Greetings!

Hard to know, whether there are more people still reading this blog than writing - but that is no excuse to for writing just the next entry. Yes, I still exist, I still live in Helsinki and I am not keeping contact as regularly as I should.

Here are two songs I wanted to point out to you for your last weekend in spring - be sure to read the lyrics.

Kill the poor sung by Matthew Grimm & the Red Smear (lyrics). I know, the Dead Kennedys once did a song with the same title - this one here is the 2008 update.

World turned upside down sung by Billy Bragg (lyrics).


That's at least part of what activates me at the moment - hope it helps you too.

Cheers
Georg

Flickr introduced a new service: they localized their site for different languages. Part of this service is, that pictures that are marked as "medium" or "restricted" will not be displayed anymore to users who indicate that they are from Germany, Singapore, Korea or Hong Kong.

That kicked off a huge debate about censorship and especially the Germans, regarding themselves as citizens of a free country in which people and arts are free, raise their voice.

It is not clear yet, why these restrictions have been applied. The flickr staff made a statement, that brought as much light to the discussion as a broken lamp during a Finnish Winters night. There are assumptions, that the restrictions in Germany apply due to a German law that forbids showing of so-called "Nazi-Symbols", i.e. symbols that are related to the third reich. Other people speculate that the German government might have had a say in that.

It is all speculation. It is not known why these restrictions are applied. Most likely flickr just wanted to be super-save and put the new mechanism there due to anticipatory obedience. One can understand that, but it could have been made clear from the beginning that this will happen and what are the reasons.

I would not go so far as to call this censorship - not yet. Give flickr a few more days to get themselves informed and to clear things up.

This discussion already hit German newspapers (at least heise and Spiegel), but it seems no English / American paper so far has woken up on this. This shows where the focus is.

http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/ ... 33,00.html

Six centuries ago,
Serbia heroically defended itself in the field of Kosovo, but it also defended Europe.
Serbia was at that time the bastion that defended the European culture, religion,
and European society in general.
Slobodan Milosevic's 1989 St. Vitus Day Speech

About four weeks ago, Israel was attacked by Hezbollah. Two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped, five others were killed.

Today Israel is in the middle of a war, which is understood by some as an act of self-defence. The Lebanon gets destroyed and faces a major humanitarian, social and political crisis. The good, the bad, the civilians - people die every day.

Five years ago, about 3000 people died in the World Trade Centre attacks. Since then we had bombings in Madrid, in London and several other attacks and attempts. The Western World, the free World is under attack by terrorists, who have a fundamentalist Muslim background.

Today US and European troops are in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both countries are staggering towards civil war. People get killed every day, by fanatic believers, by panicking and cracked-up soldiers, by people who are afraid.

In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic held a speech in which he linked a battle, that took place in 1389, to the political situation in former Yugoslavia. I remember that everybody in the rest of Europe shook heads about this reference. Milosevic was already then a shady figure and not long after, he was stamped as a war criminal.

And today? We talk about defending our values, the clash of civilization and the spirit of the free world. We are afraid of the Muslims. We do not only have the right to defend ourselves - we have the obligation to defend ourselves even without being attacked. And if we are attacked, then we do not only have the right to overreact, we are forced to overreact. We have to put fear into them. War is the only language they understand.

Doesn't that sound as if Vienna would be under siege again? And that we should consider to march to Tours and Poitiers once more?

Or does that sound more as if it is time to shake our heads again? To hold our weapons. To prevent us from becoming the beast, that we think the others are.

Stop taking our values as an excuse to betray them.

Stop manipulating us.

Stop the war in Lebanon.

Yesterday was June the 6th 2006, which can be written as 6.6.6. The "Book of Revelation", the last part of the Bible, names this sequence of digits as "The Number of the Beast", that means it represents the devil. Some peopole see in this much more than just a number - they think it is a true symbol, i.e. writing down or mentioning it would automatically evoke evil.

First of all: I like legends and symbols, there is usually a lot of inspiration coming from them. Just think of the Greek gods and their adventures. 666 was used in the 20th century on several occasions to provoke the superstitious and conservative parts of society, to indicate the departure of more liberal-minded elements from traditional values.

What happend yesterday? The news were filled with two things: Satanists spilling blood over their body and dancing naked in the woods to celebrate their lord of evil - and Christians praying to avoid the worst and to save the world just once again by kneeling down and folding hands. My thanks and blessings go to both camps. Mankind made it to the next day and nothing has changed - so their efforts were successful. I don't want to know what would have happend if they would not have cared so much for all of us.

In the South-Eastern part of Germany nevertheless they took an extra effort to rescue the last remains of moral and fear of God. Mr. Stoiber, the great leader of the Christian Socialist Union (CSU) and adored prime minister of the Republic of Bavaria invited other great minds - the leaders of religious groups in Germany - to a summit on how to protect religious views and symbols from being laughed at. Two reasons for the summit that were officially mentioned were the Muhammed cartoons and the TV-series Popetown, which both brought up understandable rage among many believers. Stoiber's goal is to change German criminal law in order to put criticism and humour in the right place: behind bars.

The Western World is one of the worst places to live in. Everybody can freely utter their opinion. Women are allowed to vote and some of them have even been seen in parliament. Scientists can research things that make the existence of a higher being less and less necessary. Children grow up without reading the Bible. Some people seem to even have sexual intercourse before they marry. What a misery we have created here.

Therefore I want to also thank those who participated yesterday in Stoiber's summit. I understand now that we have to protect and take special care of people who belive in numerology, Satan and the CSU.

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