Technoccult

Mutate Your Mind

Show menu Hide menu

TagPolitics

The Thirteen Scariest People in America

November 9, 2006 /

Get yer hate on! See AlterNet article for complete details:

Scariest Presidential Candidate: Sam Brownback / Senator (R-Kansas)

Scariest Judge: Edith Hollan Jones / Chief Justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit

Scariest Opportunity Killer: Richard Berman / President, Berman and Company

Scariest Proselytizer:: Rev. Rick Warren / Author of The Purpose Driven Life

Scariest Snoop: Derek V. Smith / CEO, ChoicePoint

Scariest Polluter: Don Blankenship / CEO of Massey Energy Co.

Scariest Scientist: Leon Kass / Member of The President’s Council on Bioethics

Scariest Cop: Joe Arpaio / Sheriff, Maricopa County, AZ

Scariest Drug Dealer: Billy Tauzin / CEO, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America

Scariest Academic: Kevin MacDonald / Professor of Psychology, California State University at Long Beach

Scariest Hidden Persuader: Michael J. Petruzzello / Managing Partner, Qorvis Communications

Scariest Billionaire: Richard Mellon Scaife/Oil and Banking Heir

Worst Insurer: Edward M. Liddy / CEO, Allstate

Steal back your vote

November 7, 2006 /

Two from Greg Palast:

How they stole the mid-term election

Steal Back Your Vote

What we face

November 3, 2006 /

Election day looms, so here’s a blast from the past:

She has never attended our domestic violence support groups as she is too tired at night and goes to bed early but the bible study was not optional.

She was excited about “God’s message” when she came back.

This week she moves into low income subsidized housing. Her newest crisis is she has found out when the college is closed for the Christmas holiday (one month) she has no employment. She is hoping to find temporary employment as a seasonal retail worker if the Christmas sales are brisk to tide her over. She doesn’t know what she will do when the baby is born, hopes she can work up till the last week (she is on her feet all day with this job). She will be eligible for subsidized daycare.

She voted for Bush because of his “family values.”

Full Story: Daily Kos.

Religion is a public health crisis.

(It’s not a crusade, it’s a rescue mission).

Perfectly good questions

November 2, 2006 /

Part 1 and Round 2. Examples:

What the HELL was going on in Omaha in 1989?

Why was all of Wilhelm Reich’s research burned by the FDA?

Why did Rev. Moon get to crown himself ‘King of the World’ in a ceremony that was attended by members of congress and the Bush administration and held in a congressional building in Washington, DC?

From one of my new favorite sites, Brainsturbation.

Two Old DeLanda Interviews

October 19, 2006 /

I actually thought I’d posted these before, but I can’t find them in the archives anywhere. They are older interviews, but they’re a good introduction to DeLanda.

From the Zero News Datapool:

Don’t call me Gaia. The Gaia hypothesis is a very interesting point. […] Philosophically, it is a terrible mistake. It is a terrible mistake precisely in the neo-materialist sense because it takes the metaphor of the organism, it sees life, living flesh as the most magical thing that happened on this planet. This is of course a chauvinism, a kind of organic chauvinism on our part. It takes the metaphor of the organism and applies it to the whole planet. Now the whole planet is alive, that what Gaia is. Not only do you call it an organism, you also give it a goddess name just to make sure you are ridiculous enough. The way out of this is to think that the planet is indeed something special, but it what Deleuze and Guttari called a body without organs, which is the exact opposite of an organism. It is a cauldron or receptacle of non-organic life, a body without organs. Because it can be alive in the sense of being creative and generating order without having genes or having organs or being an organism. In my view, the very fact that the atmosphere connected with the hydrosphere can generate things like hurricanes and cyclones and all kinds of self-organizing entities means that indeed the planet, even before living creatures appeared, was already a body without organs, a cauldron of creativity, a receptacle of spontaneously emerging order.

And here’s Erik Davis’s interview with DeLanda from Mondo 2000:

I have my shaman there, since I was like 19, this woman called Julietta. She is a direct heir of a long, long line of Mazatec knowledge.

I hate mysticism. I’ve always hated the whole idea of taking psychedelics and then going, “Western science is bullshit, let’s turn to Eastern philosophy.” I always strive to have a materialist explanation for what’s going on. I always thought that matter had much more to it than just this inert stuff that sits here. And now I’m being proved right.

Think about the Game of Life [computer-based cellular automata developed by mathematician John Conway]. At first the rules of interaction of the little cells in an abstract space were so simple that everybody thought it was a game. Then they found ladders and glider-generating guns spontaneously forming. So this tiny, abstract, stupid space all of a sudden began exploding with possibilities.

Why it’s so hard to make good things happen

October 13, 2006 /

Here then are a few of the ways in which America has become harder to change. Read them not as a victim seeking vindication for weakness or despair but as a mechanic seeking the right place to start the repairs:

– Americans are becoming increasingly socially isolated. It is hard, for example, to imagine a great social revolution with so many ears literally tuned out. And not just to Ipods. Many, as non-profits are finding, are too stressed or too busy to engage in joint ventures beyond the necessary or the profitable. From the hyper schedules of well-ordered pre-schoolers to the adult time destruction by the economy, it is harder to find the room to change.

– We live in a semiosphere of lies, noise and myth – bombarded by advertising, hype, interminable words and by sights and sounds devoid of meaning. The unavoidable ubiquity of these external messages is only a few decades old. Assessing reality in such circumstances is a chancy business at best.

Full Story: Progressive Review.

An end to human input?

October 4, 2006 /

Nicholas Carr on the fact that Google and Windows Live Search place hate site as one of the top results for “Martin Luther King”:

A Microsoft spokesman is even more explicit in asserting that the King result is a manifestation of algorithmic “integrity”:

###The results on Microsoft’s search engine are “not an endorsement, in any way, of the viewpoints held by the owners of that content,” said Justin Osmer, senior product manager for Windows Live Search. “The ranking of our results is done in an automated manner through our algorithm which can sometimes lead to unexpected results,” he said. “We always work to maintain the integrity of our results to ensure that they are not editorialized.”###

By “editorialized” he seems to mean “subjected to the exercise of human judgment.” And human judgment, it seems, is an unfit substitute for the mindless, automated calculations of an algorithm. We are not worthy to question the machine we have made. It is so pure that even its corruption is a sign of its integrity.

Full Story: Rough Type.

Foley AIMs to Please

October 4, 2006 /

As much as I like to see the Republican Party in a tailspin, the media narrative on this is ridiculous. Notice how many stories refer to Foley as a “predator” and the pages in question as “young boys” or “children.” Come on. They were 16. The only reasonable coverage I’ve found of this is, appropriately, at Reason:

But as it turns out, the Mark Foley pedophilia sex scandal lacks two things: pedophilia and sex. The victim of Foley’s electronic overfriendliness was not a pre-adolescent, but a 16-year-old; above the age of consent in D.C., and an age at which the average American moves from explicit IM exchanges to the real deal. A 16-year-old is neither a defenseless child nor an adult, but Americans don’t have a way to talk about attraction to sexually mature minors—an attraction that anchors the career of your average pop star but is best kept far, far away from an already perverse Washington. That leaves two options: Foley as pathological child abuser at one extreme, as a Clintonian philanderer on the other.

[…]

That the virtual defines the criminal is a stupid legal inconsistency, but it is part of a landscape in which legal and moral are regularly conflated. The term sex offender is so broad as to have lost all useful meaning, ranging from adults who urinate in public to those who prey on preschoolers. The barriers to slapping someone’s address on a registry are so low that any actual tragedy gets lost in a sea of banality. Yet the term itself, heavy with registry and residency requirements, adopts all the weight of its most vile associations; not the Maf54s, but the John Wayne Gacys.

For his part, Foley has been a one-man war on nuance: A vocal fan of broad databases, the first to yell sicko and cry pervert. In his own words, Foley is “never too tired” to jerk off. Nor was he too tired to use his position as chairman of the former chairman of the House Caucus on Missing Children to stretch the definitions of sex crime beyond all meaning—everything from running a nudist camps to child modeling was deemed perverse, hardly distinguishable from straight-up abuse. At a news conference in 2002, he explained that it was a mistake to distinguish between the internet and physical contact, saying ” It doesn’t make a difference if the child engaged in sex is real or virtual. In other words, an old simple saying: If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it is a duck.”

Full Story: Reason.

Economies of Design and Other Adventures in Nomad Economics

October 4, 2006 /

Economies of Design and Other Adventures in Nomad Economics

I just finished reading Abe Burmeister’s master’s thesis, Economies of Design and Other Adventures in Nomad Economics. It’s available as a free pdf or as a printed book. This is the “public draft.” It’s still pretty rough, but still quite good.

This book is very straight forward and easy to read. I don’t have much of a background in economics, but I found Abe’s writing clear and accessible. Abe’s a designer by trade, not an economist, and this book/paper was written for the Interactive Telecommunications Program, not for an econ program.

Abe seems to be mostly inspired by this quote by Manuel De Landa:

I believe that the main task for today’s left is to create a new political economy (the resources are all there: Max Weber, T.B. Veblen and the old institutionalists, John Kenneth Galbraith, Fernand Braudel, some of the new institutionalists, like Douglass North; redefinitions of the market, like those of Herbert Simon etc) based as you acknowledged before, on a non-equilibrium view of the matter? But how can we do this if we continue to believe that Marxists got it right, that it is just a matter of tinkering with the basic ideas? At any rate, concepts like “mode of production” do not fit a flat ontology of individuals as far as I can tell.

Abe takes this and runs with it. This book lays the ground work. He doesn’t have all the answers yet (he’s mentioned he’s already working on a complete re-write), but this is a great starting point. Abe’s mostly focused on designers, but this book would be a good starting point for anyone interested in the idea of “economic hacking” – activists, artists, and yes, magicians.

More links:

Abe’s research blog.

His main blog.

Bonus: More “edge” economics.

Review Sees No Advantage in 12-Step Programs

July 25, 2006 /

New York Times Reports:

When Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs are examined in controlled studies, a new review reports, scientists find no proof that they are superior to any other intervention in reducing alcohol dependence or alcohol-related problems.

The researchers, led by Marica Ferri of the Italian Agency for Public Health in Rome, found little to suggest that 12-step programs reduced the severity of addiction any more than any other intervention. And no data showed that 12-step interventions were any more – or any less – successful in increasing the number of people who stayed in treatment or reducing the number who relapsed after being sober.

Full Story: New York Times.

Older posts Newer posts

Archive by Subject

Archive by Date

© 2025 Technoccult

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑