today was Memorial day where the fallen people of Israel are remembered. there was a nation-wide siren last night at 8pm but I was still at work so missed it. today was a public holiday, as is tomorrow for Independence Day - the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel. at 11am this morning there was another siren. I left the apartment with about 1 minute to spare. the guy from upstairs ran down the stairwell just in front of me. he made it out the gate then the siren started. I was still in the front yard and I didn't want to move once it had started but I took a video from behind the green gate. the man from the laundromat was standing near his motorbike. another man stood by the car he was unpacking. a man stood on his balcony across the street - head bowed. another man put his grocery bags down and stood by them on the footpath across the road. the cars stopped. it was silent except for the ringing of the siren which could be heard across the city.

some sites with news of Israel

http://jerusalempost.com : Jerusalem Post - this is the online version of the Jerusalem Post newspaper

http://www.jerusalem-times.net - The Jerusalem Times - this is based in East Jerusalem and has Palestinian & Arabic news, though their website is often hacked so there's not much to read there

http://www.sderotmedia.com - Sderot Media - news and info about the city of Sderot which is targeted regularly and constantly by missiles from Gaza. myth busting site - here you can see that Israel actually helps Gaza residents and counter arguments against the propaganda that the media portray about the area.
articles with people living in Sderot

http://www.israelnationalradio.com - English radio documentaries and programs

http://www.israelnationalnews.com - Arutz Sheva - Israeli news site. you can receive daily email summaries of articles

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articles

most of the cafes and taxis here in Jerusalem listen to Galatz Radio - this is the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) station. army service is a part of everyone's life here in Israel with teenagers having to serve after they finish high school. they have a Hebrew news services & play popular Israeli and International music.

"India produces everything - it doesn't import anything ..." - this is what the Indian guys from work were telling me. I'm not sure if it's an exaggeration or spot on. but when I was there I certainly saw most things were locally made - from Tata & Reliance and other large corporations. I think some of the Westerners laugh at some of the locally made products - some are a little rough around the edges. but I wonder who'll be laughing in the next 10 years when India is the global economic power it's touted to be/come.

I wonder what percentage of things Australia imports? I know Australians love to support Australian-made - the green & gold. I think for Australia to stay in the list of leading countries it needs to keep producing it's own goods.

I've read that the USA doesn't produce anything any more (obviously an exaggeration) - and perhaps this will be it's downfall, especially if they keep printing more money to buy more things and 'pay off' their debts.

wow it sounds like George Monbiot got it right - unfortunately :(

from 2007 :
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329758811-121568,00.html
If we want to save the planet, we need a five-year freeze on biofuels
- Oil produced from plants sets up competition for food between cars and people. People - and the environment - will lose
George Monbiot
Tuesday March 27, 2007

It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless. In theory, fuels made from plants can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by cars and trucks. Plants absorb carbon as they grow - it is released again when the fuel is burned. By encouraging oil companies to switch from fossil plants to living ones, governments on both sides of the Atlantic claim to be "decarbonising" our transport networks.

In the budget last week, Gordon Brown announced that he would extend the tax rebate for biofuels until 2010. From next year all suppliers in the UK will have to ensure that 2.5% of the fuel they sell is made from plants - if not, they must pay a penalty of 15p a litre. The obligation rises to 5% in 2010. By 2050, the government hopes that 33% of our fuel will come from crops. Last month George Bush announced that he would quintuple the US target for biofuels: by 2017 they should be supplying 24% of the nation's transport fuel.

So what's wrong with these programmes? Only that they are a formula for environmental and humanitarian disaster. In 2004 I warned, on these pages, that biofuels would set up a competition for food between cars and people. The people would necessarily lose: those who can afford to drive are richer than those who are in danger of starvation. It would also lead to the destruction of rainforests and other important habitats. I received more abuse than I've had for any other column - except for when I attacked the 9/11 conspiracists. I was told my claims were ridiculous, laughable, impossible. Well in one respect I was wrong. I thought these effects wouldn't materialise for many years. They are happening already.

I'm doing another MLA course - this one with Starhawk called Earth As Teacher - Earth As Healer.

20042008878, originally uploaded by AliaK.

walking through the old part of the city in Istanbul - near Balat. I liked the shadows this window grill made

20/04/2008, Istanbul, Turkey

20042008878

Agit - (pron. aught ??) Kurdish women wailing in music. traditional in Eastern Turkey

book (Andrew bought) - "Journey of a Sufi musician"

other music styles : Fasil, Arabesque music

music of Turkey wikipedia entry

Taksim - improvisation : A specific sequence of classical Turkish musical forms become a fasil, a suite an instrumental prelude, an instrumental postlude (saz semaisi), and in between, the main section of vocal compositions which begins with and is punctuated by instrumental improvisations taksim

makams - musical scales in Turkish music

instrument - Oud, Saz

I've just been reading articles on the human network blog by Mark Pesce. all have been interesting, particularly the Unevenly Distributed : Production Models for the 21st Century where he talks about the death of television and film industries in their current distribution method. also mentioned were the examples of Ronda Byrne's online / streaming version of The Secret and the success it has brought her. as well as the "League of Peers" movie Steal this Film - Part 1 which is a documentary about file sharing and the troubles faced by Sweden's leading BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay.

aliak.com site was hacked on thursday night 06/03/2008 - apparently the whole server was hit so many sites were affected. it was around the time of the terrorist attack of the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem

I made a couple of flairs on facebook and sent to the girls

this is great! I installed this greasemonkey script to import Facebook events into Google Calendar by P. Organisciak, so now it's easier to add events to the site! I'm not using the drupal events module any more as it had a problem creating thousands of repeating events (which should have ended), so I linked one of my google calendars - the aliak.com one - into the site instead. plus this way events are easier to import and people can use it easier with their own google calendar (if they have one). perhaps the drupal module works better now I've upgraded to version 5. but adding manual events is a pain - very time consuming which means I miss a lot of them. the google calendar allows me to add them simply from gmail as the emails arrive and now with a single click from Facebook also! I just add the url and adjust the text as I prefer. cool!

I was checking out the NZ Audio Foundation website again today and came across a link from an email on the AF-l about funding from Damian from Frey. it's an interesting argument. I think Australia is similar to New Zealand in this way, but also at a glance I think New Zealanders have the creative support advantage over the Australians, or so it seemed to me at least, as they have MANY! support organisations helping the artists. will have to do some more research to see if my assumptions are founded.

right click to download the audio mp3 file

a sound walk through the old city of jerusalem

jugglers in jerusalem's ben yehuda mall. my friend darren & late friend angus are both jugglers so I took this to show them. my timing was out a bit as I watched the guys juggle for a while then remembered to start filming.

08/02/2008

aliak.com is being upgraded this week. some links won't work until the upgrade is complete as I've disabled some modules. the 'look & feel' of the site is currently using a default template which will also be upgraded. the RSS / XML feeds should still be working. thanks for your patience

status:
11/02/2008 - the site is now running drupal 5.0. tomorrow night I'll upgrade to the most recent drupal 5. some of the modules have been reinstalled but you may see some errors until the upgrade is complete.

19/02/2008 - the site is now running drupal 5.1. only a few patches to go ...

14/03/2008 - the site is now running drupal 5.7

15/03/2008 - the site is now running drupal 6.1
there seems to be an issue with page caching in firefox on windows (to reload the page - press Ctrl -Shift-Delete or Tools menu - clear private data, then reload the page)
IE on windows seems ok
also posting articles from a mac seems broken! :(

Click To Play

Watch the video

this is just a quick piece - playing with 3d mosaics. this week there was a terrorist bomb explosion in Dimona, in the south of Israel. multiple organisations claimed it and there were a few theories on where the terrorists came from - possibly entered following the breach of the wall between gaza & egypt, possibly they were already in the country. a policeman shot a second bomber and became a hero. one woman died and many were injured. it happened in a cafe. in a town that hasn't seen trouble before. there hasn't been a bombing for around a year. it was on the news, radio, tv, papers & online. people were commenting. I just wanted to slice up the news a bit - to remind me of the confusion & speculation - the twisting & turning of the different theories. the background is the first of the snow storm in jerusalem.

the news slices move & scale controlled by my mouse position as I move around the screen - I keep web browsing whilst the news & life is jumbled up

the music is a mixture of "Alone again so" by Kid Loco from A Grand Love Story album + "I fell once again" by Winx from the Left Above the Clouds album. I'd been wondering 'has it started again?' so I searched my itunes library for 'again' and these were a couple of the results.

06/02/2008 made in isadora. isadora patch is attached

http://blip.tv/file/651759
http://blip.tv/file/get/AliaK-newsSlicesInTheSnow510.mp4

it snowed in Jerusalem for a couple of days. the first day many of the roads were closed. the stores close - the city shuts down. my workplace was closed for both days (so a long weekend for some!). the second day by mid morning the sun was out and sky was blue.

snow in the middle east! lots of fun!

the music is "Snow" by Severed Heads off the Gigapus album
http://www.sevcom.com/

30-31/01/2008, jerusalem, israel

http://blip.tv/file/get/AliaK-jerusalemSnow649.flv
http://blip.tv/file/get/AliaK-jerusalemSnow649.mp4
http://blip.tv/file/651524

some Hakim Bey & related links gathered from the MLA forums

Hakim Bey's website - hosts his articles including the well known Temporary Autonomous Zone. The Ayahuasca Reading is interesting, especially since it sounds like it was written in the late 1940s / 1950s? at least written about events during that period. it was originally appeared in the Psychedelic Review in 1965 and Hakim Bey read a reprint of it from the Psychozoic Press on a New York radio program in 1994. interesting since Ayahuasca has become 'flavour of the year' so to speak, with even hollywood stars heading off to South America to experience it.

Rak Razam, a journalist from Australia, recorded his experiences in the video below
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3a3nt_rakaya-soul

Rak:aya soul
Uploaded by panoramabox

Robert Anton Wilson's obituary by Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey)

"Moors of Holy Ireland, we must all learn Basque" - an interview with Hakim Bey by Sasha Miltsov. they talk about the future, how things seem to be repeating themselves, how "attitudes are informed by reformism. They are not informed by a critique of capitalism or even of technology". that "that symbolic action and symbolic discourse is NOT Action!", about artists and their popularity and influence on real estate prices, and about "the idea of separatism and secession", in particular in relation to America.

"So America is isolated economically: we don't produce anything here anymore – we cant be self-sufficient in terms of industry. We don't make shoes here; we don't make umbrellas, pencils. We make entertainment and information. We don't even make the fucking computers! We produce the ideas that occupy the computers. That's why artists are so important right now – it's one of the few things that we actually produce. So the arts are hot, some artists are successful – this whole area around here is full of artists, and they drove the real-estate prices up. So, now you can't move into this county for less then 250,000 dollars. Thanks to the artists! You wonder why people get angry at artists – it's not our fault – we're just looking for low rent but the real-estate developers are following us, sniffing our butts wherever we go to find out where the next beautiful cheap real-estate is going to be ..."