Tuesday 26 December 2006


Did the Vatican steal Jesus' foreskin
so people would shut up about the savior's penis?


Even before its disappearance, the relic had a strange history.

It was discovered in Calcata in 1557, and a series of miracles soon followed (freak storms, perfumed mists engulfing the village).

The church gave the finding a seal of approval by offering a 10-year indulgence to those who came to venerate. Lines of pilgrims stretched from the church doors to beyond the walls of the fortress town. Nuns and monks from nearby villages and monasteries made candlelit processions. Calcata was a must-see destination on the pilgrimage map.

That is, until 1900. Facing increasing criticism after the "rediscovery" of a holy foreskin in France, the Vatican decreed that anyone who wrote about or spoke the name of the holy foreskin would face excommunication.


plus...

NEW PANTHEON

Monday 25 December 2006

MERCHANDISE



A SHOP BY RUSSELL HIGGS



Christmas is all about shopping.



here is my first limited edition winter selection



A SHOP BY RUSSELL HIGGS

Monday 11 December 2006

Saturday 9 December 2006

Online Museum of Old Family Photographs

in honour of anonymous people from all over the world.
the things people throw away, forget or what seems to be irrelevant.
Flickr Patterns taken from public transport

via grow-a-brain

Thursday 7 December 2006

Weatherman, known colloquially as the Weathermen and later the Weather Underground Organization, was a U.S. Radical Left organization whose purpose was to carry out a series of militant actions that would achieve the revolutionary overthrow of the Government of the United States (and of capitalism as a whole).

pdf Full text of book Weatherman,
ed. by Harold Jacobs, a collection of documents by and about SDS/Weatherman. This book was published in 1970 and deals only with WUO's early period. Out of print

pdf Full text of book The Way The Wind Blew
A History Of The Weather Underground

The Weather Underground
Official site for the 2002 documentary directed and produced by Sam Green, Bill Siegel and Carrie Lozano
The scientist, author and campaigning atheist Richard Dawkins answers your questions

"I have a (you might say fanatical) desire for people to use their own minds and make their own choices, based upon publicly available evidence. Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'."

Do you consider parents forcing children to accept their religion a form of child abuse?

"Yes. What would you think of parents who forced their children to accept their politics, or their taste in architecture? Have you ever heard anyone speak of a "Leninist child" or a "Postmodernist child"? Of course not. Why, then, do we all go along with "Christian child" and "Muslim child"? Such labelling of children with their parents' religion is child abuse."

Saturday 2 December 2006

'Letting Go'

I am at that point of 'letting go'..... says doublevelvet over on flickr ........ I want to work out a way to give all my work away, to 'gift' it, to unblock the bottle neck that commodifying art creates. I want to take the power out of the hands of those who put a price on everything. To begin with I have 120 pieces in storage up for grabs. How can we set about this?I should say, to avoid confusion, that I am not looking to barter. I am of no fixed abode and do not intend ever owning walls, so I would have nowhere ever to store work swapped. I want to 'gift' them, that is give them away. I cannot afford their upkeep. The making of them was never a commercial venture. Those that find a loving home will survive, those that don't will be destroyed. The storage is in evidence further back in my photostream. This is a move forward. I do not want to be stymied protecting my past.

plus "A Reading list presented in an attempt to encourage the Reclamation of Hope"

Wednesday 22 November 2006

Helem, Lebanon’s pioneering gay and lesbian rights organization, has scaled back its advocacy efforts in acknowledgment of Lebanese politicians’ preoccupation with other issues – and its own potential for igniting a backlash.

The backlash was to be expected, given how the group’s profile has risen since it was founded three years ago.

“[It is] a sword on your neck, basically,” says Ghassan Makaram, the co-chair of Helem’s legal committee. “It’s something you are always afraid of, that the state will take legal recourse if you are lifting your head too high in terms of events, being too public, asking for too much … We have to be careful.”

“Before the war, Helem fitted in very nicely with the new discourse of ‘freedom and democracy,’ and [was] trying to take advantage of that,”

But now legal and political advocacy has taken a back seat. Lawmakers’ attention has shifted from potential re forms to the penal code.
The Church of Scientology woos officers from the City of London police

Saturday 18 November 2006

"....a situation in which the will of the majority for peace
is displaced by the will of the minority for war."


Tony Blair, the will of that minority,
responding to a question by Sir David Frost
in an interview on the new al-Jazeera English-language Arabic TV channel.
S E L F P L E X




www.flickr.com



Tuesday 7 November 2006

13 Enemies of the internet

A list of 13 "enemies of the internet" has been released
by human rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

The list consists of countries that RSF believes are
suppressing freedom of expression on the internet.

Belarus
Burma
China
Cuba
Egypt
Iran
North Korea
Saudi Arabia
Syria
Tunisia
Turkmenistan
Uzbekistan
Vietnam
KENTUCKY FRIED CRUELTY



Bea Arthur Speaks Out Against KFC

Sunday 5 November 2006

40 THINGS THAT ONLY HAPPEN IN MOVIES

such as.....

"If a microphone is turned on
it will immediately feedback."

and...

"No matter how savagely a spaceship is attacked,
its internal gravity system is never damaged."


THE DIVINE DAVID

Thursday 2 November 2006

H A P P I N E S S

synthetic happiness
video - dan gilbert

part of a series of video mini lectures,
they last about 20 mins each,
over on T.E.D.

Sunday 22 October 2006

BUS STOP 9

BUS STOP 9

(speech bubble text: warhol)

Today is the first anniversary
of the first uploaded page
of my first photo webcomic strip
"THE INSURGENT".



www.flickr.com





Friday 20 October 2006

THE ART OF ABU GHRAIB

"The horrors of Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison have been brought to shocking life by the brush of Colombia's best-known painter, Fernando Botero."

"The artist says that anger drove him to portray the tortures inflicted by American soldiers upon Iraqi detainees in an Iraqi prison."

"This conduct by the Americans was a total shock for me..."

Tuesday 17 October 2006

Friday 13 October 2006

NAZI ZOMBIES
"Independent, unilateral reporting, free from official strictures, is crucial; not simply to us as journalists but to the role we play in a free and democratic society."


US forces killed ITN reporter in Iraq

A coroner has recorded a verdict of unlawful killing on ITN reporter Terry Lloyd, who was shot dead by US forces in southern Iraq in March 2003.

Mr Lloyd was covering the British and American invasion of Iraq as a "unilateral" journalist, rather than those "embedded" with UK or US forces, who were subject to military censorship.

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) said Mr Lloyd's killing was a "war crime" and this was echoed by Mr Lloyd's widow, Lyn.

"This was not a friendly fire incident or a crossfire incident, it was a despicable, deliberate, vengeful act,"


An inquest heard Mr Lloyd was killed by a US bullet near Basra. His interpreter died and his cameraman is missing.

The inquest heard Mr Lloyd, 50 and originally from Derby, was hit while in a makeshift ambulance, having already been hurt in American-Iraqi crossfire.


ARCHIVES FROM PREVIOUS YEARS...

MAKING SURE THE MEDIA STAYS ON MESSAGE

There are two wars in Iraq.
One war is against the Iraqi people,
and the other is a war on witnesses.


another New York Times journalist killed in Basra

Fakher Haider has been killed after men claiming to be police officers abducted him from his home in Basra. He was found dead in a deserted area of the Iraqi city yesterday.

he is the 68th journalist killed in Iraq since the start of the war in March 2003 and the 19th this year (2005)

He is also the second New York Times journalist to have been killed in Basra over the past two months.

Last month the freelance journalist Steven Vincent was killed after he and his Iraqi translator were abducted at gunpoint.


Reuters cameraman to be held in Abu Ghraib without charge

he would not be allowed to see an attorney, his family or anyone else for the first 60 days of his detention.

Lieutenant Colonel Rudisill said he was aware of five journalists for major news media in detention, including Mr Mashhadani and another freelance cameraman who has worked for Reuters, as well as a cameraman for the US television network CBS. Journalists for other major international organisations have recently been released without charge after many months in custody.

Reuters soundman Waleed Khaled was killed in Baghdad, apparently by US troops, and cameraman Haider Kadhem, who was wounded in the same incident, has been held ever since by the US military for questioning. Reuters has demanded his immediate release. Iraqi police said US troops fired into the car carrying the Reuters team.


Pentagon Threatens to Kill Independent Journalists

"The Pentagon has threatened to fire on the satellite uplink positions of independent journalists in Iraq, according to veteran BBC war correspondent, Kate Adie.

In an interview with Irish radio, Ms. Adie said that questioned about the consequences of such potentially fatal actions, a senior Pentagon officer had said: "Who cares.. ..They've been warned."

She also warned that the Pentagon is vetting journalists according to their stance on the war, and intends to take control of US journalists' satellite equipment, in order to control access to the airwaves.

Another guest on the show, war author Phillip Knightley, reported that the Pentagon has also threatened they: "may find it necessary to bomb areas in which war correspondents are attempting to report from the Iraqi side."


Reporters Without Borders accuses US military
of deliberately firing at journalists


Reporters Without Borders called on US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld to provide evidence that the offices of the pan-Arab TV station Al-Jazeera and the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad were not deliberately fired at by US forces in attacks that killed three journalists.

"we can only conclude that the US Army deliberately and without warning targeted journalists. US forces must prove that the incident was not a deliberate attack to dissuade or prevent journalists from continuing to report on what is happening in Baghdad,"

"Very many non-embedded journalists have complained about being refused entry to Iraq from Kuwait, threatened with withdrawal of accreditation and being held and interrogated for several hours. One group of non-embedded journalists was held in secret for two days and roughed up by US military police,"


In Iraq, the US eliminates those
who dare to count the dead


"We don't do body counts," said General Tommy Franks of US Central Command. The question is: what happens to the people who insist on counting the bodies - the doctors who must pronounce their patients dead, the journalists who document these losses, the clerics who denounce them?

In Iraq, evidence is mounting that these voices are being systematically silenced through a variety of means, from mass arrests, to raids on hospitals, media bans, and overt and unexplained physical attacks.


RSF says that "arrests of journalists and
censorship of media reached a record high in 2003,"


Journalist death toll in 2004 was worst since 1955

Killings are not the only way to silence journalists. Reporters Without Borders also report that 107 journalists were in prison around the world on January 1 2005. China remains the world's biggest prison for journalists, with 26 detained...


reporters without borders

Thursday 12 October 2006

THE ROBOTIC MULE

Wednesday 11 October 2006

THE NEW ABSURDIST

a community of experimental writers and malcontents dedicated to the annihilation of the literary/industrial complex.

BUST DOWN THE DOOR AND EAT ALL THE CHICKENS i

a popular vacation spot for stories who have never felt like they fit in
NEW VIDEO

RUSSELL HIGGS THE MUSICAL PART 2

LOOK

I switch on the camera, I stand in front of it, I see what comes out of me. This time its another made up song in an unknown language with a subtitled translation.

Sunday 8 October 2006

WALL

WALL
RUSSELL HIGGS' SHAKESPEARE

I LIKE DRAWING

Everyday Signs is a series of 8 new limited edition screenprints
by Ian Stevenson.
GOD IS FOR SUCKERS
a Basic Income or Citizen's Income is an unconditional,
non-withdrawable, regular income, not linked to work, payable to each individual as a right of citizenship, sufficient to provide people with a standard of living above the poverty line.
SMASHED CANS
MindGames
greyworld
Human Connectedness

anarcho-transhumanism
Cyborg Democracy
Voluntary Resistance

Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
Simple Adventures for Everyday Living
random acts of kindness
join me

global ideas bank
anxiety culture
the play ethic

chessboxing
shopdropping
amor mundi

future hi
room 13
Society for Barefoot Living
the Tissue Culture & Art Project
SKETCH SWAP

you draw something on the screen, and when you're finished, you hit "Submit drawing"... to receive a random drawing from someone else.