Month: December 2007
Happy Humpback Whale Christmas from the Southern Ocean
Grey-headed albatross - vulnerable species, 2.2m wingspan! © 2007 Dave Walsh I'm writing from the Greenpeace ship Esperanza, currently en route to the Antarctic.In the last few weeks we've threaded our way south, around Papua New Guinea, down past New Ireland (we didn't stop in, but I hear the Guinness may be good) and into to the port of Auckland, New Zealand, which is almost becoming a second home for me. I've now sailed out of there five times on Greenpeace ships since May 2004. On Wednesday we left Auckland, and headed down the east cost of New Zealand. After a quick stop off at Bluff (right at the bottom of the South Island), I'm currently writing you from remarkably good weather in the Southern Ocean. Down here, "good" is a relative term - the wind is howling outside, the ship is rolling around a bit, which makes sitting at...
Zeitgeist: The Movie, 9/11, Andrew Keen and the impossible search for ‘the truth’
In February 2007, Blather.net issued a challenge to the 9/11 Truth Movement. We said: "It's time to up the game. Time to get better. Time to write better blogs, make better movies and ask better questions. We're sorry, but Loose Change and the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are just not doing that right now." But now, it seems, somebody has upped the game: one Peter Joseph. His film, 'Zeitgeist: The Movie', is an altogether different prospect. The Call to Adventure Peter Joseph's two-hour labour of love 'Zeitgeist: The Movie' is a compelling, engaging and highly effective prayer: a hymn for the Dubyatube generation. Splicing together hundreds of videos, audio files, historical footnotes and citing and quoting sources from an impressively broad spectrum (from Roman Historians to Carl Sagan) 'Zeitgeist: The Movie' is a look at what can only be called 'the greatest conspiracy theory of all' - tracking a clear path from...
Anarchy on the High Seas
© Dave Walsh Dave and Mir tell of pirate hideaways from on board the Esperanza: The other day our ship, the Esperanza passed near the island of Sonsorol, one of the sixteen states of the Republic of Palau. But when we say "near" it's very relative - the ocean is a very very big place, and we didn't actually see it. Still, Sonsorol was there, just a tiny dot in the chart, so small. It could have been just a rock. But it is also the place of an utopian anarchist dream. Some years ago, an article called Visit Port Watson!, a sort of tourist guide about the perfect lawless society on Sonsorol, was published in a book called Semiotext(e) SF. The article would have you believe that Sonsorol was a sizeable place, a pirate enclave with towns and farms where anyone could go and live, with all sorts of...