I’m ready for people in positions of power at magazines and newspapers and movie studios to recalibrate their understanding of what it means to talk about race in the first place. If America would like to express that it truly values and appreciates the voices of its minorities, it will listen to all their stories, not just the ones reacting to its shortcomings and brutality.

Because these combat robots are coming, and many are already here, if we do not prevent their global deployment by the time you and I are old we will see robots on street corners with guns that run software we do not control, implementing policies beamed to them over the airwaves in encrypted communications, accessing databases of faces and retinas, ever watchful for enemies not of the State as we currently understand it, but of the people who own the right to program the machines which watch over us. The State will have become technocratic – fascism by remote control – and the dream of control, coveted by evil men for generations, will have come to fruition. We have a scant few years to arrest the development of these technologies or to rearchitect the social foundations of liberty to survive a situation where combat robots leave the population largely powerless to resist tyranny, whether they have their rifles or not.

Taking human life should always be a very serious thing. There’s something very close up about the Middle Ages. You’re taking a sharp piece of steel and hacking at someone’s head, and you’re getting spattered with his blood, and you’re hearing his screams. In some ways maybe it’s more brutal that we’ve insulated ourselves from that. We’re setting up mechanisms where we can kill human beings with drones and missiles where you’re sitting at a console and pressing the button. We never have to hear their whimpering, or hear them begging for their mother, or dying in horrible realities around us.

It amazes me how the seemingly most paranoid people are all “Software created by anonymous entities? Sign me up! I can’t wait to use it to store my most sensitive files/conduct illegal transactions!”

Where do these systems of obedience come from? Why do we recognize power instead of individual autonomy? These questions are fascinating to me. It’s all this strange illusion, isn’t it?

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The thing to understand is why we’re fighting - understand, the purpose of segregation is to preserve the second-class status of blacks. And the main thing for you to understand is we must continue to fight.

I am mostly a pretty worried person. In conversations, I am always worried about what to say. The first time I took ecstasy, all of that lifted away. All the anxiety, which is the baseline of my life in some way, and I had this moment of like, wait a second! Are there people who feel this way all the time? This is like a whole way to be, where you don’t feel anxious? Oh my god! It was so amazing. In the months after that, it was a really helpful thing to have experienced. It remains to this day a feeling that is helpful to know about.

Just as clean tech is being thwarted by the trillions of dollars previously sunk into fossil-fuel infrastructure, our collective investment in capitalism itself is forestalling superior post-capitalist alternatives.

I was told by another officer while in the car that recording a police officer was illegal because people are using iPhones as guns and shooting cops through the camera lens…I told him that I have the right to be recording a cop and he said that there were incidents, specifically in uptown Manhattan where a kid shot a cop with his iPhone. Straight face. Very serious.

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ionicstreet:

Ionic Street (by fotophotow)

I’m minorly obsessed with this alley off of 7th street in downtown Philly. If you come across any photos of it, let me know?

Mother of Hydrogen: a novel about war, magick, and America

I’ve had countless requests to buy text links, do link exchanges, and create hidden links on mefi to lame spammy companies. I’ve also had content companies ask if I wanted to institute a NYTimes type of system where archive pages cost a buck to view after 30 days, and I’ve gotten offers from ad firms to do keyword smart tag type advertising on all old archive pages. I’ve refused them all, and developed a mix of self-service ads and donation/payments for new users that supports the site and my time well.

It is generally understood that women get paid less than men; that white women get paid more than black men and women and hispanic men and women. However, recognizing this macrocosm functioning intimately, in the immediate, personal, local context — in our friend groups, in our teams, in our companies, and in our communities — remains massively taboo.

universalequalityisinevitable:

David Suzuki in this interview about facing the reality of climate change and other environmental issues from Moyers & Company.

I realized that if you swapped out the word housework for Facebook that 80 percent of this text was still totally crystal clear, and it really freaked me out.

As of this writing, I have blocked more than 500 Twitter users, including accounts belonging to at least 20 of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average as well as dozens of startups. I have blocked government agencies and industry lobbies, print publications and new-media ventures, burger chains and probiotic yogurts, top-shelf spirits and sports drinks, financial institutions, automakers, cell-phone providers, over-the-counter medicines, Hollywood movies, Broadway musicals, and public television shows.

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universalequalityisinevitable:

David Suzuki in this interview about facing the reality of climate change and other environmental issues from Moyers & Company.

I realized that if you swapped out the word housework for Facebook that 80 percent of this text was still totally crystal clear, and it really freaked me out.

As of this writing, I have blocked more than 500 Twitter users, including accounts belonging to at least 20 of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average as well as dozens of startups. I have blocked government agencies and industry lobbies, print publications and new-media ventures, burger chains and probiotic yogurts, top-shelf spirits and sports drinks, financial institutions, automakers, cell-phone providers, over-the-counter medicines, Hollywood movies, Broadway musicals, and public television shows.

[gallery] Source: http://yourmotherseyes.tumblr.com/post/84415774797/the-vagenda-magazine-asked-their-twitter-followers

Somewhere, some junior ad exec with the Fleischmann’s Yeast account has just gotten their first google news ping in a decade.

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fuckyeahbrutalism:

Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran, Iran, 1977

(Kamran Diba)

Neal Cassady: The Denver Years - Colorado Public Television / KBDI 12 Video

Premieres June 26, more info on Facebook

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Cira Centre at sunset

That these people, at this point of reasoning, seem to both want and not want something, to no ends, is vaguely an example of the base desire of conscious beings to want to stop being conscious, as a means of fulfillment, while knowing that if they stop being conscious they won’t require fulfillment, a paradox present in all consciousness-related phenomenon after 2-4 steps of cognition.

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breelandwalker:

fangirling-daily:

fat-pikachu-mas:

denise-puchol:

Comic Book Readers

orkin 1947

what’s this?

Little girls read comics from the very beginning of their incarnation??

“Girl reading comic book in newsstand” by Teenie Harris (c. 1940-1945) © 2006 Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

That sound you hear is thousands of wangsting sexist fanboys shrieking in horror.

Suck it.

You will have to search long and hard in Philadelphia to find anyone who will say anything bad about Comcast.

It is becoming clearer to more and more people that none of the institutions which claim to represent us are ever going to act in the interest of communities.

No doubt, some will find the idea of engineering platforms to promote diversity or adapting existing laws to curb online harassment unsettling and paternalistic, but such criticism ignores the ways online spaces are already contrived with specific outcomes in mind—they are designed to serve Silicon Valley venture capitalists, who want a return on investment, and advertisers, who want to sell us things. The term ‘platform,’ which implies a smooth surface, misleads us, obscuring the ways technology companies shape our online lives, prioritizing and upraising certain purposes over others.

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

We’ve spent the last 30 years losing every battle with kleptocracy and government support of corporations so enthusiastic it has become a merging. Political protest is a Potemkin village, and everyone knows it. It is pure spectacle, free of real world consequence. It can be safely ignored or marginalized on the edges of real American politics, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the kleptocracy. If it does, or even threatens to talk about the kleptocracy, it will be violently put down.

Turns out, as with all things political, there’s money involved in here. In order to entice Huy Fong from Rosemead - where they’ve been operating for years without complaint - Irwindale offered the company a low cost loan and expected to collect the interest. Huy Fong built the plant, moved and immediately refi’d and paid off the loan, screwing the city out of the interest. Irwindale, like a lot of these little LA satellite cities is a crooked cesspool. The Mayor and the Deputy Mayor are both under indictment for fishy practices with money. Also, the vast majority of the complaints have been filed by one household - who’s the nephew of one of the city councilmen. It’s a shake down pure and simple.

It has a neck. No fish has a neck. And you know what? When you look inside the fin, and you take off those fin rays, you find an upper arm bone, a forearm, and a wrist.

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This is the age of the obvious.  You must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, what any educated individual already should know because there is a lot of money in obfuscating the obvious.

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explore-blog:

A technical glitch causes the Hubble Space Telescope, which ordinarily captures magnificently crisp scientific imagery of the cosmos, to lose balance and create this inadvertent piece of modern art.

It is suspected that in this case, Hubble had locked onto a bad guide star, potentially a double star or binary. This caused an error in the tracking system, resulting in this remarkable picture of brightly colored stellar streaks. The prominent red streaks are from stars in the globular cluster NGC 288. 

When I first got this role I just cried like a baby because I was like, “Wow, next Halloween, I’m gonna open the door and there’s gonna be a little kid dressed as the Falcon.” That’s the thing that always gets me. I feel like everybody deserves that. I feel like there should be a Latino superhero. Scarlett does great representation for all the other girls, but there should be a Wonder Woman movie. I don’t care if they make 20 bucks, if there’s a movie you’re gonna lose money on, make it Wonder Woman. You know what I mean, ’cause little girls deserve that.

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vayarevoltillo:

Photo:Nobody Likes Me by i♡. http://flic.kr/p/koKVLc

While the physical space of the urban school is often understood to serve as preparation for factory work, with the rise of a deindustrialized economy it can be argued that students are being prepared instead for the enclosed space of the prison.

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beatonna:

Here is a sketch comic I made called Ducks, in five parts.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Ducks is about part of my time working at a mining site in Fort McMurray, the events are from 2008.  It is a complicated place, it is not the same for all, and these are only my own experiences there.  It is a sketch because I want to test how I would tell these stories, and how I feel about sharing them.  A larger work gets talked about from time to time.  It is not a place I could describe in one or two stories.  Ducks is about a lot of things, and among these, it is about environmental destruction in an environment that includes humans.  Thank you for taking the time to read it.

-Kate

If you are 35 or younger - and quite often, older - the advice of the old economy does not apply to you. You live in the post-employment economy, where corporations have decided not to pay people. Profits are still high. The money is still there. But not for you. You will work without a pay rise, benefits, or job security. Survival is now a laudable aspiration.

Passover to me is informed by the Seder ritual, but it’s more than just that. It’s a Jewish holiday par excellence because every day should be a day where we remember the drive towards freedom. It’s something we should strive to preserve and protect. The month of April marks Passover, and it is the same month that the Civil War ended in 1865. During this time my great-great-grandfather and his brother were at the courthouse the day we signed the terms of surrender with Grant. They had been enslaved Africans at a tobacco plantation in Virginia. And on this day, their former slaveholder comes up to them and says, “You’re free.” I like to think of them as the first black people to realize that the nightmare was over.

Facebook wants my data to sell me stuff. I like to think of this as a feudal model. At a most fundamental model, we are tenant farming for companies like Google. We are on their land producing data.

If a person makes an unreasonable complaint at one of the stores, security camera footage of the person is processed into facial data with the recognition system and classified as “complainer”.

You speak English, a futured language, and what that means is that every time you discuss the future or any kind of a future event, grammatically, you’re forced to cleave that from the present and treat it as if it’s something viscerally different. Now suppose that that visceral difference makes you suddenly disassociate the future from the present every time you speak. If that’s true, and it makes the future feel like something more distant and more different from the present, that’s going to make it harder to save.

If, on the other hand, you speak a futureless language, the present and the future, you speak about them identically. If that suddenly nudges you to feel about them identically, that’s going to make it easier to save.

[…]

Futureless language speakers, even after this level of control, are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year. Does this have cumulative effects? Yes. By the time they retire, futureless language speakers, holding constant their income, are going to retire with 25 percent more in savings.

Can we push this data even further? Yes. Think about smoking, for example. Smoking is, in some deep sense, negative savings, right. If savings is current pain in exchange for future pleasure, smoking is just the opposite. It’s current pleasure in exchange for future pain. What we should expect then is the opposite effect. And that’s exactly what we find. Futureless-language speakers are 20 to 24 percent less likely to be smoking at any given in time compared to identical families. And they’re going to be 13 to 70 percent less likely to be obese by the time they retire.

As the white father of an African-American son, I am keenly aware that I never face the suspicion and indignities that my son continuously confronts. In fact, all of the men among my African-American in-laws—and I literally mean every single one of them—can tell multiple stories of unjustified investigatory police stops of the sort that not a single one of my white male relatives has ever experienced.

www.youtube.com/watch

pandaj-music:

WORLD ORDER - PERMANENT REVOLUTION

www.youtube.com/watch

sojourn-of-sound:

World Order - “World Order in New York”

I just love these guys. So coordinated, tight, and talented. And the music’s not bad either. I also love that they filmed in New York, one of if not the greatest city in the world.

I’m still mad at Will I. Am. and Justin Bieber for ripping these guys and Daft Punk off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35hCo_grAqw

beneathtwomoons:

Boy Meets Girl それぞれの　あふれる想いにきらめきと
瞬間を見つけてる　星降る夜の出会いがあるよに。。。
Boy Meets Girl あの頃は　いくつものドアをノックした
あざやかに描かれた　虹のドアをきっと見つけだしたくて。。。

• Boy Meets Girl, the feelings overflow with brightness
• Discover a moment when the stars fall in the sky
• Boy Meets Girl, I knocked on many doors back then
• You want to find a vividly drawn bright rainbow door

夜明けで歌ってた　あなたが得意な SWEET LOVE SONG
やけに思い出しちゃって　スーツケースに入れとこう
旅立ちを決めたのは　 勢いだけじゃないから
あなたと過ごした日は　２０世紀で最高の出来事！

• The sweet love song you sang with pride at dawn
• You remember the suitcase you stored it away in
• Deciding to take the journey, isn’t just an impulse
• The day I spent with you is the best event of the 20th Century

Boy Meets Girl　出会いこぞ　人生の宝探しだね
少年はいつの日か　少女の夢必ず見つめる
Boy Meets Girl　輝いた　リズム達が踊り出してる
朝も昼も夜も風が南へと　心をときめかせている

• Boy meets girl, such meetings are the treasures of human life
• A boy will someday gaze into a girl’s dream
• Boy meets girl, with a dazzling rhythm they begin to dance
• In the morning, the afternoon and the night, the wind pounds my heart south

安らぎが欲しかった　誇れる場所がほしかった
だけど大切なのは　あなたとあの日　出会えたことね

• We want serenity, we want a place we can be proud of
• But most important is that I met you on that day

Boy Meets Girl それぞれの　あふれる想いにきらめきと
瞬間を見つけてる　星降る夜の出会いがあるよに。。。
Boy Meets Girl あの頃は　いくつものドアをノックした
あざやかに描かれた　虹のドアをきっと見つけだしたくて。。。
心をときめかせている

• Boy Meets Girl, the feelings overflow with brightness
• Discover a moment when the stars fall in the sky
• Boy Meets Girl, I knocked on many doors back then
• You want to find a vividly drawn bright rainbow door
• My heart pounds

Boy Meets Girl　出会いこぞ　人生の宝探しだね
少年はいつの日か　少女の夢必ず見つめる
Boy Meets Girl　輝いた　リズム達が踊り出してる
朝も昼も夜も風が南へと　心をときめかせている

• Boy meets girl, such meetings are the treasures of human life
• A boy will someday gaze into a girl’s dream
• Boy meets girl, with a dazzling rhythm they begin to dance
• In the morning, the afternoon and the night, the wind pounds my heart south

www.youtube.com/watch

eyebrowsama:

WORLD ORDER - “LAST DANCE”

www.youtube.com/watch

elisxbeth-addict:

World Order - “Welcome to Tokyo” (2013)

The leader of this group is Genki Sudo, a UFC fighter?! O_O

www.youtube.com/watch

pandaj-music:

WORLD ORDER - IMPERIALISM

www.youtube.com/watch

beneathtwomoons:

The morning of machine civilization
akai tate  kage mayoi
haiiro no fuku matoi
rizumu ni torawareta asa
itsumo to onaji shunkan
tomenai seisan rain
nanika ga kakete'ru
In the twilight of machinery
            In the morning of machine civilization,
            lost shadows, behind their red shields,
            wrapped in their grey uniforms,
            are imprisoned in the mechanical rhythms.
            It's always the same scene everyday,
            where production lines march on nonstop.
            However, something is missing
            in the twilight of machinery.
Where’s the world going
Won’t somebody tell me
Are these thoughts illusion
Are we all one
kono sekai wa kawareru no ka
kono omoi wa maboroshi ka
Where’s the world going?
Won’t somebody tell me?
Are these thoughts illusion?
Are we all one?
Will this world be able to change?
Are these thoughts illusion?
People find work to be done
hito wa hataraki  tori utau
nemuri ni ochita yume
me o samase  kare sakebu
itsumo to onaji shunkan
kono setsuna ni ikiru
itsuka kakumei motome
In the twilight of machinery
People find work to be done.
Humans work, birds sing,
and then they fall into a deep slumber.
“Open your eyes!” He shouts.
It’s always the same scene everyday,
and we live in this brief moment.
Someday we’d surely want a revolution
in the twilight of machinery.
Where’s the world going
Won’t somebody tell me
Are these thoughts illusion
Are we all one
kono omoi o kaerareru no ka
itsumo yume ni waraikakeru
Where’s the world going?
Won’t somebody tell me?
Are these thoughts illusion?
Are we all one?
Will we be able to change these thoughts?
We will always smile to our dreams.
(Are these thoughts illusion)
(Are these thoughts illusion?)
Where’s the world going
Won’t somebody tell me
Are these thoughts illusion
Are we all one
kono omoi o kaerareru no ka
itsumo yume ni waraikakeru
Where’s the world going?
Won’t somebody tell me?
Are these thoughts illusion?
Are we all one?
Will we be able to change these thoughts?
We will always smile to our dreams.
break through
paradigm
in your mind
revolution
desire
science
ascension
thirteen
white shirt
white shirt
white shirt
black shirt
black shirt
singularity
we are all one
are we all one
break through
paradigm
in your mind
revolution
desire
science
ascension
thirteen
white shirt
white shirt
white shirt
black shirt
black shirt
singularity
we are all one
are we all one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mkiGMtbrPM

kenyatta:

WORLD ORDER “HAVE A NICE DAY” (by WORLD ORDER)

A new Genki Sudo video! YAAAAAY!

www.youtube.com/watch

ounomachi:

Machine Civilization, del grupo World Order encabezado por Genki Sudo.

flightcub:

totalitarian dystopian future lit is like “what if the government got so powerful that all the bad stuff that’s already happening ALSO HAPPENED TO WHITE PEOPLE?”

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(via David A. Trampier, the Illustrator Who Defined the Look of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Has Passed Away, 1954-2014 | Tor.com)

www.youtube.com/watch

ukbp:

harikondabolu:

Hari Kondabolu on the Late Show with David Letterman. I think I might be the first standup comic to say “race is a social construct” on late night television.

HARI ON LETTERMAN!

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loverofbeauty:

Gerhard Richter: 4096 colours  (1971)

Once we made it to the lobby, Ross and Lebenthal reassured me that what I’d just seen wasn’t really a group of wealthy and powerful financiers making homophobic jokes, making light of the financial crisis, and bragging about their business conquests at Main Street’s expense. No, it was just a group of friends who came together to roast each other in a benign and self-deprecating manner. Nothing to see here. … The first and most obvious conclusion was that the upper ranks of finance are composed of people who have completely divorced themselves from reality.

Go ahead, say it out loud. The internet is a utility. There, you’ve just skipped past a quarter century of regulatory corruption and lawsuits that still rage to this day and arrived directly at the obvious conclusion. Internet access isn’t a luxury or a choice if you live and participate in the modern economy, it’s a requirement.

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source

He told the story as-is, but instead of the whole notion of the intergalactic thing which was too hard and too silly, he maintained that the existence of Doctor Manhattan had changed the whole balance of the world economy, the world political structure. He felt that THAT character really altered the way reality had been. He had the Ozymandias character convince, essentially, the Doctor Manhattan character to go back and stop himself from being created.

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new-aesthetic:

Google Street View Uses an Insane Neural Network To ID House Numbers

This neural network—which you can read about here, basically it’s a computing network modeled on animal nervous systems—has eleven layers of neurons, which makes it possible to ID millions of house numbers a day from the Street View raw image data. “We can, for example, transcribe all the views we have of street numbers in France in less than an hour using our Google infrastructure,” write the engineers in a new Arxiv paper about the project.

What about the numbers that are too blurry for this giant brain to make sense of? No prob—those are identified by humans as part of a second generation CAPTCHA program. So you may have already contributed to the cause, without even realizing it.

In 1955, a crowd gathered in a hotel ballroom to watch as feed salesmen climbed onto a scale; the men were competing to see who could gain the most weight in four months, in imitation of the cattle and hogs that ate their antibiotic-laced food. Pfizer sponsored the competition.

For many white people the only kind of anti-black racism that exists is one of slurs, overt discrimination, and stand your ground style violence. This mode of “opt-in white racism” is almost useless as an analytic tool for discussing issues in which race plays a role, but is very useful in distancing oneself from the necessity to engage those conversations. What is more interesting to me is why white people find comfort in white spaces, seemingly without the ability to see those spaces as white.

Erecting more balcony guardrails won’t persuade frat brothers to stop hosting offensive Asian-themed ragers and sending mass emails referencing “rapebait.” It won’t stop them from from throwing beer bottles at black students, calling them “Trayvon Martin,” or more or less getting away with sexual assault.

If you look at the way that the world works now, you can point to very specific things, like Twitter and blogging and the changes that are happening in the music and publishing industries, and you can actually point to this set of people, this set of thinking, and the stuff that came out of it and say, “Holy shit. That worked.”

The first hundred or so times Expereal asked me how I was feeling, my assessments were the kinds of superficial ones you might respond with if a stranger asked you on the street: “I’m fine.”, “All good.”, “Frustrated by a supermarket line.” Reviewing my answers after the first few weeks, it dawned on me: I had been politely lying to my smartphone.

My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.

Plus I find the Bay Area con­gested, racist, in­ces­tu­ous, and over­priced. So I was never re­ally tempted.

www.youtube.com/watch

unemployedblackastronaut:

surlysweetness:

Steve McQueen talks lack of Diversity in Film

This warms the cockles of my heart for so many reasons:

1.) When asked about the lack of diversity, Steve gets right to the point by basically saying, “Why the fuck you asking the black guy, the minority in the room?  How about asking the 8 other white guys who don’t cast minorities as leads in their films?” Thank you for that, Mr. McQueen.

2.) The white panelists’ complete refusal to participate in the conversation is representative of their refusal to address/acknowledge the problem of a lack of minority representation in film.  One even has the audacity to say, “I”m not getting into it.”  As if the issue at hand is completely irrelevant to his job as a director.  As if to say, how dare they, despite being part of the problem, be asked to engage in a conversation about…the problem.  The lunacy of it all! 

3.) Steve’s utter disregard for white feelings. 

THE LAST BIT ABOUT ALTERNATE REALITY IN FILM/ I’VE BEEN SAYING THAT FOR A MINUTE, WHEN MCQUEEN CAME OUT WITH IT I NEARLY FLEW OF MY CHAIR

They never did anything to me personally, or even threatened me, but they didn’t need to. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. They were über-right-wing. Now, I’m not talking about Rush Limbaugh; I’m talking about the people who make life-and-death decisions. And it’s not necessarily evil; it’s more realistic. Charles was ex-CIA. It’s weirder than you can possibly imagine. I certainly never got the truth. Since then, everything that’s happened—from Nirvana going crazy and on and on and on—none of that holds a candle to how weird that situation was. That’s David Lynch weird.

George Orwell would be flummoxed. ‘Let me get this straight: You pay every month for your tracking device?’

“Why is black pride OK but white pride is racist?” If students are taught that whiteness is based on a history of exclusion, they might easily see that there is nothing in the designation as “white” to be proud of. Being proud of being white doesn’t mean finding your pale skin pretty or your Swedish history fascinating. It means being proud of the violent disenfranchisement of those barred from this category. Being proud of being black means being proud of surviving this ostracism. Be proud to be Scottish, Norwegian or French, but not white.

I think a person should be able to dial a number, make a purchase, send an SMS, write an email, or visit a website without having to think about what it’s going to look like on their permanent record.

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Amazing visualization of the psychogeography of running with smartphones.

When I run, I’m an invisible observer of my city, a ghost forgotten by the people I pass almost as quickly as I disappear from view. I’ve gotten a broad, hard look at this city and its people. Some of it is challenging to see, but at times I think I can see the things that connect every citizen of the city. … We run across the invisible divides that segregate us from neighbors and, in that way, we come to understand where we live.

Whiteness was never about skin color or a natural inclination to stand with one’s own; it was designed to racialize power and conveniently dehumanize outsiders and the enslaved.

We have surveillance video from the hotels that shows people turn on the shower, direct the nozzle at the wall and then leave the room for the whole day.

As Americans have grown increasingly comfortable with traditional surveillance cameras, a new, far more powerful generation is being quietly deployed that can track every vehicle and person across an area the size of a small city, for several hours at a time. … A single camera mounted atop the Washington Monument, McNutt boasts, could deter crime all around the Mall.

It looks more and more as if high levels of extra antioxidants can actually give people cancer, or at the very least, help along any cancerous cells that might arise on their own. Evidence for this has been piling up for years now from multiple sources, but if you wander through a grocery or drug store, you’d never have the faintest idea that there could be anything wrong with scarfing up all the antioxidants you possibly can.

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thatlameblog:

tatecollectives:

Thanks for the submitting - See you on Friday for our 1840s GIF Party! 

"Surfbort."

This goes perfectly with Outkast’s “Hey Ya”
Update: Also perfect with Shaggy’s “Boombastic”. Don’t take my word for it!

The key is to remember that the surveillance and the abuse doesn’t occur when people look at the data, it occurs when people gather the data in the first place.

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universalequalityisinevitable:

David Suzuki, from this video.

Much as we marvel at Babylonian clay tablets listing measures of grain, future generations will find just as much meaning in our log files as they will in the media we consume.

Talk a little to your delivery guys. Get to know them. Ask them if the credit card tips are getting to them, and if not, complain at the restaurant and at Seamless, because that shit ain’t right. But mostly, just tip in cash.

You want to make metro areas of 6 million people prepared for things like this? Stop subsidizing the automobile. Stop making it so damned easy for us to build a society that’s so fragile, that’s so close to the breaking point, that the world ends and we have to sleep in our offices when we’re seven whole miles from home (as one tale had it). This isn’t solved by various Atlanta area regional governments providing more services, more salt and plow trucks, or even more transit facilities. This is solved by not subsidizing a lifestyle that makes it completely impossible to have any sort of resilience.

The people who say that are idiots. Blogging was never alive. It’s the people that matter. There will always be a small number who are what I call “natural born bloggers.” They were blogging before there were blogs, they just didn’t know what it was called. Julia Child was a blogger as was Benjamin Franklin and Patti Smith.

I’ll break you in half. Like a boy.

So I was asked to be on Roger Ailes’ television program and the moment we sat down I said, “Mr. Ailes, I’m the most conservative person you’ve ever interviewed.” (laughs) And he was surprised, said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, most conservatives just want to turn the back the clock 100 years, but I’d like to turn back the clock thousands of years, to when we lived in small communities and took care of each other.” He said, “Well, isn’t that just romantic?” And I said, “No, I don’t think the human race will survive unless we do something like that.”

If I had revealed what I knew about these unconstitutional but classified programs to Congress, they could have charged me with a felony.

The choice is not whether to allow the NSA to spy. The choice is between a communications infrastructure that is vulnerable to attack at its core and one that, by default, is intrinsically secure for its users.

Roger said that he didn’t know if he could believe in God. He had his doubts. But toward the end, something really interesting happened. That week before Roger passed away, I would see him and he would talk about having visited this other place. I thought he was hallucinating. I thought they were giving him too much medication. But the day before he passed away, he wrote me a note: “This is all an elaborate hoax.”

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new-aesthetic:

Probability that computerisation will lead to job losses in next two decades, The Economist, 2013 (via Twitter / Malbonnington)

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parislemon:

evangotlib:

spytap:

The future is so great!

FUCK

Sigh.

Our quote “Defense of the free world” is an aggressive hypocrisy that has damaged the very planet’s chance of survival. Now we have spent thousands of billions on offensive War in decades, and half the world is starving for food. The reckoning has come now for America. 100 Billion goes to the War Department this year out of 300 Billion Budget. Our militarization has become so top heavy that there is no turning back from Military Tyranny. Police agencies have become so vast – National Security Agency alone the largest police bureaucracy in America yet its activities are almost unknown to all of us – that there is no turning back from computerized police state control of America.

Allen Ginsberg
London Mantra
Sloow Tapes – CS 45

Solo recordings of Allen Ginsberg playing a small hand-pumped harmonium from India and singing mantras and songs to the cosmos. These recordings were made in the early seventies by the American poet and bibliographer George Dowden. From the vaults of Gerard Bellaart’s Cold Turkey Press (who also made the cover). 100 copies.

We can assume that people like to notice when their phone is ringing, and that most people hate missing a call. This means their perceptual systems have adjusted their bias to a level that makes misses unlikely. The unavoidable cost is a raised likelihood of false alarms – of phantom phone vibrations.

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new-aesthetic:

"The Male Gazed: Surveillance, Power, and Gender” By Kate Losse at Model View Culture

Government surveillance within social networks didn’t arise out of nowhere; instead, it is a product of longstanding inequalities in power in technology that have historically privileged white men above all, who have been much more likely to control surveillance technologies than be targeted by them. The outrage over NSA surveillance has occurred and received massive coverage not because the deployment of technology for citizen surveillance is new but because white, technical, American men have finally become targets of the surveillant gaze rather than its aloof masters.

I think I’m looking at something Orwellian. It’s a government, many-tentacled operation to gather daily information on what everybody in the country is doing. Your daily transactions on the Internet can be monitored with this kind of system, not just your Web surfing. All kinds of business that people do on the Internet these days — your bank transactions, your e-mail, everything — it sort of opens a window into your entire private life, and that’s why I thought of the term “Orwellian.” As you know, in [George] Orwell’s story [1984], they have cameras in your house, watching you. Well, this is the next best thing. …

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moviecode:

The anime series Serial Experiments Lain contains a screen shot of Conway’s Game of Life in LISP. (source @nmu102)

In the early 90s I desperately wanted to blow the whistle on racism in the market research industry, but with no Internet, not as easy to do that as it is today. Basically the company that did most of the market research for consumer product advertising (pop tarts, for example) refused to allow us to turn in surveys with more than ten percent black people in the sample. They had no other restrictions, on anything like age or gender. They were 100% clear that 0% would be fine with them, and in fact, preferred. I was doing surveys in a mall with a customer base that was probably 30% black at the time. We often had to tell people that we recruited that we couldn’t use them when the manager told us that we were over quota. The office manager would ask them what their zip code was, and whatever they said, she would say, oh, sorry we’re over quota for that zip code. Then they’d tell us that we couldn’t survey any more ‘zips’. Sometimes black people would directly even stop and ask us why we didn’t survey them, if I ignored them and asked a white person that walked by after them. I never had a good answer.

Teens aren’t addicted to social media. They’re addicted to each other. They’re not allowed to hang out the way you and I did, so they’ve moved it online.