Crate digging, digging, digging, looking through records that would otherwise have disappeared into collective music memory. The crate digger, a memory preserver, honoring almost-musicians, turning up their volume. Energy doesn't die, just echoes into static. Pay your respects as you search these boneyards, this unrecognizable record, young girl smiling as she imagines a future of riches and fame, wait thats me. Identity, the physical search for artists fruitless and fruitful, is a shadow.

Crate digging of yesteryear. Today I can download sampler packs full folders of forgotten memories. Is identity now as simple as downloading a folder into my brain? So much information and access to information, so much floating in nospace of cyberspace. There, memory is stagnant and immortalized forever, no longer becoming static noise, echoing together in indistinguishable unison. What is the consequence of memory no longer becoming the collective memory of a culture and mankind, but staying individualized, discoverable if you walk down the dim alleys of the internet? What happens to the sewage that usually flows into a filtration system? It floats, it stays afloat, and its no concern of space when space is infinite. Our memory is infinite. Multiplex consciousness is an understatement when the samples can never disappear.

"Mix culture, with its emphasis on exchange and nomadism…" Wandering around aimlessly not knowing my purpose because I am always other. Settle nowhere and for nothing, the epitome of sampling, the epitome of exchange, the epitome of humanity's echoes, collective memory's shadows. But see, so is everyone, they are convinced of home while the truth is they are just as ghostly as me.

interview with Virilio in Le Monde, 2008 (orig in french)

For thirty years now, the philosopher Paul Virilio analyses the
catastrophe as the unavoidable consequence of technological progress. He
sees in the current financial crisis the most accomplished example of
his theory, a catastrophe where the victims do not actually die, but
lose the roof above their heads by the thousands.

Gerard Courtois/Michel Guerrin:
In 2002 you have produced an exhibition at the Maison Cartier under the
title "Ce qui arrive" ('that what occurs'); It was about the accident in
contemporary history: Tchernobyl, 9-11, the Tsunami... A statement by
Hannah Arendt was the marker of your demonstration: "progress and
catastrophe are the two faces of the same coin". Is this where we have
come to with the 'crash of the stock exchange'?

Paul Virilio:
Well, of course. In 1979, at the time of the mishap at the Three Mile
Island nuclear plant in the U.S., I did mention the occurence of an
"original accident" - the kind of accident we bring forth ourselves. I
said that our technical prowess was pregnant of catastrophic promises.
In the past, accidents were local affairs. With Tchernobyl, we have
entered the era of global accidents, whose consequences are in the realm
of the long term. the current crash represents the perfect 'integral
accident'.
Its effects ripple far and wide, and it incorporates the representation
of all other accidents.
For thirty years now, the phenomenon of History accelerating has been
negated, together with the fact that this acceleration has been the
prime cause of the proliferation of major accidents. Freud said it,
speaking of death: "accumulation snuffs out the perception of contingency".
Contingency is the key word here. These accidents are not contingent
occurrences. For the time being, the prevalent opinion is that
researching the crash of the stock exchange as a political and economic
issue and in terms of its social consequences is adequate enough. But it
is impossible to understand what is going on if one does not implement a
(policy based on the) political economy of speed, the speed that
technological progress engenders, and if one does not link (this policy)
to the 'accidental' character of History.
Let's take just one example: the dictum "time is money". I add to this,
and the stock exchange testify to it: "speed is power". We have moved
from the stage of the acceleration of History to that of the
acceleration of the Real. This is what 'the progress' is: a consensual
sacrifice.

GC/MG:
So accidents are too little researched?

PV:
The dominant form of writing about History limits itself to the study of
facts as seen in the light of the long term. Contrariwise, I advocate a
study of History based exclusively on ruptures. (French) Historian
Francois Hartog calls the dominant paradigm "presentism". We must go
further. Our paradigm should be "instantaneism".
In order to study accidents, one of course must research them, but also
'expose' them. The accident is 'invented', it a work of creation. Who
could be more apt than artists to make feel the tragic dimension of
human development ('progress')? That was the intent behind the "ce qui
arrive" exhibition - where, by the way, I did mention a stock exchange
crash. It stood for the museum, or the observatory, of major accidents
that I'd like to see coming about some day. Not in order to instill
fear, but to make us face up.

GC/MG:
But then, how would you define the crash of the stock exchange, over and
beyond its surprise element?

PV:
Like with any contemporary event, it is essential to take into account
the integration in synchronous time of various issues at the
world-level. A synchronisation has taken place of customs, habits,
mores, ways to react to things, and also, of emotions. We have left the
era of class-based communitarism for that of instant and simultaneous
globalisation of affects and fears - but not longer of opinions. It was
already the case with the attacks on the World Trade Center and with the
Tsunami. The same happens now with the financial crash. After a short
'technical' phase - bank collapses, shares fall-out - kicks in a phase
of 'hystery-isation' of responses. There is talk of "markets going mad",
of "irrational" reactions, you'd almost call it 'end of the world
craze'. Terrorists have very well understood this mechanism, and they
make use of it.

GC/MG
Do you, like some people do, believe that capitalism is nearing its end?

PV:
I rather believe that the end is nearing capitalism. My field is urban
studies. This crisis shows that the Earth is not large enough for
progress, for the speed of History (as we have it). Hence repetitive
accidents. We were living in the belief that we had both a past and a
future. But 'the past does not pass', it has become a monster, so much
so that we do not mention it anymore. And as far as the future is
concerned, it is severely questioned by the issue of the environment,
and the end of natural resources like oil. So the only place left for us
to inhabit is the present. But the writer Octavio Paz said it before:
"you cannot live in the present moment, just as you cannot live in the
future". It is exactly what all of us are now going through, and that
includes the bankers.

GC/MG:
But did not the financial world bring about (invent) a virtual world?

PV:
Since speed earns money, the financial sphere has attempted to enforce
the value of time above the value of space. But the virtual is also part
and parcel of reality. And to be frank with you, this so-called virtual
world, in which one can also include tax-heavens, is a form of
'exotism' which I tend to equate with colonialism. It is the (recurrent)
myth of another inhabitable planet.

GC/MG:
As opposed to other accidents, the crash of the stock exchange remains
something of an enigma to the public at large. Is this bad?

PV:
Well, one does not understand the fine points, but one can guess, and
that is enough. One must guess (about) what occurs. Not being able to
understand naturally reinforces fear. But, at the same time, we do not
longer have the time left to experience fear. What is really disturbing
is the rise of a 'civil deterrence' of sorts, which is individual and
intimate, and which permeates all aspects of life. We are being deterred
to do this or that as individuals. Ever since 9-11 we have been affected
by a 'civil fear', and the industrialisation of the accident is its root
cause. So, in order to study the impact of collisions, car makers stage
'test crashes'. The crash of the stock exchange is such a test crash -
but at the real level. Even the break-up of relationships has been
industrialised. One could even introduce some mechanism of quotes for
divorces, risking hereby to show that the traditional couple and family
has become an illusion.

GC/MG:
Could one also speak of a morality of the stock exchange crash, in the
sense that also those who were making fortunes get blasted?

PV:
I am not a vigilante. I do empathise with critics who say that some
people have made obscene profits. I do not deny the damage caused by the
accumulation of riches in a few hands. But to merely criticize this
acceleration of profits and History, this 'run-away avarice", as Eugene
Sue called it, while remaining in the materialist framework of profit,
is a deficient, reductionist analysis.
What is happening is much more complex, and profoundly disturbing. We
have gone into something of a different nature. This economy of wealth
has become an economy of speed. By the way, this is the problem the Left
is currently facing. The Left is stuck in its old framework, states that
capitalism is dead, and now thinks that more social justice is to come
about. This is a bit hasty a deduction. We do really have a major
problem on our plates...
If the state does not take stock of this 'futurism of the moment', we
might well see instead a capitalism running riot without bounds whatsoever.

GC/MG:
You wrote once "By designing a 800 passengers plane, the firm Airbus has
simultaneously created 800 potential casualties". But till now, the
crash of the stock exchange did not kill anyone...

PV:
The crash is not the Black Death, there haven't been millions of
victims, and it's not the 11th of September either. We are not talking
death here, save maybe a few suicides. The victims are somewhere else to
be found.
Where did the current crisis stem from? the answer is: subprime
mortgages; housing credit that proved unsustainable; land. The victims
are the hundred of thousands of people who are going to lose their
homes. The whole concept of sedentarism had already been challenged by
immigrants, exiles, deportations, refugees - and the delocalisation of
economic activities. This phenomenon is bound to increase. Till 2040,
one billion people will have to move out from their their residence.
Those are the victims. We are in the realm of "stop/eject". People are
arrested, get expelled.

GC/MG:
You believe in chaos?

PV:
Having destabilised the financial system, the stock exchange crash might
well destabilise the state, which is the guarantor of last resort of
collective life. For the time being, the state tries to be reassuring.
But if the bourses keep on heading South, it will be state itself that
will go in receivership, and that will plunge nations into chaos. This
is not me embracing catastrophism. I do not believe that the worst is
unavoidable, I do not believe in chaos, that is an untenable position,
and it amounts to intellectual arrogance. But that does not mean that
one should be prevented from thinking about it. Faced with absolute
fear, I counter with hope absolute. Churchill said once that an optimist
is somebody who sees opportunity hiding behind every calamity.

MASTERED SONGS

with the live show at nospace. i think this is satisfactory finally. delete the older versions

http://www.mediafire.com/?n914nbp9iff1cf0

SLIME

H.G. Wells - "They haven't any spirit in them - no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn't one or the other-Lord! What is he but funk and precautions."

Everything from the Oprah Book Club to the Wall Street bailout to YouTube pushes us toward self. Alexis de Tocqueville noticed this about us more than two hundred years ago: “Democracy turns man’s imagination away from externals to concentrate on himself alone. Democratic peoples may amuse themselves momentarily by looking at nature, but it is about themselves that they are really excited. Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”

I dont know about this part though...
But then he went on to say, “Here, and here alone, are the true springs of poetry among them, and those poets, I believe, who will not draw inspiration from these springs will lose their hold over the audience they intend to charm.” I don’t know about “charm,” but on a variety of levels the culture is pushing us toward shallow self-inquiry. I can only point to good work that is seriously self-excavating; perhaps more importantly, there’s a distance in good work, an irony, a complicity—a sense that self isn’t being explored for self’s sake, but for readers’ sake; there is an acute sense of the writer knowing that he or she is guilty as charged, guilty before being charged.

RIP Robert C. Byrd

Senate Remarks by Robert C. Byrd


February 12, 2003


"We Stand Passively Mute"




To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences. On this February day, as this nation stands at the brink of battle, every American on some level must be contemplating the horrors of war.

Yet, this Chamber is, for the most part, silent -- ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing.

We stand passively mute in the United States Senate, paralyzed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events. Only on the editorial pages of our newspapers is there much substantive discussion of the prudence or imprudence of engaging in this particular war.

And this is no small conflagration we contemplate. This is no simple attempt to defang a villain. No. This coming battle, if it materializes, represents a turning point in U.S. foreign policy and possibly a turning point in the recent history of the world.

This nation is about to embark upon the first test of a revolutionary doctrine applied in an extraordinary way at an unfortunate time. The doctrine of preemption -- the idea that the United States or any other nation can legitimately attack a nation that is not imminently threatening but may be threatening in the future -- is a radical new twist on the traditional idea of self defense. It appears to be in contravention of international law and the UN Charter. And it is being tested at a time of world-wide terrorism, making many countries around the globe wonder if they will soon be on our -- or some other nation's -- hit list. High level Administration figures recently refused to take nuclear weapons off of the table when discussing a possible attack against Iraq. What could be more destabilizing and unwise than this type of uncertainty, particularly in a world where globalism has tied the vital economic and security interests of many nations so closely together? There are huge cracks emerging in our time-honored alliances, and U.S. intentions are suddenly subject to damaging worldwide speculation. Anti-Americanism based on mistrust, misinformation, suspicion, and alarming rhetoric from U.S. leaders is fracturing the once solid alliance against global terrorism which existed after September 11.

Here at home, people are warned of imminent terrorist attacks with little guidance as to when or where such attacks might occur. Family members are being called to active military duty, with no idea of the duration of their stay or what horrors they may face. Communities are being left with less than adequate police and fire protection. Other essential services are also short-staffed. The mood of the nation is grim. The economy is stumbling. Fuel prices are rising and may soon spike higher.

This Administration, now in power for a little over two years, must be judged on its record. I believe that that record is dismal.

In that scant two years, this Administration has squandered a large projected surplus of some $5.6 trillion over the next decade and taken us to projected deficits as far as the eye can see. This Administration's domestic policy has put many of our states in dire financial condition, under funding scores of essential programs for our people. This Administration has fostered policies which have slowed economic growth. This Administration has ignored urgent matters such as the crisis in health care for our elderly. This Administration has been slow to provide adequate funding for homeland security. This Administration has been reluctant to better protect our long and porous borders.

In foreign policy, this Administration has failed to find Osama bin Laden. In fact, just yesterday we heard from him again marshaling his forces and urging them to kill. This Administration has split traditional alliances, possibly crippling, for all time, International order-keeping entities like the United Nations and NATO. This Administration has called into question the traditional worldwide perception of the United States as well-intentioned, peacekeeper. This Administration has turned the patient art of diplomacy into threats, labeling, and name calling of the sort that reflects quite poorly on the intelligence and sensitivity of our leaders, and which will have consequences for years to come.

Calling heads of state pygmies, labeling whole countries as evil, denigrating powerful European allies as irrelevant -- these types of crude insensitivities can do our great nation no good. We may have massive military might, but we cannot fight a global war on terrorism alone. We need the cooperation and friendship of our time-honored allies as well as the newer found friends whom we can attract with our wealth. Our awesome military machine will do us little good if we suffer another devastating attack on our homeland which severely damages our economy. Our military manpower is already stretched thin and we will need the augmenting support of those nations who can supply troop strength, not just sign letters cheering us on.

The war in Afghanistan has cost us $37 billion so far, yet there is evidence that terrorism may already be starting to regain its hold in that region. We have not found bin Laden, and unless we secure the peace in Afghanistan, the dark dens of terrorism may yet again flourish in that remote and devastated land.

Pakistan as well is at risk of destabilizing forces. This Administration has not finished the first war against terrorism and yet it is eager to embark on another conflict with perils much greater than those in Afghanistan. Is our attention span that short? Have we not learned that after winning the war one must always secure the peace?

And yet we hear little about the aftermath of war in Iraq. In the absence of plans, speculation abroad is rife. Will we seize Iraq's oil fields, becoming an occupying power which controls the price and supply of that nation's oil for the foreseeable future? To whom do we propose to hand the reins of power after Saddam Hussein?

Will our war inflame the Muslim world resulting in devastating attacks on Israel? Will Israel retaliate with its own nuclear arsenal? Will the Jordanian and Saudi Arabian governments be toppled by radicals, bolstered by Iran which has much closer ties to terrorism than Iraq?

Could a disruption of the world's oil supply lead to a world-wide recession? Has our senselessly bellicose language and our callous disregard of the interests and opinions of other nations increased the global race to join the nuclear club and made proliferation an even more lucrative practice for nations which need the income?

In only the space of two short years this reckless and arrogant Administration has initiated policies which may reap disastrous consequences for years.

One can understand the anger and shock of any President after the savage attacks of September 11. One can appreciate the frustration of having only a shadow to chase and an amorphous, fleeting enemy on which it is nearly impossible to exact retribution.

But to turn one's frustration and anger into the kind of extremely destabilizing and dangerous foreign policy debacle that the world is currently witnessing is inexcusable from any Administration charged with the awesome power and responsibility of guiding the destiny of the greatest superpower on the planet. Frankly many of the pronouncements made by this Administration are outrageous. There is no other word.

Yet this chamber is hauntingly silent. On what is possibly the eve of horrific infliction of death and destruction on the population of the nation of Iraq -- a population, I might add, of which over 50% is under age 15 -- this chamber is silent. On what is possibly only days before we send thousands of our own citizens to face unimagined horrors of chemical and biological warfare -- this chamber is silent. On the eve of what could possibly be a vicious terrorist attack in retaliation for our attack on Iraq, it is business as usual in the United States Senate.

We are truly "sleepwalking through history." In my heart of hearts I pray that this great nation and its good and trusting citizens are not in for a rudest of awakenings.

To engage in war is always to pick a wild card. And war must always be a last resort, not a first choice. I truly must question the judgment of any President who can say that a massive unprovoked military attack on a nation which is over 50% children is "in the highest moral traditions of our country". This war is not necessary at this time. Pressure appears to be having a good result in Iraq. Our mistake was to put ourselves in a corner so quickly. Our challenge is to now find a graceful way out of a box of our own making. Perhaps there is still a way if we allow more time.

dont talk to strangers

on the communal learning, the specter that lived and then died...ghosts

Among the most memorable of these materials is a collection of primary documents about collectivization, published in 1937 by the CNT, the anarcho-syndicalist union that is celebrating its centenary this year. One contribution has resonated in my mind ever since, by peasants of the village of Membrilla. I would like to quote parts of it:

"In [the] miserable huts [of Membrilla] live the poor inhabitants of a poor province; eight thousand people, but the streets are not paved, the town has no newspaper, no cinema, neither a café nor a library.... Food, clothing and tools were distributed equitably to the whole population. Money was abolished, work collectivized, all goods passed to the community, consumption was socialized. It was, however, not a socialization of wealth but of poverty.... The whole population lived as in a large family; functionaries, delegates, the secretary of the syndicates, the members of the municipal council, all elected, acted as heads of a family. But they were controlled, because special privilege or corruption would not be tolerated. Membrilla is perhaps the poorest village of Spain, but it is the most just. "

These words, by some of the most impoverished peasants in the country, capture with rare eloquence the achievements and promise of the anarchist revolution. The achievements did not, of course, spring up from nothing. They were the outcome of many decades of struggle, experiment, brutal repression - and learning. The concept of how a just society should be organized was in the minds of the population when the opportunity arose. The experiment in creating a world of freedom and justice was crushed all too soon by the combined forces of fascism, Stalinism and liberal democracy. Global power centers understood very well that they must unite to destroy this dangerous threat to subordination and discipline before turning to the secondary task of dividing up the spoils.


http://www.truthout.org/remembering-fascism-learning-from-past58724

Avatar-esque company digging for demon blood

Legendary list of violations:
http://publiccitizenenergy.org/2010/05/05/cost-of-doing-business-bps-550-million-in-fines-2-criminal-convictions/

One Month Later: Five Things We Know About the BP Gulf Disaster

Statement by Tyson Slocum, Director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program

A month has passed since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and still, oil is gushing from a broken well at a rate that is still being debated but is likely far higher than BP, the company responsible for the disaster, originally estimated. Here’s what we know so far:

1. We should have seen it coming. BP was under criminal probation at the time of the disaster for felony violation of U.S. environmental laws. The company has one of the worst track records of any oil company operating in America. It needs more than just a financial slap on the wrist, which is what it will get if the $75 million liability cap remains in place. Instead, BP should pay full damages to those who have lost their livelihoods in addition to playing for the cost of cleanup.

2. Mounting evidence shows that BP was negligent. Firsthand accounts describe BP managers proceeding with work to cap the well, even though they were informed that the integrity of the blowout preventer had been compromised. BP must be held accountable – and should be subject to permanent sanctions and criminal charges against executives.

3. BP is as transparent as oil about the disaster. BP has consistently misled the public about how much oil is gushing from the well, has forbidden scientists from more thoroughly analyzing the rate of the gusher and has blocked journalists from taking photos of oil-covered beaches. At the same time, BP is footing the bill for a $70 million television ad campaign to assure tourists that Gulf Coast beaches are safe.

4. The Minerals Management Service cannot be trusted to protect workers, the environment or taxpayers. We need a total overhaul of this dreadful agency – now.

5. We must ban all new leasing, permitting and drilling offshore until a full investigation is complete. It would be senseless to continue this practice for one more second until safety is analyzed and improvements are implemented.

BP must pay. We urge the public to pledge to boycott BP for at least three months by visiting www.BeyondBP.org.


###
Public Citizen is a national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.citizen.org.

See Birds

http://downloads.pitchforkmedia.com.s3.amazonaws.com/Balam%20Acab%20-%20See%20Birds.mp3

Paul Valery's The Crisis of the Mind, 1919, just the beginning:

"
We later civilizations . . . we too know that we are mortal.

We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of empires sunk without a trace, gone down with all their men and all their machines into the unexplorable depths of the centuries, with their gods and their laws, their academies and their sciences pure and applied, their grammars and their dictionaries, their Classics, their Romantics, and their Symbolists, their critics and the critics of their critics. . . . We were aware that the visible earth is made of ashes, and that ashes signify something. Through the obscure depths of history we could make out the phantoms of great ships laden with riches and intellect; we could not count them. But the disasters that had sent them down were, after all, none of our affair.

Elam, Ninevah, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia...these too would be beautiful names. Lusitania too, is a beautiful name. And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join the works of Menander are no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers. That is not all. The searing lesson is more complete still. It was not enough for our generation to learn from its own experience how the most beautiful things and the most ancient, the most formidable and the best ordered, can perish by accident; in the realm of thought, feeling, and common sense, we witnessed extraordinary phenomena: paradox suddenly become fact, and obvious fact brutally believed.

I shall cite but one example: the great virtues of the German peoples have begotten more evils, than idleness ever bred vices. With our own eyes, we have seen conscientious labor, the most solid learning, the most serious discipline and application adapted to appalling ends.

So many horrors could not have been possible without so many virtues. Doubtless, much science was needed to kill so many, to waste so much property, annihilate so many cities in so short a time; but moral qualities in like number were also needed. Are Knowledge and Duty, then, suspect?

So the Persepolis of the spirit is no less ravaged than the Susa of material fact. Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish.

An extraordinary shudder ran through the marrow of Europe. She felt in every nucleus of her mind that she was no longer the same, that she was no longer herself, that she was about to lose consciousness, a consciousness acquired through centuries of bearable calamities, by thousands of men of the first rank, from innumerable geographical, ethnic, and historical coincidences.

So -- as though in desperate defense of her own physiological being and resources -- all her memory confusedly returned. Her great men and her great books came back pell-mell. Never has so much been read, nor with such passion, as during the war: ask the booksellers. . . . Never have people prayed so much and so deeply: ask the priests. All the saviors, founders, protectors, martyrs, heroes, all the fathers of their country, the sacred heroines, the national poets were invoked. . . .

And in the same disorder of mind, at the summons of the same anguish, all cultivated Europe underwent the rapid revival of her innumerable ways of thought: dogmas, philosophies, heterogeneous ideals; the three hundred ways of explaining the World, the thousand and one versions of Christianity, the two dozen kinds of positivism; the whole spectrum of intellectual light spread out its incompatible colors, illuminating with a strange and contradictory glow the death agony of the European soul. While inventors were feverishly searching their imaginations and the annals of former wars for the means of doing away with barbed wire, of outwitting submarines or paralyzing the flight of airplanes, her soul was intoning at the same time all the incantations it ever knew, and giving serious consideration to the most bizarre prophecies; she sought refuge, guidance, consolation throughout the whole register of her memories, past acts, and ancestral attitudes. Such are the known effects of anxiety, the disordered behavior of mind fleeing from reality to nightmare and from nightmare back to reality, terrified, like a rat caught in a trap. . . .

The military crisis may be over. The economic crisis is still with us in all its force. But the intellectual crisis, being more subtle and, by it nature, assuming the most deceptive appearances (since it takes place in the very realm of dissimulation)...this crisis will hardly allow us to grasp its true extent, its phase.

No one can say what will be dead or alive tomorrow, in literature, philosophy, aesthetics; no one yet knows what ideas and modes of expression will be inscribed on the casualty list, what novelties will be proclaimed.

Hope, of course, remains -- singing in an undertone:

Et cum vorandi vicerit libidinem
Late triumphet imperator spiritus.
"


crisis ebbs and peaks, but science raises the stakes....we remain in Valery's period of sustained high tension. Amazing how we are so well climatized..
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/valery.html

songs

u should listen to it in this order
1. accept it 2
2. dry throat
3. consideredconsideration
4. south of space
5. stop

wrong crowd 4 mayor!
http://www.2shared.com/file/TUmGNO7j/accept_it.html
download file at bottom of page, unzip

or this link:
http://www.mediafire.com/?rmnnzjw0jzn

Waht is Matrix-Liberalism?

The End of the World as We Know It

John Gray, The Guardian, September 15, 2007

Over the past few decades, many of the ideas of the far left have found new homes on the right. Lenin believed that it was in conditions of catastrophic upheaval that humanity advances most rapidly, and the idea that economic progress can be achieved through the devastation of entire societies has been a key part of the neo-liberal cult of the free market. Soviet-style economies left an inheritance of human and ecological devastation, while neo-liberal policies have had results that are not radically dissimilar in many countries. Yet, while the Marxist faith in central planning is now confined to a few dingy sects, a quasi-religious belief in free markets continues to shape the policies of governments.

Many writers have pointed to the havoc and ruin that have accompanied the imposition of free markets across the world. Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or post-communist Europe, policies of wholesale privatisation and structural adjustment have led to declining economic activity and social dislocation on a massive scale. Anyone who has watched a country lurch from one crisis to another as the bureaucrats of the IMF impose cut after cut in pursuit of the holy grail of stabilisation will recognise the process Naomi Klein describes in her latest and most important book to date. Visiting Argentina not long before the economic collapse of 2002, I found the government struggling to implement an IMF diktat to roll back public spending at a time when the economy was already rapidly contracting. The result was predictable, and the country was plunged into a depression, with calamitous consequences in terms of poverty and social breakdown.

Klein believes that neo-liberalism belongs among "the closed, fundamentalist doctrines that cannot co-exist with other belief-systems ... The world as it is must be erased to make way for their purist invention. Rooted in biblical fantasies of great floods and great fires, it is a logic that leads ineluctably towards violence." As Klein sees it, the social breakdowns that have accompanied neo-liberal economic policies are not the result of incompetence or mismanagement. They are integral to the free-market project, which can only advance against a background of disasters. At times, writing in a populist vein that echoes her first book No Logo, published seven years ago, Klein seems to suggest that these disasters are manufactured as part of a deliberate policy framed by corporations with hidden influence in government. Her more considered view, which is also more plausible, is that disaster is part of the normal functioning of the type of capitalism we have today: "An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis and the dotcom collapse all demonstrate."

There are very few books that really help us understand the present. The Shock Doctrine is one of those books. Ranging across the world, Klein exposes the strikingly similar policies that enabled the imposition of free markets in countries as different as Pinochet's Chile, Yeltsin's Russia, China and post-Saddam Iraq. Part of the power of this book comes from the parallels she observes in seemingly unrelated developments. In a fascinating and alarming examination of the underside of recent history, she notes the affinities between the policies of shock therapy imposed in the course of neo-liberal market reform and the techniques of torture that have been routinely used by the US in the course of the "war on terror". Klein begins her first chapter with a moving account of a conversation she had with a victim of a covert programme of mind-control experiments, carried out in Canada in the 1950s, which used people suffering from minor psychiatric ailments to try out techniques of "de-patterning" that aimed to scramble and reshape their personalities.

Employing electroshock therapy, sensory deprivation and drug-induced comas, these experiments helped develop some of the "coercive interrogation techniques" that have been practised in Guantánamo Bay. Klein uses torture as a metaphor, and does not claim any cause-and-effect link between its re-emergence and the rise of neo-liberal shock therapy; but she does point to some disquieting similarities. Individuals and societies have been "de-patterned" with the aim of remaking them on a better, more rational model. In each case, the experiments have failed, while inflicting lasting and often irreparable damage on those who were subjected to them.

But has the free market experiment failed? As Klein sees it, free market shock therapy may actually have succeeded in achieving its true objectives. Post-invasion Iraq may be "a ghoulish dystopia where going to a simple business meeting could get you lynched, burned alive or beheaded". Even so, Klein points out, Halliburton is making handsome profits - it has built the green zone as a corporate city-state, and taken on many of the traditional functions of the armed forces in Iraq. An entire society has been destroyed, but the corporations that operate in the ruins are doing rather well. Klein's message, then, seems to be that - at least in its own, profit-centred terms - disaster capitalism works.

There can be no doubt that fortunes have been reaped from the Iraq war as they have been from other experiments in disaster capitalism. Yet I remain unconvinced that the corporations Klein berates throughout the book understand, let alone control, the anarchic global capitalism that has been allowed to develop over the past couple of decades - any more than the neo-liberal ideologues who helped create it foresaw where it would lead. Rightly, Klein insists that free market ideology must bear responsibility for the crimes committed on its behalf - just as Marxist ideology must be held to account for the crimes of communism. But she says remarkably little about the illusions by which neo-liberal ideologues were themselves blinded. Milton Friedman and his disciples believed a western-style free market would spring up spontaneously in post-communist Russia. They were left gawping when central planning was followed by the criminalised free-for-all of the 90s, and were unprepared for the rise of Putin's resource-based state capitalism. These ideologues were not the sinister, Dr Strangelove-like figures of the anti-capitalist imagination. They were comically deluded bien-pensants, who promoted their utopian schemes with messianic fervour and have been left stranded by history, as the radiant future they confidently predicted has failed to arrive.

The neo-liberal order is already facing intractable problems. The Iraq war may have allowed another experiment in shock therapy, but a failed state has been created as a result of which Gulf oil - which a former chair of the US joint chiefs of staff accurately described as "the jugular vein of global capitalism" - is less secure than before. Faced with defeat in Iraq, the Bush administration seems to be gearing up for an assault on Iran - a desperate move that would magnify the existing catastrophe many times over. At the same time financial crisis has reached into the American heartland as an implosion in speculation-driven credit markets has started to spread throughout the system. It is impossible to know how these crises will develop, but it is hard to resist the suspicion that disaster capitalism is now creating disasters larger than it can handle.

Always Changing (The kid needs to find his lyrical voice)

“Always changing” is the product of the LP’s sense of no-time. Speaking to Mary Travers on April 26, 1975, Dylan commented upon the concept of time, the point he tried to make being not only that “the past, the present and the future all exists”, but that “it’s all the same” — something learned from Norman, Dylan told Jonathan Cott, who used to teach that:

You’ve got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room, and there’s very little that you can’t imagine happening.

Dylan’s assertion to Malt Damsker that he didn’t perform the songs on Blood On The Tracks particularly well may be surprising but, he went on, “they can be changed... “. In fact, Dylan has continually reworked the songs, changing the lyrics again and again in such songs as “Simple Twist Of Fate” and “Tangled Up In Blue”. Dylan ties up ideas of time and change to the idea of song-as-painting with specific reference to “Tangled Up In Blue” on the jacket notes to Biograph, where he says of the song:

I was just trying to make it like a painting where you can see the different parts but then you also see the whole of it. With that particular song, that’s what I was trying to do... with the concept of time, and the way the characters change from the first person to the third person, and you’re never quite sure if the third person is talking or the first person is talking. But as you look at the whole thing, it really doesn’t matter.

On the hope of an intellectual Tradition Outside of the West (India as the world center of moderation)

"The effort to create wealth in urban areas through export-oriented industries - part of the "let some get rich first" policy announced by Deng and affirmed by his successors - has given the Chinese economy an average growth rate of 10 percent and made it the fourth largest in the world. Yet China remains one of the world's poorest countries. More than 150 million people survive on a dollar a day. About 200 million of the rural population are crowding the cities and towns in search of low-paying jobs.

More than four million Chinese participated in the 87,000 protests recorded in 2005, and these statistics may not fully convey the rage and discontent of Chinese living with one of the world's highest income inequalities and deteriorating health and education systems, as well as the arbitrary fees and taxes imposed by local party officials.

Much of this, Wang said, could be laid at the feet of the "right-wing radicals" or neoliberal economists who cite Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek (advocates of unregulated markets who inspired Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s) and who argue for China's integration into the global economy without taking into account the social price of mass privatization. And it is they, Wang added, who have held favor with the ruling elite and have dominated the state-run media.

Only in the last decade, Wang said, have intellectuals of the New Left begun to challenge the notion that a market economy leads inevitably to democracy and prosperity. China's intention to join the World Trade Organization (which it did in 2001) provoked unexpectedly sharp debates among scholars. As Wang described it, the terms of the debate had changed: "Many people knew by then that globalization is not a neutral word describing a natural process. It is part of the growth of Western capitalism, from the days of colonialism and imperialism."

Which is not to say the New Left embraced an easy antiglobalist position; it has been critical of recent anti-Japanese and anti-American outbursts among urban, middle-class Chinese - of what Wang dubbed "consumer nationalism."

Wang added: "Many people also learned that the reason the Chinese economy did not collapse like the Asian tiger economies in 1997 was that the national state was able to protect it. Now, of course, China with its export-dominated economy is more dependent on the Western world order, especially the American economy, than India."

In January of this year, Wang published a long investigative article exposing the plight of workers in a factory in his hometown, Yangzhou, a city of about one million. According to Wang, in 2004 the local government sold the profitable state-owned textile factory to a real estate developer from Shenzhen. Worker-equity shares were bought for 30 percent of their actual value, and then more than a thousand workers were laid off after mismanagement of the factory led to losses.

In July 2004, the workers went on strike. In what Wang calls an agitation without precedent in the history of Yangzhou, the workers obstructed a major highway, halted bus traffic and attacked the gates of local government buildings.

Wang told me that he was helping the workers to sue the local government. "People claim," he said, "that the market will automatically force the state to become more democratic. But this is baseless. We only have to think about the alliance of elites formed in the process of privatization. The state will change only when it is under pressure from a large social force, like the workers and peasants."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/world/asia/13iht-left.3148238.html?_r=1

In the ideas of Hayek and Friedman we seem to meet something that is more than just theory, but a pure force already existent in the world willed into (reality detatched) writing. In their writings we find the intellectual framework for dismantling the hard won gains and support/societal structure of a multitude of varied cultures, and the blank slate generation of upended cultures who find everything they once grasped disappearing in a haze of numbers and business contacts. Those without an interest in the intellectual movements of professors in Anglo-Saxon countries are suddenly being told that they way their lives were organized was a mere illusion and this is the way the world truly works, no matter its unsustainability, your living standards, and your own cultural beliefs. To these people who were not brought up in the framework of western capital movements, neoliberalism came down from their own leadership like a natural disaster, with no rationale in their own traditions to explain it to them. Why does the state owned factory need to be sold off, why the decrease in wages, the reduction in living standards, etc? In western market terms these are explained as becoming competitive, profit generating, etc etc, but to the workers of the factory there is no reason, it is just foolishness. And in the end it was the common sense view of the outside that was right, it was foolishness, but how to explain common sense to the culture of power that no longer saw the world from the point of view of the universal? Neoliberal belief seems to go hand in hand with power, those with power who dont care just getting the jist of it and those who do espousing it. The everybody else is forced trying to fight for minor concessions, for gains we already once had, writing footnotes in the margins of Hayek and Friedman.

What makes this all the more frustrating is this has been what the left has been doing for the last twenty years, and we seem to have gotten nowhere, as we see in this article by a leading Chinese leftist. He is focused on finding a China model of development, but in the end he is just writing in Chinese critiques of Hayek that have existed in the west for the last 40 years. I wish him the best of luck, and I admire that he thinks the communist party can still be a force for change (which I think it can be too, if only because of the symbolic aspect of its origin), but to me it just seems that the intellectual movement has stalled and we are stuck watching the markets repeat the same damn mistakes. Maybe this is what is termed as accelerationism (leftists who believe we should just let captitalism run wild, release it completely, to speed up its ineivitable collapse) but a belief in a socalled accelerationism is a pretty pathetic concession.

In a world where the power of state is dismantled except to protect the anarchy of market forces, what happens to the segments of the population who are not capable of playing the 10% of the world's game?

"The dangers of failing to improve conditions for the majority are clear to Wang: "If we don't improve the situation, there will be more authoritarianism. We have already seen in Russia how people prefer a strong ruler like Putin because they are fed up with corruption, political chaos and economic stagnation. When radical marketization makes people lose their sense of security, the demand for order and intervention from above is inevitable."

This is the new capitalism, the authoritarian based model of Singapore and China which are used to rein in the market's excesses. You can see it even in America, where frustration with congress is at an all time high and there is a strong anger that nobody can take on wall street. If a moderate capitalism once led to an open society, a radical capitalism is leading to a dysfunctional anarchy/failed state or an authoritarian one, a government formed by the market through the money people are willing to invest in it to shape policy. While the situation in Thailand is complicated, I think it is pretty clear that democracy and neoliberalism have failed Thailand. Before you can argue that it merely didnt significantly help 90% of Thailand's population, but with the Red's reterritorialization of the Ratchaprasong area, we have a vision of Thailand as a country straddling the border of failed/authoritarian state.

I don’t really go on the internet, it’s like a ouija board, it’s like letting someone into your head, behind your eyes. It lets randoms in.

When's the third album Burial? Here's a great interview (the only one I can find, there's been none since) from 2007.

http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/347/print

ALSO a great week, as everyones favourite band Caribou releases there newest album. Dload it here
http://rs957.rapidshare.com/files/361105740/caribou.rar

search and there is always more detail

wat is going on?

http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=402&Itemid=32

amazing

Incapability and Consumption

The Middle East seems infinitely capable of sucking away our bloatedness...


Those sorts of figures define the U.S. military in the Bush era -- and now Obama's -- as the most materiel-profligate war-making machine ever. Where armies once had baggage trains and camp followers, our camp followers now help plant our military in foreign soil, build its housing and defenses, and then supply it with vast quantities of food, water, fuel, and god knows what else. In this way, our troops carry not just packs on their backs, but a total, transplantable society right down to the PXs, massage parlors, food courts, and miniature golf courses. At Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan, there was until recently a “boardwalk” that typically included a “Burger King, a Subway sandwich shop, three cafes, several general stores, a Cold Mountain Creamery, [and an] Oakley sunglasses outlet.” Atypically enough, however, a TGI Friday’s, which had just joined the line-up, was recently ordered shut down along with some of the other stores by Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal as inimical to the war effort.

* Believe it or not, according to a recent report by the Pentagon inspector general, private contractor KBR, holding a $38 billion contract to provide the U.S. military with “a range of logistic services,” has cost Washington $21 million in “waste” on truck maintenance alone by billing for 12 hours of work when, on average, its employees were actually putting in 1.3 hours.

* Believe it or not, for instance, U.S. commanders in our war zones have more than one billion congressionally mandated dollars a year at their disposal to spend on making “friends with local citizens and help[ing] struggling economies.” It’s all socked away in the Commander’s Emergency Response Program. Think of it as a local community-bribery account which, best of all, seems not to require the slightest accountability to Congress for where or how the money is spent.

Though it’s seldom thought strange (and rarely commented upon in the U.S.), the Pentagon practices war as a form of mass consumption and so, not surprisingly, bears a striking resemblance to the society it comes from. Like the Taliban, it carries its way of life to war on its back.

It’s striking, of course, that all this is happening at a moment when, domestically, small businesses can’t get loans and close to 10% of the population is officially out of work, while state governments are desperately scrabbling for every available dollar (and some that aren’t), even as they cut what would once have been considered basic services. In contrast, the Pentagon is fighting its distant wars as if American pockets had no bottoms, the national treasury had no
limits, and there was quite literally no tomorrow.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175228/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_numbers_to_die_for__/#more

The US government as last consumer standing, at least at this point. Where else to go? Just keep handing out the contracts, until carbon trading is up and running. Why the ugly distorted mirror reflections of each other (Taliban and US)? The host defines its virus. Why are the lessons not only not learned, but failed again in an obscene manner? The illusion of necessity is gone. How have we become so disconnected from immediate history? By being able to shape it so easily, a toy, a remix. Where is it going? Where it has been going, where it has been going...

Top 100 of 2000

I got caught in a micro fascism the other day. In my desperate attempts to create deeper conscious awareness Idemanded they see the world through my lens and drop their silly perspective. If you are what you think (a sentiment agreed to by the video game heavy rain, where you decide what to think about and depending on what you decide your reality changes), then there definitely is danger in spending all your damn time looking at celebrity news. But awareness comes not from someone telling you you are stupid, even if that scolding is done poetically, universally, and abstractly. It is still a fascism, I am the all powerful subject and you and your actions are the object of my analysis. I am tired of being the subject. I am tired of feeling like I need to do the obvious shitting on a movie thats no good, its too obvious, its too easy, it's draining. I am putting myself on that level and calcifying the subject-object barrier, something I do not want to do, and instead I will not worry about it, or only on a sort of parallel. I will instead try to riff off of things outside of me that I feel represent me as subject, incorporating objects into me and thus realizing myself as an object. Maybe then I will be able to get through to others. I realize this is the strength of Zizek's book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. When he preempts arguments the audience will have, when he shows his process of thought, as he takes you through the formulations of the questions to ask and how to visualize the current predicament. Highly recommended.

I think the cut and paste method will help, using others words rearranged and hopefully the merging of yourself and the other will create something new and outside. Eventually I will apply the method to my own longwinded fascist piece and cut it apart and get to the deeper meaning of what I wrote. I am not yet ready to do this though, that piece is still too painful to read.

Cokemachineglow released their top 100 albums released since the new millenium. Its an amazing list. Look to the top twenty if you are looking for some new music. Look to their writings on the music to see how seriously people can take the music they love, and how they can truly be inspired from it in their writing. Surely makes me feel better about being a music obsessive, and that listening to music does not have to be approached cynically-ironically, nor does it have to be enjoyed purely physically, as an empty-headed vacuous exercise. If anybody can find a list quite so passionate for novels, or poetry........

I also find here is about as far as hardcore experimental is going to go. The bountiful negative space, the absence of substance, “ok, I guess I get that, sure”, nought-y due to all the cracks. Artsier sci-fi is all about cutting off your air supply and is set upon stripping away every last piece of unnecessary flesh, if that’s creepily titillating or just plain off-putting, well, The Big Bang happened. Derelicts align perception down to a prenatal understanding, it doesn’t sound forced or lifeless- pretentiousness isn’t actually real. A massive entity that can apparently fuck with your genetic code interfaces with us, its immensity and mesmeric draw stretch my consciousness out wider and wider. Enclose it with my thought, I am transformed, untouchable, one single image that includes those inmost parts of all who encounter it. Sculpted time, typically filled by the impatient murmurs of those who will have none of it, subjects us to that shit because that’s actually the shit that most defines us. The projector is flipped and a sea of light dances across our cornea, sort of coldly comforting that I am not alone. The nigh infinite depth is just barely ample enough for the insertion of the tip of one’s own soul.

Makin Planz

These are the days, Danny, the good old days, so let's sculpt them in the image of what we'll one day want to see, because nostalgia's one of my weeknesses, my cheif weekness even, and I know i'll be old some day, dead some time after that, bed ridden at some point in between, becuase I smoke and drink and do too many drugs, and so will you, all three of those things, and we'll want to look back fondly on what we did in our twenties. Even now, at the age for which fat fucks in their forties feel nostalgic, I feel nostalgic for my childhood, my precious youth spent playing cricket and hide and seek in the park, and i feel sad about the things i didn't do. It's a problem of mine, an illness of the mind, but one i need to take into account when planning for my old age, because it's not the kind of thing that i can kick. So, here's what I propose. Come back to America and we'll let New York chew us up and swallow us, then we'll roll down the esophogus of central america - by train, by car, by magic school bus - until we reach the belly of south america - columbia, brazil, venezuela - fat and distended, where we'll let ourselves digest and bounce around until we get squeezed into the long slender intestines that are Argentina and Chile, and we'll stay there, tucked away in some absortive fold, until we've got nothing left to give and we're shat back into the world with a purpose.

Disassociation from Tezt

its important to know that james uses no samples in his music from other artist. he creates all of the sounds himself from scratch using old digital samplers/synths and weird keyboards and stuff blending things together. besides using some beavis and butthead straight of the T.V. I read in a italian magazine interview last week, it was cool to hear that because I was under the impression he sampled alot of his material, really adds a really cool dimension knowing that its all from scratch. he was being interviewed from his apartment in las vegas at the time september of last year. was asked about all the internet slamming and replied by saying he doesn’t mind what people think “I imagine most of the people contributing to it to have some inner turmoil they have to get out and it just manifest itself in that way ,” and as far as it being information, the writing is so bad, so sometimes I cant help but interpret what I read as a reflection of their own self hate, the words dissolve and its just the energy behind it, which appears to be pretty black, hopefully it doesn’t spread to far out of the arena,but it seems completely natural for communication to evolve into this” a lot of its okay with him though he goes on to say. he views it as ”a virtual cage of online persona crucifixions and those as “psychological throw downs” but he “loves a good roast” and if it makes some one feel good until the next inability to cope with reality puts them in front of the computer thats cool with him. also from an aesthetic point of view he thinks it’s really cool and makes it easier to understand t.v. shows like CSI LAS VEGAS and Survivor, it’s like watching the central brain of a world on autopilot, and its cool to be in there somewhere. and ended with saying ‘’some times when the rage travels outside of the fun house people should just pull their own plug but you gotta let everyone have their fun, it’s sadistic I love it!

Every Man's a Hero (Where am I?)

Jean Baudrillard. The despair of having everything
Translated by Luke Sandford
November 2002

The West's mission is to make the world's wealth of cultures interchangeable, and to subordinate them within the global order. Our culture, which is bereft of values, revenges itself upon the values of other cultures. by Jean Baudrillard

IS globalisation inevitable? What fervour propels the world to embrace such an abstract idea? And what force drives us to make that idea a reality so unconditionally?

The universal used to be an idea. Yet when an idea is actually realised globally, it commits suicide. With humankind as the sole authority of note, occupying the empty space left by a dead God, the human species now rules unchallenged, though it no longer has any overarching goal. Since humanity's enemies have all fled, it must generate foes from within its own ranks, while showing symptoms of inhumanity.

Hence the violence associated with globalisation, with a system that wants to eliminate any manifestation of negativity and singularity (including the ultimate expression of singularity, death). This is the violence of a society in which we are almost forbidden to engage in conflict. This violence, in a way, marks an end to violence itself, because it yearns for a world free from any natural order that might govern the human body or sexuality, life or death. It might be more accurate to use the word virulence, rather than violence. This violence has viral force: it spreads by contagion and chain reactions. It gradually destroys our immunity and ability to resist.

Globalisation's triumph is not certain yet, though. Faced with its homogenising and destabilising effects, hostile forces are arising everywhere. But anti-globalisation's ever-sharper manifestations — including social and political resistance — should be seen as more than just outmoded forms of rejection. They are part of an agonising revision that focuses on the achievements of modernity and "progress", a process that rejects both the globalised techno-structure and an ideology that wants to make all cultures interchangeable.

Anti-globalisation actions may be violent, abnormal or irrational, at least as judged by our enlightened philosophy. They may be collective, bringing together different ethnic, religious and linguistic groups, or they may be individual, including maladjustment and neurosis. It would be wrong to denounce anti-globalisation forces as populist, antiquated or terrorist. Every current event — including Islamic hostility to the West — happens in opposition to the abstraction that is the concept of universality. Islam is now public enemy number one because it has shown the most vehement opposition to Western values.

Who or what can thwart the global system? Surely not anti-globalisation forces, whose only aim is to slow the pace of deregulation; their political influence may be considerable but their symbolic impact is nil. The protestors' violence is merely another event within the system that the system will absorb — while remaining in control of the game.

Singularities [unique or unusual identities or approaches] could be used to baffle the system. Being neither positive nor negative, they do not represent alternatives; they are wild cards outside the system. They cannot be evaluated by value judgments or through principles of political reality; they can correspond to either the best or the worst. They are obstacles to one-track thinking and dominant modes of thought, although they are not the only kind of contrary approach. They make up their own games and play by their own rules.

Singularities are not inherently violent. Some can be subtle, unique characteristics of language, art, culture or the human body. But violent singularities do exist, and terrorism is one of them. Violence revenges all the varied cultures that disappeared to prepare for the investiture of a single global power. This is not really a clash of civilisations. Instead, this anthropological conflict pits a monolithic universal culture against all manifestations of otherness, wherever they may be found.

Global power — as fundamentalist as any religious orthodoxy — sees anything different or unorthodox as heretical, and the heretics must be made to assume their position within the global order or disappear completely. The West's mission (we could call it the "former West" since it lost its defining values long ago) is to reduce a wealth of separate cultures into being interchangeable, of equal weight, by any brutal means possible. A culture that is bereft of values revenges itself on the values of other cultures. Beyond politics and economics, the primary aim of warfare (including the conflict in Afghanistan) is to normalise savagery and beat territories into alignment. Another objective is to diminish any zone of resistance, to colonise and tame any terrain, geographical or mental

The rise of the globalised system has been powered by the furious envy of an indifferent, low-definition culture faced with the reality of high-definition cultures. Envy is what disenchanted systems that have lost their intensity feel in the presence of high-intensity cultures. It is the envy of deconsecrated societies when confronted with sacrificial cultures and structures.

The global system assesses any resistance as potentially terrorist, as in Afghanistan (1). When a territory bans democratic liberties such as music, television or women's faces, when nations take courses opposed to what we call civilisation, the "free" world sees these events as indefensible, regardless of what religious principles may be at stake.

So to disavow modernity and its pretensions of universality is not allowed. Some resistors reject the belief that modernity is a force for good or represents the natural ideal of our species; others question the universality of our mores and values. Even when the resistors are described as "fanatics", their contrariness remains criminal, according to the received wisdom of the West.

This confrontation can only be understood by considering symbolic obligations. To understand the hatred the rest of the world feels towards the West, we must reverse our perspectives. This is not the hatred felt by people from whom we have taken everything and to whom we have given nothing back. Rather, it is the hatred felt by those to whom we have given everything and who can give nothing in return. Their hatred stems from humiliation, not from dispossession or exploitation. The attacks of 11 September were a response to this animus, with one kind of humiliation begetting another.

The worst thing that can happen to global power is not for it to be attacked or destroyed but for it to be humiliated. Global power was humiliated on 11 September because the terrorists inflicted an injury that could not be inflicted on them in return. Reprisals are only physical retaliations, whereas global power had suffered a symbolic defeat. War can only respond to the terrorists' physical aggression, not to the challenge they represent. Their defiance can only be addressed by vengefully humiliating the "others" (but surely not by crushing them with bombs or by locking them up like dogs in detention cells in Guantanamo Bay).

There is a fundamental rule that the basis for all domination is a total lack of any counterflow to the prevailing power. Bestowing a unilateral gift is a powerful act. The "good" empire gives without any possibility of a return of gifts. This is almost to assume God's place or to take on the role of the master who ensures his slaves' safety in exchange for their labours. (Since work is not a symbolic compensation, the only remaining options for the slaves are revolution and death.)

But even God allowed humanity to give him the gift of sacrifice. Within the traditional order it was always possible to repay God, or nature, or another higher authority, by sacrifice. This safeguarded the symbolic equilibrium between human beings and everything else. Today there is no one left to compensate, to whom we might repay our symbolic debt. This is the curse of our culture: although giving is not impossible, giving back is impossible, because sacrifice has had its importance and power taken away, and what remains is a caricature of sacrifice (like contemporary ideas of victimisation).

So we find ourselves stuck with always being on the receiving end, not from God or nature, but from technical mechanisms that provide general exchange and gratification. Almost everything is given to us. And we are entitled to it all. We are like slaves, bondservants whose lives have been spared but who are still bound by an intractable debt. At some point, though, that fundamental rule always applies and any positive transfer will be met with a negative reaction.

This is a violent expression of repressed feeling about lives in captivity, about sheltered existences, about, in fact, having far too much existence. The return to a more primitive condition may take the form of violence (including terrorism) or the form of denials characterised by powerlessness, self-hatred and remorse, negative passions, which are a debased form of the payback that it is impossible to make. The thing we hate within ourselves, the obscure focus of our resentment, is our surfeit of reality: our excessive power and comfort, our sense of accomplishment. This is the fate that Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor had prepared for the tamed masses in The Brothers Karamazov ["to vanquish freedom and to do so to make men happy"]. It is exactly what the terrorists condemn in our culture. Hence the endless coverage of — and fascination with — terrorism.

Terrorism depends not only on the obvious despair of the humiliated, but on the invisible despair of globalisation's beneficiaries. It depends on our subjugation to the technology integral to our lives, and to the crushing effects of virtual reality. We are in thrall to networks and programmes, and this dependence defines our species, homo sapiens gone global. This feeling of invisible despair — our own despair — is irreversible because it is the result of the total fulfilment of our desires.

If terrorism is really the result of a state of profusion without any hope of payback or obligation to sacrifice, of the forced resolution of conflicts, then eradicating it as if it were an affliction imposed from the outside could only be illusory. Terrorism, in its absurdity and meaninglessness, is society's verdict on — and condemnation of — itself.

(1) You could say serious natural disasters are a form of terrorism since, although they are technically classified as accidents (such as Chernobyl), they may resemble terrorism. In India, the Bhopal poison gas tragedy (technically an accident) could have been terrorism. Any terrorist group could claim responsibility for an aviation accident. Irrational events can be attributed to anyone or anything, so that, at the limit, we could see anything as criminal, even cold weather or an earthquake. There is nothing new about this: in the aftermath of the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, thousands of Koreans were blamed and killed. In a system as integrated as our own, everything destabilises; everything seeks to undermine a system that lays claim to infallibility. Given what we are already undergoing because of the system's rational grip, we may wonder if the worst catastrophe is the infallibility of the system.

We Are Experiencing Turbulence

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not everything see

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT0IGA6VSQQ&fmt=18



DR CARTER ANYONE?!

Statement of Purpose (Nihil/Narcissism Unbound?)

Placebos Are Getting More Effective

In the trenches of a small Thai pharmaceutical company here, gotta say, shit is looking sketchy in the industry these days. What's the snake oil? What's the poisonous snake oil? Sugar tablets as good as anti-depressants, without those nasty side effects. Tis the numero uno industry in terms of profit margin (true news there, this d-style here). More dan oil? Can't be more than those govt contracts where u get a billion dollars in aid and then u build a few ramshackle huts for some soon to be dead Hatians and cop the rest for yourself. Oh for the good old days in the 60's where you didn't have to keep track of free samples and drug reps roamed the countryside in candy filled cars exchanging amphetamines for hand jobs. We got freedom in America, thats why we are free to pay double for the same drugs that those ceiling lovers in Canada do..sky's the limit! Now our lauded science is started to dance away from us and flirt with that bad scene, with such trouble makers as irrationality and incomprehensibility...lo and behold the future is now and there is no order and there is no order, no new world order.

Crackberries turn us into crackbabies turning our heads into Mush (Believe it or not, but know that believing ain't enough)
"Perhaps most worrisome, though, are the preliminary results of the multinational Interphone study sponsored by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, in Lyon, France. (Scientists from thirteen countries took part in the study, the United States conspicuously not among them.) Interphone researchers reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell-phone use, the chance of getting a brain tumor—specifically on the side of the head where you use the phone—goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Interphone researchers in Israel have found that cell phones can cause tumors of the parotid gland (the salivary gland in the cheek), and an independent study in Sweden last year concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. Another Interphone study reported a nearly 300 percent increased risk of acoustic neuroma, a tumor of the acoustic nerve."

The sizzle in the air invisible see, except when you hear at the break of dawn we're FREE.
Silent silence, it calls out to me, "turn on the wifi and watch celebrities!
Wimax, the broadband laced, the air burns microwaves slowly twist fate
not just cancer, depression its a blessing
give up anything- for the next thing
turn off the cable the sound is there a warning of the airwaves trying to share
celebrate the cell phone tower burning terrorist like the man who stole a tank and rolled over 6 of them in australia- real raw helicopter field squad health care real odd anybody deals with all the- true disease threat its everywhere scared, aware cant breath, security apparatus it defines the next thing but microwave got me for 20 years my cells thinned- freak show real cold my friends they see no evil on/in disney its 1 or 2, kid star or athlete the earnings the worming in the skull the neural control- eyes closed hypertension blind slow culture swallows minds foes- turns into 1 disease my bro, culture one the time slows- plastic wants release takes control, endocrine system gotta go- what am i eating scared what am i eating paranoid visions of the cracks in the cement- ancestors watching SHAME talk no action SHAME no nonono clearness no nono CHANGE.

China on da march. Exports wanna move. All the kids in they basements got something to prove. Workers get nothing. They really want something. They call that something a special bill worth loving. Positive attitude nobody wanna get caught frontin. The boy he's not hating. Just got no patience with the cliches on the pavement. Robots check nope, wisdom child check no. Please only jokes and riddles only broken battered flow.

Any mention of generation y nostalgia's getting slashed. Sick to see Eminem selling big because we miss our childhood raps. Tired know nothing- yes we pathetic- quote movies holla back. nickelodeon golden age of our syrup tinged crap.

Contortionists please abort these fetuses, I'm scared of their anger when they come out twenty years later they'll be like no thank you, wat the fuck you set us free for, so we can just be bored, I will get some C4 and blow up what I deplore. uh help if they take it all and store it away who the fuck are we to tell em they aint wrong, cuz we took it up the ass and convinced ourselves we loved it all along

tongue in cheek ok please i dont make claims to do this art unique but I hear them talking often but they hardly speak

Theres the one voice and then theres the double. I see the alternative and the alternative's alternative and the history can be split recombined and split and recombined. They called me for a memoir I said fuck its just the same shit. Who is accusing the other, and what is their name and rationale? That man represents that organization and that organization represents what geo-coordination...or simply from planet iPhormation. Please no narrow spit out recapsuled humorbomb all lessons taught are lessons already known. All lessons that should be learned are spit straight from the dome. While you were listening to punk rock i stripped the artifice from music looking for the subterranean terrain where the message ripples through the sky causing cataracts of sound dropping birds of feather flocking the same north south. DJs who reduce music to the 4/4 rhythms of mix and match beats so ppl cant move their silly movements miss the intricacies of noise rearranged through time trace the legacy of faust to muslimgauze- i am on that next shit please get on board. Whos being cocky? The ego has yet reached no barrier it only seems to hate on everything as it is so many's everything that is worthy of hate, in my mind there is much to set apologies for and praise to the heavens I have nothing against religion persae per each thing i say. Please think of plateaus, your words spoken are on that same ol' plateau- mine might not be your favorite but its different or at least it tries, does research, in its way aims high.

.....................

A Liquid Universe

The young boy squatted on a rock by the lake. The sky, sterling blue, as if it were light refracted from a pristine sapphire, stretched infinitely around the bounds of the horizon, only adorned by the occasional lazily wafting cloud. The lake, as limpid as distilled water, reflected the great azure sky so perfectly as to deceive the mind between down and up, sky and liquid, heaven and hell. The peace of the lake was only interrupted by the ripples of the soft fall breeze and the ducks that floated and dove underneath for food.

The waters were so clear and still that one could see the pebbles that lay and the fish that swam about underwater. It was the fish that caught the boy's eyes, and he peered at them curiously. Their scales sparkled so vibrantly in the sunshine, and the way they wriggled and wiggled so fluidly in the liquid fascinated him. He had great, big, curious eyes, as any innocent child does; his spirit was as pure as the lake and sky before him. He squatted there on the bank, riveted at the squirming bodies underwater.

"Hello, child. What are you doing?"
The child turned around.

A man, in his middle ages, appeared behind the child. He had on a suit, tie, and top hat; he carried nothing but one large, black suitcase. His coat and pants were sullied by dust, his tie was somewhat upset. He had scraggly scrubble growing off of his face; he seemed to have not shaved in days.

"What are you doing?"
"I'm looking at the fish."
"Oh?"

The man came over next to the boy and peered over the rock. He, too, saw the fish. He smiled.

“Do you like fish?” the man asked.
“Huh?”
“I said, do you like fish.”
“I don’t know,” said the boy.
“What do you mean?” the man replied.
“Well,” thought the boy, “I only sort of know what a fish is. I ate it before and it was delicious, but I’ve never touched it and I’ve never met one. I don’t really know what a fish is other than seeing it swim in the water.”

A short silence punctuated the conversation. A cool breeze tumbled by, ruffling the man’s clothes and briefly disturbing the surface of the water. One could hear the grass crinkling in the rolling meadows, the trees rustling their multicolored autumn foliage, the bark crunching under the feet of a mockingbird that warbled melodiously in the distance.

“They’re not that interesting,” said the man.
“Yes, they are,” the child retorted.
“What’s so interesting about some stupid fish?” the man scoffed.

The boy’s gaze never left the water for an instant, even as he spoke. His voice was gentle, his words simple yet clear: “Fish are interesting animals because they’re so different from us. We have arms and legs and a head and neck and face, but they only have a face and one long body and some fins and flippers. They live only in water and they die in the air, which is opposite to us. Their world is one in water, they live in a thing that we can only die in. They have no cars, no legs, no horses, only fins and they swim very quickly with them. But they never complain! All they know how to do is swim and swim and swim. We would think that’s boring, but they’re happy with just swimming.”

A pause.

The man was not one to think much of the words of children and felt a sense of superior arrogance in that he knew much more than the boy. He dismissed the child’s words as stupid garbage and thought not much of his intelligence.

“These fish are not so interesting! They’re just slippery, slimy things that are good to eat. I think that’s boring!” He tilted his head back and laughed. The child was unfazed.

“You know,” the man continued, “I went to a very good school and I read many books. I’m a traveling scholar, and I know many things. I’ve experienced much more than you, so I know that these fish are boring and have nothing to them. Why you are so transfixed by them, I don’t know. Do you even know what transfixed means? Probably not – it means to be fascinated by – but do you even know what fascinate means? Probably not, you don’t seem to bright if you’re so fascinated by fish. Anyways, if you like fish so much, do you want to see one above the water?”
The boy shook his head. “No. It will die. I’m happy with just looking at them.”
The man frowned. “That’s so boring, though. Let’s go touch the fish.” He walked closer to the edge of the rock. “The water doesn’t even look that deep, child. I think I can touch one of them…”

As the man knelt down to submerge his hand under the water, his foot slipped. He slid feet first right into the water with a sloppy splash. The water around him sprayed and splattered violently as he thrashed about. Upon his noisy entrance, the alarmed fish scattered into a million directions.

“Hell!” he yelled. “It’s fucking deep!”
The boy’s eyes enlarged. “Mister? Do you need help?”

“No,” the man said between gasps of water. “I read lots of books and I – splash – recently read a book on swimming and – splash – ack – can manage myself well – blah – splash – and I’ll be ash… - splash – ptooey – ashore in – splash, gurgle, bubble – ashore in a second…”

Surely I can make it ashore! thought the man. That book I read on swimming – How to Swim Like a Marlin by J. L. Smith – surely it will help me out here!

Unfortunately for him, neither marlins nor this body of water had heard of that book before and, curiously enough, the author himself, J. L. Smith, had slipped and knocked his head unconscious in his bathtub and drowned to death a month after said book’s publication. The man sank to the bottom of the lake and never resurfaced. He didn't belong in the liquid universe.

The boy stood up. “I guess that mister was right,” he said. “Fishes are pretty boring.” He turned around and walked away from the lake.

Dear Toiling Masses

I was sitting in my study the other day, counting the profits from my numerous copper mines in South America, and in the mists of curling cigar smoke and in between the sounds of squeaking leather and the swishing of brandy a thought occurred to me: Robots.

Yes that’s right robots. Now I know what you’re thinking dear reader, “Why would this obviously well to do business man that turns a profits from the less fortunate natives of uncivilized countries, that oppresses the masses through hazy back room deals with governments, and sits atop his spire looking down at the world and laughing, why would he be thinking about robots?” Well I will tell you, at great risk to my personal safety. That’s right dear reader I will be the whistle blower. I will expose the circuitous plans of the power elite.

That plan, as I have stated is robots. At first they will be benign; robots that help you do chores, that walk your dog, and robots with which you can entertain your most depraved sexual fantasies with. This is step one, a step which as we speak is in action. Step two is far more devious and will be undertaken to two phases. Phase one: kill drones, robots for national security, robots that kill foreign “terrorists”. This too is already in effect, but it is Phase Two which will be the nail in your underprivileged coffins. Kill drones for domestic “terrorists”, Kill drones for everyone and everything. Kill drones that kill. It will be under the guise of a so called “robot revolution”. This will obviously lead to the extermination of the lower class (minus, of course, a few choice females which are deemed worthy of breeding), and the ruling elites will be free to reproduce and spread their seed across the world, enjoying a life free from toil and the disgusting stench of the sweat the working man leaves on this planet.

Why have I told you this? Why when it would seemingly benefit me to let this diabolical plan come to fruition? Well I have discovered an even more sinister plot devised by those more elite than I which will separate the elites left after the robot revolution into elite elites and just regular elites to create a ruling-working elite class and a ruling-ruling elite class. Then under the guise of a “cephalopod revolution” exterminate the ruling-working elite class thus starting the cycle over again.

Yes dear reader, it is not the elites who are your enemies it is the combined forces of robots and cephalopods that seek to destroy everything we have fought so hard for. Do not place your energies into defeating the corporations; do seek to dethrone the kings of new. No! Seek out and destroy all robots and cephalopods and all robot and cephalopod look-a-likes for they may just be robots and cephalopods in disguise. To arms ye noble savages, with sword and valor destroy all Johnny 5’s and smite all cuttlefish.

Sincerely,
J. Arthur Reginald III Paranoid-Schizophrenic Extraordinaire