Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
theKed
theKed's Journal
theKed's Journal
October 24, 2013
Russell Brand on Revolution [New Statesman Magazine]
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/10/russell-brand-on-revolutionLike most of the superficially decent things I do in life, my motivation was to impress women more than to aid the suffering. A couple of days in Africa, I thought, and a lifetime cashing in on pics of me with thin babies, speculate to accumulate, I assured my anxious inner womaniser.
After visiting the slums of Kibera, where a city built from mud and run on fear festers on the suburbs of Nairobi, I was sufficiently schooled by Live Aid and Michael Buerk to maintain an emotional distance. It was only when our crew visited a nearby rubbish dump that the comforting buoyancy of visual clichés rinsed away by the deluge of a previously inconceivable reality. This rubbish dump was not like some tip off the M25 where you might dump a fridge freezer or a smashed-in mattress. This was a nation made of waste with no end in sight. Domestic waste, medical waste, industrial waste formed their own perverse geography. Stinking rivers sluiced through banks of putrid trash, mountains, valleys, peaks and troughs all formed from discarded filth. An ecology based on our indifference and ignorance in the cradle of civilisation where our species is said to have originated. Here amid the pestilence I saw Armageddon. Here the end of the world is not a prophecy but a condition. A demented herd chewed polystyrene cud. Sows fed their piglets in the bilge. Gloomy shadows split the sun as marabou storks, five foot in span with ragged labial throats, swooped down. My mate Nik said he had to revise his vision of hell to include what hed seen. Here and there, picking through this unending slander, children foraged for bottle tops, which had some value, where all is worthless.
...
To have such suffering adjacent to such excess is akin to marvelling at an incomparable beauty, whose face is the radiant epitome of celestial symmetry, and ignoring, half a yard lower down, her abdomen, cancerous, weeping and carbuncled. Keep looking at the face, put a handbag over those tumours. Strike a pose. Come on, Vogue.
After visiting the slums of Kibera, where a city built from mud and run on fear festers on the suburbs of Nairobi, I was sufficiently schooled by Live Aid and Michael Buerk to maintain an emotional distance. It was only when our crew visited a nearby rubbish dump that the comforting buoyancy of visual clichés rinsed away by the deluge of a previously inconceivable reality. This rubbish dump was not like some tip off the M25 where you might dump a fridge freezer or a smashed-in mattress. This was a nation made of waste with no end in sight. Domestic waste, medical waste, industrial waste formed their own perverse geography. Stinking rivers sluiced through banks of putrid trash, mountains, valleys, peaks and troughs all formed from discarded filth. An ecology based on our indifference and ignorance in the cradle of civilisation where our species is said to have originated. Here amid the pestilence I saw Armageddon. Here the end of the world is not a prophecy but a condition. A demented herd chewed polystyrene cud. Sows fed their piglets in the bilge. Gloomy shadows split the sun as marabou storks, five foot in span with ragged labial throats, swooped down. My mate Nik said he had to revise his vision of hell to include what hed seen. Here and there, picking through this unending slander, children foraged for bottle tops, which had some value, where all is worthless.
...
To have such suffering adjacent to such excess is akin to marvelling at an incomparable beauty, whose face is the radiant epitome of celestial symmetry, and ignoring, half a yard lower down, her abdomen, cancerous, weeping and carbuncled. Keep looking at the face, put a handbag over those tumours. Strike a pose. Come on, Vogue.
October 10, 2013
The Perfect Metaphor for the Shutdown - Not a Game: The Government Shutdown Home Game
I don't know if this clip's been put up here. From the Colbert Report - sums up the situation nicely.
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/429570/october-07-2013/government-shutdown-s-one-week-anniversary
EDIT to add YouTube video clip embedding.
Profile Information
Member since: Tue Sep 11, 2012, 10:00 AMNumber of posts: 1,235