Monday, 29 August 2011

American Theocracy Revisited

19 years old iPhone hacker Nicholas Allegra (comex) joins Apple

Famed Scientist Richard Dawkins Destroys Rick Perry on Evolution

Jamie xx Essential Mix (27/08/11)

Broadcast on BBC Radio 1, 27th August 2011.
Tracklist:
Orbital - Belfast
Phanes - Lucky Woman
Ifan Dafydd - No Good
Harvey Mandel - Christo Redentor
Koreless - Lost in Tokyo
Floating Points - Sais
Wiley - Colder (Instrumental)
Fantastic Mr. Fox - Untitled
Pärson Sound - Untitled
DJ Deeon - Fine Hoes
Luke Vibert - Analord
New Look - Janet
John Tejada - Unstable Condition
Univac - Untitled (Track 1)
Aardvarck - Nosestep (Original Mix)
Jean Jacques Smoothie - 2 People
Instra:mental - Pyramid
Grimm Limbo - Fortune Favours the Brave
R A G - Rage (Spaventi &Aroy Raw Mix)
Ronnie Dyson - All Over Your Face
Jamie xx - Far Nearer (Bootleg)
Axel Boman - Purple Drank
Loosse - About You (feat. Yolanda)
Anette Party - Moreno (feat. Anita Coke)
Gino Soccio - Dancer
Mr Beatnick - Synthetes
Funke, Sacha vs Nina Kraviz - Moses (Stimming Remix)
Jamie xx &Gil Scott Heron - I'll Take Care of U (Special DJ Version)
Genius of Time - Houston We Have a Problem
Austin Eterno/The xx - I Remember Shelter
James Blake - Libra (Edit)
Pangaea - Bear Witness
Holly Miranda - Slow Burn Treason
Peter Horrevorts - Siren
Chuck Roberts - My House (Acappella)
Virgo Four - Do You Know Who You Are?
Morning Factory - Diane's Love
Karen Pollack - You Can't Touch Me (Roc &Kato Vocal Beat Trip Mix)
War - The World Is A Ghetto (Special Disco Mix)
Marshall Jefferson - Mushrooms (Justin Martin Mix)
Radiohead - Bloom (Jamie xx Rework)

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Wow, Slowed down #Nyan cat sounds like Vangelis conducting a choir of whales. Top comment by Dontholdback too youtu.be/d0Ud0tSx1tw

Smoking # 109 (LadyLike)

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Krystof from NO JUSTICE NO BART speaks to BART BOARD

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The Rampant Misuse of 'Orwellian'

Nightmare or fantasy? A look at the often used (and often misused) insult.

A recurring theme of this column is that language is a giant organic beast, with thousands of tentacles and no sense of right and wrong. Nowhere is the amorality of language more clear than in the realm of eponyms, those words that turn a name into a new term, often in ways the bearer of the name would despise.
The best example might be “Orwellian”—an adjective that has likely made George Orwell spin in his grave repeatedly, ever since his name started being used as a synonym for the totalitarian doublethink he attacked in 1984. Recent uses of “Orwellian” seem to expand the term even further, as it joins “socialist” as a common weapon used by right wingers against all things Obama. Without a doubt, “Orwellian” is one of our most commonly and controversially used words.
Though Orwell was a prolific writer—you should really check out his essays—it’s the dystopian novels 1984 and Animal Farm that form the popular sense of “Orwellian.” The Oxford English Dictionary started finding examples of its use as early as 1950, one year after 1984 debuted. The OED also collects other meanings for the word, including “an admirer of the works and ideas of Orwell,” but that more flattering use didn’t show up until 1971, and the bulk of recent uses mean doublethink-y, newspeak-esque, and Big Brother-ish. It’s as if we called criminal scum “Batmanistic” because Batman is so effective in beating them senseless.
Though “Orwellian” is almost always a negative term, the targets vary. Often, it’s about language: Legislation like the "Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010” and disturbing euphemisms like "sudden in-custody death syndrome” get the Orwellian label. Writers make reference to “an Orwellian global corporate state” and the GPS-like Facebook feature “Places” is described as being “so Orwellian as to surpass even what Orwell imagined...” Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric about a new weapon is called “exactly the kind of Orwellian doublethink that characterized the Bush administration.” Even the “end” of the Iraq war gets the Orwellian treatment, as Salon’s Hannah Gurman writes that the author "could not have invented a more Orwellian tale than the actual story of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.”
In particular, the recent “Ground Zero Mosque” hubbub has been the cause of many accusations of Orwellianism, as seen in stories like “MSNBC Masking the Mosque: Muslim 'Scholars' aka Stealth Jihadists, an Orwellian Freak Show” and “Associated (Orwellian) Press.” These stories equate the recent AP stand against saying “Ground Zero mosque” (because the potential mosque/Islamic cultural center would not actually be located at Ground Zero, just near it) with the Nazi-inspired totalitarian villains of Orwell’s books. It doesn’t seem like a stretch to say that is a stretch...

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Mark Peters @'GOOD'

Right Wing Tries New Tactic To Soften Bush’s Katrina Debacle: Say Obama’s Leadership On Irene Was Just For Show

First Federal Reserve Audit Reveals Trillions in Secret Bailouts

♪♫ Public Enemy - Black Is Back

Luxury, horror lurk in Gadhafi family compound

Twirling in Times Square

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It’s the Economy, Dummkopf!

Why the Impossible Happens More Often

The Noosphere Sculpture by Yves Jeason

I've had to persuade myself to believe in the impossible more often. In the past several decades I've encountered a series of ideas that I was conditioned to think were impossibilities, but which turned out to be good practical ideas. For instance, I had my doubts about the online flea market called eBay when it first came out. Pay money to a stranger selling a car you have not seen? Everything I had been taught about human nature suggested this could not work. Yet today, strangers selling automobiles is the major profit center for the very successful eBay corporation.
I thought the idea of an encyclopedia that anyone could change at any time to be a non-starter, a hopeless romantic idea with no chance of working. It seemed to go against my general understanding of human nature and group interaction. I was so wrong. Today I use Wikipedia at least once a day.
Twenty years ago if I had been paid to convince an audience of reasonable, educated people that in 20 years time we'd have street and satellite maps for the entire world on our personal hand held phone devices -- for free -- and with street views for many cities -- I would not be able to do it. I could not have made an economic case for how this could come about "for free." It was starkly impossible back then.
These supposed impossibilities keep happening with increased frequency. Everyone "knew" that people don't work for free, and if they did, they could not make something useful without a boss. But today entire sections of our economy run on software instruments created by volunteers working without pay or bosses. Everyone knew humans were innately private beings, yet the impossibility of total open round-the-clock sharing still occurred. Everyone knew that humans are basically lazy, and they would rather watch than create, and they would never get off their sofas to create their own TV. It would be impossible that millions of amateurs would produce billions of hours of video, or that anyone would watch any of it. Like Wikipedia, or Linux, YouTube is theoretically impossible. But here this impossibility is real in practice.
This list goes on, old impossibilities appearing as new possibilities daily. But why now? What is happening to disrupt the ancient impossible/possible boundary...?