Countless Rooftops.

test

2011-11-22T11:43:00.001+01:00

My semi-secret salvation is the musical. Ever since my stirring performance as “Little Native American Girl” in the Deerfield Children’s Theater’s production of The Will Rogers Follies, I have enjoyed a story told to music. I still get choked up when I see large numbers of people in character shoes dancing together or hear an exquisite vibrato singing about personal turmoil.Over time my taste in musical theater has become more refined (though I still enjoy a very intense relationship with Les Miserables). Recently I’ve been into Jason Robert Brown’sParade. Set in Georgia in 1913, the musical is about the trial of Leo Frank, a Brooklyn Jew transplant accused of raping and murdering a local 13-year-old (good group dance material, right?! I can only imagine the kickline). Anyway, the trial is a big hullabaloo and Frank ends up getting kidnapped and hanged from an oak tree. Parade covers a slough of interesting topics — the post-Civil War South, Jews in the South, women in the South, race relations in the South and prison — ALL SET TO MUSIC. It’s amazing, beautiful, weird, sad and educational, just like life.

2011-11-21T16:27:00.001+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

Interesting. After a bit of browsing the opinion on this matter in the open source world seems to be divided. I remember that cards from Red Hat were the first that I saw with the fingerprint displayed. However there's also this interesting complaint that it has only ever been used to mock the owner of the card. They also seem to be popular with Debian developers and people were seen complaining that it has been dropped from Ubuntu's design.I actually thought for a while whether to add it or not before submitting the design. For instance, it makes the little Moo card much more cluttered and I liked the previous simplicity of three lines with an e-mail and web address. On the other hand I like to promote secure communication and have been consistently cryptographically signing my mail for many years now. So you can also take it as a statement I guess.Part of why I think sharing your public key in this way is a good idea is because in my opinion trusting keys based on traditional key-signing parties was a big blunder. There you had 10 random people, signing keys based on some government-issued identification. What this does is only to transfer your trust in government ID to trust in the key. Let's not even go to the problem of me not knowing what the official IDs look like in most countries or the fact that I don't necessarily trust your government. You could score a hundred signatures like that and that doesn't help me in knowing whether the key owner is the person behind the face I met here-and-here.So I am now willing to sign a public key after I spent some time with the person that personally gave me that key. Enough time to convince me that he is who he claims to be. And I encourage other people to do the same when signing my key (a ritual, by the way, a certain social scientist once described as fascinating).Yes, this method is vulnerable to a social engineering attack. But so is signing a key based on someone's driver's license and I am sure social interaction is harder to fake than a foreign-looking personal identification card. By getting a fingerprinted business card you get a hard-to-undetectably-change hard-copy of the fingerprint, for which you can be reasonably sure that it belongs to the person that gave it to you.

test

2011-11-14T10:33:00.001+01:00

Image by Studio 5:55 via Flickr

But they also resemble modern proletarians in the precariousness of their means of support, which conflicts with the continual spending to which they have been conditioned; and in the fact that they have to hire themselves out on an open market without owning the instruments of their labor. They need money to buy commodities, because things have been so arranged that they have no enduring access to anything that has not been commodified.But in their economic situation they are more like peons, in that they are no longer left even the momentary handling of the money around which their entire activity revolves. They have to spend it immediately because they don’t receive enough to save. But even so, sooner or later they find themselves obliged to consume on credit; and the credit they are granted is docked from their pay, forcing them to work even more to free themselves from debt. Since the distribution of goods is totally interlinked with the organization of production and the state, their rations of food and of space are reduced in both quantity and quality. Though nominally remaining free workers and consumers, they are scorned everywhere and have no real possibility of redress.

Image via Wikipedia

test

2011-10-14T10:01:00.001+02:00

Image via Wikipedia

You're missing out on a bunch of things by not being registered with Preferences!

test!

2011-10-10T11:56:00.000+02:00

Image via WikipediaChromium Blog* Today we are introducing an early preview of Dart, a class-based optionally typed programming language for building web applications. Dart’s design goals are: - Create a *structured yet flexible* language for web programming. - Make Dart feel *familiar and natural* to programmers and thus easy
to learn. - Ensure that Dart delivers *high performance* on all modern web browsers and environments ranging from small handheld devices to server-side execution.

testttttttt

2011-08-31T12:52:00.002+02:00

Image via CrunchBaseFor you bloggers out there making money with your Amazon Affiliate account, Zemanta has something for you!
Activate your Amazon Affiliate account by simply heading over to your Zemanta preferences page, locate the Affiliate Marketing section and list your Amazon Affiliate ID (amazon.com only!).

test

2011-08-26T09:46:00.000+02:00

Zemanta tip of the Day!
Image via WikipediaAdding images is a piece of cake!

Add photos to your blog post by simply choosing the image you wish to use from the recommendations and drag & drop it to where you want it.

To remove the image, simply click on it again in the sidebar. You can also select the image in the editor and press the delete button.

chrooooome

2011-08-24T11:19:00.002+02:00

As you write your blog post, Zemanta picks out which people and terms are important in the text and recommends links to them. Inserting a link is a one click operation, but if you really want contr
Image via Wikipediaol, you can pick out a different destination from the drop-down (not available on all links)

dela

2011-08-23T09:10:00.001+02:00

Image by rogercarr via Flickr

Amazon Affiliate links

For you bloggers out there making money with your Amazon Affiliate account, Zemanta has something for you!

Activate your Amazon Affiliate account by simply heading over to your Zemantapreferences page, locate the Affiliate Marketing section and list your Amazon Affiliate ID (amazon.com only!).

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2011-08-04T18:06:00.002+02:00

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeFOREST FIRE (USA) just announced their signing to FAT CAT !!
Their new album Staring At The X will be released on october 17.2011
With their sophomore record, Forest Fire make an electrifying leap forward from
the "cosmic Americana" of their lauded debut, 'Survival', which was named one
of 2009's top ten albums by Rough Trade Shops, and album of the year by La Blogotheque.

test

2011-07-21T10:35:00.002+02:00

Image by AcmeAJ via FlickrAdd photos to your blog post by simply choosing the image you wish to use from the recommendations and drag & drop it to where you want it.

To remove the image, simply click on it again in the sidebar. You can also select the image in the editor and press the delete button.

test

2011-07-20T17:56:00.003+02:00

Image via WikipediaSo you see... you are already fighting, consciously or otherwise, for a society where an end to obligatory work will be replaced by a collective creativity regulated by the wishes of each individual, and by the free distribution of the goods necessary for our everyday needs. The end of forced work means the end of the system where profit, hierarchical power and universal lies reign supreme. It signifies the end of the spectacular commodity system and opens the doors to an overall re-examination of priorities. The pursuit of money and of morsels of power will give way to the quest for a harmonisation of enthusiasms which will, at last, be released and given recognition.

Has it ever happened that, outside your place of work, you have felt the same distaste and weariness as you do inside the factory'? In that case, you have come to understand that:
The factory is all around us. It is the morning, the train, the car, the ravaged countryside, the machine, the bosses, the chief, the house,the newspapers, the family, the trade union, the street, one's purchases, pictures, one's pay, the television, one's language, one's holidays, school, housework, boredom, prison, the hospital and the night. It is the time and space of our everyday subsistence. It is the becoming accustomed to repetitive moves and suppressed emotions, emotions sampled through the proxy of intermediary images.
Every activity reduced to mere existence is obligatory work: and all obligatory work transforms the product and the producer into objects of mere existence, into commodities themselves.
Rejection of the universal factory is everywhere, since sabotage and re-appropriation are everywhere among the proletariat, allowing them still to derive some morsel of pleasure from idleness, or from love-making, or socialising or chatting or eating, drinking, dreaming or preparing to revolutionise everyday life by neglecting none of the delights of being not quite totally alienated.
So you see, you are fighting, consciously or otherwise, for a society where feelings will be all, and boredom and work, nothing. Mere survival has so far prevented us from really living. We must now stand the world on its head and value those glimpses of authentic living which are fated to be covered up and distorted in the system of the commodity and the spectacle... these moments of real contentment, of boundless pleasure and passion.

Haven't you ever thought about using your machine to turn out some instrument for use outside the factory? In that case you have realised that:
The machine produces contrary effects according to whether it is employed for the benefit of the employer and the State or whether it is put to use by the worker for his own immediate benefit.
The principle of misappropriation consists of employing against the enemy those very techniques and weapons which he usually employs against us.
The opposite of obligatory work is the creativity of the individual or group. Proletarians aspire to create their own living conditions so that they may thereby cease to be proletarians. Outside of a handful of rare revolutionary outbursts, this pent-up creativity has thus far remained hidden (using the boss's machinery, doing odd jobs, experimentation, and the quest for new emotions and sensations).
The passion to create seeks to be all. Implying as it does the demolition of the commodity system and the reconstruction of our everyday lives, this passion to create embraces all our passions. The misappropriation of techniques so that creativity may enjoy all their benefits for all is, consequently, the only way to have an end of work and the omnipresence of compartmentalisation (into manual/intellectual, work/recreation, theory/practice, individual/society, being/appearance).

new post

2011-07-20T17:55:00.000+02:00

Image via WikipediaAdding tags to your post not only makes it easier for your readers to navigate through your blog archives, but it also helps you boost your SEO ranking by giving search engines m
ore ways to find your content. A

2011-07-11T14:34:00.002+02:00

Image via WikipediaIf you work in any kind of service industry you’ve undoubtedly come across the Request For Proposal, or “RFP.” The RFP process has become a standard by which organizations solicit competitive bids. It attempts to level the playing field and minimize bias by holding everyone to the same requirements—no special treatment, no rule bending. In return, the organization issuing the RFP is able to select a vendor by comparing apples to apples. Alas, in practice, RFPs are the least creative way to hire creative people. The rigidity of the process, and the lack of meaningful dialogue makes this little more than a game of roulette. How can we successfully navigate the heartburn-inducing RFP process? And what can we as an industry do to turn RFPs into the exception rather than the default means of hiring an agency?

test

2011-07-11T14:29:00.002+02:00

ie9

2011-07-11T14:28:00.002+02:00

testy tewsty

2011-07-11T14:26:00.002+02:00

Image via WikipediaIf you work in any kind of service industry you’ve undoubtedly come across the Request For Proposal, or “RFP.” The RFP process has become a standard by which organizations solicit competitive bids. It attempts to level the playing field and minimize bias by holding everyone to the same reqImage via Wikipediauirements—no special treatment, no rule bending. In return, the organization issuing the RFP is able to select a vendor by comparing apples to apples. Alas, in practice, RFPs are the least creative way to hire creative people. The rigidity of the process, and the lack of meaningful dialogue makes this little more than a game of roulette. How can we successfully navigate the heartburn-inducing RFP process? And what can we as an industry do to turn RFPs into the exception rather than the default means of hiring an agency?

better test

2011-07-11T11:40:00.000+02:00

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeZemanta tip of the Day!
Amazon Affiliate links

For you bloggers out there making money with your Amazon Affiliate account, Zemanta has something for you!

Image via WikipediaImage via WikipediaActivate your Amazon Affiliate account by simply heading over to your Zemanta preferences page, locate the Affiliate Marketing section and list your Amazon Affiliate ID (amazon.com only!).

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2011-07-11T09:44:00.003+02:00

Image via Wikipedia

t’s been a long time since I’ve made a Camino-related post (due to my new time constraints), but I wanted to pass along some good news quickly.

Sunday night Stuart and I landed the last two bugs we’d been waiting on for Camino 2.1 Beta 1, so our final preview is now cod
Image via Wikipediae complete. There is still some release note- and website-related work to be done before we can build and ship Beta 1, but we’re close enough that you can start counting down the days!t’s been a long time since I’ve made a Camino-related post (due to my new time constraints), but I wanted to pass along some good news quickly.

Sunday night Stuart and I landed the last two bugs we’d been waiting on for Camino 2.1 Beta 1, so our final preview is now code complete. There is still some release note- and website-related work to be done before we can build and ship Beta 1, but we’re close enough that you can start counting down the days!t’s been a long time since I’ve made a Camino-related post (due to my new time constraints), but I wanted to pass along some good news quickly.

test

2011-07-11T09:38:00.000+02:00

Image via WikipediaIt’s been a long time since I’ve made a Camino-related post (due to my new time constraints), but I wanted to pass along some good news quickly.

Sunday night Stuart and I landed the last two bugs we’d been waiting on for Camino 2.1 Beta 1, so our final preview is now code complete. There is still some release note- and website-related work to be done before we can build and ship Beta 1, but we’re close enough that you can start counting down the days!

morrissey!

2011-07-11T09:06:00.000+02:00

Cover of Andy RourkeBy the end of 1982, the band appointed a permanent bass player. Andy Rourke (b. Manchester, England) was an alumnus of various previous groups with Marr. After being taken under the wing of local entrepreneur Joe Moss, the band strenuously rehearsed and after a series of gigs, signed to Rough Trade Records in the spring of 1983. By that time, they had issued their first single on the label, "Hand In Glove", which failed to reach the Top 50. During the summer of 1983, they became entwined in the first of several tabloid press controversies when it was alleged that their lyrics contained references to child molesting. The eloquent Morrissey, who was already emerging as a media spokesperson of considerable power, sternly refuted the rumours.

During the same period the band commenced work on their debut album with producer Troy Tate, but the sessions were curtailed, and a new set of recordings undertaken with John Porter. In November 1983 they issued their second single, "This Charming Man", a striking pop record that infiltrated the UK Top 30. Following an ill-fated trip to the USA at the end of the year, the quartet began 1984 with a new single, the notably rockier "What Difference Does It Make?", which took them to number 12.

The Smiths ably displayed the potential of the band, with Morrissey's oblique, genderless lyrics coalescing with Marr's spirited guitar work. The closing track of the album was the haunting "Suffer Little Children", a requiem to the child victims of the 60s Moors Murderers. The song later provoked a short-lived controversy in the tabloid press, which was resolved when the mother of one of the victims came out on Morrissey's side. A series of college gigs throughout Britain established the band as a cult favourite, with Morrissey displaying a distinctive image, complete with National Health spectacles, a hearing aid and bunches of gladioli. A collaboration with Sandie Shaw saw "Hand In Glove" transformed into a belated hit, while Morrissey dominated music press interviews.

His celibate stance provoked reams of speculation about his sexuality, and his ability to provide good copy on subjects as diverse as animal rights, royalty, Oscar Wilde and 60s films, made him a journalist's dream interviewee. The singer's celebrated miserabilism was reinforced by the release of the autobiographical "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now", which reached number 19 in the UK. Another Top 20 hit followed with "William, It Was Really Nothing". While the Smiths commenced work on their next album, Rough Trade issued the interim Hatful Of Hollow, a bargain-priced set that included various flip-sides and radio sessions. It was a surprisingly effective work, that captured their inchoate charm.

testttting

2011-06-10T10:44:00.005+02:00

Image via WikipediaAs you know, it was Thomas Gold Appleton, Longfellow’s brother-in-law, who said, “Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.” He failed to add that, prior to joining the choir eternal, good Americans all go to eat at L’Ami Louis. Presidents, movie stars, C.E.O.’s, playboys, and Woody Allen all make their way to a little bistro on a side street near the old market of Les Halles. It’s not just good Americans—fat Englishmen are drawn to L’Ami Louis. Two nations, separated by a common language and a mutual antipathy to each other’s cuisine, are joined in an appetite for L’Ami Louis.

In all my years as a restaurant critic I have learned that there is a certain type of florid, blowsy, patrician Brit who will sidle up and bellow, with a fruity bluster, that if I ever happen to find myself in Paris (as if Paris were a cul-de-sac on a shortcut to somewhere else) there is this little place he knows, proper French, none of your nouvelle nonsense, bloody fantastic foie gras, and roast chicken like Bridget Bardot’s tits, and that I should go. But, they add, don’t bloody write about it. We don’t want Monsieur Yank and his good lady wife turning up in droves. It’s called …

I know what it’s called. L’Ami Louis. I ask the hotel concierge at Le Meurice to book a table for lunch. “L’Ami Louis,” he says, with a pitiful sadness. “It’s always L’Ami Louis for les Anglais.”

What you actually find when you arrive at L’Ami Louis is singularly unprepossessing. It’s a long, dark corridor with luggage racks stretching the length of the room. It gives you the feeling of being in a second-class railway carriage in the Balkans. It’s painted a shiny, distressed dung brown. The cramped tables are set with labially pink cloths, which give it a colonic appeal and the awkward sense that you might be a suppository. In the middle of the room is a stubby stove that also looks vaguely proctological.

tests

2011-06-09T17:59:00.002+02:00

Image via Wikipedia
Watching movie and television versions of Charles Dickens’s novels, I often have imagined him back from the beyond, only this time living in America, putting his remarkable powers of observation to the dramatization of life in our inner cities. Then one day, while screening some episodes of HBO’s The Wire, it hit me: Dickens was back and his name is David Simon.

What Charles Dickens learned walking the streets and alleys of Victorian London, Simon saw and heard over twelve years as a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He turned his experiences first into a book and the NBC television series Homicide, then the HBO series The Corner. Next, with Ed Burns, a real-life cop turned teacher, he created The Wire. Simon’s meticulous and brutally honest storytelling made Baltimore a metaphor for America’s urban tragedy. During its five seasons, The Wire held up a mirror to an America most of us never see, where drugs, mayhem, and corruption routinely betray the promise of “ life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that is so ingrained in our political DNA.

For The Wire and his other work, David Simon received a MacArthur Fellowship, the no-strings-attached $500,000 grant that honors singular creativity and innovation. In the last few years, Simon also has produced Generation Kill, a brutal and realistic depiction of combat in Iraq, and Treme, a series that dissects post-Katrina New Orleans much as The Wire did Baltimore. Yet “when television history is written,” one critic wrote, “ little else will rival The Wire.” Nor, when historians come to tell the story of America in our time, will they be able to ignore this Dickensian portrayal of America’s expendable people.

rerere

2011-06-09T17:54:00.000+02:00

Watching movie and television versions of Charles Dickens’s novels, I often have imagined him back from the beyond, only this time living in America, putting his remarkable powers of observation to the dramatization of life in our inner cities. Then one day, while screening some episodes of HBO’s The Wire, it hit me: Dickens was back and his name is David Simon.

What Charles Dickens learned walking the streets and alleys of Victorian London, Simon saw and heard over twelve years as a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He turned his experiences first into a book and the NBC television series Homicide, then the HBO series The Corner. Next, with Ed Burns, a real-life cop turned teacher, he created The Wire. Simon’s meticulous and brutally honest storytelling made Baltimore a metaphor for America’s urban tragedy. During its five seasons, The Wire held up a mirror to an America most of us never see, where drugs, mayhem, and corruption routinely betray the promise of “ life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that is so ingrained in our political DNA.

For The Wire and his other work, David Simon received a MacArthur Fellowship, the no-strings-attached $500,000 grant that honors singular creativity and innovation. In the last few years, Simon also has produced Generation Kill, a brutal and realistic depiction of combat in Iraq, and Treme, a series that dissects post-Katrina New Orleans much as The Wire did Baltimore. Yet “when television history is written,” one critic wrote, “ little else will rival The Wire.” Nor, when historians come to tell the story of America in our time, will they be able to ignore this Dickensian portrayal of America’s expendable people.

2011-06-09T17:28:00.003+02:00

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeWatching movie and television versions of Charles Dickens’s novels, I often have imagined him back from the beyond, only this time living in America, putting his remarkable powers of observation to the dramatization of life in our inner cities. Then one day, while screening some episodes of HBO’s The Wire, it hit me: Dickens was back and his name is David Simon.
What Charles Dickens learned walking the streets and alleys of Victorian London, Simon saw and heard over twelve years as a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He turned his experiences first into a book and the NBC television series Homicide, then the HBO series The Corner. Next, with Ed Burns, a real-life cop turned teacher, he created The Wire. Simon’s meticulous and brutally honest storytelling made Baltimore a metaphor for America’s urban tragedy. During its five seasons, The Wire held up a mirror to an America most of us never see, where drugs, mayhem, and corruption routinely betray the promise of “ life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that is so ingrained in our political DNA.
For The Wire and his other work, David Simon received a MacArthur Fellowship, the no-strings-attached $500,000 grant that honors singular creativity and innovation. In the last few years, Simon also has produced Generation Kill, a brutal and realistic depiction of combat in Iraq, and Treme, a series that dissects post-Katrina New Orleans much as The Wire did Baltimore. Yet “when television history is written,” one critic wrote, “ little else will rival The Wire.” Nor, when historians come to tell the story of America in our time, will they be able to ignore this Dickensian portrayal of America’s expendable people.

zemanta test

2011-06-08T16:06:00.001+02:00

Image by rokp via FlickrA social network is crucially different from a social circle, since the function of a social circle is to curb our appetites and of a network to extend them. Everything once inside is outside, a click away; much that used to be outside is inside, experienced in solitude. And so the peacefulness, the serenity that we feel away from the Internet, and which all the Better-Nevers rightly testify to, has less to do with being no longer harried by others than with being less oppressed by the force of your own inner life. Shut off your computer, and your self stops raging quite as much or quite as loud.

tst

2011-04-13T13:09:00.002+02:00

Image by uconnlibrariesmagic via FlickrOthers unthinkingly followed the paths learned once and for all, to their work and their home, to their predictable future. For them duty had already become a habit, and habit a duty. They did not see the deficiency of their city. They thought the deficiency of their life was natural. We wanted to break out of this conditioning, in search of different uses of the urban landscape, in search of new passions. The atmosphere of a few places gave us intimations of the future powers of an architecture that it would be necessary to create in order to provide the setting for less mediocre games. We could expect nothing of anything that we ourselves had not altered. The urban environment proclaimed the orders and tastes of the ruling society just as violently as the newspapers. Man unifies the world, but man has extended himself everywhere. People can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is animated. Obstacles were everywhere. And they were all interrelated, maintaining a unified reign of poverty. Since everything was connected, it was necessary to change everything through a unitary struggle, or nothing. It was necessary to link up with the masses, but sleep was all around us.

2011-04-13T12:18:00.000+02:00

Image via Wikipedia

Mr Mubarak, 82, is in hospital after reportedly suffering heart problems. His detention order will be in place for 15 days, state TV reported.

His sons Alaa and Gamal have also been detained amid allegations of corruption and violence, police say.

Mr Mubarak stood down in February after a popular uprising against his rule.

Since then, tens of thousands of protesters have staged weekly Friday protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square, demanding that he stand trial.

At least 360 people are thought to have been killed during the protests, as police opened fire and cracked down on the crowds. Rights groups say the figure is much higher.

There are also widespread allegations of corruption and abuse of power under Mr Mubarak's 30-year rule.

testpost safari

2011-04-13T09:30:00.002+02:00

Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Just over a month after the worst natural disaster in modern Japanese history, scientists and researchers are still trying to piece together the mystery of exactly how and why some areas were wiped out by tsunami and others escaped.

International teams of geologists are mapping out the geological causes and complex effects of the March 11 tsunami waves triggered by a magnitude-9.0 quake off the eastern coast of Japan. First moments of the tsunami Video More than 13,000 people died in the tsunami and another 14,000 are still missing and feared washed to sea, including a dozen residents of Yoriso in Miyagi prefecture. The small fishing village juts out on a peninsula, making it the closest populated point to the epicenter of the quake, and one of the first places to be hit by the tsunami waves. Rumi Endo, a 17-year-old high school student now sheltered in the village elementary school recounted the terror she felt after rushing to high ground as the tsunami siren sounded. "I had never imagined such a thing happening," she said as she showed a video taken on her cell phone, powered by a hand-cranked generator. "I was scared to death."

She said that a total of four waves crashed through the concrete breakwater sheltering the cove. In her video she is screaming as one wave picks up a family member's home and carries it careening far up the hill. It's the job of teams like that led by Akio Okayasu to figure out just how high those waves got, so experts can help design new defenses against future tsunamis.

Up the coast in the town of Yamada, the professor of engineering at the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology measured wave heights of more than 15 meters in some spots.

But some other locations in the same bay look virtually untouched, with waves under half that size.

Wearing hard hats and heavy boots, the teams scramble up cliffs and comb through shattered buildings.

They're scanning for clues such as dirty water lines near the roofs of two-story warehouses and floating fishing gear tangled in power lines that give them a hint of the destructive power of the waves.

They use sophisticated laser pointers, computers with global positioning systems and towering measuring sticks to log the wave heights and strength.

Associate professor of engineering at Georgia Tech Hermann Fritz specializes in monitoring tsunamis. He's conducted field studies of a dozen, including the one off the Indonesian coast in 2004 that killed over 200,000 people.

Still, he was stunned by the amount of debris and the ultimate height of the latest tsunami.

ie9 addon

2011-04-07T13:39:00.000+02:00

Image via Wikipedia"He felt a premonition that he would be detained," she added.
She is also concerned for his health, saying the 53-year old artist takes medicine for a range of illnesses.
Foreign governments have called for Ai Weiwei's immediate release.
The US Ambassador Jon Huntsman mentioned the artist among other activists who "challenge the Chinese government to serve the public in all cases and at all times".
Human rights groups say China's current crackdown on dissent is a response to protests in the Middle East and North Africa.
Human Rights Watch said up to 25 lawyers, activists and bloggers had been either detained, arrested or had disappeared. Dozens more had been subjected to harassment, it said.
Ai Weiwei currently has an exhibition at the Tate Modern gallery in London, displaying 100 million porcelain objects that look like sunflower seeds.

2011-03-08T17:32:00.000+01:00

Image via WikipediaA Libyan foreign ministry official described as "absolute nonsense" reports that Col Gaddafi had offered to stand down, the Reuters news agency reports.
The rebels believe the approaches are merely an attempt to divide the opposition, says the BBC's Jon Leyne in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.
Another member of the rebel council, Jalal al-Gallal, told the BBC: "To leave is one thing, but not to be prosecuted at a further date is not acceptable."

Test jquery

2011-02-23T12:09:00.000+01:00

Image via WikipediaFirefox now lets you tell sites you don't want your online behavior tracked for advertising purposes: check the box in the Advanced Preferences dialog to notify all servers you want to opt out. (Note: although Firefox is leading the web towards a universal Do Not Track standard, you won't notice any difference in your browsing until sites and advertisers agree to respond to your preference.)

2011-02-23T11:50:00.000+01:00

Nadja is a duo of Aidan Baker (guitars/vocals/piano/woodwinds/drums) and Leah Buckareff (bass/vocals). Nadja began in 2003 as a solo project for Baker to explore the heavier/noisier side of his experimental/ambient music performed mainly on the electric guitar. In 2005 Buckareff joined in order to make the project more than just a studio endeavour and to allow Nadja to perform live.[1]

Cover of Truth Becomes DeathThe duo combines soundscape, electronics and atmospheric vocals with slow, epic riffs and dirge-like percussion, creating a slowly moving grand wall of music that has been described as drone, ambient-doom, and shoegazer-metal. Aidan noted that they prefer to call their style of music "ambient metal" or "ambient doom", though he's fond of the term "dreamsludge" as well.[2]

After several limited edition CD-R releases on various small labels worldwide, Nadja released its first official album Truth Becomes Death on Montreal's Alien8 Recordings in 2005. The duo has since released material on wider distributed labels and went through re-releasing older recordings either remastered or completely re-arranged, such as the newer Touched 2007 version back on Alien8 or the Bodycage album on Profound Lore Records/LP version on Equation.

They have performed in Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, sharing the stage with, among others, artists as Kayo Dot, Knurl, Khanate, Francisco Lopez, Isis and Mare. They successfully toured Europe in Spring 2007 and are currently touring through Europe in Spring/Summer 2010.

The band's name comes from Aidan's name spelled backwards in order to match the concept of a musical style different from his own work. The J replacing the I, is according to Aidan a "reference the Nadja character from Breton's book and Elina Löwensohn's character from the vampire movie."[3]

nadja jquerytest15

2011-02-23T11:39:00.000+01:00

Nadja is a duo of Aidan Baker (guitars/vocals/piano/woodwinds/drums) and Leah Buckareff (bass/vocals). Nadja began in 2003 as a solo project for Baker to explore the heavier/noisier side of his experimental/ambient music performed mainly on the electric guitar. In 2005 Buckareff joined in order to make the project more than just a studio endeavour and to allow Nadja to perform live.[1]

The duo combines soundscape, electronics and atmospheric vocals with slow, epic riffs and dirge-like percussion, creating a slowly moving grand w
Image via Wikipediaall of music that has been described as drone, ambient-doom, and shoegazer-metal. Aidan noted that they prefer to call their style of music "ambient metal" or "ambient doom", though he's fond of the term "dreamsludge" as well.[2]

After several limited edition CD-R releases on various small labels worldwide, Nadja released its first official album Truth Becomes Death on Montreal's Alien8 Recordings in 2005. The duo has since released material on wider distributed labels and went through re-releasing older recordings either remastered or completely re-arranged, such as the newer Touched 2007 version back on Alien8 or the Bodycage album on Profound Lore Records/LP version on Equation.

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeThey have performed in Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, sharing the stage with, among others, artists as Kayo Dot, Knurl, Khanate, Francisco Lopez, Isis and Mare. They successfully toured Europe in Spring 2007 and are currently touring through Europe in Spring/Summer 2010.

The band's name comes from Aidan's name spelled backwards in order to match the concept of a musical style different from his own work. The J replacing the I, is according to Aidan a "reference the Nadja character from Breton's book and Elina Löwensohn's character from the vampire movie."[3]

coolio

2011-01-27T16:10:00.001+01:00

Image via WikipediaAdd new partner

1. Go to and log in with your credentials.
2. In the list, find Partners. Click.
3. Click Add partner on the top right of your screen.
4. Enter all data that is provided.
5. Save

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Storage/IE9

2011-01-21T11:37:00.004+01:00

Image by philippe leroyer via FlickrRenault senior vice president Christian Husson told the AFP news agency that the people concerned were in a "particularly strategic position" in the company.
An investigation had uncovered a "body of evidence which shows that the actions of these three colleagues were contrary to the ethics of Renault and knowingly and deliberately placed at risk the company's assets", Mr Husson said.
One of the three suspended senior managers is a member of the carmaker's management committee.
The three have been given the opportunity to respond to the charges made against them, before the carmaker's human resources department decides on any sanctions.
Renault's investigation into alleged industrial espionage followed an "ethics alert" sent to its compliance committee.Image by Gilles Couteau via Flickr
The carmaker, alongside its partner Nissan, has invested heavily in electric vehicle technology.

shitstorm

2010-10-20T12:11:00.000+02:00

But most importantly: this particular public, which has been so totally deprived of freedom and which has tolerated every sort of abuse, deserves less than any other to be treated gently. The advertising manipulators, with the usual impudence of those who know that people tend to justify whatever affronts they don’t avenge, calmly declare that “People who love life go to the cinema.” But this life and this cinema are equally paltry, which is why it hardly matters if one is substituted for the other.

The movie-going public

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Image via Wikipedia

, which has never been very bourgeois and which is scarcely any longer working-class, is now recruited almost entirely from a single social stratum, though one that has been considerably enlarged — the stratum of low-level skilled employees in the various “service” occupations that are so necessary to the present production system: management, control, maintenance, research, teaching, propaganda, entertainment, and pseudocritique. Which suffices to give an idea of what they are. This public that still goes to the movies also, of course, includes the young of the same breed who are merely at the apprenticeship stage for one or another of these functions.

From the realism and the achievements of this splendid system one could already infer the personal capacities of the underlings it has produced. Misled about everything, they can only spout absurdities based on lies — these poor wage earners who see themselves as property owners, these mystified ignoramuses who think they’re educated, these zombies with the delusion that their votes mean something.

2010-09-23T17:04:00.000+02:00

Image via CrunchBase

Called Google Transparency, the online report shows that internet censorship around the world is increasing over time, and not always in the countries you'd expect, said Dorothy Chou, a Google policy analyst who worked on the project.
"The threat to internet freedom has actually been growing over the past few years," she said, noting that the United States generally bucks that trend by supporting open online communication.
Google Transparency includes an interactive map where users can see how many requests countries have made for Google to block or remove content.

Image via CrunchBase

The online tool also lets users explore internet up-time in specific countries for specific Google-owned websites. Using the tool, for example, people can see that Iran blocked YouTube after a disputed election in 2009 and hasn't let its internet users see that video website since. After "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" -- an online protest in support of free speech -- earlier this year, Pakistan similarly blocked YouTube for 10 days, the data show.
Countries that would be thought less likely to filter the internet also try, Chou said.
Thailand, for example, asked Google to remove YouTube videos that showed the Thai king, Bhumibol Adulyadej, with feet near his head. A national law bans such offensive representations, Chou said, and Google agreed not to show such videos within Thailand, although they are still available elsewhere in the world.
Germany bans neo-Nazi content, and Google has agreed to remove such sites from its Google.de search engine in that country, Chou said. Turkey, meanwhile, blocks YouTube, she said, because the company refused to take down all potentially offensive videos about Ataturk, the Turkish political hero.
Australia is considering a law that would block some websites in an effort to prevent the trafficking of child porn, she said.
Google said it hopes Transparency will shed light on how the internet differs from country to country, and on the efforts of nations to block internet content.
"What we're trying to do is give a picture of what's accessible around the world -- are our services accessible?" she said. "What we believe is more information is better for users." The data only applies to sites that Google owns, which include Blogger, YouTube, AdWords, Google Maps and others.

2010-08-25T10:41:00.001+02:00

Stretching the genre of documentary, this experimental essay-film is a composition of thoughts, images and scenes, mainly from Japan and Guinea-Bissau, "two extreme poles of survival"[1]. Some other scenes were filmed in Iceland, Paris, and San Francisco. A female narrator reads from letters supposedly sent to her by the (fictitious) cameraman Sandor Krasna.

peteteSans Soleil is often labelled as a documentary or travelogue, however it contains fictional elements and moves from one location to another without regard to a location or character-based narrative.

drek

2010-08-20T14:32:00.000+02:00

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeThe National Museum in Oslo hosted avaf for their summer exhibition this summer. avaf, an artist collective based in Paris and Berlin, asked us to work on their promotional material.
Image via WikipediaAs part of the whole identity, we made invitations, a series of posters, banners and exhibition leaflets. avaf have a way of forcing the viewer to totally indulge in their work, in order to experience it properly. We wanted to convey that through the printed matter and forced the receiver to think, before understanding the message. The invitation was a see-through folded poster with mirrored text, printed on 60 gsm paper. The posters were printed as a series, which revealed the information once the different posters were put up. This made those who already knew about avaf immediatly understand, while others had to decipher the information. The triangular shape avaf used to construct the exhibition is reflected in the use of typography and composition.
Material printed in various PMS colours and black. Format: 50×70 cm

2010-08-17T19:00:00.000+02:00

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeThe basis of an EmotionML document is represented by the element, having as children one of the following elements: , , , . There are various emotion category sets, the shortest one being Paul Ekman’s, containing six basic emotions having facial expressions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprised. Other sets are more elaborate like Fontaine, Scherer, Roesch and Ellsworth’s, having 24 categories. The dimension element can also have various values depending on the author(s) studying it, an example being: pleasure, arousal, and dominance. The same goes for appraisal and action-tendency, detailed in the document.

2010-08-17T11:40:00.002+02:00

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The US is to reduce its forces in Iraq to 50,000 at the end of this month, and plans to withdraw all troops from the country by the end of 2011.

The 50,000 that will stay until next year will help train Iraqi forces and support counter-insurgency operations, although they will be combat capable.

Iraq's top army officer recently questioned the timing of the pull-out, saying the Iraqi military might not be ready to take control for another decade.

Meanwhile, Iraqi politics has remained deadlocked five m

Image via Wikipediaonths after national elections, with no new government yet in place.

On Monday, the al-Iraqiya bloc that won the most seats in March suspended talks with the second-placed Shia-led bloc of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Al-Iraqiya, which is led by former prime minister Iyad Allawi and says it is non-sectarian, was upset by a TV interview in which Mr Maliki said al-Iraqiya represented the Sunnis of Iraq.

test

2010-07-14T14:15:00.003+02:00

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Javad Jahangirzadeh, a member of Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, said Iranian officials had turned over the documents to the Swiss ambassador in Tehran.

The U.S. State Department has denied that charge.

A U.S. official, who is not authorized to talk to the media about such issues, told CNN last month that it would be "ludicrous, absurd and even preposterous" to claim an individual was kidnapped by the United States and held against his will.

Image by uconnlibrariesmagic via Flickr

Last month, two videos surfaced on the Internet of a man claiming to Amiri, in which he said he had escaped from U.S. agents and was hiding in Virginia.

Image via Wikipedia

dnd testz

2010-07-14T11:34:00.000+02:00

Javad Jahangirzadeh, a member of Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, said Iranian officials had turned over the documents to the Swiss ambassador in Tehran.
The U.S. State Department has denied that charge.
A U.S. official, who is not authorized to talk to the media about such issues, told CNN last month that it would be "ludicrous, absurd and even preposterous" to claim an individual was kidnapped by the United States and held against his will.
Last month, two videos surfaced on the Internet of a man claiming to Amiri, in which he said he had escaped from U.S. agents and was hiding in Virginia.

Image by http2007 via Flickr

That was the third time that videos allegedly showing Amiri had been circulated on the Internet.

In one, he said he had been kidnapped by U.S. agents. Another contradicted that claim and said he was living freely and studying in Arizona.

In one of the videos posted June 30 on YouTube and dated June 14, the man again said that he was brought against his will to the United States and fears he will be discovered and re-arrested.

"I am Shahram Amiri, the son of the Islamic Republic of Iran, who with God's help succeeded in running away from the U.S. security agents in the state of Virginia. I am [temporarily] at a safe place and I am trying to do this video but it is quite possible that I may shortly be again arrested by American security agents."

He went on to say: "I am not free here and not allowed to contact my family or other people. If I face any problems or if I do not return to my country soon, the government of the U.S. would be directly responsible for it."
CNN could not independently verify the authenticity of the videos, nor the identity of the man in them.

"If he is who people think he is, the U.S. would be in contact with the person," a CIA official said last month. And if he were being held against his will, "how would he have been able to produce any of the videos?" the official said.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

In the second video that surfaced June 30 and dated June 23, the man claiming to be Amiri reassures his family about his well-being.
"I want to let my beloved family know that I am OK and they should not worry about my health," he says. "With God's help I shall return to my beloved country in the next few days. I want them to be, as always, strong and patient and to pray for my safe return. I hope to see you in our beloved country."
Tehran blamed Washington for Amiri's disappearance shortly after revelations surfaced that Iran has been building a second uranium enrichment facility near the city of Qom. After that, tensions over Iran's nuclear program mounted.

Iran claims its nuclear energy is solely for civilian purposes. But the United States has pushed the United Nations to punish Tehran for its nuclear ambitions. The Security Council recently slapped a fourth round of tough sanctions on the Islamic republic.

Safari5 - freeze

2010-06-08T11:15:00.001+02:00

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The second part of the museum—with its couples of stuffed animals—would then be the earthly paradise as we have always dreamed it. Not so sure... animal innocence may be a trick for getting around censorship, but perhaps also the mirror of an impossible reconciliation. And even without original sin this earthly paradise may be a paradise lost. In the glossy splendour of the gentle animals of Josen-kai I read the fundamental rift of Japanese society, the rift that separates men from women. In life it seems to show itself in two ways only: violent slaughter, or a discreet melancholy—resembling Sei Shonagon's—which the Japanese express in a single untranslatable word. So this bringing down of man to the level of the beasts—against which the fathers of the church invade—becomes here the challenge of the beasts to the poignancy of things, to a melancholy whose color I can give you by copying a few lines from Samura Koichi: “Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound... disembodied.”

2010-06-07T13:59:00.002+02:00

Image by dullhunk via Flickr

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The elements of a document tree that are represented by a selector are the subjects of the selector. A selector consisting of a single sequence of simple selectors represents any element satisfying its requirements. Prepending another sequence of simple selectors and a combinator to a sequence imposes additional matching constraints, so the subjects of a selector are always a subset of the elements represented by the last sequence of simple selectors.

2010-05-28T12:30:00.002+02:00

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"There are many ways in which I could begin but perhaps it is best to start by explaining how I became Karen Eliot. The name Karen Eliot is a collective name. It is a name anyone can use - and many people do indeed use it. The purpose of having a number of people use the same name is to examin
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e practically the philosophical question of individuality. It was interest in such philosophical questions and their solution which led me to adopt the collective pseudonym Karen Eliot.

2010-04-29T13:27:00.000+02:00

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Not to falter from particular realities, the word communism should be understood without any previous knowledge of certain political systems, ideologies or schools of thought that also used the term. These are our worst enemies. Some words are battlegrounds where we should stand our ground much more than others. Though none should be ignored or marginalized. It is a new word for us and where we use it, we use it because there is no other word that sums up the meaning of the common, that is, an absolute shared reality, better.
Where should we part with the critique of a particular system we are trapped in and start engaging in the new one? Someone wrote that the desert is everywhere and it might deepen. The desert is a good analogy to describe this state. But how to get out of it and not stumble upon these oases being offered at every point, every ideology, identity and it’s price in sight.
Commodity fetishism exists and reproduces itself on the basis of private property. In the sphere of constant contradictions between dichotomies that balance out in what today is described with one word: the false and uncontested state of “peace”, it self regulates it’s form and essence between the rich and poor, between having and not having, between these extreme binary conditions that contribute to one thing and make themselves evident: when an individual gets rid of his overpowering stale pond of morality. A possibility of communism makes itself evident. When one gets over the fallacious notions of private property, materialism and other shapes of “liberties”, the true essence of community arises. A low-pay is placed to ensure as little sharing as possible and when one no longer depends on pay of any kind and gets his food for free, sharing and caring seems ubiquitous. The contradictions among which we find ourselves and

new post

2010-04-29T12:31:00.000+02:00

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Ahead of the final TV debate, Labour's Alan Johnson said it was "perfectly legitimate" to raise the topic.

Mr Brown was under a lot of pressure and made a "dreadful mistake", he said.

Mr Brown has apologised. He will face David Cameron and Nick Clegg for a debate focused on the economy in Birmingham from 2030 BST.

Image by Labour via Flickr

The BBC's Nick Robinson said he expected a feisty performance from Mr Brown, who would be fighting not just for himself but also for the future of the Labour Party, amid fears the gaffe will sap morale and persuade people not to bother to vote.

'Not insensitive'

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Home Secretary Mr Johnson said pensioner Gillian Duffy had not been bigoted to raise the topic of immigration from eastern Europe and he was "really pleased Gordon made that clear".

He said Mr Brown was "under a great deal of pressure" - from dealing with the demands of the campaign as well as being PM - and had made a "dreadful mistake".

"No-one can suggest that this wasn't damaging, I think we have to look at how Gordon responded. People will have sympathy for the fact that sometimes you say things you wish you hadn't said."

2010-04-19T12:01:00.001+02:00

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It comes from southern Iceland's Eyjafjallajoekull volcano, which began erupting for the second time in a month on Wednesday.

Airspace remains closed, or partially closed, in more than 20 countries.

Tens of thousands of flights have been cancelled since the clampdown began, and the prospect of a return to normal air travel remains far from clear.

The flight bans came amid fears that the ash - a mixture of glass, sand and rock particles - can seriously damage aircraft engines.

Britain has extended a ban on most flights in its airspace until at least 1900 local time on Monday (1800 GMT).

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced the move to deploy the Royal Navy ships.

He defended the continuing flight ban, saying: "I think the first thing we have got to say is the safety of air passengers is of paramount importance."

2010-04-19T11:59:00.003+02:00

Image via Wikipedia

It comes from southern Iceland's Eyjafjallajoekull volcano, which  began erupting for the second time in a month on Wednesday. 
Airspace  remains closed, or partially closed, in more than 20 countries. 
Tens  of thousands of flights have been cancelled since the clampdown began,  and the prospect of a return to normal air travel remains far from  clear. 
The flight bans came amid fears that the ash - a mixture  of glass, sand and rock particles - can seriously damage aircraft  engines. 
Britain has extended a ban on most flights in its  airspace until at least 1900 local time on Monday (1800 GMT). 
British  Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced the move to deploy the Royal Navy  ships. 
He defended the continuing flight ban, saying: "I think  the first thing we have got to say is the safety of air passengers is of  paramount importance."

2010-03-30T11:25:00.001+02:00

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Network Rail plans to axe 1,500 jobs, alongside introducing increased weekend working for its staff. According to the RMT, workers are concerned about the safety implications of the redundancies alongside an increasing workload, antisocial hours and the prospect of compulsory redundancies. Network Rail’s plans have already faced criticism (including from the Office of Rail Regulation and 150 MPs) on safety grounds. 77% voted for strike action, with 89% voting for action short of a strike. The turnout for the ballot was 65%. No strike dates will be announced until the 19th of March.

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Meanwhile, further strike action is brewing amongst other sections of workers in the industry. 5,500 signal workers could strike following the announcement of their ballot, due to take place next week. Even Network Rail management has conceded that a signallers’ strike would paralyse significant sections of the rail network. The RMT has suggested the prospect of a single strike by both sets of workers.

On top of this, the TSSA union announced today that it would ballot 1,600 of its members including electrical controllers over a 0.8% pay offer over the coming weeks. The union announces the result of a separate ballot of 2,000 of its members tomorrow.

2010-03-15T15:09:00.000+01:00

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“You know that chicken is chicken, right?” she pointed out. Foer’s older brother sniggered. Where had their parents found this moron? But Foer was shaken. That chicken was a chicken! Why had he never thought of this before? He put down his fork. Within a few years, however, he went back to eating chickens and other animals. During high school and college, he converted to vegetarianism several more times, partly to salve his conscience and partly, as he puts it, “to get closer to the breasts” of female activists. Later, he became engaged to a woman (the novelist Nicole Krauss) with a similar history of relapse. They resolved to do better, and immediately violated that resolve by serving meat at their wedding and eating it on their honeymoon. Finally, when he was about to become a father, Foer felt compelled to think about the issue more deeply, and, at the same time, to write about it. “We decided to have a child, and that was a different story that would necessitate a different story,” he says.

test

2010-03-15T14:59:00.000+01:00

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Any attempt to present the situation in a better way than it really is just falls in a meaningless gap. Any attempt to present the restructuring as Germans’ attack against Greece is suitable only for B-class TV-stations, even if SYRIZA [1] tries to promote it declaring nonsense about the “sacred money” for compensation of German Nazi occupation. An Orwell type propaganda of mass media has necessarily been mobilized and restructuring is presented as natural disaster. At present, this propaganda has been partly successful. Several clerks and workers in the private sector welcome the reductions in salaries of the employees in the public sector. The employees in public sector are divided on the basis of who is “truly privileged” and who not. But all these have an expiry date. If someone wonders what being privileged means, they can ask the dismissed of Olympic Airways who squatted the State General Accounting Office while 15 days ago they would recognise “the difficult and quite heavy programme of the Ministry” when the step-minister ignored them after they had begged him for a meeting. Also, about the impacts on daily lives because of the attempted restructuring, one can ask the workers at the National Printing Office who after reading the text of the austerity plan’s law and realized that 30% of their income is cut, they decided to squat the building they work at in order to prevent from printing the Gazette! One can also ask them about the role of their trade union leaders who ended the occupation because they were orally “promised by the government” a circular amending the law!

greece strike

2010-03-15T14:43:00.002+01:00

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2010-03-15T12:05:00.001+01:00

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Capital is forced to try to resolve the crisis by destroying fixed capital (buildings, machinery, infrastructure) and variable capital (human) to recreate the conditions of its reproduction, without being, at the moment, able to do it with its only directly effective manner: the widespread, global war. Thus, for the time being, the restructuring inevitably deepens. The wage cuts are rising up to the point that the lowest wage and unemployment benefit tend to be equal, which results in the explosive growth of debt for more and more proletarians. Privatizations of reproduction sectors (health, education, social insurance) multiply, the unemployed have smaller and smaller benefit and are forced into slave working conditions with wages below the level of reproduction. The present historical period reaches its limits. That’s why the state places police corporal guards outside schools in France or inside schools in the USA to arrest the undisciplined students. Capital’s only way out today is repression, namely, there is absolutely no way out of the crisis. This is obvious in cases of natural disasters such as in Haiti and Chile. In such cases, capitalist system is directly put into question by proletarians, who, temporarily unable to be labour power, organize the expropriation of commodities and use them according to their needs in order to survive; and the only way to maintain capitalist property is by using military violence. Curfews during the night and straight assassinations (Haiti) are imposed or imprisonments without trial (Chile) take place and suddenly life looks like prisoners’ life in concentration camps similar to undocumented migrants who in thousands live imprisoned at the borders of each capitalist state.

2010-03-15T10:35:00.000+01:00

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During the last year in China where the economy still grows very quickly, all kinds of contradictions are rising. Clashes of workers with the police is common for a number of reasons: because of demands for increasing the very low wages (on which steep economic growth is based), because of preventing land enclosures in villages, because of attributing compensation to dismissed workers, against the inadequacy of the health system resulting in high

Image by msomustek via Flickr

mortality rate of children. In USA where a historical low record of workers’ demanding struggles has appeared, thousands of homeless and unemployed people occupy vacant houses which have been seized by banks and students occupy universities in California and New York writing on their banners: We have decided not to die, demanding this way what was until recently taken for granted, that is, just their ability to continue being students. The reproduction of their own life (of course from a much worse position imposed by the hierarchy of capitalist states) proletarians in South Africa and Algeria demand as well as they clash with police because they still do not have water or electricity and are forced to live in slums; in India as well, because the price of bread suddenly rises and they starve to death. Last year in Spain workers in shipyards which are shut down burn police cars; in South Korea dismissed workers as well occupy factories and clash with police for two and a half months; in Bangladesh, dismissed workers again, clash with police and burn factories. In France and Belgium, dismissed workers kidnap their bosses, placing explosives in the factories and threatening to blow them up if not compensated for their dismissal. In India and China they kill their boss during the conflicts because of thousands of upcoming dismissals. In this historical phase proletarian struggles are objectively struggles for the assertion of life reproduction itself.

2010-03-11T16:04:00.001+01:00

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Serbia says the Yugoslav convoy, accompanied by UN peacekeepers, was attacked during the retreat from a Bosnian Muslim area of Sarajevo in violation of a safe passage pact.

Clare Montgomery QC, for Mr Ganic, says the allegations have already been rejected by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Extradition agreements give the Serbian authorities 45 days from the date of arrest to make their extradition request.

After his arrest, thousands of Bosnians protested outside the British and Serbian embassies in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo demanding his release.

Previously Westminster magistrates had refused bail on the grounds there was a danger of Mr Ganic leaving the country and he had been remanded to Wandsworth Prison.

But bailing him to appear again before Westminster magistrates on 13 April, Lord Justice Laws said that £300,000 had been provided as security by a "well-wisher" described as "a lady of substantial means".

Nightly curfew

Buckingham University vice-chancellor Dr Terence Kealey had also offered a £25,000 surety, which was accepted by the court.

Mr Ganic had attended a degree ceremony at the university, which is partnered with the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology of which he is president, hours before he was arrested.

ha

2010-03-11T12:57:00.000+01:00

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The inauguration ceremony in the port city of Valparaiso is set to be an austere affair. The planned dinner has been cancelled and the whole event scaled back out of respect for victims of the quake.
Ms Bachelet, Chile's first woman president, was constitutionally barred from seeking re-election.
She will hand the red, white and blue presidential sash to Mr Pinera, whose presidential win ended 20 years of centre-left rule in Chile.
Seldom can an incoming president have faced such a massive and immediate challenge, says the BBC's Gideon Long in Santiago.
Thousands of people have been made homeless by the quake, and around half a million homes destroyed.
"We won't be the government of the earthquake, we'll be the government of reconstruction," the 60-year-old billionaire said recently.
Last month, the conservative leader named his cabinet, leaving out any figures linked with the former military ruler, Augusto Pinochet.
In his election campaign, Mr Pinera said he would focus on boosting economic growth and producing jobs while continuing with the outgoing president's social policies.
Mr Pinera is one of the country's richest men. He made his fortune introducing credit cards to Chile, then went on to buy a television channel, a stake in Chile's most successful football club, and put millions of dollars into other investments.

2010-03-11T11:58:00.000+01:00

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It is early in the morning of Tuesday, March 9th. Bemused audiences tuned in to an Athens news station to listen to an evidently uncomfortable police spokesperson. How could he not be? He must explain a rather embarrassing incident: days earlier, on March 5th, the police had tear-gassed Manolis Glezos in the face for trying to prevent a youth’s brutal arrest [photo]. Glezos is 88 years old today; it was almost 70 years ago, on May 30 1941, in Nazi-occupied Athens that he and Apostolos Santas climbed up the Acropolis and tore down the Swastika – an action for which he was arrested and tortured the following year.

2010-03-11T11:48:00.003+01:00

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2010-03-11T11:10:00.000+01:00

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"I guess we can analyse the game in many ways, but the one thing we cannot deny is the performance of United," said the Brazilian. "They played a truly great game.

"Conceding a goal so early made a comeback even more complicated for us.

"In the first leg we played an equal match. We lost but we dominated for some periods. Today was different.

"We have some problems but United is a very strong team, they can use your mistakes in the best way. They are very clinical and that is what you have to be in this competition."

2010-03-10T14:52:00.001+01:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

2010-03-10T14:27:00.001+01:00

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To make shame more shameful still
by making it public

It is pretty safe to say that the student is the most universally despised creature in France, apart from the policeman and the priest. But the reasons for which he^T1 is despised are often false reasons reflecting the dominant ideology, whereas the reasons for which he is justifiably despised from a revolutionary standpoint remain repressed and unavowed. The partisans of false opposition are aware of these faults — faults which they themselves share — but they invert their actual contempt into a patronizing admiration. The impotent leftist intellectuals (from Les Temps Modernes to L’Express) go into raptures over the supposed “rise of the students,” and the declining bureaucratic organizations (from the “Communist” Party to the UNEF [National Student Union]) jealously contend for his “moral and material support.” We will show the reasons for this concern with the student and how they are rooted in the dominant reality of overdeveloped capitalism. We are going to use this pamphlet to denounce them one by one: the suppression of alienation necessarily follows the same path as alienation.

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Up till now all the analyses and studies of student life have ignored the essential. None of them go beyond the viewpoint of academic specializations (psychology, sociology, economics) and thus they remain fundamentally erroneous. Fourier long ago exposed this “methodical myopia” of treating fundamental questions without relating them to modern society as a whole. The fetishism of facts masks the essential category, the mass of details obscures the totality. Everything is said about this society except what it really is: a society dominated by commodities and spectacles. The sociologists Bourderon and Passedieu,^T2 in their study Les Héritiers: les étudiants et la culture, remain impotent in face of the few partial truths they have succeeded in demonstrating. Despite their good intentions they fall back into professorial morality, the inevitable Kantian ethic of a real democratization through a real rationalization of the teaching system (i.e. of the system of teaching the system). Meanwhile their disciples, such as Kravetz,⁽¹⁾ compensate for their petty-bureaucratic resentment with a hodgepodge of outdated revolutionary phraseology.

Modern capitalism’s spectacularization⁽²⁾ of reification allots everyone a specific role within a general passivity. The student is no exception to this rule. His is a provisional role, a rehearsal for his ultimate role as a conservative element in the functioning of the commodity system. Being a student is a form of initiation.

This initiation magically recapitulates all the characteristics of mythical initiation. It remains totally cut off from historical, individual and social reality. The student leads a double life, poised between his present status and the utterly separate future status into which he will one day be abruptly thrust. Meanwhile his schizophrenic consciousness enables him to withdraw into his “initiation group,” forget about his future, and bask in the mystical trance of a present sheltered from history. It is not surprising that he avoids facing his situation, particularly its economic aspects: in our “affluent society” he is still a pauper. More than 80% of students come from income groups above the working class, yet 90% of them have less money than the lowest worker. Student poverty is an anachronism in the society of the spectacle: it has yet to attain the new poverty of the new proletariat. In a period when more and more young people are breaking free from moral prejudices and family authority as they are subjected to blunt, undisguised exploitation at the earliest age, the student clings to his tame and irresponsible “protracted infancy.” Belated adolescent crises may provoke occasional arguments with his family, but he uncomplainingly accepts being treated as a baby by the various institutions that govern his daily life. (If they ever stop shitting in his face, it’s only to come around and bugger him.)

Student poverty is merely the most gross expression of the colonization

of all domains of social practice. The projection of social guilty conscience onto the students masks the poverty and servitude of everyone.

But our contempt for the student is based on quite different reasons. He is contemptible not only for his actual poverty, but also for his complacency regarding every kind of poverty, his unhealthy propensity to wallow in his own alienation in the hope, amid the general lack of interest, of arousing interest in his particular lacks. The requirements of modern capitalism determine that most students will become mere low-level functionaries, serving functions comparable to those of skilled workers in the nineteenth century.⁽³⁾Faced with the prospect of such a dismal and mediocre “reward” for his shameful current poverty, the student prefers to take refuge in an unreally lived present, which he decorates with an illusory glamor.

The student is a stoical slave: the more chains authority binds him with, the freer he thinks he is. Like his new family, the university, he sees himself as the most “independent” social being, whereas he is in fact directly subjected to the two most powerful systems of social authority: the family and the state. As their well-behaved, grateful and submissive child, he shares and embodies all the values and mystifications of the system. The illusions that formerly had to be imposed on white-collar workers are now willingly internalized and transmitted by the mass of future petty functionaries.

If ancient social poverty produced the most grandiose systems of compensation in history (religions), the student, in his marginal poverty, can find no other consolation than the most shopworn images of the ruling society, the farcical repetition of all its alienated products.

As an ideological being, the French student always arrives too late. The values and enthusiasms that are the pride of his closed little world have all long ago been condemned by history as laughable and untenable illusions.

Once upon a time the universities had a certain prestige; the student persists in the belief that he is lucky to be there. But he came too late. His mechanical, specialized education is as profoundly degraded (in comparison to the former level of general bourgeois culture)⁽⁴⁾ as his own intellectual level, because the modern economic system requires a mass production of uneducated students who have been rendered incapable of thinking. The university has become an institutional organization of ignorance. “High culture” is being degraded in the assembly-line production of professors, all of whom are cretins and most of whom would be jeered by any audience of highschoolers. But the student, in his mental menopause, is unaware of all this; he continues to listen respectfully to his masters, conscientiously suppressing all critical spirit so as to immerse himself in the mystical illusion of being a “student” — someone seriously devoted to learning serious things — in the hope that his professors will ultimately impart to him the ultimate truths of the world. The future revolutionary society will condemn all the noise of the lecture halls and classrooms as nothing but verbal pollution. The student is already a very bad joke.

The student is unaware that history is altering even his little “ivory tower” world. The famous “crisis of the university,” that detail of a more general crisis of modern capitalism, remains the object of a deaf-mute dialogue among various specialists. It simply expresses the difficulties of this particular sector of production in its belated adjustment to the general transformation of the productive apparatus. The remnants of the old liberal bourgeois university ideology are becoming banalized as its social basis is disappearing. During the era of free-trade capitalism, when the liberal state left the university a certain marginal freedom, the latter could imagine itself as an independent power. But even then it was intimately bound to the needs of that type of society, providing the privileged minority with an adequate general education before they took up their positions within the ruling class. The pathetic bitterness of so many nostalgic professors⁽⁵⁾ stems from the fact that they have lost their former role as guard-dogs serving the future masters and have been reassigned to the considerably less noble function of sheep-dogs in charge of herding white-collar flocks to their respective factories and offices in accordance with the needs of the planned economy. These professors hold up their archaisms as an alternative to the technocratization of the university and imperturbably continue to purvey scraps of “general” culture to audiences of future specialists who will not know how to make any use of them.

More serious, and thus more dangerous, are the modernists of the Left and those of the UNEF led by the FGEL “extremists,” who demand a “reform of the university structure” so as to “reintegrate the university into social and economic life,” i.e. so as to adapt it to the needs of modern capitalism. The colleges that once supplied “general culture” to the ruling class, though still retaining some of their anachronistic prestige, are being transformed into force-feeding factories for rearing lower and middle functionaries. Far from contesting this historical process, which is subordinating one of the last relatively autonomous sectors of social life to the demands of the commodity system, the above-mentioned progressives protest against delays and inefficiencies in its implementation. They are the partisans of the future cybernetized university, which is already showing its ugly head here and there.⁽⁶⁾The commodity system and its modern servants — these are the enemy.

But all these struggles take place over the head of the student, somewhere in the heavenly realm of his masters. His own life is totally out of his control — life itself is totally beyond him.

Because of his acute economic poverty the student is condemned to a paltry form of survival. But, always self-satisfied, he parades his very ordinary indigence as if it were an original “lifestyle,” making a virtue of his shabbiness and pretending to be a bohemian. “Bohemianism” is far from an original solution in any case, but the notion that one could live a really bohemian life without a complete and definitive break with the university milieu is ludicrous. But the student bohemian (and every student likes to pretend that he is a bohemian at heart) clings to his imitative and degraded version of what is, in the best of cases, only a mediocre individual solution. Even elderly provincial ladies know more about life than he does. Thirty years after Wilhelm Reich (that excellent educator of youth),⁽⁷⁾ our would-be “nonconformist” continues to follow the most traditional forms of amorous-erotic behavior, reproducing the general relations of class society in his intersexual relations. His susceptibility to recruitment as a militant for any cause is an ample demonstration of his real impotence.

In spite of his more or less loose use of time within the margin of individual liberty allowed by the totalitarian spectacle, the student avoids adventure and experiment, preferring the security of the straitjacketed daily space-time organized for his benefit by the guardians of the system. Though not constrained to separate his work and leisure, he does so of his own accord, all the while hypocritically proclaiming his contempt for “good students” and “study fiends.” He accepts every type of separation and then bemoans the “lack of communication” in his religious, sports, political or union club. He is so stupid and so miserable that he voluntarily submits himself to the University Psychological Aid Centers, those agencies of psycho-police control established by the vanguard of modern oppression and naturally hailed as a great victory for student unionism.⁽⁸⁾

But the real poverty of the student’s everyday life finds its immediate fantasy-compensation in the opium of cultural commodities. In the cultural spectacle the student finds his natural place as a respectful disciple. Although he is close to the production point, access to the real Sanctuary of Culture is denied him; so he discovers “modern culture” as anadmiring spectator. In an era when art is dead he remains the most loyal patron of the theaters and film clubs and the most avid consumer of the packaged fragments of its preserved corpse displayed in the cultural supermarkets. Consuming unreservedly and uncritically, he is in his element. If the “Culture Centers” didn’t exist, the student would have invented them. He is a perfect example of all the platitudes of American market research: a conspicuous consumer, conditioned by advertising into fervently divergent attitudes toward products that are identical in their nullity, with an irrational preference for Brand X (Pérec or Godard, for example) and an irrational prejudice against Brand Y (Robbe-Grillet or Lelouch, perhaps).

And when the “gods” who produce and organize his cultural spectacle take human form on the stage, he is their main audience, their perfect spectator. Students turn out en masseto their most obscene exhibitions. When the priests of different churches present their lame, consequenceless dialogues (seminars of “Marxist” thought, conferences of Catholic intellectuals) or when the literary debris come together to bear witness to their impotence (five thousand students attending a forum on “What are the possibilities of literature?”), who but students fill the halls?

Incapable of real passions, the student seeks titillation in the passionless polemics between the celebrities of Unintelligence: Althusser — Garaudy — Sartre — Barthes — Picard — Lefebvre — Lévi-Strauss — Halliday^T3 — Châtelet — Antoine, and between their rival ideologies, whose function is to mask real problems by debating false ones: Humanism — Existentialism — Structuralism — Scientism — New Criticism — Dialectico-naturalism — Cyberneticism — Planète-ism — Metaphilosophism.

He thinks he is avant-garde if he has seen the latest Godard, or bought the latest Argumentist book,⁽⁹⁾ or participated in the latest happening organized by that asshole Lapassade. He discovers the latest trips as fast as the market can produce its ersatz version of long outmoded (though once important) ventures; in his ignorance he takes every rehash for a cultural revolution. His overriding concern is always to maintain his cultural status. Like everyone else, he takes pride in buying the paperback reprints of important and difficult texts that “mass culture” is disseminating at an accelerating pace.⁽¹⁰⁾ Since he doesn’t know how to read, he contents himself with fondly gazing at them.

His favorite reading matter is the press that specializes in promoting the frenzied consumption of cultural novelties; he unquestioningly accepts its pronouncements as guidelines for his tastes. He revels in L’Express or Le Nouvel Observateur; or perhaps he prefers Le Monde, which he feels is an accurate and truly “objective” newspaper, though he finds its style somewhat too difficult. To deepen his general knowledge he dips into Planète, the slick magical magazine that removes the wrinkles and blackheads from old ideas. With such guides he hopes to gain an understanding of the modern world and become politically conscious!

For in France, more than anywhere else, the student is content to be politicized. But his political participation is mediated by the same spectacle. Thus he seizes upon all the pitiful tattered remnants of a Left that was annihilated more than forty years ago by “socialist” reformism and Stalinist counterrevolution. The rulers are well aware of this defeat of the workers movement, and so are the workers themselves, though more confusedly. But the student remains oblivious of it, and continues to participate blithely in the most laughable demonstrations that never draw anybody but students. This utter political ignorance makes the universities a happy hunting ground for the manipulators of the dying bureaucratic organizations (from the “Communist” Party to the UNEF), which totalitarianly program the student’s political options. Occasionally there are deviationary tendencies and slight impulses toward “independence,” but after a period of token resistance the dissidents are invariably reincorporated into an order they have never fundamentally questioned.⁽¹¹⁾ The “Revolutionary Communist Youth,” whose title is a case of ideological falsification gone mad (they are neither revolutionary nor communist nor young), pride themselves on having rebelled against the Communist Party, then join the Pope in appealing for “Peace in Vietnam.”

The student takes pride in his opposition to the “outdated” aspects of the de Gaulle regime, but in so doing he unwittingly implies his approval of older crimes (such as those of Stalinism in the era of Togliatti, Garaudy, Khrushchev and Mao). His “youthful” attitudes are thus actually even more old-fashioned than the regime’s — the Gaullists at least understand modern society well enough to administer it.

But this is not the student’s only archaism. He feels obliged to have general ideas on everything, to form a coherent worldview capable of giving meaning to his need for nervous activity and asexual promiscuity. As a result he falls prey to the last doddering missionary efforts of the churches. With atavistic ardor he rushes to adore the putrescent carcass of God and to cherish the decomposing remains of prehistoric religions in the belief that they enrich him and his time. Along with elderly provincial ladies, students form the social category with the highest percentage of admitted religious adherents. Everywhere else priests have been insulted and driven off, but university clerics openly continue to bugger thousands of students in their spiritual shithouses.

In all fairness, we should mention that there are some tolerably intelligent students. These latter easily get around the miserable regulations designed to control the more mediocre students. They are able to do so precisely because they have understood the system; and they understand it because they despise it and know themselves to be its enemies. They are in the educational system in order to get the best it has to offer: namely, grants. Taking advantage of the contradiction that, for the moment at least, obliges the system to maintain a small, relatively independent sector of academic “research,” they are going to calmly carry the germs of sedition to the highest level. Their open contempt for the system goes hand in hand with the lucidity that enables them to outdo the system’s own lackeys, especially intellectually. They are already among the theorists of the coming revolutionary movement, and take pride in beginning to be feared as such. They make no secret of the fact that what they extract so easily from the “academic system” is used for its destruction. For the student cannot revolt against anything without revolting against his studies, though the necessity of this revolt is felt less naturally by him than by the worker, who spontaneously revolts against his condition as worker. But the student is a product of modern society just like Godard and Coca-Cola. His extreme alienation can be contested only through a contestation of the entire society. This critique can in no way be carried out on the student terrain: the student who defines himself as such identifies himself with a pseudovalue that prevents him from becoming aware of his real dispossession, and he thus remains at the height of false consciousness. But everywhere where modern society is beginning to be contested, young people are taking part in that contestation; and this revolt represents the most direct and thorough critique of student behavior.

It is not enough for theory to seek its realization in practice;
practice must seek its theory

After a long period of slumber and permanent counterrevolution, the last few years have seen the first gestures of a new period of contestation, most visibly among young people. But the society of the spectacle, in its representation of itself and its enemies, imposes its own ideological categories on the world and its history. It reassuringly presents everything that happens as if it were part of the natural order of things, and reduces truly new developments that herald its supersession to the level of superficial consumer novelties. In reality the revolt of young people against the way of life imposed on them is simply a harbinger, a preliminary expression of a far more widespread subversion that will embrace all those who are feeling the increasing impossibility of living in this society, a prelude to the next revolutionary era. With their usual methods of inverting reality, the dominant ideology and its daily mouthpieces reduce this real historical movement to a socio-natural category: the Idea of Youth. Any new youth revolt is presented as merely the eternal revolt of youth that recurs with each generation, only to fade away “when young people become engaged in the serious business of production and are given real, concrete aims.” The “youth revolt” has been subjected to a veritable journalistic inflation (people are presented with the spectacle of a revolt to distract them from the possibility of participating in one). It is presented as an aberrant but necessary social safety valve that has its part to play in the smooth functioning of the system. This revolt against the society reassures the society because it supposedly remains partial, pigeonholed in the apartheid of “adolescent problems” (analogous to “racial issues” or “women’s concerns”), and is soon outgrown. In reality, if there is a “youth problem” in modern society, it simply consists in the fact that young people feel the profound crisis of this society most acutely — and try to express it. The young generation is a product par excellence of modern society, whether it chooses integration into it or the most radical rejection of it. What is surprising is not that youth is in revolt, but that “adults” are so resigned. But the reason for this is historical, not biological: the previous generation lived through all the defeats and swallowed all the lies of the long, shameful disintegration of the revolutionary movement.

In itself, “Youth” is a publicity myth linked to the capitalist mode of production, as an expression of its dynamism. This illusory preeminence of youth became possible with the economic recovery after World War II, following the mass entry into the market of a whole new category of more pliable consumers whose consumer role enabled them to identify with the society of the spectacle. But the official ideology is once again finding itself in contradiction with socioeconomic reality (lagging behind it), and it is precisely the youth who have first asserted an irresistible rage to live and who are spontaneously revolting against the daily boredom and dead time that the old world continues to produce in spite of all its modernizations. The most rebellious among them are expressing a pure, nihilistic rejection of this society without any awareness of the possibility of superseding it. But such a perspective is being sought and developed everywhere in the world. It must attain the coherence of theoretical critique and the practical organization of this coherence.

At the most primitive level, the “delinquents” all over the world express with the most obvious violence their refusal to be integrated into the society. But the abstractness of their refusal gives them no chance to escape the contradictions of a system of which they are a spontaneous negative product. The delinquents are produced by every aspect of the present social order: the urbanism of the housing projects, the breakdown of values, the extension of an increasingly boring consumer leisure, the growing police-humanist control over every aspect of daily life, and the economic survival of a family unit that has lost all significance. They despise work, but they accept commodities. They want everything the spectacle offers them and they want it now, but they can’t afford to pay for it. This fundamental contradiction dominates their entire existence, constricting their efforts to make a truly free use of their time, to express themselves, and to form a sort of community. (Their microcommunities recreate a primitivism on the margin of developed society, and the poverty of this primitivism inevitably recreates a hierarchy within the gang. This hierarchy, which can fulfill itself only in wars with other gangs, isolates each gang and each individual within the gang.) In order to escape this contradiction the delinquent must either resign himself to going to work in order to buy the commodities — to this end a whole sector of production is specifically devoted to seducing him into consumerhood (motorcycles, electric guitars, clothes, records, etc.) — or else he is forced to attack the laws of the commodity, either in a rudimentary manner, by stealing, or in a conscious manner by advancing toward a revolutionary critique of the world of the commodity. Consumption “mellows out” the behavior of these young rebels and their revolt subsides into the worst conformism. For the delinquents only two futures are possible: the awakening of revolutionary consciousness or blind obedience in the factories.

The Provos are the first supersession of the experience of the delinquents, the organization of its first political expression. They arose out of an encounter between a few dregs from the world of decomposed art in search of a career and a mass of young rebels in search of self-expression. Their organization enabled both sides to advance toward and achieve a new type of contestation. The “artists” contributed a few ideas about play, though still quite mystified and decked out in a patchwork of ideological garments; the young rebels had nothing to offer but the violence of their revolt. From the beginning the two tendencies have remained distinct; the theoryless masses have found themselves under the tutelage of a small clique of dubious leaders who have tried to maintain their “power” by concocting a “provotarian” ideology. Their neoartistic reformism has prevailed over the possibility that the delinquents’ violence might extend itself to the plane of ideas in an attempt to supersede art. The Provos are an expression of the last reformism produced by modern capitalism: the reform of everyday life. Although nothing short of an uninterrupted revolution will be able to change life, the Provo hierarchy — like Bernstein with his vision of gradually transforming capitalism into socialism by means of reforms — believes that a few improvements can transform everyday life. By opting for the fragmentary, the Provos end up accepting the totality. To give themselves a base, their leaders have concocted the ridiculous ideology of the “provotariat” (an artistico-political salad composed of mildewed leftovers of a feast they have never known). This new provotariat is contrasted with the supposedly passive and “bourgeoisified” proletariat (eternal refrain of all the cretins of the century). Because they despair of a total change, the Provos despair of the only force capable of bringing about that change. The proletariat is the motor of capitalist society, and thus its mortal threat: everything is designed to repress it — parties, bureaucratic unions, police (who attack it more often than they do the Provos), and the colonization of its entire life — because it is the only really menacing force. The Provos have understood none of this; they remain incapable of criticizing the production system and thus remain prisoners of the system as a whole. When an antiunion workers’ riot inspired the Provo base to join in with the direct violence, their bewildered leaders were left completely behind and could find nothing better to do than denounce “excesses” and appeal for nonviolence. These leaders, whose program had advocated provoking the authorities so as to reveal their repressiveness, ended up by complaining that they had been provoked by the police. And they appealed over the radio to the young rioters to let themselves be guided by the “Provos,” i.e. by the leaders, who have amply demonstrated that their vague “anarchism” is nothing but one more lie. To arrive at a revolutionary critique, the rebellious Provo base has to begin by revolting against its own leaders, which means linking up with the objective revolutionary forces of the proletariat and dumping people like Constant and De Vries (the one the official artist of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the other a failed parliamentary candidate who admires the English police). Only in this way can the Provos link up with the authentic modern contestation of which they are already one of the fledgling expressions. If they really want to change the world, they have no use for those who are content to paint it white.^T4

By revolting against their studies, the American students have directly called in question a society that needs such studies. And their revolt (in Berkeley^T5 and elsewhere) against the university hierarchy has from the start asserted itself as a revolt against the whole social system based on hierarchy and on the dictatorship of the economy and the state. By refusing to accept the business and institutional roles for which their specialized studies have been designed to prepare them, they are profoundly calling in question a system of production that alienates all activity and its products from their producers. For all their groping and confusion, the rebelling American youth are already seeking a coherent revolutionary alternative from within the “affluent society.” Unfortunately, they remain largely fixated on two relatively incidental aspects of the American crisis — the blacks and Vietnam — and the small “New Left” organizations suffer from this fact. Their forms reflect a striving for genuine democracy, but the weakness of their subversive content causes them to fall into dangerous contradictions. Due to their extreme political ignorance and naïve illusions about what is really going on in the world, their hostility to the traditional politics of the old left organizations is easily rechanneled into unwitting acceptance of them. Abstract opposition to their society leads them to admire or support its most conspicuous enemies: the “socialist” bureaucracies of China or Cuba. A group like the “Resurgence Youth Movement” can in the same breath condemn the state and praise the “Cultural Revolution,” that pseudorevolt staged by the most gargantuan bureaucracy of modern times: Mao’s China. At the same time, these semilibertarian and nondirective organizations, due to their glaring lack of content, are constantly in danger of slipping into the ideology of “group dynamics” or into the closed world of the sect. The widespread consumption of drugs is an expression of real poverty and a protest against this real poverty: it is a fallacious search for freedom in a world without freedom, a religious critique of a world that has already superseded religion. It is no accident that it is so prevalent in the Beat milieu (that right wing of the youth revolt), where ideological refusal coexists with acceptance of the most ridiculous superstitions (Zen, spiritualism, “New Church” mysticism, and other rotten carcasses such as Gandhiism and Humanism). In their search for a revolutionary program the American students make the same mistake as the Provos and proclaim themselves “the most exploited class in society”; they must henceforth understand that they have no interests distinct from all those who are subject to commodity slavery and generalized oppression.

In the Eastern bloc, bureaucratic totalitarianism is also beginning to produce its own forces of negation. The youth revolt there is particularly intense, but the only information on it must be derived from the denunciations of it in official publications and from the police measures undertaken to contain it. From these sources we learn that a segment of the youth no longer “respects” moral and family order (which still exists there in its most detestable bourgeois form), devotes itself to “debauchery,” despises work, and no longer obeys the Party police. The USSR has set up a special ministry for the express purpose of combatting this new delinquency. Alongside this diffuse revolt, a more coherently formulated contestation is striving to express itself; groups and clandestine journals emerge and disappear depending on the fluctuations of police repression. So far the most important act has been the publication of the Open Letter to the Polish Communist Party by the young Poles Kuron and Modzelewski,^T6 which explicitly affirms the necessity of “abolishing the present production relations and social relations” and recognizes that in order to accomplish this, “revolution is inevitable.” The Eastern intelligentsia is seeking to elucidate and make conscious the critique that the workers have already concretized in East Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest^T7: the proletarian critique of bureaucratic class power. This revolt is in the difficult situation of having to pose and solve real problems at one fell swoop. In other countries struggle is possible but the goal remains mystified. In the Eastern bureaucracies the struggle is without illusions and the goals are known; the problem is to devise the forms that can open the way to their realization.

In England the youth revolt found its first organized expression in the antibomb movement. This partial struggle, rallied around the vague program of the Committee of 100 — which was capable of bringing 300,000 demonstrators into the streets — accomplished its most beautiful action in spring 1963 with the “Spies for Peace” scandal.⁽¹²⁾ For lack of radical perspectives, it inevitably fell back, coopted by traditional political manipulators and nobleminded pacifists. But the specifically English archaisms in the control of everyday life have not been able to hold out against the assault of the modern world; the accelerating decomposition of secular values is engendering profoundly revolutionary tendencies in the critique of all aspects of the prevailing way of life.⁽¹³⁾ The struggles of the British youth must link up with those of the British working class, which with its shop steward movement and wildcat strikes remains one of the most combative in the world. The victory of these two struggles is only possible if they work out common perspectives. The collapse of the Labour government is an additional factor that could be conducive to such an alliance. Their encounter will touch off explosions compared to which the Amsterdam Provo riot will be seen as child’s play. Only in this way can a real revolutionary movement arise that will answer practical needs.

Japan is the only advanced industrialized country where this fusion of student youth and radical workers has already taken place.

The Zengakuren, the well-known organization of revolutionary students, and the League of Young Marxist Workers are the two major organizations formed on the common orientation of the Revolutionary Communist League. This formation is already tackling the problems of revolutionary organization. Simultaneously and without illusions it combats both Western capitalism and the bureaucracy of the so-called socialist countries. It already groups together several thousand students and workers organized on a democratic and antihierarchical basis, with all members participating in all the activities of the organization. These Japanese revolutionaries are the first in the world to carry on large organized struggles in the name of an advanced revolutionary program and with a substantial mass participation. In demonstration after demonstration thousands of workers and students have poured into the streets to wage violent struggle with the Japanese police. However, the RCL lacks a complete and concrete analysis of the two systems it fights with such ferocity. It has yet to define the precise nature of bureaucratic exploitation, just as it has yet to explicitly formulate the characteristics of modern capitalism, the critique of everyday life and the critique of the spectacle. The Revolutionary Communist League is still fundamentally a vanguard political organization, an heir of the best features of the classical proletarian organizations. It is presently the most important revolutionary grouping in the world, and should henceforth be a pole of discussion and a rallying point for the new global revolutionary proletarian critique.^T8

To create at last a situation that goes
beyond the point of no return

“To be avant-garde means to move in step with reality” (Internationale Situationniste #8). The radical critique of the modern world must now have the totality as its object and as its objective. This critique must be brought to bear on the world’s actual past, on its present reality, and on the prospects for transforming it. We cannot grasp the whole truth of the present world, much less formulate the project of its total subversion, unless we are capable of revealing its hidden history, unless we subject the entire history of the international revolutionary movement, initiated over a century ago by the Western proletariat, to a demystified critical scrutiny. “This movement against the whole organization of the old world came to an end long ago” (Internationale Situationniste #7). It failed. Its last historical manifestation was the Spanish proletarian revolution, defeated in Barcelona in May 1937. But its official “failures” and “victories” must be judged in the light of their eventual consequences, and their essential truths must be brought back to light. In this regard we can agree with Karl Liebknecht’s remark, on the eve of his assassination,^T9 that “some defeats are really victories, while some victories are more shameful than any defeat.” Thus the first great “defeat” of proletarian power, the Paris Commune, was in reality its first great victory, in that for the first time the early proletariat demonstrated its historical capacity to organize all aspects of social life freely. Whereas its first great “victory,” the Bolshevik revolution, ultimately turned out to be its most disastrous defeat.

The triumph of the Bolshevik order coincided with the international counterrevolutionary movement that began with the crushing of the Spartakists by German “Social Democracy.” The commonality of the jointly victorious Bolshevism and reformism went deeper than their apparent antagonism, for the Bolshevik order also turned out to be merely a new variation on the old theme, a new guise of the old order. The results of the Russian counterrevolution were, internally, the establishment and development of a new mode of exploitation, bureaucratic state capitalism, and externally, the spread of a “Communist” International whose branches served the sole purpose of defending and reproducing their Russian model. Capitalism, in its bureaucratic and bourgeois variants, won a new lease on life, over the dead bodies of the sailors of Kronstadt, the peasants of the Ukraine, and the workers of Berlin, Kiel, Turin, Shanghai, and finally Barcelona.

The Third International, ostensibly created by the Bolsheviks to counteract the degenerate social-democratic reformism of the Second International and to unite the vanguard of the proletariat in “revolutionary communist parties,” was too closely linked to the interests of its founders to ever bring about a genuine socialist revolution anywhere. In reality the Third International was essentially a continuation of the Second. The Russian model was rapidly imposed on the Western workers’ organizations and their evolutions were thenceforth one and the same. The totalitarian dictatorship of the bureaucracy, the new ruling class, over the Russian proletariat found its echo in the subjection of the great mass of workers in other countries to a stratum of political and labor-union bureaucrats whose interests had become clearly contradictory to those of their rank-and-file constituents. While the Stalinist monster haunted working-class consciousness, capitalism was becoming bureaucratized and overdeveloped, resolving its internal crises and proudly proclaiming this new victory to be permanent. In spite of apparent variations and oppositions, a single social form dominates the world. The principles of the old world continue to govern ourmodern world; the tradition of dead generations still weighs on the minds of the living.

Opposition to this world offered from within it, on its own terrain, by supposedly revolutionary organizations is only an apparent opposition. Such pseudo-opposition, propagating the worst mystifications and invoking more or less rigid ideologies, ultimately helps consolidate the dominant order. The labor unions and political parties forged by the working class as tools for its own emancipation have become mere safety valves, regulating mechanisms of the system, the private property of leaders seeking their own particular emancipation by using them as stepping stones to roles within the ruling class of a society they never dream of calling into question. The party program or union statute may contain vestiges of “revolutionary” phraseology, but their practice is everywhere reformist. (Their reformism, moreover, has become virtually meaningless since capitalism itself has become officially reformist.) Wherever the parties have been able to seize power — in countries more backward than 1917 Russia — they have only reproduced the Stalinist model of totalitarian counterrevolution.⁽¹⁴⁾ Elsewhere, they have become the static and necessary complement⁽¹⁵⁾ to the self-regulation of bureaucratized capitalism, the token opposition indispensable for maintaining its police-humanism. Vis-à-vis the worker masses, they remain the unfailing and unconditional defenders of the bureaucratic counterrevolution and the obedient agents of its foreign policy. Constantly working to perpetuate the universal dictatorship of the economy and the state, they are the bearers of the biggest lie in a world of lies. As the situationists put it, “A universally dominant social system, tending toward totalitarian self-regulation, is only apparently being combatted by false forms of opposition — illusory forms that remain trapped on the system’s own terrain and thus only serve to reinforce it. Bureaucratic pseudosocialism is only the most grandiose of these disguises of the old world of hierarchy and alienated labor.”

As for student unionism, it is nothing but a parody of a farce, a pointless and ridiculous imitation of a long degenerated labor unionism.

The theoretical and practical denunciation of Stalinism in all its forms must be the basic banality of all future revolutionary organizations. It is clear that in France, for example, where economic backwardness has delayed awareness of the crisis, the revolutionary movement can be reborn only over the dead body of Stalinism. Stalinism must be destroyed.^T10That must be the constantly repeated watchword of the last revolution of prehistory.

This revolution must once and for all break with its own prehistory and derive all its poetry from the future. Little groups of “militants” claiming to represent the “authentic Bolshevik heritage” are voices from beyond the grave; in no way do they herald the future. These relics from the great shipwreck of the “revolution betrayed” invariably end up defending the USSR; this is their scandalous betrayal of revolution. They can scarcely maintain their illusions outside the famous underdeveloped countries, where they serve to reinforce theoretical underdevelopment.⁽¹⁶⁾ From Partisans (organ of reconciled Stalino-Trotskyist currents) to all the tendencies and semi-tendencies squabbling over the dead body of Trotsky within and outside the Fourth International, the same revolutionary ideology reigns, with the same theoretical and practical inability to grasp the problems of the modern world. Forty years of counterrevolution separate them from the Revolution. Since this is not 1920, they can only be wrong (and they were already wrong in 1920).

The dissolution of the “ultraleftist” Socialisme ou Barbarie group after its division into two fractions — “Cardanist-modernist” and “traditional Marxist” (Pouvoir Ouvrier) — is proof, if any were needed, that there can be no revolution outside the modern, nor any modern thought outside the reinvention of the revolutionary critique (Internationale Situationniste #9). Any separation between these two aspects inevitably falls back either into the museum of revolutionary prehistory or into the modernism of the system, i.e. into the dominant counterrevolution: Voix Ouvrière or Arguments.

As for the various anarchist groups, they possess nothing beyond a pathetic faith in the ideological label “Anarchy” in which they have pigeonholed themselves. The pitiful Le Monde Libertaire, obviously edited by students, attains the most incredible degree of confusion and stupidity. Since they tolerate each other, they would tolerate anything.

The dominant social system, which flatters itself on its constant modernization, must now be confronted with a worthy opponent: the equally modernized negation that it is itself producing.⁽¹⁷⁾ Let the dead bury the dead. The practical demystifications of the historical movement are exorcizing the phantoms that haunted revolutionary consciousness; the revolution of everyday life is being confronted with the immensity of its tasks. Revolution and the life it announces must both be reinvented. If the revolutionary project remains fundamentally the same — the abolition of class society — this is because the conditions giving rise to that project have nowhere been radically transformed. But this project must be taken up again with a new radicality and coherence, learning from the failure of previous revolutionaries, so that its partial realization will not merely bring about a new division of society.

Since the struggle between the system and the new proletariat can only be in terms of the totality, the future revolutionary movement must abolish anything within itself that tends to reproduce the alienation produced by the commodity system — i.e. the system dominated by commodified labor. It must be a living critique of that system, a negation embodying all the elements necessary for its supersession. As Lukács correctly showed, revolutionary organization is this necessary mediation between theory and practice, between man and history, between the mass of workers and the proletariat constituted as a class. (Lukács’s mistake was to believe that the Bolshevik Party fulfilled this role.)^T11 If they are to be realized in practice, “theoretical” tendencies and differences must immediately be translated into organizational questions. Everything ultimately depends on how the new revolutionary movement resolves the organization question; on whether its organizational forms are consistent with its essential project: the international realization of the absolute power of workers councils as prefigured in the proletarian revolutions of this century. Such an organization must make a radical critique of all the foundations of the society it combats: commodity production; ideology in all its guises; the state; and the separations imposed by the state.

The rock on which the old revolutionary movement foundered was the separation of theory and practice. Only the supreme moments of proletarian struggles overcame this split and discovered their own truth. No organization has yet bridged this gap. Ideology, no matter how “revolutionary” it may be, always serves the rulers; it is the alarm signal revealing the presence of the enemy fifth column. This is why the critique of ideology must in the final analysis be the central problem of revolutionary organization. Lies are a product of the alienated world; they cannot appear within an organization claiming to bear the social truth without that organization thereby becoming one more lie in a world of lies.

All the positive aspects of the power of workers councils must already be embryonically present in any revolutionary organization aiming at their realization. Such an organization must wage a mortal struggle against the Leninist theory of organization. The 1905 revolution and the Russian workers’ spontaneous self-organization into soviets was already a critique in acts⁽¹⁸⁾ of that baneful theory. But the Bolshevik movement persisted in believing that working-class spontaneity could not go beyond “trade-union consciousness” and was thus incapable of grasping “the totality.” This amounted to decapitating the proletariat so that the Party could put itself at the “head” of the revolution. Contesting the proletariat’s historical capacity to liberate itself, as Lenin did so ruthlessly, means contesting its capacity to totally run the future society. In such a perspective, the slogan “All power to the soviets” meant nothing more than the conquest of the soviets by the Party and the installation of the party state in place of the withering-away “state” of the armed proletariat.

“All power to the soviets” must once again be our slogan, but literally this time, without the Bolshevik ulterior motives. The proletariat can play the game of revolution only if the stakes are the whole world; otherwise it is nothing. The sole form of its power, generalized self-management, cannot be shared with any other power. Because it represents the actual dissolution of all powers, it can tolerate no limitation (geographical or otherwise); any compromises it accepts are immediately transformed into concessions, into surrender. “Self-management must be both the means and the end of the present struggle. It is not only what is at stake in the struggle, but also its adequate form. It is itself the material it works on, and its own presupposition” (“The Class Struggles in Algeria”).

A unitary critique of the world is the guarantee of the coherence and truth of a revolutionary organization. To tolerate the existence of an oppressive system in some particular region (because it presents itself as “revolutionary,” for example) amounts to recognizing the legitimacy of oppression. To tolerate alienation in any one domain of social life amounts to admitting an inevitability of all forms of reification. It is not enough to be for the power of workers councils in the abstract; it is necessary to demonstrate what it means concretely: the suppression of commodity production and therefore of the proletariat. Despite their superficial disparities, all existing societies are governed by the logic of the commodity; it is the basis of their totalitarian self-regulation. Commodity reification is the essential obstacle to total emancipation, to the free construction of life. In the world of commodity production, praxis is not pursued in accordance with autonomously determined aims, but in accordance with the directives of external forces. Economic laws take on the appearance of natural laws; but their power depends solely on the “unawareness of those who participate in them.”

The essence of commodity production is the loss of self in the chaotic and unconscious creation of a world totally beyond the control of its creators. In contrast, the radically revolutionary core of generalized self-management is everyone’s conscious control over the whole of life. The self-management of commodity alienation would only make everyone the programmers of their own survival — squaring the capitalist circle. The task of the workers councils will thus be not the self-management of the existing world, but its unceasing qualitative transformation: the concrete supersession of the commodity (that enormous detour in the history of human self-production).

This supersession naturally implies the abolition of work and its replacement by a new type of free activity, thereby eliminating one of the fundamental splits of modern society: that between an increasingly reified labor and a passively consumed leisure. Presently decomposing groups like Socialisme ou Barbarie or Pouvoir Ouvrier,⁽¹⁹⁾ although adhering to the modern watchword of Workers’ Power, continue to follow the path of the old workers movement in envisioning a reformism of labor through its “humanization.” But work itself must now be attacked. Far from being “utopian,” the abolition of work is the first condition for the effective supersession of commodity society, for the elimination within each person’s life of the separation between “free time” and “work time” — those complementary sectors of alienated life — that is a continual expression of the commodity’s internal contradiction between use-value and exchange-value. Only when this opposition is overcome will people be able to make their vital activity subject to their will and consciousness and see themselves in a world that they themselves have created. The democracy of workers councils is the solution to all the present separations. It makes impossible “everything that exists outside individuals.”

The conscious domination of history by the people who make it — that is what the whole revolutionary project amounts to. Modern history, like all past history, is the product of social praxis, the (unconscious) result of human activities. In the era of totalitarian domination, capitalism has produced its own new religion: the spectacle. The spectacle is the terrestrial realization of ideology. Never has the world been so inverted. “And like the ‘critique of religion’ in Marx’s day, the critique of the spectacle is today the essential precondition of any critique” (Internationale Situationniste #9).

Humanity is historically confronted with the problem of revolution. The increasingly grandiose material and technological means are equalled only by the increasingly profound dissatisfaction of everyone. The bourgeoisie and its Eastern heir, the bureaucracy, are incapable of putting this overdevelopment (which will be the basis of the poetry of the future) to any good use precisely because they both must strive to maintain an old order. The most they can use it for is to reinforce their police control. They can do nothing but accumulate capital, and therefore proletarians — a proletarian being someone who has no power over his life and who knows it. It is the new proletariat’s historical fortune to be the only consequent heir to the valueless riches of the bourgeois world — riches that it must transform and supersede in such a way as to foster the development of fully realized human beings pursuing the total appropriation of nature and of their own nature. This realization of human nature can only mean the unlimited multiplication and full satisfaction of the real desires which the spectacle represses into the darkest corners of the revolutionary unconscious, and which it can realize only fantastically in the dreamlike delirium of its advertising. The true fulfillment of genuine desires — which means the abolition of all the pseudoneeds and pseudodesires that the system manufactures daily in order to perpetuate its own power — cannot take place without the suppression and positive supersession of the commodity spectacle.

Modern history can be liberated, and its innumerable achievements can be freely put to use, only by the forces that it represses: the workers without power over the conditions, the meaning and the products of their own activities. In the nineteenth century the proletariat was already the heir of philosophy;^T12 now it has become the heir of modern art and of the first conscious critique of everyday life. It cannot suppress itself without at the same time realizing art and philosophy. To transform the world and to change life are one and the same thing for the proletariat,^T13 the inseparable passwords to its suppression as a class, the dissolution of the present reign of necessity, and the finally possible accession to the reign of freedom. The radical critique and free reconstruction of all the values and patterns of behavior imposed by alienated reality are its maximum program. Free creativity in the construction of all moments and events of life is the only poetry it can acknowledge, the poetry made by all, the beginning of the revolutionary festival. Proletarian revolutions will be festivals or nothing, for festivity is the very keynote of the life they announce. Play is the ultimate principle of this festival, and the only rules it can recognize are to live without dead time and to enjoy without restraints.^T14

[NOTES IN THE ORIGINAL EDITION]

1. Marc Kravetz, a slick orator well known among the UNEF politicos, made the mistake of venturing into “theoretical research”: in 1964 he published a defense of student unionism in Les Temps Modernes, which he then denounced in the same periodical a year later.

2. It goes without saying that we use the concepts of spectacle, role, etc., in the situationist sense.

3. But without the revolutionary consciousness: the skilled worker did not have the illusion of promotion.

4. We are referring to the culture of Hegel or the Encyclopédistes, not to that of the Sorbonne or the École Normale Supérieure.

5. No longer daring to speak in the name of philistine liberalism, they invoke fantasized freedoms of the universities of the Middle Ages, that epoch of “the democracy of nonfreedom.”

6. See “Correspondence with a Cybernetician” in Internationale Situationniste #9 and the situationist tract La tortue dans la vitrine directed against the neoprofessor A. Moles.

7. See The Sexual Struggle of Youth and The Function of the Orgasm.

8. With the rest of the population, a straitjacket is necessary to force them to appear before the psychiatrist in his fortress asylum. But with students it suffices to let them know that advanced outposts of control have been set up in their ghetto: they rush there in such numbers that they have to wait in line to get in.

9. On the Arguments gang and the disappearance of its journal, see the tract Into the Trashcan of History issued by the Situationist International in 1963.

10. In this regard one cannot too highly recommend the solution already practiced by the most intelligent, which consists of stealing them.

11. The latest adventures of the “Union of Communist Students” and its Christian counterparts demonstrate that all these students are united on one fundamental principle: unconditional submission to hierarchical superiors.

12. In which the partisans of the antibomb movement discovered, made public, and then invaded several ultrasecret fallout shelters reserved for members of the government.

13. One thinks here of the excellent journal Heatwave, which seems to be evolving toward an increasingly rigorous radicality.^T15

14. The parties have striven to industrialize these countries through classic primitive accumulation at the expense of the peasantry, accelerated by bureaucratic terror.

15. For 45 years the French “Communist” Party has not taken a single step toward seizing power. The same is true in all the advanced countries that have not fallen under the heel of the “Red” Army.

16. On their role in Algeria, see The Class Struggles in Algeria (Internationale Situationniste #10).

17. Address to Revolutionaries of Algeria (Internationale Situationniste #10).

18. After the theoretical critique of it by Rosa Luxemburg.^T16

19. In contrast, a group like ICO, by shunning any organization or coherent theory, condemns itself to nonexistence.

[TRANSLATOR’S NOTES]

T1. In some passages of my translations from the SI I have followed the current practice of replacing formerly conventional masculine forms with gender-neutral ones (e.g. changing “man” to “humanity”). In other cases, however, I have retained the original terms in order to avoid a complicated recasting of what are sometimes already rather complex texts. In the present case, much of the incisiveness of the SI’s critique of “the student” would be lost if the text was changed to plural or “his or her” forms.
Note also that “student” in this pamphlet always refers to college students. Grade school and high school students are referred to by different French terms.

T2. “Bourderon and Passedieu”: The actual names of these authors (transposed to make a sarcastic French play on words) are Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron.

T3. Halliday: rock star Johnny Halliday (or Hallyday), a sort of French Elvis, included in this list as an additional insult to the other “celebrities of Unintelligence” (all the rest of whom were prominent academic intellectuals).

T4. For more on the Provos, see “Révolte et récupération en Hollande” (Internationale Situationniste #11, pp. 65-66).

T5. Allusion to the 1964 Free Speech Movement at the University of California in Berkeley. See David Lance Goines’s The Free Speech Movement.

T6. English-language editions of Kuron and Modzelewski’s text have appeared under several different titles: An Open Letter to the Party; A Revolutionary Socialist Manifesto;Revolutionary Marxist Students in Poland Speak Out; and Solidarnosc, the Missing Link.

T7. Allusion to the East Berlin revolt of 1953 and the Polish and Hungarian revolts of 1956.

T8. The SI’s judgment of the Revolutionary Communist League turned out to be mistaken in some respects. The RCL Zengakuren was not “the” Zengakuren, but only one of several rival ones (another was dominated by the Japanese Communist Party, others by various combinations of Trotskyists, Maoists, etc.). In the early sixties the Zengakuren faction that was to form the RCL did indeed have many of the positive features the SI attributed to it: it had a political platform distinctly to the left of Trotskyism, participated militantly in political struggles on many fronts, and seems to have had a fairly experimental approach to organizational and tactical questions. In 1963 it sent some delegates to Europe who met the situationists, and it later translated a few situationist texts into Japanese. At least by 1970, however, when an SI delegate (René Viénet) visited Japan, the RCL had devolved into a largely Leninist position and turned out to be not very different from leftist sects everywhere else.

T9. Karl Liebknecht: one of the few German socialists to oppose World War I. He and Rosa Luxemburg founded the Spartakus League in 1916; they were both killed following the crushing of the Spartakist insurrection in January 1919.

T10. The original text cites the Latin phrase delenda Carthago (“Carthage must be destroyed”) with which the ancient Roman senator Cato the Elder ended all his speeches. The sense is that the destruction of Stalinism must be constantly, and even obsessively, insisted upon until it is carried out.

T11. See the last chapter of Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness.

T12. “Just as philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapons in philosophy. . . . Philosophy cannot be realized without the supersession of the proletariat; the proletariat cannot be superseded without the realization of philosophy” (Marx, “Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”).

T13. “ ‘Transform the world,’ said Marx. ‘Change life,’ said Rimbaud. For us these two commands are one and the same” (André Breton).

T14. The ending is stronger and more scandalous in the original: the French word jouir (“to enjoy”) also means “to come” in the sexual sense.

T15. Heatwave editors Christopher Gray and Charles Radcliffe subsequently joined the SI.
Obsolete addresses of Heatwave, the Zengakuren, and the Japanese RCL (included in the original pamphlet) have been omitted.

T16. See Luxemburg’s “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy” (1904), in which she criticizes Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? (1903).

“De la misère en milieu étudiant” was originally published November 1966 at the expense of the Strasbourg Student Union (see Our Goals and Methods in the Strasbourg Scandal). With the possible exception of The Society of the Spectacle, it is the most widely reproduced situationist text. It has been translated into Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Farsi, Finnish, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and probably several other languages, and its total printing is over half a million.

This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

greek situation

2010-03-08T14:55:00.001+01:00

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Sure, there is lies, damn lies and statistics. But some times opinion poll findings can be interesting. A mainstream Athens Sunday paper published a poll today: 86.9% of participants predict social unrest in the near future (very likely: 48,7%, quite likely: 38,2%). 85.2% estimate that the gap between rich and poor will widen. The Greek society is deeply divided in lines of class as much as political affiliations and this gets reflected even in this poll: 45.6% are positive toward the mobilisations of the country’s two main trade unions (GSEE and ADEDY) while 54.8% say they will not be participating. 50.3% think the decrease in their income gives birth to new class divides.

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chile

2010-03-01T10:10:00.000+01:00

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The nation's hardest-hit major city declared an overnight curfew.

Calling Saturday's early morning 8.8-magnitude quake an "unthinkable disaster," Chilean President Michelle Bachelet said a "state of catastrophe" in the worst-hit regions would continue, allowing for the restoration of order and speedy distribution of aid. The death count doubled on Sunday from a day earlier, to 708 deaths.

Looting broke out in parts of the country, including in hard-hit Concepcion in central coastal Chile, about 70 miles (115 km) from the earthquake's epicenter.

Desperate residents scrounged for water and supplies inside empty and damaged supermarkets. On Sunday morning, authorities used tear gas and water cannons to disperse looters in some areas.

Chilean President-elect Sebastian Pinera, scheduled for a March swearing in, warned Sunday that looting could grow worse with nightfall, calling for more government help in restoring order.

"Tonight we will experience a very, very difficult situation with public order, particularly in the area of Concepcion," Pinera told Radio Bio Bio.

In Concepcion, the capital of the Bio Bio region, there were not enough police in the city to control all those seeking food and supplies from the stores. Some became desperate as supermarkets closed and gasoline was unavailable, CNN Chile reported.

2010-02-25T16:56:00.000+01:00

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. Click the Microsoft Vista Start logo in the bottom left corner of the screen
2. Click All Programs
3. Click Accessories
4. RIGHT-click on Command Prompt
5. Select Run As Administrator
6. In the command window type the following and then hit enter: ipconfig /flushdns
7. You will see the following confirmation:

test

2010-02-25T16:50:00.000+01:00

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gbdfgdfgd

2010-02-25T16:47:00.000+01:00

Image by Matthew Stewart Photographer via Flickr

Write text here...

2010-02-25T15:29:00.001+01:00

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lysts say the crackdown on the military would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.
The army has regarded itself as the guardian of a secular Turkish state, but its power has been eroded in recent years, with Turkey enacting reforms designed to prepare it for entry to the European Union.
Many Turks regard the cases as the latest stage in an ongoing power struggle between Turkey's secular nationalist establishment and the governing AK Party.
Critics believe the Ergenekon and sledgehammer investigations are simply attempts to silence the government's political and military opponents.
The AK Party has its roots in political Islam, and is accused by some nationalists of having secret plans to turn staunchly secular Turkey into an Islamic state.
The government rejects those claims, saying its intention is to modernise Turkey and move it closer to EU membership.
"Transformations may sometimes be painful," Economy Minister Ali Babacan said Wednesday.
"We are trying to make Turkey's democracy first class."

2010-02-25T14:53:00.000+01:00

View Larger Map

Analysts say the crackdown on the military would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.
The army has regarded itself as the guardian of a secular Turkish state, but its power has been eroded in recent years, with Turkey enacting reforms designed to prepare it for entry to the European Union.
Many Turks regard the cases as the latest stage in an ongoing power struggle between Turkey's secular nationalist establishment and the governing AK Party.
Critics believe the Ergenekon and sledgehammer investigations are simply attempts to silence the government's political and military opponents.
The AK Party has its roots in political Islam, and is accused by some nationalists of having secret plans to turn staunchly secular Turkey into an Islamic state.
The government rejects those claims, saying its intention is to modernise Turkey and move it closer to EU membership.
"Transformations may sometimes be painful," Economy Minister Ali Babacan said Wednesday.
"We are trying to make Turkey's democracy first class."

2010-02-25T14:47:00.001+01:00

View Larger Map

Analysts say the crackdown on the military would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.

The army has regarded itself as the guardian of a secular Turkish state, but its power has been eroded in recent years, with Turkey enacting reforms designed to prepare it for entry to the European Union.

Image by IsraelMFA via Flickr

Many Turks regard the cases as the latest stage in an ongoing power struggle between Turkey's secular nationalist establishment and the governing AK Party.

Critics believe the Ergenekon and sledgehammer investigations are simply attempts to silence the government's political and military opponents.

The AK Party has its roots in political Islam, and is accused by some nationalists of having secret plans to turn staunchly secular Turkey into an Islamic state.

The government rejects those claims, saying its intention is to modernise Turkey and move it closer to EU membership.

"Transformations may sometimes be painful," Economy Minister Ali Babacan said Wednesday.

"We are trying to make Turkey's democracy first class."

2010-02-23T16:02:00.001+01:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

When asked why some apps with adult content had remained intact he said that Apple took into consideration how "well-known" companies were as well as whether they had "previously published material".
ChilliFresh is an Australian company that creates apps for the iPhone, including the recently banned Wobble, which provides pictures of women's breasts.
"I'm now worried the eco-system is run by puritans and is not fair to all players," developer Jon Atherton said on its website.
"And worst of all it is not a secure source of income. It can drop to close to zero if they decide to change the rules," he added.
The firm was making £320 a day out of its apps, a figure which has dropped to £5 since the ban, he said.
"On Friday evening we got an e-mail out of the blue which basically said, thanks very much but we don't want you any more. Apple said it was removing all overtly sexual apps," he told the BBC.
He said that if Apple was serious about protecting young customers it should allow parents to set controls for devices.
He called on Apple to publish its new guidelines so that developers were clear on what they could and could not do as well as to clarify why not all sex-related apps are affected by the ban.
"My view is that this is a knee-jerk reaction. Apple is very controlling. These apps are getting popular but the apps store doesn't have an adult section," he said.
"I'd have thought there was a technological way of fixing the problem rather than pulling the rug out from under people's feet," he added.

links work ok

2010-02-22T17:18:00.000+01:00

Image by danbri via Flickr

One might object to the above mentioned analogy of astrology, that it is impertinent to abstractly attribute a methodological requirement to a diverse field of enterprises, which we for reasons of convenience put under the category of “sciences”, but which in reality do not share one fixed set of methodological rules. Doesn’t today’s compartmentalization of universities into natural sciences, social sciences and humanities suggest that the term science refers to absolutely distinct enterprises, not to talk about the methodological distinctions within each discipline? Shouldn’t one rather focus more on the particularity of a certain science with regard to the nature of it’s object of investigation, and then discuss adequate modes of how research in this certain field should be carried out?

class war

2010-02-22T16:11:00.000+01:00

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In the development of Marxist philosophy one can realize a decisive shift with regard to the amount of attention writers have paid to the notion of commodity fetishism. While neomarxist philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century have made abundant efforts to apply the concept to modern Capitalist societies ( 1), more recent commentators, mainly associating themselves with what has been called analytical Marxism, either seem to neglect it totally or deal with it only marginally. While the former regarded the notion of commodity fetishism as pertinent to analyze forms of alienation and reification in late modernist societies as they became more pressing than issues of mass-pauperization, the latter often look at it as an ancillary artifact that is not central to Marx’s overall analysis of political economy. The fact that the label "commodity fetish" has been applied rather generously by various recent studies on a variety of phenomena ranging from Mickey Mouse to rare stamps without paying close attention to the detailed structural analysis Marx himself used to introduce the term into his overall theory might explain why the more analytically oriented philosophers turned there back on it. The central place Marx has reserved for his explicit discussion on commodity fetishism, although the idea is prevalent throughout his writings, at the end of the significant opening chapter of Capital shows at least, that personally he placed enormous importance on its role and connection to the commodity form as such. We know that especially in the first chapter of Capital, Marx spent an enormous amount of time writing and rewriting because he regarded it most important to introduce the basics of his theory in a precise manner. For this reason one should take him seriously and try to make sense of these sections. In this paper I want to show why his analysis of the commodity fetish is extremely important not just in understanding the commodity form but also to get a grasp of what the structural components that enable its persistence are. In doing so I will argue in favor of an interpretation that looks at fetishism as, in an important sense, a real phenomenon. In order to do so it is essential to throw some light on Marx’s notion of "false consciousness".

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2010-02-22T15:54:00.000+01:00

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The White House is to release details of the plan on its website later on Monday.
Bitter debate
The Democrats' loss of a Senate seat in Massachusetts to Republican Scott Brown in January deprived them of their filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate, although they still control both houses.
Thursday's debate is seen as a key moment in Mr Obama's bid to pass new legislation, and comes after months of often bitterly-contested congressional debates.
Mr Obama referred to the talks in his weekly radio address on Saturday, saying: "I don't want to see this meeting turn into political theatre, with each side simply reciting talking points and trying to score political points.
"Instead, I ask members of both parties to seek common ground in an effort to solve a problem that's been with us for generations."
The House of Representatives and the Senate adopted different versions of the bill at the end of last year, and they must now be combined into a single bill Mr Obama can sign into law.
Mr Obama says reform of the healthcare system is crucial for the US economy to rein in costs over the long term.

Countless Rooftops.

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To make shame more shameful still
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practice must seek its theory

To create at last a situation that goes
beyond the point of no return