Disaster Fund Disparity

It’s a theme that i revisit regularly, it seems; disparity in how the first world looks at the third world and the tragedies related. I’m sure for lots of the big newspapers and conversations round the watercooler, few are still talking about the incredibly devastating earthquake in Kashmir. But I’m still watching, and I’m still angry at the embarassing and disrespectful reaction for many of the powerful forces in the international community.

Today I read the UN’s statement that out of the 550 million $ they need to get through the coming months of relief work, they’ve only received 20%! 20%! As a comparison, the almost cliché call for hurricane relief in the US gulf coast has generated 1 billion $! 1 billion!

It’s not my preferred hobby to sit around comparing disasters and death, but 80,000 people died in Kashmir. 800,000 are displaced and without shelter. Yet they receive not even 1/4 of the amount of aid. That’s shameful, unjust, and I’d venture to say it’s also racist.

bicyclemark78: Children of the Stones; Refugees in the West Bank

An interview with an excellent photojournalist, social scholar, and friend of mine who recently returned from working in the West Bank, where he interviewed children and their families about the culture and practice of throwing stones at soldiers and tanks.

AudioCommunique #78(mp3)
29min+, 80kbps, 17Mb+

Discussed:
Why he decided to go to refugee camps in Palestine
How children explained their role in Palestinian society
What their parents said about this practice
The children’s vision and hope for the future
Stratos’s Photo Website

Song in this show:
Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros – Minstrel Boy

Simply Exhausted

Instead of blabbing about how tired I am and speaking about Haloween in Amsterdam and frisbee. I’ll simply share images of my day. We lost all our matches, my excuse is I belong playing outside amongst the dirt and wind. Sniff sniff… I smell.

MC throws

Game Time

group shot.

Hmm... drunky?

Step Two:

After awhile it becomes boring to just echo what all the other follow-the-leader bloggers are yappin about. So go somewhere else to read about how little scooter is done for. And this is certainly not nuff, I want so heads to roll next week as well please.

What they really should fire/disband is the whole CIA. It is a pathetic agency. I repeat PATHETIC. Intelligence? They don’t seem to have a clue about the world in the last few decades. They don’t know who is developing nuclear weapons or who is eating yellow cake or where attacks are going to be launched or anything. They are useless. And worst of all, they have a BLACK BUDGET. Meaning they can spend as much as they dam well please and no one ever gets to know about it. I’m betting majority of the CIA is on vacation the whole year round faking they’re investigating something. Yeah, get me a plane ticket, I need to go investigate fine wine and beautiful people on the Fiji islands. It’s top secret, so don’t tell any regular citizens.

When you add to that, the fact that they’ve single handedly toppled governments and assasinated elected leaders around the world, I’m thinking they have the shittiest record of any so-called intelligence agency in the history of the world.

The firing of scooters and harry it’s is very cute and loads of fun. But really, this is a drop in the bucket and I demand they cut to the chase and disband the group of thugs that have helped to create a rediculously violent world filled with half-assed information (like this blog). FIRE THE CIA! HOORAY.

Podcast after I’ve returned home victorious tomorrow as my indoor frisbee team the “A’dam and Eve’s” takes on the BFrisbee2’s and other wakka-wakka named teams in Nijmegen tomorrow… err… later today.

Step One:

Let the official collapse begin. Harry It is done. Rejoice all ye rational human beings.

Bicyclemark Launches Fatwah Against Temp Agencies

That’s right. Read the title. Circumstances in my own life and all over the world have left me with little choice. Bicyclemark hereby declares a personal nonviolentFatwah against Temp Agencies around the world.

They started it. With their shitty benefits, fake smiles, and insulting -nee – degrading salaries. With their staff of young good looking hipsters and promises of pie-in-the-sky, temporary employment agencies are destroying quality of life worldwide, with a smile and a cool soundtrack in the background. And the blame doesn’t merely lie with them. Mais non! They have accomplices: businesses, organizations, institutions that contract them! use their slave labor as a shortcut in the realm of paperwork and that pesky process of “hiring workers.” And the culprit list continues; the governments – who should have outlawed these evil entities from the get-go.

And so it has come to this. My Fatwah. Hear me, Temp Agencies everywhere, take note — I AM YOUR ENEMY. Wherever I go, whatever I do, I will nonviolently and perhaps passively work to make you miserable. How, you might ask? I’ve got some ideas. Smear campaign on my blog, for starters. Incriminating photos of your employees and directors sitting at their hip I-Macs while electronically stealing money from the average ex-student. Bags of dog poo, perhaps sometimes burning, left at your door. Or maybe I should recruit young punk-rockers to borrow a page from the fur movement and throw red paint on your post-modern glass facade. Another idea running around in my head is to hire homeless people to sit outside your doors with signs reading “former temp” and “temp agencies hurt baby jesus”. Oh yes.. lemme write that one down somewhere besides this blog.

In closing, you’re in big trouble you son of a bitch temp agencies. Whether you’re in Europe, North America or the friggin Galapogos Islands, my wrath knoweth no hemispheric limits.