Rimbaud “Democracy”

 

 

Democracy

 

   “The flag’s off to that filthy place, and our speech drowns the sound of

The drum.

   “In the centers we’ll feed the most cynical whoring. We’ll smash all logical

revolts.

   “To the peppery dried up countries!-in the service of the most gigantic

industrial or military exploitation.

   “Goodbye to this place, no matter where we’re off to. We conscripts of

good will are going to display a savage philosophy; ignorant in science, 

rakes where our comfort is concerned; and let the world blow up! This is 

the real march. Forward, men!”

 

 

 

AR

LSD good for the terminally ill (and aren’t we all terminally ill?)

 

    First test of “psychedelic psychotherapy” since the 70’s. Researchers hope effects will improve quality of life.

    Scientists are exploring the use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD to treat a range of ailments from depression to cluster headaches and obsessive compulsive disorder.

    The first clinical trial using LSD since the 1970s began in Switzerland in June. It aims to use “psychedelic psychotherapy” to help patients with terminal illnesses come to terms with their imminent mortality and so improve their quality of life.

The world sucks / it’s great to be alive.

The Delusion Revolution: We’re on the Road to Extinction and in Denial By Robert Jensen, AlterNet Posted on August 15, 2008, Printed on August 19, 2008 http://www.alternet.org/story/95126/ A version of this essay was delivered to the Interfaith Summer Institute for Justice, Peace, and Social Movements at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on Aug. 11, 2008. Audio files of the talk and discussion are available online from the Radio Ecoshock Show.   “The old future’s gone,” John Gorka sings. “We can’t get to there from here.”

Catastrophic Global Warming Provides Amazing New Design Challenges For Architects …Or… Wingnut Makes Drawings Of Floating Concentration Camps

 

   

 A Floating Ecopolis for Ecological Refugees    

 

Jun 13, 2008

It’s common knowledge that the planet is warming, ice caps are melting, and water levels are rising. The international scientific community predicts that a temperature elevation of 1°C will lead to a water rise of 1 meter, resulting in massive land loss and the displacement of millions of people world wide. Vincent Callebaut, a visionary Belgian architect, is responding to this inevitability with his proposal LILYPAD, A Floating Ecopolis for Ecological Refugees.

Coming soon: Capitalism Part 2- The Reckoning!

The Ambiguous Legacy of ‘68

Forty years ago, what was revolutionized — the world or capitalism?

Slavoj Zizek

 

In 1968 Paris, one of the best-known graffiti messages on the city’s walls was “Structures do not walk on the streets!” In other words, the massive student and workers demonstrations of ‘68 could not be explained in the terms of structuralism, as determined by the structural changes in society, as in Saussurean structuralism. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s response was that this, precisely, is what happened in ‘68: structures did descend onto the streets. The visible explosive events on the streets were, ultimately, the result of a structural imbalance.

There are good reasons for Lacan’s skeptical view. As French scholars Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello noted in 1999’s The New Spirit of Capitalism, from the ’70s onward, a new form of capitalism emerged.

Navigating Movements: an interview with Brian Massumi, Delueze scholar and expert in forms of social control

NAVIGATING MOVEMENTS 

When you walk, each step is the body’s movement against falling — each 

movement is felt in our potential for freedom as we move with the earth’s 

gravitational pull. When we navigate our way through the world, there are 

different pulls, constraints and freedoms that move us forward and propel us 

into life. But in the changing face of capitalism, media information and 

technologies — which circulate the globe in more virtual and less obvious ways 

— how do the constraints on freedom involve our affective and embodied 

dimensions of experience? That is, how do we come to feel and respond to 

life and reality itself when new virtualised forms of power mark our every 

step, when the media and political activity continually feed on our 

insecurities — for instance, when a political leader can deploy overseas troops 

to make a country feel safe and secure in the face of ‘terror’. Our beliefs and 

hopes can be galvanised for this ‘good’, and as a tool for orchestrating attacks 

on ‘evil’ and threats to national security. Against this framework of despair 

that enact our relations to the world — violence, terror and the virtual lines 

of capital flow — what are the hopes for political intervention? 

Philosopher Brian Massumi explores the hopes that lie across these fields of 

movement; the potentials for freedom, and the power relations that operate 

in the new ‘societies of control’. These are all ethical issues — about the 

reality of living, the faith and belief in the world that makes us care for our 

belonging to it. Massumi’s diverse writings and philosophical perspectives 

radicalise ideas of affect — the experiences and dimensions of living — that 

are the force of individual and political reality. His writings are concerned 

with the practice of everyday life, and the relations of experience that 

engage us in the world, and our ethical practices. He is based in Montreal. 

Movements — hope, feeling, affect

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent

Visionary Urban Planning For The Future Of Humanity

“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.” - Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe 

The cities will be part of the country; I shall live thirty miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live thirty miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car.

We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work…

enough for all.

                  -Le Corbusier, The Radiant City (1967)

 

 

Future wars ‘to be fought with mind drugs’

Future wars could see opponents attacking each other’s minds, according to a report for the US military. (?)!

Some Arthur Schopenhauer - The Architect of Gloom.

Compared to the bleakness of scientists stealing brains from rat fetuses and placing them in robots, I felt that Schopenhauer’s grim musings would be gleeful.

“There are only pessimists and liars”-Paul Virilio 

“The truth is ugly.” - Friedrich Nietzsche 

Arthur Schopenhauer

Studies in Pessimism

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ON THE SUFFERINGS OF THE WORLD.

Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.

Baby Rat Brains Removed… Put Into Robots.

 

	A ‘Frankenrobot’ with a biological brain   Aug 13 03:25 PM US/Eastern Meet Gordon, probably the world’s first robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue.Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon’s primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday.    Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the lead researchers told AFP.

Job Stealing Robots

Which one is the robot?

 

Thank heavens somebody finally came up with an entertaining and modern replacement for those boring old priests that used to preside over these crazy, antique, performance art spectacles. You know, the ones where couples legalize their love with a contract from the state. Look at the expressiveness of the red emoter lights hovering in the midst of its shiny, black plastic, empathy displacement screen.

I wonder what other tricks it can perform? 

A High Quality David Graeber Essay

 

 

 

Beyond Power/Knowledge 

an exploration of the relation of 

power, ignorance and stupidity 

 

Professor David Graeber 

LSE 

Thursday 25 May 2006

Adolescent Sex Dolls

Here are some images of the latest models from Japanese sex doll manufacturer Honey Dolls. Warning these images are not for the easily offended, further evidence that humans are in trouble…

Youthful Kaze…so lifelike…so cute…

The Banality of Evil

What a way to start the day…the screeching of your Dalek-ian alarm clock accompanied by the smell of sizzling pig corpse, just roll over and shove that scrap of roasted flesh into your crusty morning-breath maw. It only makes sense that such an infernal and stupid device should crafted with a complete lack of artistry by some half-assed carnivore dimwits being ironic.

 

Pre-bacon existence

 

This is a really great book.      Pleasurable Kingdom | by Jonathan Balcombe

An Excerpt Also read a Sample Chapter PDF (MacMillan Science) A group of hippopotamuses rests motionless in the cool of an African freshwater spring. Schools of tiny fish have gathered round their flanks and feet, nibbling at parasites and sloughing skin. The hippos, far from passive participants, splay their toes, gape open their mouths and spread their legs to assist the fish in their cleaning services. Five thousand miles away, in a Montreal lab, an iguana ventures away from her warm perch to retrieve a gourmet tidbit from a frigid corner of her terrarium, ignoring the dull, processed reptile chow just beneath her perch. It’s a reptilian version of shunning the fruit bowl and dashing out for doughnuts on a wintry night. And in Bowling Green, Ohio, a pair of young rats utter ultrasonic squeaks as they chase a hand to be tickled. Rats accustomed to being petted also approach a hand, but not nearly so quickly, nor with as many squeaks as rats trained to expect a tickle.

Caring for our elders…the new fashioned way!

 

“Here comes a robot called uBOT-5 developed by a group of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to take care of the elderly people, in place of a human medical care giver. This robot has been designed similar to the human anatomy with the sense of vision and touch. This robot can intimate the Baby Boomers, the time for taking medicines and when to do grocery shopping.

uBOT-5 has the ability to track the movement of the elders, sense and intimate the remote medical technician if they fall down or if no movement is recognized from the old people. The robot has also been designed to converse with the elders so that they would not feel lonely.

The uBOT-5 also has the ability to recognize outsiders or parcels blocking its path. In fact, it can lift about 2.2 pounds and carry to another place, the researchers say. The uBOT-5 carries a Web cam, a microphone, and a touch-sensitive LCD display so that it acts as interface for communicating with the outside world.”

 

“Boy, how awesome is it going to be when I am being touched, watched, and reminded to take drugs by this charmer!”

“Who needs people when you have this adorable automaton for interfacing with the outside world.”

“I can’t wait until I am old and can no longer take care of myself so I can have a 24/7 surveillance drone buzzing around my domicile keeping an eye on me so nothing unexpected (death?) disrupts my expensive prescription drug regiment…”

 

“what could possibly go wrong?”

 

 

From the nation that has brought us the butter pen, umbrella tube, and eye-drop funnels comes a lovely old person washing machine, just throw your dirty and troublesome wrinkle-bag in this gizmo, set the appropriate wash cycle and hit the start button, in just a jiffy you have one sparkling clean elder. The future looks bright and clean for these technophile old farts.

 

The folks around here are eagerly looking forward to a future with absolutely no human contact. Here is an image of woman sexually interfacing with a lover (client?) using communications technology and remotely  controlled, robotic, sex-machines… With those flexible lighting solutions and the variety of camera angles provided by the documentary film crew, it is just like being there and operating the machines in person… now that is hot.

Jane Jetson eroticized… a womp bomma a lu mop, balomp bam boom!

 

A poem by Wallace Stevens

The Death of a Soldier

Life contracts and death is expected,
As in a season of autumn.
The soldier falls.

He does not become a three-days personage,
Imposing his separation,
Calling for pomp.

Death is absolute and without memorial,
As in a season of autumn,
When the wind stops,

When the wind stops and, over the heavens,
The clouds go, nevertheless,
In their direction.

A CONVERSATION WITH CATHERINE MALABOU

 

 A CONVERSATION WITH CATHERINE MALABOU 

The questions of the following interview are aimed at introducing Catherine 

Malabou’s work and philosophical perspective to an audience who may 

have never heard of her, or who know only that she was a student of 

Derrida. What I hope that this interview reveals, however, is that Malabou 

“follows” deconstruction in a timely, and also useful way. For one of the 

common charges levied against deconstruction, at least by American critics, is 

that by opening texts to infinite interpretations, deconstruction unfortunately 

does away with more than the master narratives; it mires political agency in 

identity politics and offers no way out the socio-historical and political constructs 

of textuality other than the hope anchored in faith at best, but otherwise simply 

in the will to believe that the stance of openness to the other will let the other 

become part of the major discourses without thereby marginalizing or 

homogenizing them.  

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency.”

— Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Some Poems by Emily Dickinson

 

A WORD.




A word is dead

When it is said,

  Some say.

I say it just

Begins to live

  That day

DELEUZE: Postscript to Societies of Control

 

G

---
"Postscript on the Societies of Control"
Gilles Deleuze

Technology

 

by John Zerzan

Tech-nol-o-gy n. According to Webster’s: industrial or applied science. In reality: the ensemble of division of labor/production/industrialism and its impact on us and on nature. Technology is the sum of mediations between us and the natural world and the sum of those separations mediating us from each other. it is all the drudgery and toxicity required to produce and reproduce the stage of hyper-alienation we live in. It is the texture and the form of domination at any given stage of hierarchy and commodification.

Diogenes the Cynic

LIFE OF DIOGENES

---

DIOGENES was a native of Sinope, the son of Tresius, a money-changer. And Diocles says that he was forced to flee from his native city, as his father kept the public bank there, and had adulterated the coinage.

Alfredo M. Bonanno: From Riot to Insurrection

 

 

Analysis for an anarchist perspective against post-industrial capitalism

A classic from the Meese commission.

 

Pornography is a medical and public health problem because so much of it teaches false, misleading, and even dangerous information about human sexuality. A person who learned about human sexuality in the “adults only” pornography outlets of America would be a person

Renzo Novatore

 

 

My soul is a sacrilegious temple

in which the bells of sin and crime,

voluptuous and perverse,

 loudly ring out revolt and despair.

LSD is good for you.

Lancet calls for LSD in labs

“Use more psychedelic drugs,” is not advice you would expect from your GP, but that is the call from an influential UK medical journal to researchers.

PIRATE RANT

Captain BellamyDaniel Defoe, writing under the pen name Captain Charles Johnson, wrote what became the first standard historical text on pirates, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. According to Patrick Pringle’s Jolly Roger, pirate recruitment was most effective among the unemployed, escaped bondsmen, and transported criminals. The high seas made for an instantaneous levelling of class inequalities. Defoe relates that a pirate named Captain Bellamy made this speech to the captain of a merchant vessel he had taken as a prize. The captain of the merchant vessel had just declined an invitation to join the pirates.

Construction Workers Drinking On Job

CBS 2 HD Investigation Catches Employees On Camera Guzzling Booze, Lying To Their Bosses, And Having A Kick-Ass Time.

 Reporting

Kirstin Cole

NEW YORK (CBS) ― Construction accidents have claimed the lives of 20 in New York this year alone and as federal safety watchdogs kick off a two-week crackdown on high-risk building sites, CBS 2 HD found it wasn’t hard to find workers having a liquid lunch then heading back to work, where they may be putting everyone around them in a good mood.

CAN’T EAT FLAG SO IT GOES TO PAWNSHOP

OKLAHOMA CITY—The depression is endangering patriotism. Here this week “there breathed a man with soul so dead,” or with stomach so empty, that he gave a silk American flag for $2 to a pawnbroker.

Proprietors said during the past few months persons have pawned dogs, false teeth, and almost every other possession imaginable, but this was the first flag.