malformalady: Eleven year old Elsa Armindo Chela, is from Angola, she was picking mangoes with her cousin when she lost her eye to an anti-personnel land mine accident. Her cousin died. Kuito, Angola. Photo credit: © Tim Grant. This shouldn’t be happening to anyone :c and to think, even when conflicts that lead to war cease there’s still the leftovers to pick up after. Land mine accidents are still a huge public concern in the war-torn areas of the world. Which is why I love technology like the proposed wind-powered tumbleweed by Afghan design graduate Massoun Hassadi because it aims to get rid of these atrocious instruments of war so that we may never have to tell a story like Elsa’s and her cousin again.

malformalady:

Eleven year old Elsa Armindo Chela, is from Angola, she was picking mangoes with her cousin when she lost her eye to an anti-personnel land mine accident. Her cousin died. Kuito, Angola.

Photo credit: © Tim Grant.

This shouldn’t be happening to anyone :c and to think, even when conflicts that lead to war cease there’s still the leftovers to pick up after. Land mine accidents are still a huge public concern in the war-torn areas of the world. Which is why I love technology like the proposed wind-powered tumbleweed by Afghan design graduate Massoun Hassadi because it aims to get rid of these atrocious instruments of war so that we may never have to tell a story like Elsa’s and her cousin again.

3 weeks ago
 2360
Source
Via knowledgeequalsblackpower
Posted by ikenbot
# war
# land mine

"We have the creativity and mental capacity to end wars but use that same sense to start them."

5 months ago
 397
Posted by ikenbot
# thoughts
# war
# brain
# creativity
Wind-Powered Bamboo Tumbleweed Could Clear Afghan Minefields Planting landmines is easy and cheap, but the costs (both human and financial) of finding and removing them later can be vast. One possible solution, proposed by Afghan design graduate Massoun Hassadi, is the Mine Kafon. It’s a concept for a wind-powered minesweeper, or an artificial tumbleweed that can — through the serendipity of the wind’s random gusts — clear a blight from the land that kills and maims hundreds each year. The Mine Kafon looks a bit like a bunch of plungers attached to a central ball. It’s light enough (70kg) to be propelled by a normal breeze, while still being heavy and big enough (190cm in diameter) to activate mines as it rolls over them. When released by its owner, the Kafon will roll around wherever the wind takes it, tracing a path through the sand and able to survive the loss of many of its legs in several explosions before it loses structural integrity. Wired.co.uk spoke to over the phone to Hassadi in Eindhoven, where he lives after graduating from the city’s Design Academy. The Mine Kafon was his final graduate project, but it’s deeply inspired by his childhood — he grew up on the outskirts of Kabul, in a community where landmine deaths and injuries are common. There are usually hundreds of landmine deaths a year in Afghanistan, thanks to the country’s sad history of conflict over the past few decades. The Kafon idea came about as part of some “sketches” Hassadi did around the themes of elements — “air, water, fire, the basic elements”, he explains. “I was trying to integrate these, in a physical way. And I also did a project about my childhood in Kabul, where I would make all kinds of things.” Some of those things, as you can see in the video embedded in this story, were toys powered by the wind. Combining the two ideas led to “12 or 13 toys, or prototypes — one was a helicopter, and another was a sail-powered model”. He spent a couple of months tinkering with designs — and finishing his design internship — before he settled on the current tumbleweed-esque design for the Kafon. Hassadi said: “I worked it up for my final project, and proposed new features and ideas, and we realised that the most interesting was the one that was moved by the wind. It was more personalised, like the toys that we played with in Kabul, outside the house. I was just playing around, and I said ‘maybe I can make one bigger’, as a kind of joke to my tutor, and they said ‘why not?’” Now that Hassadi has finished his degree he has time to work on the Kafon in earnest. The basic shape and idea is almost there for the first prototype — it has light, strong legs, with feet at the end, and in the middle is a GPS chip. As the Kafon meanders along it transmits data about its journey back to the user. That should allow the plotting of routes through minefields that are safe.

Wind-Powered Bamboo Tumbleweed Could Clear Afghan Minefields

Planting landmines is easy and cheap, but the costs (both human and financial) of finding and removing them later can be vast. One possible solution, proposed by Afghan design graduate Massoun Hassadi, is the Mine Kafon. It’s a concept for a wind-powered minesweeper, or an artificial tumbleweed that can — through the serendipity of the wind’s random gusts — clear a blight from the land that kills and maims hundreds each year.

The Mine Kafon looks a bit like a bunch of plungers attached to a central ball. It’s light enough (70kg) to be propelled by a normal breeze, while still being heavy and big enough (190cm in diameter) to activate mines as it rolls over them. When released by its owner, the Kafon will roll around wherever the wind takes it, tracing a path through the sand and able to survive the loss of many of its legs in several explosions before it loses structural integrity.

Wired.co.uk spoke to over the phone to Hassadi in Eindhoven, where he lives after graduating from the city’s Design Academy. The Mine Kafon was his final graduate project, but it’s deeply inspired by his childhood — he grew up on the outskirts of Kabul, in a community where landmine deaths and injuries are common. There are usually hundreds of landmine deaths a year in Afghanistan, thanks to the country’s sad history of conflict over the past few decades.

The Kafon idea came about as part of some “sketches” Hassadi did around the themes of elements — “air, water, fire, the basic elements”, he explains. “I was trying to integrate these, in a physical way. And I also did a project about my childhood in Kabul, where I would make all kinds of things.” Some of those things, as you can see in the video embedded in this story, were toys powered by the wind.

Combining the two ideas led to “12 or 13 toys, or prototypes — one was a helicopter, and another was a sail-powered model”. He spent a couple of months tinkering with designs — and finishing his design internship — before he settled on the current tumbleweed-esque design for the Kafon. Hassadi said: “I worked it up for my final project, and proposed new features and ideas, and we realised that the most interesting was the one that was moved by the wind. It was more personalised, like the toys that we played with in Kabul, outside the house. I was just playing around, and I said ‘maybe I can make one bigger’, as a kind of joke to my tutor, and they said ‘why not?’”

Now that Hassadi has finished his degree he has time to work on the Kafon in earnest. The basic shape and idea is almost there for the first prototype — it has light, strong legs, with feet at the end, and in the middle is a GPS chip. As the Kafon meanders along it transmits data about its journey back to the user. That should allow the plotting of routes through minefields that are safe.

5 months ago
 615
Source
Posted by ikenbot
# science
# news
# tech
# war
# land mines
# minesweeper
# wind powered

Mine Kafon | Callum Cooper

A short documentary portrait on a designer who has created a low cost solution to landmine clearance.

The Mine Kafon is a Semifinalist in the $200,000 Focus Forward Filmmaker Competition and is in the running to become the $100,000 Grand Prize Winner. It could also be named an Audience Favorite if it’s among the ten that receives the most votes. If you love it, vote for it. Click on the VOTE button in the top right corner of the video player. Note that voting may not be available on all mobile platforms, and browser cookies must be enabled to vote.

5 months ago
 102
Posted by ikenbot
# science
# news
# tech
# landmines
# mine sweeper
# war
# film
# documentary

"We don’t take sides; we care for people on all sides of this war. For neighbors shot for cutting down a tree; for children shot for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; for people injured by a blast while going down the street for bread; for entire families who have had grenades thrown at them."

MSF Nurse Brett Adamson, on treating victims of the war in Afghanistan. (via doctorswithoutborders)

Wish our media took the same stance.
6 months ago
 247
Via doctorswithoutborders
Posted by ikenbot
# afghanistan
# war
# neutral
# msf
# nurse
# doctors without borders
# field work
# trauma

oumkalthoum:theatlantic:

The Places Where America’s Drones Are Striking, Now on Instagram

Technology has countervailing effects. We can send a battle by air to a land we have never set foot in, laying previously unimaginable distance between us and our wars. But at the same time we can see on a device in our pocket a satellite picture of these places so remote. Maybe, Bridle writes, the instant connectivity of our world can be a platform not just for faster information, but for deeper empathy for people who live a world away.

See more. [Images: Dronestagram]

I’m not sure this writer for The Atlantic understands the nature of Washington’s drone warfare and this blatant promotion of the ‘Dronestagram’ product frightens me.

The reality is murder is inflicted predominantly onto people whose names don’t exist on any lists as suspects of legitimate crimes or potential threats to security, which would not excuse murder if it even were the case. Victims of drones are completely unknown to those sent to kill them. The U.S. military kills people in multiple regions across the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, which you empathetically deem ‘another world’, based on monitored “patterns of activity”. This vague data is believed to signal possible intent to conduct terrorist activity somewhere, onto someone, maybe someday sometime. The lives of thousands of people and their entire communities are in the hands of Americans staring at computer screens while wielding joysticks that turn human beings into “bug splatter”, as they call them, with the touch of a button. If the soldiers who order these murders can do so without having any empathy, what the hell makes you think the most privileged members of American society looking at maps will develop this emotion?

6 months ago
 712
Source
Via nutopiancitizen
Posted by ikenbot
# drone
# war
# militarism
# obama
6 months ago
 109
Source
Via inspirement
Posted by ikenbot
# war
# militarism
# warmongering

theneighbourhoodsuperhero:

The air of the interview and the room changes, becoming icy, as do the facial expressions and responses of Ruhal Ahmed, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee (who was released after several years of detainment with no charges), upon hearing Brandon Neely, a former Guantanamo Bay guard, confess to one of his crimes against a detainee. (Neely is sitting towards Ahmed’s left in the interview).

Neely confesses that he unjustly physically abused and injured an “older, older detainee” for jerking when he was forced down on his knees so that his handcuffs and goggles could be removed. Neely later found out that the detainee jerked because he thought he was about to be executed, as he had had family members executed in the same manner in his country.

Neely’s confession seems to have triggered emotions and memories of past experiences at the hands of guards during his detainment in Guantanamo Bay within Ahmed, who becomes withdrawn for the rest of the interview, providing short, undetailed answers despite the interviewer’s probing.

Torture and interrogation methods used on the detainees (whose ages have ranged from nine years old to ninety eight years old) in interrogation periods of over twenty consecutive hours include (but are NOT limited to) (categories do overlap):

Humiliation, mainly religious, cultural, and sexual –

being raped, made to watch other prisoners being humiliated and raped, urinated on by soldiers/guards, having menstrual blood wiped on detainees’ faces, bodies, and beards, used as a “human mop” to wipe up faeces, urine and other bodily excretions, forced nudity (during which the guards take photos to keep as trophies), being forced to watch guards and interrogators engage in sexual acts, forcibly straddled and felt up by scantily dressed female guards, forced to wear feminine clothes, forced to participate in indecent acts with other detainees and both male and female guards, having facial hair shaved, having to witness guards throw Qur’ans down to the ground and in toilets, being mocked by guards while praying, guards and interrogators employing prayer (which is a compulsory component of Islam and must be performed five times a day at specific times) as a privilege, being prevented from praying, not being allowed clean clothes, being force fed during Ramadhaan (the month in which Muslims are required to fast for a portion of the day), guards withholding blankets as they are employed as a privilege

Psychological abuse –

being taunted with the prospect of home, familial reunion, and good food, sleep deprivation, hours of interrogations, use of phobias as torture, sensory bombardment, sensory deprivation, isolation, music torture, mock executions, having to hear guards and interrogators’ threats directed at family members, especially towards female family members

Physical abuse -

being made to walk on barbed wire and shards of glass, having hot liquids poured over the head and body, being subject to electric shocks, burns (inflicted by cigarettes), long and short shackling for hours on end, stress positions, beatings, violent dogs, waterboarding, abdomen strikes

Environmental and blatant health manipulation -

extreme cold, cold cell (hypothermia), being force fed, forced injections

(Side note – respect to Neely for owning up to his crimes and apologising. Ahmed and Neely have become good friends since this interview).

6 months ago
 987
Source
Via labyrintho
Posted by ikenbot
# Guantanamo bay
# war
# detainee
# brandon neely
# ruhal ahmed
# interview
# america
# prison

Yep. Romney is a racist, sexist, reactionary dolt.

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

And Obama is a smooth talker who knows all the right things to say.

While he orders drone hits on children, women, all people of color.

While he works to undermine the remains of the public education system and keep the schools-to-jails pipeline flowing.

Happy election 2012!

Word :/

7 months ago
 212
Via fuckyeahmarxismleninism
Posted by ikenbot
# romney
# obama
# imperialism
# war
# drones
# massacre
# racist
# sexist
# education
# privatization
# wall street
# debate
# elections

"Abroad, armed with science, the United States could make an even bigger difference. Instead of paying $1 billion for a new B-2 bomber or $2 billion for a Virgina Class Submarine – tools designed to forcefully combat the symptoms of the world’s problems — we could pay less and actually work to solve those problems. We live in a new age where people can collaborate as never before, working cooperatively across previously insurmountable barriers of distance and language. In this modern age, we don’t need an army of soldiers; we need an army of scientists."

Steven Ross Pomeroy - Stop Building Bombs and Start Building Starships
7 months ago
 803
Posted by ikenbot
# science
# perfect
# tech
# war
# army
# militarism
scinerds: Severed Hands Discovered in Ancient Egypt Palace A team of archaeologists excavating a palace in the ancient city of Avaris, in Egypt, has made a gruesome discovery. The archaeologists have unearthed the skeletons of 16 human hands buried in four pits. Two of the pits, located in front of what is believed to be a throne room, hold one hand each. Two other pits, constructed at a slightly later time in an outer space of the palace, contain the 14 remaining hands. They are all right hands; there are no lefts. “Most of the hands are quite large and some of them are very large,” Manfred Bietak, project and field director of the excavations, told LiveScience. The finds, made in the Nile Delta northeast of Cairo, date back about 3,600 years to a time when the Hyksos, a people believed to be originally from northern Canaan, controlled part of Egypt and made their capital at Avaris a location known today as Tell el-Daba. At the time the hands were buried, the palace was being used by one of the Hyksos rulers, King Khayan.

scinerds:

Severed Hands Discovered in Ancient Egypt Palace

A team of archaeologists excavating a palace in the ancient city of Avaris, in Egypt, has made a gruesome discovery.

The archaeologists have unearthed the skeletons of 16 human hands buried in four pits. Two of the pits, located in front of what is believed to be a throne room, hold one hand each. Two other pits, constructed at a slightly later time in an outer space of the palace, contain the 14 remaining hands.

They are all right hands; there are no lefts.

“Most of the hands are quite large and some of them are very large,” Manfred Bietak, project and field director of the excavations, told LiveScience.

The finds, made in the Nile Delta northeast of Cairo, date back about 3,600 years to a time when the Hyksos, a people believed to be originally from northern Canaan, controlled part of Egypt and made their capital at Avaris a location known today as Tell el-Daba. At the time the hands were buried, the palace was being used by one of the Hyksos rulers, King Khayan.

9 months ago
 563
Via scinerds
Posted by ikenbot
# Science
# News
# History
# Egypt
# Discovery
# War
# Ancient
# Archaeology
9 months ago
 2136
Via thatfuckingfrenzy
Posted by ikenbot
# make love
# not war
# war
# peace
# love

»  Al-Jazeera video breaks down military spending by the dollar

sinidentidades:

More than half of every dollar we pay into taxes goes toward military spending, according to an analysis posted by Al-Jazeera earlier this week.

The video illustrates a conversation between radio host Dennis Bernstein and journalist Dave Lindorff.

“People have to realize that 53 cents of every dollar that they are paying into taxes is going to the military,” Lindorff says. “It’s an astonishing figure. There is an enormous, enormous amount of money being blown on war and killing and destruction.”

Of the proposed $3 trillion budget, Lindorff says, $717 billion would be allocated to the Pentagon budget; a $158 billion “contingency fund” would be used for military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan; $40 billion in “black box” intelligence spending

“They never tell us how much they spend on the CIA, NSA and DIA, and all these different intelligence activities, which are all war-related,” he says. An error in testimony about two years ago an error in Congressional testimony led to the revelation that the covert intelligence budget was around $37 billion, Lindorff says, adding that he suspects the budget is really closer to $60 billion or $70 billion.

Watch the Al-Jazeera USA video

Militarism at its best.

10 months ago
 163
Source
Via melancholic-despondency-deactiv
Posted by ikenbot
# news
# government
# politics
# military
# war

"Fights between individuals, as well as governments and nations, invariably result from misunderstandings in the broadest interpretation of this term. Misunderstandings are always caused by the inability of appreciating one another’s point of view. This again is due to the ignorance of those concerned, not so much in their own, as in their mutual fields. The peril of a clash is aggravated by a more or less predominant sense of combativeness, posed by every human being. To resist this inherent fighting tendency the best way is to dispel ignorance of the doings of others by a systematic spread of general knowledge. With this object in view, it is most important to aid exchange of thought and intercourse."

Nikola Tesla
1 year ago
 133
Posted by ikenbot
# Science
# Lit
# War
# Peace
# Wisdom
# Philosophy
# Politics
# History

warandconflict:

Women of WWII

1 year ago
 349
Source
Via misty2824
Posted by ikenbot
# feminism
# feminist
# war