Category: Control
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A Brief Outbreak Of Draconian Sanity | Esquire
A conviction on this charge [“aiding the enemy”] literally would have criminalized the dissemination of information, which is the central purpose of the First Amendment, as long as one of our many purported enemies had access to a computer, or a buck to pick up The New York Times at…
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Doubling McDonald’s Salaries Would Cause Your Big Mac To Cost Just 68¢ More: Study
McDonald’s can afford to pay its workers a living wage without sacrificing any of its low menu prices, according to a new study provided to The Huffington Post by a University of Kansas student. Doubling the salaries and benefits of all McDonald’s employees — from workers earning the federal minimum…
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Robert Scheer: Gag Me With Lawrence Summers – Robert Scheer’s Columns – Truthdig
The idea that Barack Obama would still consider appointing Lawrence Summers to head the Federal Reserve rather than order an investigation into this former White House official’s Wall Street payments, reported Friday by The Wall Street Journal, mocks the president’s claimed concern for the disappearing middle class. Summers is in…
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Fox News Host Never Asked Baptist College Professor Why He Wrote Book About Islam
Following up on the earlier post where Lauren Green at Fox made a thorough fool of herself… While host Lauren Green, the main religion correspondent for Fox News, spent the interview asking Aslan about his Muslim faith, Green never asked a professor from a university affiliated with Southern Baptists why…
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The Sad Reality of White-on-White Violence
A frightening and violent mob swept through the normally quiet seaside community of Huntington Beach last night following a surfing competition in the area. Businesses were vandalized and looted, portable toilets overturned, and brutal fistfights waged right out in the open. It was an ugly display and a sad day…
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Combative Fox Interviewer Gets Destroyed by Religious Scholar Reza Aslan | RYOT News
I find that I get more from reading Esquire, Truthout, and even some blogs than I get from watching journalism on any of the news networks. So while I am not a great friend of the global financial news networks–CNN, MSNBC, etc–I am astounded that there are people who can…
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The Crisis of Finance Capitalism and the Exhaustion of Neoliberalism
The report “Changing Banking for Good” attempts to make bankers personally responsible, to reform bank governance and strengthen the powers of regulators. Some think that if the report’s recommendations are implemented, it will destroy London as a global financial center. Others believe that the report does not go far enough…
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This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is Gas Land
The Obama Administration has proposed new regulations for hydraulic fracturing on 756 million acres of public and tribal lands. The rules were written by the drilling industry and will be streamlined into effect by a new intergovernmental task force, established by the president, to promote fracking — a practice that…
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Maybe There is Something Wrong with our Notion of Paradise
Slavoj Žižek, one of the more public philosophers of our day, considers the difference between revolution and reformation. On which cusp do we find ourselves today? He identifies two traps that must be avoided in order to answer the question and possibly effect some change: false radicalism and false gradualism.…
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On the Cover of the Rolling Stone
This thing with the cover of the Rolling Stone is more in the vein of the Society of Propriety notions that I dealt with the other day. I was mostly going to avoid the topic, then I was popping around Facebook… it is all over the place. Even Channing Tatum…
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Jesus of Siberia | Vice
Deep in Siberia’s Taiga forest is Vissarion, a cult leader who looks like Jesus and claims to be the voice of God. He’s known as “the Teacher” to his 4,000 followers, who initially seem surprisingly normal. Over time, however, their unflinching belief in UFOs and the Earth’s imminent demise made…
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How to Spot Propaganda
propaganda (n.) 1718, “committee of cardinals in charge of Catholic missionary work,” short for Congregatio de Propaganda Fide “congregation for propagating the faith,” a committee of cardinals established 1622 by Gregory XV to supervise foreign missions. The word is properly the ablative fem. gerundive of Latin propagare (see propagation). Hence,…
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Pseudo-Modernism
An interesting entry from Alan Kirby at the British magazine Philosophy Now. Very well worth the read, and I hope it will spawn a few thoughts from me on the Society of Control. Let’s see what happens. …Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless,…
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Techno-Conspiracy and Control
A link here to a Big Think blog where Teddy Goff considers the power of technology in the Society of Control. Okay… you caught me! He does not call it the Society of Control. I mean, maybe he knows the concept from Gilles Deleuze who was cutting-up and splicing together…
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The Last Words of Hassan i Sabbah | Burroughs
Okay. Another video from William S. Burroughs. But look here: NSFW. This is an example of the cut-up technique developed by Brion Gysin and perfected by Burroughs. It does not necessarily make complete sense. But it is very cool. And it is a great example of where the notion of…
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Giant Corporations and Their Expendable Temps
It’s 4:18 a.m. and the strip mall is deserted. But tucked in back, next to a closed-down video store, an employment agency is already filling up. Rosa Ramirez walks in, as she has done nearly every morning for the past six months. She signs in and sits down in one…
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George Zimmerman, Propriety, and Losing Way
Got up this morning and began looking through the reactions about the George Zimmerman acquittal. As usual, Charles P. Pierce over at Esquire magazine’s Politics Blog caught my eye… Thought experiments are useless now. Of course, if the races of the two participants were reversed, Trayvon Martin already would have…
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Debt – a global scam | New Internationalist
Large outstanding personal debts – say a mortgage taken out during a housing bubble – can turn even the stoutest of us into ‘quivering insomniac jellies of hopeless indebtedness’ (as Margaret Atwood so accurately puts it). Debt is, we feel, whatever the rights or wrongs, ‘our own fault’. We can’t help…
CALL ME MAGGIE 