Archive for the ‘et cetera’ Category

The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein, The Younger (1533)

A found map- The Ambassadors (1533) is a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger in the National Gallery in London.

.:nikolasschiller.com->

Plants Talk

Black Market Art Prints Sale

Get up to 30% off during Black Market Art Prints inaugural sale until July 31st. Use the code MNPSALE01 to receive your discount. Contact blackmarketprint@gmail.com to place your order!

2008 DNC/RNC Mobilizations: Full Report

At long last, wea€™ve completed our 35,000-word full report on last summera€™s anarchist mobilizations against the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, complete with chronological maps and painstaking documentation. Updated from the feature in Rolling Thunder #7 and expanded to include the complete text of thirteen different participant narratives, this report offers a comprehensive history of the preparations for, events of, and aftermath following the protests, and an analysis of their context and implications.

.::crimethinc->

Crowd Surfing in China

^Two years ago, Chinese President Hu Jintao called on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members to a€oeassert supremacy over online public opinion, raise the level and study the art of online guidance and actively use new technologies to increase the strength of positive propaganda.a€A

After Hu’s speech, Communist Party officials and the State Council issued an official call for a€oecomrades of good ideological and political character, high capability and familiarity with the Internet to form teams of Web commentators … who can employ methods and language Web users can accept to actively guide online public opinion.a€A

The CCP has hired thousands of freelance Internet propagandists whose job is to infiltrate chat rooms, message boards and comment areas on the Internet posing as ordinary users to voice support for the agenda and interest of the CCP. They praise Chinaa€™s one-party system and condemn anyone who criticizes Chinaa€™s policy on Tibet. They comment aggressively on news reports about Chinaa€™s food-safety problems, relations with Taiwan, suppression of bird-flu and AIDS information, Internet censorship, jailing of dissidents, support of Sudana€™s military in Darfur and other sensitive topics. Comments applaud the Chinese government and slam its critics, all using scripts and lines approved by the party.

The BBC calls these freelance propagandists China’s 50 Cent Party. The Guardian newspaper calls it the 50 Cent Army. (50 Cent isna€™t a rapper in this case, but a reference to the pay: 50 Chinese "cents" per post, which is equivalent to about 7 US cents). Other names include a€oered vestsa€A and the a€oered vanguard.a€A

Some estimates claim that the 50 Cent Army includes a whopping 300,000 people. If thata€™s accurate, China’s freelance propagandists exceed in number the total populations of 47 countries.

Article can be found -> itmanagement.earthweb

Recession and the rings

Back on this date in 1981, on the cusp of the Reagan era, it may have seemed like morning here in America. But at the very same time, the international Olympic movement looked out ahead and saw nothing but clouds on every horizon. As real-world crises kept intruding on and overshadowing the worlda€™s quadrennial sports celebration, the future of the Olympics increasingly appeared fraught with peril.

The Olympic crown jewela€"the Summer Gamesa€"had just witnessed a third successive disaster. Munich a€™72 had endured the murder of Israeli Olympians by Black September terrorists, a worst-case scenarioa€"Jewish blood spilt on German soila€"that was far worse than anything organizers ever imagined. Montreal a€™76 was not as infamous, unless, of course, you lived there; it left behind crippling debta€"finally paid off just a few years agoa€"and facilities that came to define white elephants. And Moscow a€™80 had been reduced to a private party, virtually ignored in the West after America and its allies boycotted the festivities to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Continue reading -> globalpost.com

Project: Report Awards

Trajectory

A series of imminent and necessary breakdowns are inherent to the production of desire: first, because desires connect up to an outside, with something which is always unrecognized, which is totally foreign; next, because desire is brought to turn upon itself, it is seduced into betrayal (by resentment, fear, hate, etc.); finally, because desires are always collective, but the individual makes these collective desire their own, digests and reintegrates them. In each case, there is a kind of fundamental deadlock to any investigation of the unconscious which reflects the essential paradox of psychoanalysis.

We risk not only our feelings and thoughts but even ourselves as beings entirely: the risk of losing not just our habits, our beliefs and our identities, but the very significance, the subjectivity, of our reality. Everything becomes a trajectory, a cosmic machine, a universal process of production. A becoming-nothing which is the essence of consciousness: and in the end will we know which it is a€" a disease or an experiment? a€"But what do we matter? For alienation is becoming a stranger; not trading places with a double, nor a diagnosis, but rather this mis-recognition of an alien consciousness always already present within enjoyment, within our desire itself.

The Disaster, the Event, Difference a€" this is what is always recognized but never known; or rather, you dona€™t know, you will never know whether this alterity is truly radical or not. We must make a certain wager in order to discover the real, to know our desire, to learn anything at all about ourselves. It is not a question of imitation, but of pure intensities, of movements and singularities and flows. There is always a risk involved in a becoming, a risk which is always recognized and never known to us a€" a displacement of essence internal to becoming, an infinite capacity which transfigures reality.

Fantasy depends upon an element exterior to the situation itself radically exceeding the space which is gazed upon and yet intricately involved in every detail of its structure: it is not only because the gaze is the fantasya€™s only audience that this absolutely alien element is always already the hidden meaning of its excess. But what is ultimately so traumatic is the very fragility and inconsistency not of our fantasy but of reality itself, its ironic vulnerability to sudden and immediate disintegration, our apparent powerlessness in the face of disaster.

.::via -> fractal ontology

Ninja Video

culture debates, forums and zero-day releases from tv and movie ninjas…

.::Explore -> NinjaVideo.net