Everyday Tragedies

All the people who never achieve their life dreams. The single mothers working double time to give their kids shit they never had. The children of Iraq lost in the sand. Palestinian kids stuck in the ghetto. The people on their deathbeds who regret their lives. All the soldiers that never got to go back home. The Bangladeshi children who choose between food (a job) and education. The surviving half of a loving, happy old couple. Patients that received HIV from a blood transfusion. Victims of the Darfur Genocide. All the Africans chained to a sunken slave ship in the bottom of the Atlantic. Everyone killed by drunk drivers. Everyone stuck in the cycle of poverty. All the oppressed victims of the Imperialism that exists all over the world. All the people who didn't get up after falling down. The innocent who are struck down. Every refugee ever who had to leave everything behind. School children who are gunned down. People who work hard their whole life and are still poor. The babies born addicted to heroine. Women trapped in an abusive relationship. People who lose everything in "natural" disasters. The oppressed. The rich folks who realize how little all their money matters. American Indians walking on the Trail of Tears. The starving in Cambodia. The people who spend their lives in darkness. Parents who have to bury a child.

The Uncultured Project

Along the same lines of my "Africa" post, yesterday I stumbled across "The Uncultured Project". Shawn Ahmed is a Notre Dame grad who was influenced by Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, an author and speaker, who spoke at Notre Dame on September 14, 2006. One of Sach's books is titled The End of Poverty.

The speech along with the book inspired Shawn Ahmed to make a difference. He went to Bangladesh and worked and spoke with many of the poorest villagers. He brought with him many water purification tools and mosquito nets, in order to help flood victims. The people he interviews are quite remarkable, to say the least. But I don't need to tell you, check it out for yourself.

YouTube http://youtube.com/user/UnculturedProject

Blog http://uncultured.com/

(I don't know if there's some protocol for linking on blogs, but it's just me giving props to Shawn for his work)

I find Shawn inspiring and hope to do some similar work in the near future.
Before I saw "The Uncultured Project", I had began making plans to go to South America. Perhaps it's a sign?

The Prophecy - Immortal Technique

I calculate planet alignment like Mayan astronomy
Discovering atrocities worst than Aristotle
Subjecting children to sodomy
Your theory of the galaxy is primitive like Ptolemy
The truth about the universe stuck up like Aztec pottery
Unpredictable results like experimental psychology
I stomp the streets with emcee's beneath my feet in colonies
But presentation and spirit revolve around autonomy
Searching for monogamy
And cutting fake bitches out of my mind like a lobotomy
So obviously I'm not gonna be here to play games
Walked the top of the world and leave the arctic circle in flames
Battle the beast and false prophet predicted in the King James
I give a fuck about your emcee name I don't admire you
Only by dental records will you be identifiable
Cause the future is not reliable
Remember when rap was not economically viable
Comparable to what motherfuckers think of me
I might be nobody but wait till I'm together like a symphony
Resounding sound that will continue infinitely
Angel of death punishing all those who live in infamy
And shine so far away from you
You'll never get a glimpse of me
Attempts to extinguish me don't even bother me none
Like retarded kids throwing ice cubes at the sun
A victory against Immortal Technique will never be done
Just degrees of losing it every second your adding one
Some niggas dream of pushing kilos but I drop tons
With more facts and formulas and philosophical logic
Then a basement full of scientists puffing on chronic
Dip the mic in potassium cyanide and liquid bubonic
And use it as a sonic one to find the spawn of the demonic
Screaming like onyx is of absolutely no consequence
The poison is dense enough to clog up your arteries
Mercy is not a part of me
I cause you bodily injury permanently be simply verbally murdering me
Is inconceivable cause of the unbelievable evil injected inside
The blood stream of my people
And redemption is not located under a church steeple
The feeble and the meek in soul just like the technique
Will inherit the earth, But the earth will be weak
Mother earth in her decrepit terminal illness physique
The year three thousand is bleak no happily ever after
Just death following the Forth Reich disaster, a legacy of bastards
With plastic explosives your futures been eroded
Cause you forgot that when your free it's multiplied indefinitely
By the struggle that be the struggle I see
To socialistically united the third world countries
Expose hypocrisy in Americas democracy
Sloppily obsessed with stopping me cause I speak prophecy
Trample and dismantle your capitalist philosophy
The same way I stomp the conquering rap monopoly
And I'm not a fucking prophet
But that's the fucking prophecy

YouTube

The video on YouTube with the most views of all time is called "Evolution of Dance". It was viewed 77,524,468 times as of March 8th 2008. The video is 6:00 long, exactly. The cumulative time spent by YouTubers watching "Evolution of Dance" is 885 years.

Just putting things in perspective.


-Adam

Africa

It seems like in the past two weeks the topic of Africa has come up just about every other day. In Time Magazine last week, in a few documentaries I watched and in my wandering about on the internet, I found a wealth of information on one of the less popular continents.

All around we hear stories about the suffering in places like Darfur and Rwanda, and the epidemics spread across the continent. It seems that Africa is in a strange place, unlike developing countries and yet a blind eye seems to be cast upon the country by the so-called "first worlders". Not to mention the civil unrest and potential for war everywhere south of the Sahara.

It struck me as odd when I learned the population of Africa - over three times the population of the US. Almost a billion people living in such vastly different conditions and environments. It is striking to think that for every one person in the US there are three African counterparts. It pains me to see the images on the internet of these places. We have time, we have resources, we have money... so why do we allow this type of tragedy to exist?

Light Pirate

Lately I've been overcome with urges to turn off lights. Sometimes when I don't have anything better to do I just walk around buildings and turn off all the unused lights (you'd be surprised how many there are). Anyways, an idea occurred to me just the other day as I was making my rounds. I remember a professor I had in a design class talked about making people more aware of the energy they use (or waste). His idea was some kind of resistance in the switch so it would be harder to flip the longer the light was left on. That way, when someone forgets to turn off a light, they are reminded of it when they finally turn it off. The main problem with the system as it exists today is our energy is just too cheap. This is indicated by the fact that we use SO much of it when we could easily cut our use in half and feel almost no impact on our standard of living.
During the day people should turn off the lights and open the blinds! This takes no electricity, almost no effort, and the natural light is much more pleasant to work/be in.
If our energy cost was higher (as to reflect the damage to the environment (which is priceless) ) it would increase people's awareness of how much they actually use (although, as a side note, I'm not proposing we make energy unfordable for the poor, rather we possibly have a per capita energy amount that you can get for today's price, and then beyond that the price increases (as to eliminate frivolous usage) ). Same goes for water; it's WAY too cheap. Same, needless to say, for fossil fuels. Even if it didn't slow the massive consumption of all of these things (which economics dictates it WOULD), it would at least give increased profits, profits which could be used to find cleaner, cheaper and better energy technologies.

Anyways....

The idea I had is this:
What if there was a company who paid people to turn off lights. It would be great, people would turn off lights wherever they went - it would be like finding money on the ground (but you don't have to bend over to get it). The money would come from the people who left the light on but weren't using it. Sooooo as opposed to the energy companies getting the money, it would go to the do-gooder who turned off the unused lights.
Now obviously this type of system will never be implemented (for obvious reasons) but hey, it sure is something to think about. I just wish people understood that we pay a lot more for our energy than that little figure you see at the bottom of your monthly bill.

Copenhagen and Oslo

Ok, so on Friday I biked into Copenhagen to go to the airport (by the way, I would not recommend anyone bike to an airport unless it's necessary...) and on the way I rode all around the city looking at Copenhagen in daylight (which I'd never seen before). It turned out to have a lot of really cool small shops and things not the typical franchise, chain branded stores I'm used to in the states.
I read a lot about "Second hand Copenhagen" which is a group of these shops that specialize in used stuff (clothes mostly, but also furniture). Again, these shops were a lot different than the second hand stores I'm used to. In the states, second hand shops (Goodwill, The Salvation Army etc.) receive donations and then sell them at low prices and use the money to fund poorer areas (at least I think). The idea behind this is that it will benefit the lower class in more than one way: they benefit from the profits of the stores and they have affordable clothes available to buy. In Copenhagen, however, second hand boutiques such as Kobenhavn K, KK Vintage, The Second Way, and Fiske are quite expensive indeed. In fact, these stores were comparable to if not more expensive than stores selling new clothes.
While the clothes were out of my price range (Tee shirts from 100DKK to 300DKK (20USD to 60 USD), I had a lot of fun looking at them. There were a lot of retro stores selling some really cool tees, jackets and sun glasses and one store with all vintage shoes. Very cool.
I really feel the second hand idea and I guess this works so well in Denmark because of the country's enormous wealth. Which is too bad for me (who wanted to buy some cool new (or rather "used") clothes), but I still got some cool pictures.
So after 5 hours of exploring Copenhagen, I headed south to try and find the airport. Annnnnnd that turned out to be quite a task. Once I found the airport (took like an hour), I tried to find an entrance that wasn't a freeway or an underground metro (took another hour). But all was well, and I found a way and everything worked out alright and I got on a plane and headed to Oslo (in Norway) for some snowboarding. Quite awesome, but two things were not so good. First, I thought Denmark was expensive, but sadly Norway is a fair amount more expensive. And secondly, I like broke my wrist snowboarding, so I'm on my way now to the Doctor to get it checked out =\\\. All in all though it was a really good weekend.