UGH!

 

Fem-bot’s my love machine

Perfect couple … Le Trung with Aiko

 

A BOFFIN too busy to find real love has INVENTED his idea of the perfect woman – a female ROBOT.

Inventor Le Trung, 33, created Aiko, said to be “in her 20s” with a stunning 32, 23, 33 figure, shiny hair and delicate features.

She even remembers his favourite drink and does simple cleaning and household tasks.

The Inimitable Frere Dupont

 

FOR EARTHEN CUP

By Frere Dupont

Complex Reproduction

The individual consumption of the labourer, whether it proceed within the workshop or outside it, whether it be part of the process of production or not, forms therefore a factor of the production and reproduction of capital; just as cleaning machinery does, whether it be done while the machinery is working or while it is standing. The fact that the labourer consumes his means of subsistence for his own purposes, and not to please the capitalist, has no bearing on the matter. The consumption of food by a beast of burden is none the less a necessary factor in the process of production, because the beast enjoys what it eats. The maintenance and reproduction of the working-class is, and must ever be, a necessary condition to the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave its fulfilment to the labourer’s instincts of self-preservation and of propagation. All the capitalist cares for, is to reduce the labourer’s individual consumption as far as possible to what is strictly necessary, and he is far away from imitating those brutal South Americans, who force their labourers to take the more substantial, rather than the less substantial, kind of food. [ - Karl Marx chapter 23: simple reproduction, Capital, vol 1]

To place some emphasis here,

The maintenance and reproduction of the working-class is, and must ever be, a necessary condition to the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave its fulfilment to the labourer’s instincts of self-preservation and of propagation.

This evidently has not been the case since 1914; the whole apparatus of social control from the outsourcing of “training” from private enterprise to state education, to ceaseless “welfare” interference, to continuous regulation of industrial relations, all prove that the capitalist social relation finds it extremely difficult to reproduce itself when relying on the working class”s “instincts of selfpreservation and of propagation”.

Conversation with ‘Anarchy Alive’ author Uri Gordon from Haaretz

Over the telephone Uri Gordon does not sound like he’s gloating, but for an anarchist such as himself, the earth-shaking economic developments of the past six weeks have to have provided some satisfaction. After all, today’s anarchists are certain of the wrong-headedness of the modern capitalist system, with its inevitable march toward a greater concentration of the world’s wealth in an increasingly smaller number of hands. Most also see the need for a radical change in humanity’s relationship with the environment, an understanding that seems to have been adopted by at least much of the West in recent months, as the effects of oil depletion and climate change become felt.  

Mike Davis on Obama’s future economic challenges

Why Obama’s Futurama Can Wait

Schools and Hospitals Should Come First in Any Stimulus Package

By Mike Davis

 

America’s “Futurama” is defunct. The famous walk-through diorama of a car-and-suburb world, imagineered by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, has weathered into a dreary emblem of our national backwardness. While GM bleeds to death on a Detroit street corner, the steel-and-concrete Interstate landscape built in the 1950s and 1960s is rapidly decaying into this century’s equivalent of Victorian rubble.

EXTINCTION

 

                                                      The beautiful Baiji, now extinct.

October 6, 2008
AFP 

Half the world’s mammals are declining in population and more than a third probably face extinction, said an update Monday of the “Red List,” the most respected inventory of biodiversity.

A comprehensive survey of mammals included in the annual report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which covers more than 44,000 animal and plant species, shows that a quarter of the planet’s 5,487 known mammals are clearly at risk of disappearing forever.

Raymond Williams

    

 

Raymond Williams

Utopia and Science Fiction*

 

 

 

There are many close and evident connections between science fiction and utopian fiction, yet neither, in deeper examination, is a simple mode, and the relationships between them are exceptionally complex.** Thus if we analyse the fictions that have been grouped as utopian we can distinguish four types: (a) the paradise, in which a happier life is described as simply existing elsewhere; (b) the externally altered world, in which a new kind of life has been made possible by an unlooked-for natural event; (c) the willed transformation, in which a new kind of life has been achieved by human effort; (d) the technological transformation, in which a new kind of life has been made possible by a technical discovery.

Matt Taibbi: “Mad Dog Palin”

 

Mad Dog Palin By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com Posted on September 27, 2008, Printed on September 29, 2008 http://www.alternet.org/story/100551/ I’m standing outside the XCEL ENERGY CENTER in St. Paul Minnesota Sarah Palin has just finished her speech to the Republican National Convention, accepting the party’s nomination for vice president. If I hadn’t quit my two-packs-a-day habit earlier this year, I’d be chain-smoking now. So the only thing left is to stand mute against the fit-for-a-cheap-dog-kennel crowd-control fencing you see everywhere at these idiotic conventions and gnaw on weird new feelings of shock and anarchist rage as one would a rawhide chew toy.

Naomi Klein: Free market ideology is far from finished

 

                     \

Whatever the events of this week mean, nobody should believe the overblown claims that the market crisis signals the death of “free market” ideology. Free market ideology has always been a servant to the interests of capital, and its presence ebbs and flows depending on its usefulness to those interests.

During boom times, it’s profitable to preach laissez faire, because an absentee government allows speculative bubbles to inflate. When those bubbles burst, the ideology becomes a hindrance, and it goes dormant while big government rides to the rescue. But rest assured: the ideology will come roaring back when the bailouts are done. The massive debts the public is accumulating to bail out the speculators will then become part of a global budget crisis that will be the rationalization for deep cuts to social programs, and for a renewed push to privatize what is left of the public sector. We will also be told that our hopes for a green future are, sadly, too costly.

Mike Davis: Welcome to the Anthropocene

 

Living on the Ice Shelf

Humanity’s Meltdown
By Mike Davis

 

1. Farewell to the Holocene

Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.

This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column.