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Calling the Arctic

During my occasional working days here in Brussels, I have lots of time on busses and trains to think about how much I miss my bike and the topics of my next podcasts.

For the next few months I will be frequently touching upon the topic of the Arctic and the race to exploit its resources, re-claim property rights, and the ongoing accelerating process of global warming effecting the region (and in turn, the world).

While mainstream media has dedicated the occasional article on this topic, they focus mostly on the horserace or “competition” between Russia, Canada, US, and Denmark (no mentions of Norway lately). Some tacit attention is given to the political conflict and the use of “submarines” by Russia to plant an underground flag or something to that effect.

What lacks is the real details that effect people’s lives. The information regarding exactly what these nations are doing and plan to do in the name of political power, economics, and what some call progress. They leave out the communities that live in and around the arctic, how they are being effected by all these activities. Rising sea level, melting of the ice caps, increased ship traffic.. these things all come with a price. And then take that to a global level, because the arctic is such an important place for everyone that exists on this planet.. and our collective future.

Some scientific magazines and organizations are indeed dedicating time and energy to bring this information to the public. But this still leaves a huge segment of the global population in the dark, those who continue to look to the media giants for knowledge about the world around them, including the activity of their government in far off places. So long as this disfunctional information relationship continues, it remains much too easy for the powerful governments to mount an aggressive campaign to pick apart the arctic no matter what the cost.

As a podcaster, journalist, and concerned world citizen, these next few months will be dedicated to more in-depth research on the arctic crisis. More interviews with people living and breathing the situation, and with the desire to share their knowledge and experiences with a curious and concerned audience.

KGB Baltic Documents

A new project came to my attention this week via global voices: The KGB Baltic document project. Decades and decades of secret KGB records and documents about activity in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.

Just glancing through the list of documents, translated to English, there are titles like:

about the work done to expose Lithuanian and other bourgeois nationalists through the broadcast and print media.
about the constant attention which should be paid to known writers of anti-Soviet documents written anonymously, and to those who published and distributed them.

plan of the main KGB agency and operative measures on how to strengthen the KGB’s fight against ideological sabotage aimed at the country’s artists

Amazing to see the types of surveillance this secret and wide reaching agency was involved in. Just reading through these kinds of headlines, one might think to oneself “what a strange time that was”.

Yet what if we could get our hands on CIA and FBI documents from the last 2 to 4 years? Reading through info of how agents try to disrupt peace marches, or infiltrate groups organizing against the war. Artists and community leaders that are, as we speak, monitored and tracked.. in the name of “national security.”

For now Ill keep reading through the KGB documents and try not to see the parallels.

bmtv56 New Semester, New Message for Brooklyn C

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Some Images from Heidelberg

Arrived from VlogEurope in desperate need of sleep. So tomorrow will be back to business, today I leave you with 3 photos from Heidelberg.

Greetings from VlogEurope2007

Yes it is that time again.. here I sit as Gabe and Gabe are speaking in the final talk-session of VlogEurope 2007. This year we’re here in Heidelberg, Germany, an extremely picturesque city south of Frankfurt. The group this year is the smallest its ever been since the first conference back in Amsterdam 2005. At the same time, we still manage to have lots of old friends meeting here to talk about this tool, this art, the vehicle that we believe so strongly in — video blogging.

If you wish to watch the live feed, it is probably too late, but the archived conference can be seen here. If you do watch you’ll see me speaking here and there, including a segment where I introduce and break down Euronews’s NO COMMENT video podcast. (pause as the panel discussion asks me a question)

Beyond the conference, the one thing I notice over and over again in Heidelberg is the presence of the American military. As I strolled through the old section of town, an amazingly beautiful oldfashioned city scape, I heard loud shouting.. at many points.. the familiar sounds of two booming American voices threatening each other. As I turned the corner there before me are two amazingly huge and muscular men, drunkenly yelling at each other while a barefoot girl lay half passed out on the ground. I kept walking due to my fear of muscular drunk people, only to pass the entrances of various flashy bars and night clubs.. again the familiar accents.

My wonderful hostess (thanks hospitality club) whom I’ve never met before but we’ve become fast friends, told me that there are various US military bases in the region.. including an important hospital nearby. For them its a completely normal thing and I found it fascinating as I strolled in the daytime, to see how they are in fact regular fixtures in the backdrop of daily life here. Come to think of it, I’m typing this from the great JoelArt’s house, he too has told me tons about the world of US military employees in Germany.

I bring it up because it is a fascinating world. It is also one that I’m not sure I like. To put it another way, it makes me uncomfortable as an American and as a European that US troops have a permanent prescence anywhere.. that is unless they’re there to actually help people and improve the quality of life.

Anyway, fireworks are starting here at the VLogEurope07 party, yes, it is a special night here in Heidelberg. (explosion… off I go to look out over the river)

Silence On Executions

Part of having a podcast/vlog/blog about under reported issues and global concerns, means that the good people around the world send me emails and comments asking that I look into certain issues. It is nothing short of an honor that people look to me for any such work, in many ways saying – I know you’d be good at looking into this – it is quite flattering. When it isn’t overwhelming.

With the most recent case of yet another human on death row in the United States for questionable reasons due to a questionable case, I received emails from concerned world citizens asking me to please talk about the case. Yet Again. Unfortunately with the United States and the state of Texas as they are at present, this seems to happen every few months. It becomes hard to count on both hands how many people were executed who had been convicted on very flimsy evidence and a very flawed case.

Yet even after receiving these emails I didn’t do much. And I wanted to explain that a bit:
I didn’t feel compelled to write much of anything because I didn’t feel the outrage. Rather I feel this stronger sense of routine and acceptance, like somehow I’ve mentally come to accept the truth – that various states in the US routinely murder the wrongly convicted, children, and the mentally disabled. It is their policy, it is their culture, it is their system, and somewhere along the way this became less of an outrage and more of a terrible despicable truth.

Likewise the objective to write about it on the internet in order to mobilize citizens to push the government to stop this practice, also stopped seeming like a productive idea. Despite all the blog posts and all the commenting and everything many concerned people do on the internet in the quest to inform and motivate the public, the government continues to kill, unphased by the benign buzzing we do in this online world. Beyond that, while a small minority on the internet become concerned and take action to oppose these murders, the majority are using the internet for watching pop music videos and chatting to their friends about last night, utterly indifferent to whomever is being wrongly killed in their name.

There are many issues I feel strongly about that I feel deserve more attention and action. The death penalty, while always one of them, has more strongly become routine – a cold shameful reality revealing the truth about the society that allows it to continue. Writing about it, while important, has proven ineffective and simply put – not enough.

PS- Yes as I write this the news came out that Foster will not be killed. An example contrary to what I wrote? PErhaps.. but how many more innocent people will still have to die?