"My holidays in the axis of evil"

PNAC.info - Exposing the Project for the New American Century

Deryk Thomas

Word of the day:

invidious

1. tending to cause discontent, animosity, or envy
2. envious
3. of an unpleasant or objectionable nature: obnoxious

Scorecard of Evil

Gregory Crewdson

Dark Passage: exploring urban ruins

Tom, Chained At Last! - Hugo Sperger

Karl Junker

Lee Wellborn Carter

Friedrich Schr?der-Sonnenstern

Charles Lanert

Henry Darger

Claudio Braier

Kirsty O'Conner

Hill of Crosses, Lithuania

Congress witholding military aid from countries which are refusing to grant the US immunity from prosecution in the International Criminal Court

Judge your dates by their drinks

"The first most teenagers hear of Tranquility is therefore when they are woken from their beds at home at 4am by guards, who place them in a van, handcuffed if necessary, drive them to an airport and fly them to Jamaica..."

Silence by Leonid Andreyev

Preservation Tips

"When you are in the middle of reading a book, and you need to stop, what do you use to hold your place? I shudder at some of the answers I have heard! The most outlandish one is a slab of raw bacon. Obviously, that should not be used for a host of reasons (no food products, please).

Another thing some people tend to do is turn the corner of the page over. Damaging the book is never a good idea. Other offenders include: hacksaw blade, pencils or pens, gum wrappers, and post-it note papers. The correct answer is a bookmark (preferably made from acid-free paper or card stock). If a bookmark is not acid-free (or you are uncertain), make sure you remove it (as well as any other papers) when you are finished with the book."

(from July's NYS Library Information Bulletin)

(Thanks to Jesse)

Remedios Varo

The last Bread and Puppet

"Scientific investigation, which starts from common sense naturalism, arrives back at a contrary conclusion: we cannot trust our senses to tell us the true nature of reality. This is still also where the physical sciences of today meet their final limits in the attempt to establish the truth by physical experimentation. Their outgoing search for reality reveals the emptiness of physical appearances and eventually dissolves the very belief that reality is nothing but physical nature. Science brings its followers to the limits of the materialistic fallacy, and philosophical insight must begin all over again."

Science and the Demise of Philosophy

Digital Book Index

"The hope to change the world is a childish illusion. You have to change yourself." --Marie-Louise Von Franz

"...we decided that we wanted to make a personal ad system for people like ourselves: jaded, sarcastic wankers... we guaranetee that you will look wittier on this system than on any other!" --Über Personals

The Pain Station

Unwise Microwave Oven Experiments

A dedicated neurophisiologist writing to his wife:

My dear.

I Have long thought of myself as an acute and well-informed interpreter of your behaviour. I think I have been able to identify nearly every thought that has made you smile! My research has even made such a progress that I no longer need to understand you IN THIS WAY. I'm happy to say I'm now in a position, with the aid of an apparatus which I shall promptly attach you, to assign to each body movement you make a specific antecedent condition in your cortex.

In the meantime, perhaps you would have dinner with me tonight.

I trust you will not resist if I bring along this apparatus then to help me determine, as quickly as possible, the physiological idiosyncracies which obtain in your system.

"Resisting madness can be the maddest way of being mad." --Norman O. Brown

What is Libertarian Socialism?

"That sand into which we bury ourselves in order not to see, is formed of words..." --Georges Bataille

"When my son was four or five years old, he asked one of those interminable questions that children ask: "Why does the sky get dark at night?"

Eager to increase his understanding, I put a lamp in the middle of the floor to act as the sun, got down the world globe, and used a tennis ball for the moon. Then I walked around the "sun", carrying the globe and turning it, explaining how we are suspended in space, constantly moving. It was the universe in a nutshell - sun, earth, moon, stars, seasons.

My son watched the production with silent, squint-eyed attention. When I finished, he said to me, "You don't expect me to believe that, do you?"

Wynette Barton

Who is Bush's Brain?

Suehiro Maruo

"We understand ourselves thanks only to our speed past words." --Paul Valery

MIT Treasure Hunt tradition inspires Wizard of Oz Hunt

R.Z. is a thirty-five year old man... A single man, he lives alone and does not work. His main activity is photographing the landscape that he sees from his window. He regularly shows these photographs to his therapist and comments on them: "Here there is a car." "There, the car did not move during the night." "This is the same car on another day, there are dead leaves on the roof." He says, "Time goes by, things do not change. I find time with photographs."

Rebuilding Reality: A Phenomenology of Aspects of Chronic Schizophrenia

José Clemente Orozco

"One thing must be understood: I have said nothing extraordinary or even surprising. What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it." --Maurice Blanchot

"Her father stabbed her 12 times in the chest, and made sure that she was beyond recovery before he called the police and the ambulance to come and get her."

"..the United Nations conservatively estimates that 5,000 women a year are killed in this way, and the majority of those women are killed in Jordan and in the West Bank and Gaza Strip areas... and that's a very conservative estimate on the United Nations' part, because the majority of these crimes are later classified as suicides and accidental deaths"

Honor Killings in Jordan

""Operation Keelhaul!" To this day, it is an unavenged post-war crime of immeasurable cruelty committed by the Allies"

"If you find an atheist in your neighborhood,
TELL A PARENT OR PASTOR RIGHT AWAY!

You may be moved to try and witness to these poor lost souls yourself, however
AVOID TALKING TO THEM!
Atheists are often very grumpy and bitter and will lash out at children or they may even try to trick you into neglecting God's Word.

Very advanced witnessing techniques are needed for these grouches. Let the adults handle them."

SETI signal verification attempts at Arecibo
Pics

Shaking Things Up: Progressive and Radical Librarians

Jake and Dinos Chapman, Great Deeds Against the Dead

Damien Hirst, Mother and Child Divided

on the acceptance of meteorites into scientific thinking : "If anyone were so credulous as to suggest that stones had fallen from the sky, he was reasoned with thus: In the first place, there are no stones in the sky; Therefore no stones can fall from the sky." "Even when meteorites were taken on board as being a genuine scientific phenomena, it was decreed that only objects of "True Meteoric Material" were meteorites, and that other material that fell had not come from space, but could be explained in the same fashion as meteorites had once been" --Charles Fort (first quote)

"...an excellent example of a good approximation of anti-entropic behaviour was given in the Xmas Royal Society Lectures this year. I big drum of colourless colloid had a vertical line of dye in it. It got stirred to smear the dye around and then *unstirred* to restore a fair semblance of a vertical blue line. My eyes nearly popped warching it!"

Jane Alexander

The Lighter Report

"Reserved for heretics and atheists (acording to my informant, who held a rare visiting fellowship), The Sixth Circle of Hell boasts the largest faculty of philosophers in the universe. Given its permanent endowment and aggressive recruiting methods, I expect the Sixth Circle to be the top- ranked philosophy department for quite some time, perhaps eternity. (But keep checking this space until then.) This school's secret? It's their retention program: faculty members are not permitted to leave, no matter how big the outside offer. The downside, of course, is that the worst damned philosophers gain effective tenure upon arrival. However, the distinguished senior faculty includes Socrates, Spinoza, Hobbes, Nietzsche, J.S. Mill, and Bertrand Russell, among many others."

Conference Alerts: Academic Conferences, worldside

Tips for the Top: How to be a Philosopher

Technique 1

"Begin by making a spurious distinction. Befuddle the reader with your analytic wizardry. The reader will enter a logical trance, from which she will be unable to recall the initial spurious distinction and will feel strangely compelled to accept your conclusions."

"O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire. ... We ask it in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the source of love." --Mark Twain

"Modern man has heard enough of guilt and sin. He is sorely beset by his own bad conscience, and wants rather to know how he can reconcile himself with his own nature, how he is to love the enemy in his own heart and call the wolf his brother.

The modern man does not want to know in what way he can immitate Christ, but in what way he can live his own individual life, however meager and uninteresting it may be. It is because every form of imitation seems to him deadening and sterile that he rebels against the force of tradition that would hold him to well trodden ways. All such roads for him lead in the wrong direction. He may not know it, but he behaves as if his own individual life were God's special will which must be fulfilled at all costs." --C.G. Jung

"The indifference of American public culture to the experiences of other peoples is reflected in the lack of work translated from foreign languages. Without translations, Americans, who are notoriously monolingual, have access only to the perspectives of those who write and speak in English; thus the ideas of millions are lost to them.

About 3% of the fiction and poetry published in the United States in 1999 was translated.

America compares unfavourably to almost every other country and most unfavourably to western Europe, the region closest to an ideological sibling... There, Germany translates the most works - about six times as many as the US each year. Spain is close behind, while the French publishing industry exceeds the US by four times.

Without translations, Americans, who are notoriously monolingual, have access only to the perspectives of those who write and speak in English; thus the ideas of millions are lost to them."

"Possibly we shall know a little more than we do now. But the real nature of things, that we shall never know, never." --Albert Einstein

Thomas Pynchon on 1984

Prison art

Ashcroft's detention camps for US citizens declared enemy combatants

Sex is a brain thing

Our Preposterous Universe

Spam, spam, spam, spam

A personal experience with the new police state.
(Working link, thanks to James)

Do not try this at home.
(Working link, thanks to James)

Word of the day: appurtenance
Something added to another, more important thing; an appendage

Bush is trying to suppress the 911 report

One day, a little while after this, Satan appeared again. We were always watching out for him, for life was never very stagnant when he was by. He came upon us at that place in the woods where we had first met him. Being boys, we wanted to be entertained; we asked him to do a show for us.

"Very well," he said; "would you like to see a history of the progress of the human race? -- its development of that product which it calls civilization?"

Mark Twain "A History of War" from The Mysterious Stranger

"On Monday, April 17th, 2000 at about 8:30 am near the corner of 18th and K I was beaten by a plainclothes officer (not sure if fed or mpd) after photographing him going crazy though the streets hitting people over the headwith his baton. At the time I didn't even think it wasa cop! Wearing my Independent Media Center badge, I photographed this man, who I believed was an motorist angry about the traffic disruptions. After seeing me about to take the photograph of him, he lunged towards my neck with his hands and proceeded to club me at least two times with this club like device and pushed me to the ground. He then hit me several more times and wrestled the camera from my hands. I called for police to arrest this man still believing this was a case of road rage. Upon arrival the police officer (not sure if MPD,secret service or another agency) informed me that the man was a plainclothes officer."
More... and more...

parodies of Chick tracts, for your fundie friends

No, really, how much would could a woodchuck chuck?

How to Give Up Hope - An Exile Guide

August Strindberg in "Absinthe and Women"

Leon Trotsky's "FASCISM: What it is and how to fight it"

Paul Laffoley
Biography from the Kent Gallery in NYC

Fucking scary

"Ideas are more dangerous than guns. We don't allow our enemies guns, so why should we allow them ideas." --Joseph Stalin

KittyFan

"Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances." --Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867)

"All is mystery; but he is a slave who will not struggle to penetrate the dark veil." --Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)

Fake voice recordings easy to make, hard to detect

"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid." --Soren Kierkegaard

Debunking the "Expensive Procedure Call" Myth
or Procedure Call Implementations Considered Harmful
or Lambda: The Ultimate GOTO

netselect, an ultrafast intelligent parallelizing binary-search implementation of "ping."

"Put a spot of ink upon paper, fix your eye upon that spot, and retire to such a distance, that at last you lose sight of it; 'tis plain, that the moment before it vanish'd the image or impression was perfectly indivisible." --David Hume, 1739

"Astute observers of history are aware that for every notable event there will usually be at least one, often several wild conspiracy theories which spring up around it. "The CIA killed Hendrix" " The Pope had John Lennon murdered ", "Hitler was half Werewolf", "Space aliens replaced Nixon with a clone" etc,etc. The bigger the event, the more ridiculous and more numerous are the fanciful rantings which circulate in relation to it..."

"One of the wilder stories circulating about Sept 11, and one that has attracted something of a cult following amongst conspiracy buffs is that it was carried out by 19 fanatical Arab hijackers, masterminded by an evil genius named Osama bin Laden, with no apparent motivation other than that they 'hate our freedoms.'"

OO vs modules in functional programming (especially OCaml)

New Noam Chomsky interview, concerning Iraq

Civilian Victims

Seldom mentioned consequences of the Iraq war.

Wars, Massacres and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century: Year-by-Year Death Toll

A blacklisting project, Campus Watch hopes to do for students and professors what Project TIPS would have done for mail carriers and plumbers.