Trailer for '69' - a documentary by Nikolaj Vijborg

69 is the story of the last days of Ungdomshuset (Youth House), a squatted social center in Copenhagen.

69 is directed by Nikolaj Vijborg, a Danish filmmaker who also directed the Lost Film Fest touring classic short, USA UNDER ATTACK.

This trailer will be screened on the Lost Film Fest tour in 2008 and 2009. For more info about Lost Film Fest please visit lostfilmfest.com

German TV character taken as political hostage

When a statue was recently stolen from the main square of the central German city of Erfurt, it was more than a mere theft. It was a kidnapping.

The statue was of Bernd das Brot, a hugely popular TV character -- a melancholy bread loaf -- on German children's channel KLKA.

The channel presented the statue to the city in 2007, and it stood next to the imposing neo-gothic city hall until Jan. 21, when it disappeared.

A group of anarchists claimed responsibility for the abduction, followed by a YouTube video that indicated that the anthropomorphic loaf had joined its members in solidarity.

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[ via Dan Clore ]

Jim Kunstler: Poverty of imagination

So far -- after two weeks in office -- the Obama team seems bent on a campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs, to attempt to do all the impossible things listed above. Mr. Obama is not the only one, of course, who is invoking the quest for renewed "growth." This is a tragic error in collective thinking. What we really face is a comprehensive contraction in our activities, especially the scale of our activities, and the pressing need to readjust the systems of everyday life to a level of decreased complexity.

For instance, the myth that we can become "energy independent and yet remain car-dependent is absurd. In terms of liquid fuels, we're simply trapped. We import two-thirds of the oil we use and there is absolutely no chance that drill-drill-drilling (or any other scheme) will change that. The public and our leaders can not face the reality of this. The great wish for "alternative" liquid fuels (bio fuels, algae excreta) will never be anything more than a wish at the scales required, and the parallel wish to keep all our cars running by other means -- hydrogen fuel cells, electric motors -- is equally idle and foolish. We cannot face the mandate of reality, which is to do everything possible to make our living places walkable, and connect them with public transit. The stimulus bills in congress clearly illustrate our failure to understand the situation.

The attempt to restart "consumerism" will be equally disappointing. It was a manifestation of the short peak energy decades of history, and now that we're past peak energy, it's over. That seventy percent of the economy is over, especially the part that allowed people to buy stuff with no money. From now on people will have to buy stuff with money they earn and save, and they will be buying a lot less stuff. For a while, a lot of stuff will circulate through the yard sales and Craigslist, and some resourceful people will get busy fixing broken stuff that still has value. But the other infrastructure of shopping is toast, especially the malls, the strip malls, the real estate investment trusts that own it all, many of the banks that lent money to the REITs, the chain-stores and chain eateries, of course, and, alas, the non-chain mom-and-pop boutiques in these highway-oriented venues.

Washington is evidently seized by panic right now. I don't know anyone who works in the White House, but I must suppose that they have learned in two weeks that these systems are absolutely tanking, that the previous way of life that everybody was so set on not apologizing for has reached the end of the line. We seem to be learning a new and interesting lesson: that even a team that promises change is actually petrified of too much change, especially change that they can't really control.

The argument about "change" during the election was sufficiently vague that no one was really challenged to articulate a future that wasn't, materially, more-of-the-same. I suppose the Obama team may have thought they would only administer it differently than the Bush team -- but basically life in the USA would continue being about all those trips to the mall, and the cubicle jobs to support that, and the family safaris to visit Grandma in Lansing, and the vacations at Sea World, and Skipper's $20,000 college loan, and Dad's yearly junket to Las Vegas, and refinancing the house, and rolling over this loan and that loan... and that has all led to a very dead end in a dark place.

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Jobless in America: Stories from the frontlines of the economic crisis

Every business day brings announcements of new layoffs at the big corporations. Layoffs in the small businesses, which comprise hundreds of thousands of jobs, do not get the publicity, but the consequences are the same--panic, worry, want and family disintegration. Animal shelters report that jobless people are bringing in the pets they no longer can afford to keep.

At the current accelerating rate of layoffs, we will be called on to deal with a catastrophe by the end of June. And at this time next year, the nation could be suffering 6, 7, even 8 million more Americans without jobs in a society singularly ill equipped to take on a disaster that many of the people in power thought could never happen.

Past recessions hit blue-collar workers and farmers the hardest and schooled them psychologically, if not financially, in alternating good times and bad. The white-collar wipeout is something new. We have no experience in handling the huge numbers of college-educated, technically trained unemployed.

Not only does unemployment ruin the lives of the people enduring it; it kick-starts home foreclosure rates and stimulates bankruptcies. The people who still have jobs, fearing that they could be next, stop spending money on cars, houses, clothes or anything else.

The past century of depressions, recessions, slumps, panics, dips, slowdowns, busted bubbles and crashes shows that jobs are the last thing to come back, that employment is the slowest to recover. Every job lost postpones the return of prosperity.

This is the moment for a tourniquet on the job hemorrhage. News of the millionaire class using public bailout money for their bonuses and private airplanes has left people feeling stranded and furious. They are demanding that something be done for them.

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Kalash people's ancient culture

Short film by a Kalash

Part 1




Part 2