From Jim E.:
Red shows you how to make a complete Christmas dinner without a kitchen.
Artist Makes Music with Instruments of Death
From Weaponry to Symphony: An Artist Makes Music from Confiscated Guns
by Andri Antoniades
TakePart.com
December 2, 2012
Mexican artist Pedro Reyes transforms ‘agents of death’ into ‘instruments of life.’
Mexican artist Pedro Reyes transformed 6,700 used weapons into an orchestra of musical instruments as an act of protest against gun violence and a firearms industry he says is killing his people.
As part of a project Reyes calls Imagine, he worked with six musicians over several weeks to reimagine the weapons into objects that could create beautiful sounds. Together, they took the weapons apart and re-welded them into a variety of playable instruments that include wood, strings, and percussion.
Reyes writes on his website that the process of turning these “agents of death into instruments of life” was painful, albeit personally transformative. “It”s important to consider that many lives were taken with these weapons; as if a sort of exorcism was taking place the music expelled the demons they held, as well as being a requiem for lives lost.”
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Mark Cuban and the EFF Declare War on Crappy Patents
EFF creates the “Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents”
by Cory Doctorow
BoingBoing.net
December 20, 2012
Broadcast.com founder Mark Cuban and Minecraft creator Markus Persson have donated $500,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to endow the “Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents,” which will be occupied by an attorney tasked with hunting down and destroying crappy patents that have been recklessly granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office to unscrupulous “inventors” who claim to have invented things that were obvious and/or already extant; and to pay for activists to fight for substantive patent reform:
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“Almighty God” Arrested Preparing for the End
Almost 1,000 doomsday cult members arrested in China
BBC News China
December 20, 2012
The BBC’s Damian Grammaticas says police are likely to detain suspected cult members for several days
Police in China have carried out further arrests of members of a doomsday cult for spreading rumours about the imminent end of the world, state media say.
Almost 1,000 members of Christian group Almighty God have now been detained.
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image: Huffington Post
Hacker collective UG Nazi Targets Westboro Baptist Church Social Media
Hackers’ Westboro Baptist Church Blitz Continues: UG Nazi, Jester, Anonymous Take Down Twitter Accounts, Sites
by Dominique Mosbergen
The Huffington Post
December 20, 2012
The online offensive against the Westboro Baptist Church continues to gain momentum.
The Twitter accounts of two prominent members of the hate-mongering group were apparently infiltrated this week by members of the infamous hacker collective UG Nazi.
On Monday, Wired.com confirmed that 15-year-old whiz kid “Cosmo the God,” a prolific member of the UG Nazi “hacktivist” group, had successfully carried out a takeover of @DearShirley, the Twitter account opened by WBC spokeswoman Shirley Lynn Phelps-Roper.
The Washington Post details the hijacking of Phelps-Roper’s account:
Phelps-Roper apparently sent her last authentic tweet hours after the Sandy Hook tragedy, announcing that the controversial group planned to picket outside the funerals of Newtown victims. Cosmo broke into the account on Monday morning, changing Phelps-Roper”s background to an illustration that said “pray for Newtown” and editing her profile information.
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