Del.icio.us links for October 19th through January 3rd… sorry, I forgot to do these posts for AGES AND AGES. It’s a huge morass of links o’ interest; sorry for not sorting them.
- Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World – “Members of the earth’s earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.”
Tags: satire comedy funny creationism youngearthcreationism religion - Aspects of a racist diatribe – What are the precise dimensions of a ‘culture’ that supposedly yields violent crime, for example? No one knows. Something about rappers and absent fathers, possibly. We all know how to use phrases such as ‘culture of dependency’, ‘culture of blame’, ‘culture of violence’, etc., but these are miasmic conceits designed to retail a particular kind of reactionary politics. Their vagueness is their virtue. Indeed, without wishing to dignify the discussion by endowing it with serious theoretical merit, we can at least acknowledge in passing that in understanding crime, both how it is constructed and how and why it is carried out, there are all sorts of issues involved that do not correspond to the bigoted obsessions of the commentariat. So, the point is not violent crime. The aim of such bombast is to resurrect some antique racial stereotypes that hold black people to be, whether by endowment or ‘culture’, rapists, robbers and murderers.
Tags: racism rightwing media journalism journalisticstandards hatespeech language - Dunning–Kruger effect – The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”.[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding.
Tags: psychology incompetence competence people studies - My $62.47 Royalty Statement: How Major Labels Cook the Books with Digital Downloads – we all know that major labels are supposed to be venal masters of hiding money from artists, but they’re also supposed to be good at it, right? This figure wasn’t insulting because it was so small, it was insulting because it was so stupid.
Tags: majorlabels musicindustry money accounting transparency bullshit riaa music recordlabels business - What Really Happened in Rwanda? – Halfway into our presentation, a military man in a green uniform stood up and interrupted. The Minister of Internal Affairs, he announced, took great exception to our findings. We were told that our passport numbers had been documented, that we were expected to leave the country the next day and that we would not be welcomed back into Rwanda — ever. Abruptly, our presentation was over, as was, it seemed, our fieldwork in Rwanda.
Tags: rwanda history research studies unpopular+conclusions africa ethnicity civilwar - What happened in Rwanda? – Some statistics and citations from a study of killings in Rwanda.
Tags: statistics rwanda history politics genocide distortion justice - The shade of Labourism – For the last decade or so, much of the far left at any rate has shared a perspective that there needed to be a drastic realignment on the left, and that the window for this was provided by disaffection with New Labour’s right-wing rule.
Tags: labourparty leftism farleft socialism politics UK britain activism strategy electoralpolitics - Because As We All Know, The Green Party Runs the World. – “Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it. And it does that at least partly fueled by our pettiness and our rivalries. Science is alchemy: it turns shit into gold. Keep that in mind the next time some blogger decries the ill manners of a bunch of climate scientists under continual siege by forces with vastly deeper pockets and much louder megaphones.” Paul still wins at pulling out the best quotes.
Tags: peterwatts science academia peerreview climatechange globalwarming politics debate internet bullshit obfuscation - Eco-malthusianism – What is driving ‘climate change’ is a particular kind of economic activity, not population growth. Lifestyles are important too. Those sported by the richest tend to exploit and run down our environmental life support systems the hardest. The carbon footprint of a multi-billionaire philanthropist is certain to be dozens of times higher than that of an African labourer. To put it one way, Bill Gates will emit more CO2 jetting to conferences on population growth than a coltan miner in the DRC will in is entire lifespan. So maybe Bill and Melinda shouldn’t have any fucking kids. And, by the way, Bill needs that coltan miner, and the genocidal armies who ensure that the ore is delivered to western corporations such as Microsoft, so he shouldn’t really get lippy about population growth.
Tags: populationgrowth overpopulation climatechange philanthropism resources poverty classwar capitalism media - Matt Taibbi – Sarah Palin, WWE Star – It doesn’t matter what the argument is about. What’s important is that once the argument starts, the two sides will automatically coalesce around the various instant-cocoa talking points and scream at each other until they’re blue in the face, or until the next argument starts.
Tags: politics personality sarahpalin republicanparty fringepolitics rightwingheroes partisanry - The Bitch is Back: Books: GQ – 2009’s most influential author is a mirthless Russian-American who loves money, hates God, and swings a gigantic dick. She died in 1982, but her spawn soldier on. And the Great Recession is all their fault
Tags: objectivism aynrand USA article philosophy economics humour utopianism ideology - THE FLATLINERS on MySpace Music – Yes yes yes yes yes
Tags: band music hotdamn! - LENIN’S TOMB: The graveyard of the Russian empire – What did the USSR want with Afghanistan? Even some of their supporters had difficulty working it out. Alexander Cockburn ironically extolled the virtues of the invasion as a civilising mission: “I yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape it’s Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too…” Others insisted that Russia was there to defend the gains of the ‘Saur revolution’, support womens’ rights, build schools for the people, overthrow the khans, etc. There is no doubt that this is what the Afghan communists wanted, and had sought to achieve through the disastrous strategy of military dictatorship. But the idea that an exploitative and oppressive bureaucratic state like the USSR approached Afghanistan as modernising revolutionaries is tweaking the nose of credulity.
Tags: history war invasion occupation USA USSR afghanistan communism capitalism - LENIN’S TOMB: A few points about that ‘age of austerity’ – The economic crisis has thrown that ideological hegemony into disarray. In a recent poll, only 11% of people questioned in 27 countries approved of the way that free market capitalism is working. While the majority of people feel that the system can still be saved and made to work with adequate reforms and redistribution of wealth, sizeable minorities say it is totally unworkable and “a different economic system is needed”. That minority is 20% in the UK – smaller than many others, but still a massive number of people questioning the basic running of society. That is the basis for a social movement. If that questioning, and the anger that underlies it, is not articulated by the left then it will be appropriated by the far right. Actually, forget ‘will’ – it is being appropriated by the far right.
Tags: politics leftwing rightwing reformism capitalism polls UK - Noam Chomsky – War, Peace, and Obama’s Nobel – The hopes and prospects for peace aren’t well aligned — not even close. The task is to bring them nearer. Presumably that was the intent of the Nobel Peace Prize committee in choosing President Barack Obama. The prize “seemed a kind of prayer and encouragement by the Nobel committee for future endeavor and more consensual American leadership,” Steven Erlanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in The New York Times.Silence is often more eloquent than loud clamor, so let us attend to what is unspoken.
Tags: nobelprize politics war nuclearweapons IAEA USA iran afghanistan iraq india pakistan israel middleeast - Pseudo Nippon on MySpace Music – Weird Japanese pop/beat/experimental music, sounds like pretty good fun.
Tags: band music - OX_BOW on MySpace Music – Experimental avant-garde group combining grinding noise with minimalism and throttled screams.
Tags: band music - T ∑ ∑ T H on MySpace Music – Rad noisy punk ‘n spazz throbbing electro thing.
Tags: band music - A Lesson In The Abuse of Information Technology (The Menzingers) – Rad rad rad
Tags: band music hotdamn! - Quantum gravity theories wiped out by a gamma ray burst – One of the awkward aspects of modern physics is that its two most successful fields, relativity and quantum mechanics, are fundamentally incompatible, as things happen in the quantum world that relativity says should not be possible. That’s left physicists looking for a way to harmonize the two, with two primary contenders: string theories, and quantum gravity theories. Testing either of them has been a bit challenging, but researchers have now managed to use a single, intensely powerful photon detected by the Fermi Telescope to significantly limit the number of viable quantum gravity theories.
Tags: astrophysics science research technology space stringtheory quantumtheory theoryofrelativity theory - Xerox develops silver ink to usher in new era of low cost printable electronics – Integrated circuits are made up of three components – a semiconductor, a conductor and a dielectric element – and currently are manufactured in costly silicon chip fabricating factories. Printable electronics promises to make the mass production of thin, cheap and flexible electronic circuits a reality, but researchers have been faced with the difficult challenge of developing conductive electronic inks that work in an ordinary, everyday environment. By creating a silver ink to print the conductor, Xerox has developed all three of the materials necessary for printing plastic circuits.
Tags: technology computing electronics futurism - Crisis and recovery: myths about China – “Any talk of global recovery needs to start by looking at two key places – China and the USA. The two countries are locked together in an unwilling but interdependent dance from which neither can escape. The USA is China’s largest trading partner with 21 percent of China’s exports going to the US and almost eight percent of its imports coming from there. In the US, China is now the USA’s number 1 trading partner, representing up to 19 percent of total trade vs Canada’s 14.5 percent.” Fascinating post about economic policy in China, the US and Europe, the effects of the recession upon strategies being followed, the dangers China’s elite face and what changes there might mean for the rest of the world.
Tags: economics growth development capitalism investment production exports politics china USA europe - Winterval watch: Here we go! – I had been a bit concerned, given that it’s getting towards the end of October. But here we are at last. Hooray! The first “Christmas is being called something else for fear of offending terrorists or something” quote is IN – and it’s been found by the BBC, of all people.
Tags: bullshit idiocy funny christmas holidays britain christianity are+people+really+this+thick? - Noam Chomsky on the Global Economic Crisis, Healthcare, US Foreign Policy and Resistance to American Empire – Today, a conversation with one of the most important dissident intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky, on the global economic crisis, healthcare, the media, US foreign policy, the expanding wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and resistance to American empire. Noam Chomsky is a world-renowned linguist, philosopher, social critic, and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Tags: noamchomsky politics USA geopolitics barackobama afghanistan war southamerica neoliberalism economics capitalism protectionism - Noam Chomsky on US Expansion of Afghan Occupation, the Uses of NATO, and What Obama Should Do in Israel-Palestine – To talk about Afghanistan, NATO and the state of US economic and military power in the world today, we’re joined by one of the world’s most astute thinkers and most important intellectuals of our time: linguist, philosopher, social critic, political dissident, Noam Chomsky.
Tags: noamchomsky politics USA strategy resourceconflict geopolitics barackobama afghanistan nato europe russia history isreal palestine - The Encyclopedia Of Decency: When I Called It “Human Rights Watch,” I Meant “Watch The Baddies, Not The Goodies” – As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join a militant wingnut circle-jerk with a mealy-mouthed and disingenuous hissy fit of epic proportions.
Tags: amazing funny humanrightswatch israel palestine bias bullshit warcrimes decency - thefuckinEDC on MySpace Music – Pretty rad histrionic punk/indie/emo outfit. Remind me of La Dispute.
Tags: band music - Laura Stevenson – 3 tracks from Laura Stevenson & the Cans. <3
Tags: band music - Corporate Supremacy and the Rape of a Human Girl – We are fast approaching the time of the next great battle over evolution. The Neo-creationists will be corporations, and they will argue that they could not possibly be descended from human beings.This isn’t science fiction. Just the other day 30 Republicans voted in the U.S. Senate to deny justice to a human victim of rape in order to protect the so-called sovereign rights of corporations.
Tags: corporatism law conservatism business rape - Exclusive Interview With Ashok Banker! « The World SF News Blog – Ashok Banker is the best-selling author of the Ramayana series, and a prolific novelist, short story writer, journalist and blogger. An outspoken critic of Western publishing, he has refused interviews in the past with the New York Times,Salon.com and even a feature cover for the Washington Post Book World, and so we were delighted that he’d agreed to this interview. Here, Banker speaks candidly to Charles Tan about his difficult childhood, his views on US and UK genre publishing, and his role as India’s “self-appointed poet laureate without a license.”
Tags: interview writer author genres genrebending genreghettoes - Twenty questions for the BNP – I’ve suggested a few issues Nick Griffin could be asked about when he appears on Question Time – have I missed anything?
Tags: bnp fascists racists politics interviews - How Safe is the HPV vaccine? – I’ve been reading a lot about the HPV (Human Papillomavirus) vaccine and the risk of serious side effects and even death. I thought I would seek out the numbers and put them in context. Especially given headlines claiming the HPV jab is “as deadly as the cancer” it seeks to prevent.
Tags: vaccinations diagram statistics medicine health information hpv - They don’t get it – It’s not just Jan who doesn’t get a lot of its. A lot of people don’t get a lot of its. But we should forgive them their ignorance, their lack of understanding of these new social media phenomena. They have been brought up in a didactic world of media, where newspapers tell you what to think and why to think it; not in a world where readers give back as good as they get, want to correct inaccuracies and don’t stand for being lied to.
Tags: media news newspapers printmedia dailymail homophobia prejudice racism commentary socialnetworks - If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one to hear it, can Carter-Ruck ban all mention of the sound? – Super-injunctions raise a worrying question: what else don’t we know? Hitler could be alive, and in negotiations to present the Radio 1 breakfast show
Tags: charliebrooker funny law censorship freedomofspeech UK corporations carter-ruck trafigura media news - The Fall Of Boss Koala on MySpace Music – Probably the best of the (all good) Scottish screamo / post-hardcore / indie bands I’ve listened to today. Hot damn indeed!
Tags: band music hotdamn! - Archive on MySpace Music – Electronica / trip-hop outfit from London.
Tags: band music - Kaddish on MySpace Music – There is a pattern to these Scottish screamo bands, which is that they are good. Kaddish are from Dundee!
Tags: band music - Black Channels on MySpace Music – Why, it’s another Glasgow screamo band! Also pretty damn good.
Tags: band music hotdamn! - Mesa Verde on MySpace Music – Rad screamo from Aberdeen!
Tags: band music hotdamn! - Carson Wells on MySpace Music – Aberdeen indie / post-punk / screamo band. Rad!
Tags: band music hotdamn!
but I would rather see Penn take on Kos.