While not quite as technically impressive as the recent video with the waterfalls of Post-it notes, I prefer the “pixel-art” aesthetic of this one.

Well worth a watch!

FIT Watch campaigner Emily Apple assaulted by police

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2009/jun/21/fit-watch-kingsnorth-arrests

You must watch this video.

Another extremely worrying video from The Guardian showing the British police acting like the fascist thugs they are.

The two women are campaigners with FIT Watch, who undertake ’sousveillance’ of the British police teams who monitor and record campaigners at marches and other events. The FIT Watch campaigners photograph and catalogue the police who are cataloguing and photographing them. They watch the watchers.

They are assaulted, restrained at the arms and legs, arrested and thrown into the back of police vans and held without bail for 3 days for nothing more than asking a police officer who has removed his badge numbers to identify himself.

This is Britain today.

More and more the regime in Iran seems to ape the reactions of the Shah’s regime to the popular uprising. If they continue to ignore the will of the people, and the people remain as united as they seem to be, the days of the ayatollah and the dual political system in Iran could be numbered.

I urge everyone to watch this video and see the increasingly desperate and violent efforts of the Iranian state to put down its people.

Video from Iran of clashes between riot police and protesters

Riot police on motorbikes in Iran

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2009/jun/17/iran-uprising

The Guardian, one of the last decent newspapers, has an excellent website. Much time I have spent perusing it. Today, I found this link to a live-updating page about the Iran situation.

Two things struck me in particular:

11am:
The man who leaked the real election results from the Interior Ministry – the ones showing Ahmadinejad coming third – was killed in a suspicious car accident, according to unconfirmed reports

11.20am:
A key Iranian figure, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who has remained invisible since the election, has called an emergency meeting of the Assembly of Experts, according to the US-based Iran expert Reza Aslan.
“If true, this is a bombshell,” says Nico Pitney on his excellent live blog of the crisis on the Huffington Post.

There is also a gruesome picture of a young man killed yesterday but I will not re-link that. It is on that page if you care to look. I hope this will not be another Tiananmen, but the senses of hope and danger are the same.

My own relatively uninformed opinion is that the anger initially directed towards Ahmadinejad has now crossed over and that the “other half” of the Iranian dual political system is now feeling the heat.

For a good summary of the co-existing systems of democracy and tyranny in Iran, visit this BBC link: How Iran is ruled

This picture really affected me:

Iran protest yesterday

EnglishRussia is an amazing source of bizarre and entrancing images, videos and stories from Russia. Their slogan is “Because something cool happens daily on 1/6 of the Earth’s surface”, and I really have to agree. They regularly dig up archive photos from Russia during Soviet times, during WWII, and even before Soviet times.

Luftwaffe funeral?

In this post, there are a mixture of photos taken from the air and on the ground by Nazi German pilots in the Luftwaffe during WWII, flying over cities in Russia. There are some miscellaneous other photos mixed in too.

Here’s the link: http://englishrussia.com/?p=2952

With the gunner at the turret

Empty beach - Varosha, Cyprus

About a fortnight ago, Aengus made a rather good post about abandoned places.

Today I came across another page with photos of abandoned places, probably the largest one I’ve seen so far. All the usual ones are there, Pripyat, San Zhi and Centralia, but also a few I hadn’t seen before. If you are new to this addiction, this will whet your appetite. This one has three pages full of photos, and while it’s just a compilation, it’s not to be missed!

http://www.dirjournal.com/info/abandoned-places-in-the-world/

Abandoned building - Varosha, Cyprus

I made a decision in setting up this blog that all posts about Irish politics or related matters would be made to another blog, the “Jaded Isle” that my friends have heard about for so long.

It is now online at http://jadedisle.ie

The wry meaning behind the name should hopefully be clear (a play on Emerald Isle).
The reasoning behind a separate blog for this material is not quite so obvious.
Essentially, the reasons are three-fold:

• to collect all political material in one place that it might eventually have some identity and “brand recognition” in and of itself
• to isolate the vitriol from the rest of the content here
• that others might contribute to the site, which would be rather strange on a site bearing my name directly.

A little collection of some of the more visually arresting photos I took last year, mainly from my trip to Sweden.

These were taken before I got my new camera, so quality’s not perfect, but I like them.

The man on the park bench
Was a spy.
I know he was,
Because he said he wasn’t.

Somewhere in my apartment
There’s a bug.
But I can’t find it,
They’re too good at hiding things.

One time at night I heard
A click on the phone.
They’re listening now,
So I don’t talk any more.

John Lunney
12/04/2009

After the Great Fire, and many promises to many people of a new site, johnl.org has at last returned, in the form of a blog. Of sorts.

I know I probably said I would never have a blog, but if it encourages me to write more often, and share more, perhaps it is a good thing.

I am extremely impressed with WordPress now. The last time I looked at it, it was still pretty shoddy. Now it is quite impressive.

I think perhaps I will begin migrating content across from my old site…