The Antidote

I wrote this for obrigado:

Real Life Aliens: The Not-So-Secret-Seven

If you’ve ever looked at certain celebrities and thought “you can’t be for real!!”, you may not have been too far off the mark. We have it on good authority that the following stars are not just off their heads, but literally from off the planet.

Riaan Cruywagen: He used to channel a news reading bunny, his hair piece is the latest in extraterrestrial hi-tech fashion and his cultivated death-warmed-up look is beyond the ken of earthly medicine.

Keith Richards: Schnarfing your own father’s ashes is just not the done thing in this part of the solar system.

Patricia Lewis: It’s a known fact that producers of German erotic thrillers don’t cast Earthlings on principle.

Michael Jackson: Unlike Jared Leto, who’s trying very hard to appear alien, Michael has managed to fool millions into believing that he is humanoid for decades.

John Voigt: One look at the man should make it patently obvious that there is no way for him to have fathered Angelina Jolie without very substantial assistance from an unthinkably advanced civilisation.

Ozzy Osbourne: He bites the heads off doves and bats and converses in an incomprehensible language, recently identified as closely related to a dialect spoken in the neighbourhood of Lupus Major.

Donatella Versace: The lips, the nose, the cellulite, the skimpy bikinis – you’ve always known there’s something seriously odd about her… now you know why.

Steve Buscemi: Used his freaky alien eyes to hypnotise the Coen Brothers into casting him in more of their movies than John Turturro.

Mickey Rourke: Oh, Mickey used to be so fine, but after 9 1/2 weeks, no hair implant or face lift on Earth had the power to stem his otherworldly rate of bodily decay.

Helena Bonham Carter: Her dress sense is a clue, but it’s the state of her hair that’s the dead give-away: she’s permanently primed for transmissions from her home planet.

Susan Shabangu: She graduated with honours from the Judge Dredd “Shoot-First-Ask-Questions-After-The-Autopsy” Police Academy in a galaxy far, far away.

Another documentary screening by While You Were Sleeping:

Uncounted, a spine-chilling, feature-length film by Emmy award-winning director David Earnhardt about how Americans were cheated during the 2004 and 2006 elections will be shown at the Labia on Orange cinema in Cape Town on Sunday 2 November at 6.15pm, on Monday 3 November at 8:15pm and on Tuesday 4 November at 8:15pm.

On the eve of the 2008 US presidential elections, Uncounted is a wakeup call for everyone who has unconditional faith in election procedures in the world’s most “advanced” democracy. This controversial new documentary shows how election fraud changed the outcome of the 2004 election, led to even greater fraud in 2006 and how it now looms as an unbridled threat to the outcome of the 2008 election.

Uncounted examines in factual, logical, and yet startling terms how easy it is to change election outcomes and undermine election integrity. Noted computer programmers, statisticians, journalists, and experienced election officials provide the irrefutable proof. Eyewitness accounts from whistleblowers are backed up by election experts in revealing how racist tactics, electronic voting machine security breaches, vote count manipulation, and illegal behaviour by a major voting machine manufacturer all threaten the very core of US democracy – the vote.

Looking towards our own national and provincial elections next year, Uncounted is of particular interest and relevance to South Africans. Don’t miss it!

For more information consult the official Uncounted website: www.uncountedthemovie.com.

The screenings will be followed by a facilitated audience discussion. Tickets are R20 and can be reserved by calling The Labia at (021) 424 5927. Reserving tickets is strongly recommended to avoid disappointment.

This event is presented by The Labia and While You Were Sleeping, a Cape Town-based non-profit film collective committed to bringing progressive, non-mainstream documentaries with important social and environmental messages to South African audiences.

Contacts:

The Labia:

021 424 5927

While You Were Sleeping:

Andreas Späth

084 772 1056

Andreas_Spath@yahoo.com

The very first movie While You Were Sleeping, the documentary film screening collective I’m involved in, showed was called The End of Suburbia. Now we’re doing the “sequel”. Please come and join us:

Escape From Suburbia, a sobering new documentary movie about the prospect of a future without cheap oil will be shown at the Labia on Orange cinema in Cape Town on Sunday 28 September at 8:15pm, on Monday 29 September at 6:15pm and on Tuesday 30 September at 8:15pm.

Escape from Suburbia is the follow-up to the immensely influential cult-classic The End of Suburbia, one of the first documentaries to explore the concept of Peak Oil – the point in time when half of the Earth’s oil supplies will have been used up. In Escape From Suburbia director Greg Greene once again takes us “through the looking glass” on a journey of discovery – a sobering yet vital and ultimately positive exploration of what the second half of the Oil Age has in store for us.

Escape From Suburbia outlines the causes and consequences of the coming oil crisis and also offers us some possible solutions. Through personal stories and interviews, the film examines how declining world oil production has already begun to affect our lives. Expert scientific opinion is balanced with “on the street” portraits from an emerging global movement of citizen’s groups who are confronting the challenges of Peak Oil in extraordinary ways.

The clock is ticking. Escape From Suburbia asks the tough questions: Are we approaching Peak Oil now? What are the controversies surrounding our future energy options? Why are a growing number of specialists and citizens sceptical of these options? What are ordinary people doing in their own communities to prepare for Peak Oil? And what will YOU do as oil and food prices skyrocket and the Oil Age draws to a close?

For more information consult the official movie website: www.escapefromsuburbia.com.

The screenings will be followed by a facilitated audience discussion. Tickets are R20 and can be reserved by calling The Labia at 021 424 5927. Reserving tickets is strongly recommended to avoid disappointment.

This event is presented by The Labia, The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) South Africa and While You Were Sleeping, a Cape Town-based non-profit film collective committed to bringing progressive, non-mainstream documentaries with important social and environmental messages to South African audiences.

Contacts:

The Labia:

021 424 5927

ASPO – South Africa:

www.aspo.org.za

info@aspo.org.za

While You Were Sleeping:

Andreas Späth

084 772 1056

Andreas_Spath@yahoo.com

www.whileyouweresleeping.wordpress.com

Please come and join While You Were Sleeping and Shikaya at the screening of a captivating new documentary film about the post-Apartheid education system in South Africa:

Testing Hope: Grade 12 in the new South Africa directed by Molly Blank.

Testing Hope tells the story of four students in Nyanga township outside Cape Town, who started school the year that Mandela was elected president, as they prepare for their crucial Matric exams which one student calls, “the decider.” The film considers what’s at stake if students pass or fail and how they envision their future in this evolving democracy.

Testing Hope will be shown at the Labia on Orange cinema in Cape Town on Sunday 31 August at 8:00pm, on Monday 1 September at 8:00pm and on Tuesday 2 September at 8:00pm.

This captivating and enlightening film recently been featured in Drum Magazine, the Sunday Times, the Star, the Saturday Star, and on the American National Public Radio.

“In a brilliant new documentary…an American filmmaker traces the lives, hopes and aspirations… of black teenagers during…their Matric year. It is a heartbreaking story, and nobody who watches this hour long film will ever again interpret the Matric results with the unrestrained exuberance to which we are treated every year… Testing Hope has touched a raw nerve in our post-1994 democracy. What drives many to action upon seeing this film is that, we realize, in a very vivid way, how high the stakes are for poor students and the dramatic consequences of failure for individuals, families and ultimately society as a whole. This movie is activism in its purest form.”

Jonathan Jansen, immediate past Dean, Education Faculty, University of Pretoria

For more information on the film, visit www.testinghope.com.

The screenings will be followed by a facilitated audience discussion. The director Molly Blank and some of the students featured in the film will be present to take part in the discussion. Tickets are R20 and can be reserved by calling The Labia at 021 424 5927. Reserving tickets is strongly recommended to avoid disappointment.

This event is presented by The Labia, Shikaya, a non-profit that works with teachers to create responsible, critical thinking and caring citizens of South Africa, and While You Were Sleeping, a Cape Town-based non-profit film collective committed to bringing progressive, non-mainstream documentaries with important social and environmental messages to South African audiences.

Contacts:

The Labia:

021 424 5927

While You Were Sleeping:

Andreas Späth

084 772 1056

Andreas_Spath@yahoo.com

www.whileyouweresleeping.wordpress.com

Shikaya

Dylan Wray

021 461 4239

083 391 3709

dylan@shikaya.org

You may remember me writing about the growing public relations effort around the world and in South Africa dedicated to making nuclear power more palatable to the general public. I commented on a pro-nuclear article written in Greenprint by Mike Freedman of a local PR outfit called Freedthinkers. His take on the issue seemed to be that the only thing wrong with atomic energy industry was that it had not spent enough money on good PR.

In response to my questions about his article, Mr Freedman said the following:

I write in my private capacity. I am not a representative of government, neither do I inform them of what I write.

[...]

The work we did for the dti had nothing to do with Eskom & PBMR.

[...]

This may have been true at the time, but alas, it seems that Mr Freedman has now officially joined the nuclear lobby in more than just a “private capacity” – or perhaps his article got him the attention of people who were willing to pay money for the contribution he was already making so selflessly for free.

According to an article in The Times which makes for really interesting reading,

The government has enlisted the aid of a brand consultant to give the image of nuclear power in South Africa a major makeover.

It is seeking to identify so-called “nuclear ambassadors” to endorse nuclear power stations in communities and the business world.

But opponents fear that the move may be an attempt to short-circuit public consultation as the government presses ahead with its programme to build a dozen more conventional plants and at least twice that number of pebble-bed reactors.

The makeover initiative was being led by the department of public enterprises, working with minerals and energy and Eskom.

They hired the services of brand consultants Freedthinkers, which calls itself a “research and development think-tank”.

Freedthinkers had begun conducting interviews with a range of people in organisations including the business sector, large corporations, and NGOs.

According to the guide that Freedthinkers provided for its interviewers, the objective of the project was to “unearth the perceptions, misperceptions, fears and expectations surrounding nuclear power and related issues”.

Nice one!

I’ve been reading issues 1 to 4 of SteamPunk Magazine recently.

If you enjoy China Mieville’s books or Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Michael Moorcock’s A Nomad of the Timestreams series or even if you’re into cyberpunk, I’m guessing you’d enjoy reading the mag, too. Find out more, order or download here.

Durban-based activist/academic Patrick Bond makes a very convincing argument against carbon trading, the mechanism meant to mitigate industrial carbon dioxide emissions (for a great intro to the subject, check-out this urban sprout post).

Bond agrees with Vandana Shiva that “the right to pollute is a multitrillion dollar giveaway to the people who caused the bulk of the climate problems” in the first place.

He criticizes the role South African environment minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk played at the recent Bali conference:

Van Schalkwyk’s leadership is a travesty, for he has said nothing about South Africa’s own $20 billion in new investments – partly privatised through the US multinational AES – in cheap coal-fired electricity generation for the sake mainly of large corporations; he endorses nuclear energy expansion. SA already has an emissions output per person per unit of GDP twenty times worse than the US [GULP!], and van Schalkwyk’s official carbon trading policy argues that it is primarily a ‘commercial opportunity.’

and he points to a “very different strategy and demand by civil society activists: leave the oil in the soil, the resources in the ground”. This strategy that is also supported by George Monbiot:

‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have the answer! Incredible as it might seem, I have stumbled across the single technology which will save us from runaway climate change! From the goodness of my heart I offer it to you for free. No patents, no small print, no hidden clauses. Already this technology, a radical new kind of carbon capture and storage, is causing a stir among scientists. It is cheap, it is efficient and it can be deployed straight away. It is called … leaving fossil fuels in the ground.

It’s the stop-what-you’re-doing principle again, isn’t it.

And if you can’t be bothered to read it all, here’s a short video of Bond on the topic:

I know this is incredibly late in the day (literally), but if you’re in PE this afternoon, please try to support this (I just found it on urban sprout myself). And those of you in the Eastern Cape looking for an environmental home, try NiMBLE.

MARCH AGAINST ALCAN IN PE

Protesters that include parents, community members, farmers and environmentalists will hold a peaceful demonstration against the Alcan/Coega development. They will meet behind the Paxton Hotel in Humerail, Port Elizabeth tomorrow – Friday 25 May between 4-5pm to march and hand out informative pamphlets to the public.

What is their aim? They believe that Alcan represents the first of a new wave of industrial development in the PE Metro. Alcan has had a hugely negative global impact and they protest against them setting up in the PE Metro. The whole deal has been made with little gain for local people and much harm. Protesters hope that public pressure will highlight objections to the development and force local and national leaders to rethink their national strategy.

The combined protesters of Alcan want a national strategy for sustainable development as well as a local strategy for healthy, prosperous local livelihoods.

For further information contact:
Greg Smith
NiMBLE
0741165509
info@nimblesa.org
www.nimblesa.org