music video using autotune to turn the speeches of political hacks and corporate media talking heads into a bumpin club jam. with some help from back up singers and Sen. Junkie Einstein
Potter fandom documentary. features the guy behind WizardPeople, a young lady who lead a legion of fans to victory against WBs HP copyright initiative, a woman who is convinced HP leads to Satan, and members of several Wizard Rock bands including Harry and the Potters, the Hungarian Horntails, the Womping Willow and Draco and the Malfoys.
awesome documentary series about the Freud family and the use of psychoanalytic theory by governments and big business. interesting how you never see any Jungians inventing corporate propaganda and attempting large scale social control...
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, changed the perception of the human mind and its workings. His influence on the twentieth century is generally considered profound. The series describes the ways public relations and politicians have utilized Freud's theories during the last 100 years for the "engineering of consent".
Freud himself and his nephew Edward Bernays, who was the first to use psychological techniques in public relations, are discussed. Freud's daughter Anna Freud, a pioneer of child psychology, is mentioned in the second part, as is one of the main opponents of Freud's theories, Wilhelm Reich, in the third part.
Along these general themes, The Century of the Self asks deeper questions about the roots and methods of modern consumerism, representative democracy and its implications. It also questions the modern way we see ourselves, the attitude to fashion and superficiality.
small Illinois town that might be right out of a Sufjan song goes bust, witch school moves in. this is a documentary with a lot of candid footage and a vaguely (Wes) Andersonian aesthetic feel. novel religions, meth problems, the sweet corn festival, etc.
Hoopeston, Illinois was founded by Thomas Hoopes in 1871. Originally a small farming community, the town grew into a canning powerhouse by the 1950s. It became known as the “Sweet Corn Capital of the World.”
In the nineties, Hoopeston's industry collapsed in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Today Hoopeston has vast unemployment and some of the cheapest real estate in America. The mayor has offered Hoopeston's tallest building free to any business that can bring jobs to town.
Because buildings are so cheap in Hoopeston, a Witch School moved there from Chicago in 2003. The directors of the school faced stiff opposition from religious conservatives (Hoopeston has over a dozen churches—its other nickname is “The Holy City”). But the Witch School is now a fixture in Hoopeston, one that forces the town to ask whether its future lies in traditional industry or internet wand sales.
Hoopeston tells the story of the former Sweet Corn Capital through the lives of its residents. A laborer struggles to find work, a young entrepreneur buys the only motel in town, the police chief battles a drug epidemic, and the Correllian Chancellor lays plans for a vast Crystal Web.
When authorities resort to propaganda confidence building instead of substantive action in response to an actual crisis, you know you are in real trouble (Katrina, Iraq, etc.). We are seeing this again today in regards to the global economic crisis, with media amplified whispers of green shoots and bald pronouncements of immanent recovery.
It won't help. The underlying fundamentals are toxic: US gross debt as a percentage of GDP (currently at 375%) is still climbing, housing prices are still falling (wealth destruction as far as the eye can see), un/underemployment is still rising (an inability to service debt), the financial industry is back to its old tricks (bonuses are shooting through the roof again, etc.), China is still manipulating its currency (dashing prospects of future jobs), commodities (higher costs for daily life) are shooting up again, etc. Worse, what action has been taken is largely short term masking of symptoms and not a cure. Our government "brain-trust" is using all of its financial powder on deprecated 20th Century economic measures to prop up the industries that got us into this crisis: like the greasing of palms in the bloated construction industry (what relation that industry has to our future prosperity is a big mystery) and the flooding of a failing oligopoly (the financial industry) with free money.
In short, the economic decline we just experienced is being primed to continue (perhaps with greater force), when the spin eventually fails to convince. Without a means to rectify our course except for spin economics, the trend towards a post-Westphalian century replete with neo-feudalism and global guerrillas is on an inexorable march. [+]
He who would understand human beings must put away his academic gown, say good-bye to the study, and wander with a human heart through the world. There, in the horrors of the prison, the hospital and the asylum, in the drinking-shops, brothels, and gambling halls, in the salons of the elegant, the exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, religious revivals and secular ecstasies, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him.
while trying to compose a mnemonic acronym to remember the order of Austin's north-south streets (yes, I was born here and no, I still don't know) I discovered something interesting: the street plan of downtown Austin from West to East St (now known as the southbound I-35 access road) can be interpreted as two octaves of the major scale, with Congress Ave as "middle C". So now i am singing major scales to myself up and down..."West, RioGrand, Nueces, SanAntone, Guad, Lavaca, Colorodo, Congress!" etc. of course, they also mirror the placement of their respective namesake rivers in Texas. one wonders if there isn't some occult psychogeographical mystery at the heart of Austin's layout...
"So what do I propose for a Republican Party that will be relevant in the future? I’m thinking we need to work towards becoming a loose confederation of warlords. In the post-apocalyptic wasteland, resources will be scarce and the strong will crush the weak — and frankly, those are conditions in which Republicans should thrive. The Republican Party will need to cement its rule through force, destroy the weak, and take their resources. Back to basics for the party, really."
If you ask a person what sort of behavior is acceptable, they will likely reply, “Do whatever you like so long as it doesn’t harm others.”
The principle described above is a “liberal” principle. Liberal, derived from the root word liberty, concerns the freedom of individuals to do as they please, as well as their individual rights which cannot be infringed upon by others.
The formal philosophical name of that principle is the “non-aggression axiom,” and it means that the initiation of force against another person is immoral. It is the single foundational principle of anarchism. Anarchism is a political philosophy that asserts this principle to be the sole moral law, and in doing so comes to a logical conclusion: the institution we call the “government” is in the business of breaking this law constantly.
We are all aware of it. Most obviously, the government takes a portion, about one third, of all of our earnings. We have no choice in this matter, and we have absolutely minimal view on how it is spent. This directly violates the ethics of liberalism.
Secondly, the government decrees certain items and actions to be “illegal”. There was a time the government outlawed alcohol in the United States. In many governments, one is supposed to have certain religious beliefs, which makes merely thinking certain thoughts illegal. The mere concept of illegality is illiberal.
Naturally, one must object, “But don’t we need the government? Isn’t it only practical? Who will punish murderers? Who will feed the poor? Who will defend us from enemies?” These are all good questions, which we as open-minded people must further explore. But the point stands for now that to accept government is, logically, to reject that common sense principle of individual liberty.
“We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system,” Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. “There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it’s all right really, because under such-and-such a model of capitalism ... there is no such model. It isn’t supposed to work like this, and there is no road-map for what’s happened.”
The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.
the thing i like about Google Wave is that its the kind of app that could kill email, IM, blogs, flikr, youtube, the MyFace, text messaging AND twitter in one fell swoop.
Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.
We are now in a different kind of war — a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call “cars” may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.
The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn’t give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true — that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.
President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately….
You know what would rock? Being a completely bankrupt nation-state, and declaring yourself the world capital of antimoney. Conventional money is illegal in your country (because you can’t get any of it anyway) but every financial experiment that isn’t money gets legalized in your territory. You bring in all the socialist ecommerce radicals, egold freaks, cellphone bankers, whuffie fanatics, rightwing silver-coinage loons, whatever; you give ‘em your derelict factories and all the broadband they can eat.
Then you just step back and watch the Revolution. [+]
A budding British director is enjoying success on a shoestring at Cannes with "Colin," a new zombie feature that cost a scarcely believable $70 to make. "Colin" director Marc Price who spent 18 months making the film, working nights at a private car hire firm. Japanese distributors are currently in negotiations for the rights to the film and buzz around the no-budget zombie chiller has attracted interest from some major American distributors -- all of which is a very nice surprise for the team behind "Colin."
"When we say it's a low budget film, people presume a couple of hundred thousand [dollars]. People can't figure out how it's possible. What Marc's achieved has left people astonished." It was by advertising for volunteer zombies on social networking site Facebook, borrowing make-up from Hollywood blockbusters and teaching himself how to produce special effects that thrifty director Price was able to make the film for less than the price of a zombie DVD box set.
"The approach was to say to people, 'OK guys, we don't have any money, so bring your own equipment,'" the the 30 year-old director told CNN. With help from a makeshift band of friends and volunteers, Price shot and edited the feature -- which ingeniously spins the zombie genre on it's head by telling the story entirely from the zombie's perspective -- over a period of 18 months while working nights part-time as a booker for a taxi company. Online social networking was an invaluable tool in both generating buzz and cheaply sourcing the undead: "We went on Facebook and MySpace and said 'Who wants to be a zombie?'" Price told CNN. "We managed to get 50 brilliantly made up zombies and stuff them into a living room."
also, Portugese society has dramatically failed to collapse into substance-fueled pandemonium in the last 8 years.
On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal framework, all drugs were “decriminalized,” not “legalized.” Thus, drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed to be exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm.... The data show that, judged by virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework has been a resounding success. Within this success lie self-evident lessons that should guide drug policy debates around the world.
today i built a pen in the back yard for Isaac Newton and Christiaan Hugyens (the baby chickens, not the world-renowned dead guys). five posts, 8 stakes, 25' of 4' chicken wire and a few hours later, them chicks are penned in (36'^2 with gate). which is good, because now they can spend most of the day outside instead of in their box. over all, i'd say it was a pretty satisfying experience.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
