1. The situation in Egypt is bad. The democratically elected president, Morsi, was ousted early July because he stopped acting so democratically (see my earlier post here)…
…but his friends in the Muslim Brotherhood will not let it go and have set up protest camps like right in the middle of town — and this week the middle-class neighborhood turned into a war zone. You can read about it here or here but really… a friend of mine is Egyptian living in LA and his FB summation is the best (lightly edited here):
“The Muslim Brotherhood are a small, extremist, militant political group (the most fair and even comparison in the States would be The Ku Klux Klan) who are determined to turn Egypt into a radical Islamic state, even at the cost of the lives of their own children and the prosperity and wellbeing of Egypt and its people.
One of their main camps was set in a busy, residential and commercial square in the middle of Nasr City, one of Cairo’s busier districts. In an effort to avoid unnecessary violence, the military (with international support) repeatedly urged the protestors to leave the square, to no avail. They warned them of the military action to come, and told them to at least have their women and children leave the area, etc. (This went on for 3 weeks.)
Finally, a couple of days ago, the military intervened, and after being met with violence and attacks from [the Muslim Brotherhood, who were] using illegal artillery and makeshift weaponry, the military cracked down on said law-breakers with a sweep of violence that has left over 500 dead and hundreds more injured […] The true victim in this story is not the Brotherhood or the soldiers who perished, but Egypt — a country that is being choked by people that don’t want to evolve.“
2. Talking about which, sunsets! Here’s an ode/crochety lament to the over-snapped dusk through time (and its Insta-incarnation). But really I want to talk about: the sun rising on the Hyperloop! The billionaire entrepreneur behind Tesla and Paypal, Elon Musk, he of the impossibly odoriferous name, revealed the design plans for a super sexy transport train thingy that would go almost the speed of sound using SOLAR power, hurling passengers from SF->LA in half an hour. Only one problem:
Har har.
3. Awesomeness from the web! A) COME ON. This maps compilation that’s been going around is SO cool — see the world differently thanks to more filters than Instagram, from “Where People Feel the Most and Least Loved” (in case we needed an update on last week’s Russia story), to “Where the Atheists live,” to a time-lapse of a year as seen from space. It’s enough to turn anyone into an accidental cartographile.
B) Craigy Ferguson with a legit theory on how we became a dumbness-revering culture:
And C) Ok, this is sort of the be-all end-all video — a quote from psychonaut Terence McKenna:
A tough love reminder that we all gotta step away from the screen (slash-magazine-slash-even radio) from time to time if we wanna make culture and not just gobble it up, like, you know, the “trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.” ‘N stuff. For example:
And also:
Heh. Have brilliant weekends, all!
Quote of the week:
The Smarty at the Party 