killing a whole bunch of people.. D'you remember when it was a shame that a few years ago we produced enough food for anyone on this planet and what a shame it was that we didn't share it properly? In those days we were just fucking the poor populations of the world. Nowadays we are rapting and killing them through our policies, I'd like to talk about that.

The European commision mad it the law, and it's for our climate isn't it ? Well, contrary to what you might believe, the production of biofuels actually harms our supposed fight against co2. The demand for Biofuels has gone up because of this law, so people started cutting down forests so they would have more land to produce Biofuel on ! Forests are the only thing in the world that actually need co2.

And it isn't even an answer to our peakk-oil problems! If you would use all of the land on this planet (including impossible agricultural terrains like the Sahara desert) and you would use all that to produce Biofuel you would only end up with roughly 30% of the fuel needed to run the world. And that's not enough !

This shouldn't be news to you as there have been numerous articles on the subject. But every now and again I still hear someone going on about how great biofuels are. Thanks to this new law you don't just "hurt the environment" when you are filling up your car and going for a ride. Now you are also murdering starving Africans. You and I. We have murdered. We are so fucked up as a species.