http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/07/ethnic_clashes_in_urumqi_china.html
*A bunch of well-chosen photos here of ethno-religious rioters busting up the joint in central Asia... ugly, of course, but nothing particularly remarkable there... However, check out the atemporal cellphone/spiked mace techno-mashup brandished by this agitated local urbanite. You see that hardware? He probably invented that. He made that gizmo up and he assembled it himself, I reckon. That's kinda like MAKEZINE gear for instant ethnic pogroms. Maybe somebody passed him an instructable through that nifty camera phone.
*In another, similar pic, some jittery street-kid brandishes a spear-shield combo that would be straight out of the Roman Empire, if he hadn't, in fact, clearly copied it from the crypto-medieval gear of contemporary Chinese riot cops.
*Thanks, Anne-Laure!
