Louis Theroux and the Ultra Zionists

Another great documentary on Jewish illegal settlement of the West Bank in Palestine. This time it’s the loveable Louis Theroux who is visiting settlements and zionist tours, as well as Palestinians who protest or fight for their land. Click on the photo above to go to the vimeo link.

If you haven’t ever check out any Louis Theroux docs, I would highly recommend you do so. As well, if you have not yet had the chance of watching Five Broken Cameras, one of the documentaries nominated for an Oscar this year, please do yourself a favour and watch it as soon as you can, and with friends. Youtube has it for $4.99 or something. The Louis doc actually has him visiting Bil’in, but from the Jewish side. Pretty surreal to have seen it only from the Palestinian side in Five Broken Cameras, and then from the other side in this doc. There’s a funny moment (to me) near the end, where the one zionist points out that Louis is an atheist. Louis says “[yes], it’s very comforting… it’s very comforting to know there’s no one up there looking after me” which is a very tongue in cheek response. It’s at 53mins. The guy responds “you think you came from a monkey?” Zionism and religious fanaticism scare me. I guess what scares me most is such strong belief in dogma… Later, Louis is talking to the one real estate guy (I think he was a real estate agent-type person) and says “you see the enmity between the Arabs and Jews as being in some ways Biblically decreed?” to which the man agrees. Louis asks if he does not believe that he is creating this hostility, or exacerbating it, in order to agree with the literature. The man says “as you pointed out, it exists no matter what. There’s something intrinsic. We’re not creating anything because it exists there,” and Louis says “Or that the literature is wrong.” It’s scary that this man can’t think this way…

Jewish Settlement of Palestine with VICE Magazine

Another VICE video, about the Jewish occupation of Palestine:

Suicide in Modern Japan with VICE Magazine

I’ve been watching lots of interesting VICE youtube videos recently, including North Korean work camps in the middle of nowhere in Russia, Fashion week and sweat shops in Thailand, and the Mexican drug cartel. Some of them are pretty long, but the one below is only ~20mins and is about this forest at the base of Mt Fuji in Japan that a lot of people choose to end their lives in every year:

North Korea’s Concentration Camps and Google Earth

The people over at One Free Korea have a constantly updated section of their website devoted to identifying North Korea’s largest concentration camps:

The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea estimates that North Korea holds approximately 200,000 people in its system of concentration and detention camps, and that 400,000 people have died in these camps from torture, starvation, disease, and execution. These reports, in the context of estimates that North Korea has allowed between 600,000 and 2,500,000 of its people to starve to death while its government squandered the nation’s resources on weapons and luxuries for its ruling elite, suggest that North Korea’s oppression and politically targeted starvation of its people collectively constitute the world’s greatest ongoing atrocity, and almost certainly the most catastrophic anywhere on earth since the end of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979.

They go on to define the various kinds of concentration camps and describe the ones they have been able to identify on Google Earth.

Here’s a particularly chilling fact: “Most of the prisoners are incarcerated for political offenses. Pursuant to Kim Jong Il’s guidance to “root out class enemies for three generations,” family members of persons accused of political crimes are also sent to concentration camps or labor camps.”

Another quote:

Despite reports of the use of an experimental gas chamber and experimentation on human subjects at Camp 22, there is no evidence that the camps engage in industrial-scale extermination operations such as those at Auschwitz. What we know of the camps’ brutal conditions suggest that they are comparable to those in the Nazi camps at Mauthausen and Buchenwald, which largely killed through a combination of exhaustion, disease, starvation, and arbitrary brutality.

I find it interesting that this kind of thing was only discovered throught something like Google earth by an ‘everyday citizen’…although, I think his background is as a former CIA agent…

Be sure to check these out as well: Camp 22 and Defining Genocide Down

Jamie Stewart from Xiu Xiu Recalls His Father’s Suicide

I was visiting the Xiu Xiu website, since every now and then Jamie Stewart will write something of interest: either dramatic life stuff, or fun silliness, and came upon a really intense post about his father’s suicide which occurred 10 years earlier. Here it is in full:

Sustainable, Self-Sufficient, Off-the-Grid Houses: Earthsip Biotecture and Mike Reynolds

I talked about this in my last post, about Mike Reynolds the ‘Garbage Warrior’. He builds houses that are essentially made of garbage (about 45%), relies largely on the sun for heating (and dirt-filled tire walls to keep in heat), grows plants inside and outside for food, catches rainwater and recycles the water used through grey water recycling and plant purification. I want one of these house so bad!

And you can watch the full documentary Garbage Warrior about Mike here:

Vegetarianism, Anarcho-Primitivism, Permaculture, Sustainability, and Ted Kaczynski

As you can probably tell from the title, this post is going to be a clusterfuck.

I don’t know where to start, so I’ll just talk about a book I’m currently reading, that got me back on some of these ideas I’ve been introduced to before, and go from there. The book is titled The Vegetarianism Myth by Lierre Keith. You can read the first chapter from her website here.

This book is chock full of both good arguments, and full out bat-shit nonsense. The main point of the book is that a vegetarian diet is unsustainable and unhealthy (at least for veganism), and that if you really want to save the world and so on, we should switch to an anarcho-primitivist style of living: either by going back to hunter-gatherer lifestyles, or using permaculture type farming. I believe (although she hasn’t used the term yet) that this type of diet is similar to the the paleo diet.

The part that I like about this book is in its discussion of sustainability and the problems with mono-crop agriculture, and the benefits of permaculture farming. Within that discussion, I do see her points that mono-crop agriculture is terrible for the environment (they require lots of resources and essentially deplete the soil of its nutrients but don’t put them back in (I first learned about this from Jared Diamond’s book Collapse)), and that a permaculture type farming, including raising and killing animals for food and being part of the whole farm ecosystem, is something that can be within the ethical domain of treating animals humanely. I’m not sure about the details of how to feed the world based on permaculture farming, but that could potentially be answered through urban/city/green design and agriculture, and by reducing (not eliminating) meat consumption (which requires so much grain and water and so on). [for a really cool look at this kind of idea, see Garbage Warrior (Mike Reynolds). Trailer:

]