Snorkmaiden

ungreatfuldead:

The eyes of Marines before, during & after Afghanistan. Photographed by Dutch photographer Claire Felicie. 

This honestly may be one of my favorite posts on Tumblr.

Helmet and two ankle guards. Greek, Apulo-Corinthian, early 4th century B.C.

The etched decorations on this helm depict various scenes of death and funerals - sphinxes guarding tombs; satyres reclining beside a cup. These pieces probably were part of a trove of burial offerings placed in the tomb of a warrior from southern Italy.

Courtesy & currently located at the J. Paul Getty Museum, California, USA. Photo taken by Taifighta.

In the spirit of questioning ethics or at least making a “half-arsed” attempt to probe and point the finger, I’ve got a bit of a Freaky Friday oddity on my hand.  Whilst browsing around the weird and wonderful wares of Harajuku’s Dog, I came across the name Tony Alamo.  Oooh, spray painted and diamante-encrusted denim jackets in a sort of theme-y Nudie Cohn vein.  A quick search on Etsy and eBay yields more examples of “The Tony Alamo of Nashville – For Designers for the Stars” – mostly denim jackets, intricately spray-painted and adorned with crystals.  They’re the sort of eighties   On Google though, the name Tony Alamo yields something far more alarming.  Forgive me on the count of ignorance on religious cult leader convictions in the U.S.A. but it turns out Alamo’s is prominent for being convicted for multiple counts of rape and sexual assault of minors, abusing his position as founder of the cult Tony Alamo Christian Ministries.  Alamo’s business of “Tony Alamo” branded sequinned denim jackets, later called “Tony Alamo of Nashville” was a surprising sideline to him and his wife Susan’s syndicated TV sermons – it adds a whole new spin to the word “cult”, when we used lightly in the context of fashion.  Eventually, the business was convicted for federal tax evasion in 1994 and of course, later Alamo’s other atrocities came to light and he is now currently serving out a life long prison sentence.  A fascinating article on the LA Times written in 1989 when Alamo was already on the run from arrest for felony-child abuse.  At one point, total sales of Tony Alamo jackets were anything from $500,000 to $1 million.  Whilst on the run, he took the time to be interviewed to say that he would send in sketches from his hide-outs, faxing them through – “Everything I do is a work of art.”  Interestingly, even as the charges against him were surfacing in the public, the stores still bought into them, apparently unable to resist their allure and their celebrity-endorsed cachet (Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson and Dolly Parton were Alamo fans), with only a handful of stockists pulling out.

It’s a sordid tale with a strange after trail of vintage specimens, that have since graced the likes of Nicky Minaj and Miley Cyrus, who in December last year was spotted wearing a Tony Alamo ensemble with Beverly Hills emblazoned across the back.  It’s unlikely Cyrus was aware of the origins of her spangled denim but it’s also hard to say whether the association would make it less or more appealing for her.  Weirdly, nobody else seems to care.  According to Miami legendary vintage store C. Madeleine, you can Shop This Look without any mention of Alamao’s past, and that there’s even a collectible value attached to Alamo’s pieces, because of his imprisonment.  The moral question behind even considering Alamo’s pieces as a fashion choice has one clear answer.  Especially when you read the slightly ludicrous statements like this, as seen on this fashion blog “You may find yourself asking, who is Tony Alamo anyway? Well on top of being a cult leader and a maker of awesome jackets, he is also a child sex offender! Neat-o!”  Neat-o wouldn’t be my first word of choice, but hey-ho, guess a convicted child sex offender and rapist isn’t exactly a shocking exception in a world when seemingly, entertainers offending in plain sight, are all coming out of the woodwork.

But why bother dwelling on this random defunct fashion line, you might ask?  Fashion has a long history of aligning itself with the debauched and the morally questionable.  A figure like Tony Alamo might well find itself on to a moodboard as a offbeat reference point.  It’s an industry that also unconditionally protects people like Terry Richardson (although it has to be said in the eyes of the law, he hasn’t committed a crime).  Only a handful have challenged this status quo, best summed up by this Hadley Freeman article.  She’s right – creepiness shouldn’t be confused with edginess even when the lines are increasingly blurred.  That applies to seemingly harmless ironic/cool/retro denim jackets.

Kyle McLoughlin and Maximilian Forte

“Just as our vision of homeland security has evolved as we have made progress in the War on Terror, we also have learned from the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina….We have applied the lessons of Katrina to this Strategy to make sure that America is safer, stronger, and better prepared. To best protect the American people, homeland security must be a responsibility shared across our entire Nation. As we further develop a national culture of preparedness, our local, Tribal, State, and Federal governments, faith-based and community organizations, and businesses must be partners in securing the Homeland. This Strategy also calls on each of you….Many of the threats we face…also demand multinational effort and cooperation. To this end, we have strengthened our homeland security through foreign partnerships, and we are committed to expanding and increasing our layers of defense, which extend well beyond our borders, by seeking further cooperation with our international partners. As we secure the Homeland, however, we cannot simply rely on defensive approaches and well-planned response and recovery measures. We recognize that our efforts also must involve offense at home and abroad”. (George W. Bush, preface to Homeland Security Council, 2007).

Before we get into an overview of this book, we should provide you with some of the basic information about the book, and how to obtain a copy. Following that, we have a brief introductory overview of the contents and significance of this volume.

About the Book

Emergency as Security: Liberal Empire at Home and Abroad (Montreal: Alert Press, 2013), is the newly released third volume in the New Imperialism series emerging from the seminar at Concordia University. The published chapters consist of a selection of some of the best work produced by advanced undergraduate researchers in the seminar, and this is likely our best volume to date. Chapters in this volume offer some profound theoretical and analytical insights into the history and complexity of contemporary imperialism, as well as developing a useful conceptual vocabulary for analyzing the imperial landscape.

This volume’s scope ranges from description and analysis of the historical context of the first “new imperialism,” that of Britain in the late 1880s, along with theorizing the normative, psychological, and socio-economic transformations of neoliberal imperialism and U.S. exceptionalism. Also included are the gender dynamics of militarism; analysis of the “men of the frontier” syndrome; the relationships between paternalism, effeminization, and imperialism; and, even the beginnings of an ambiguous queering of empire. Furthermore, the links between imperialism, ecology, and environmentalism, and the unequal environmental exchange of the contemporary world system, also come into focus. Retrospective analysis of the watershed events surrounding Hurricane Katrina in 2005 raises not only the specter of “humanitarian intervention” (still primarily other- and outward-oriented), but also the rise of the nonprofit-industrial complex. Chapters on the military-industrial complex, on the other hand, address the domestication of militarization in policing and surveillance, the militarization of entertainment media, and the militarization of anthropology. Finally, we consider guidelines for an anti-imperial anthropology.

The contributors to this volume are: Philip Capozzi, Max Forte, Élie Jalbert, Kyle McLoughlin, Nathaniel Millington, Angela Noel, Nicole Pas, Gretchen Smith, Julian Stasky, and H. Jordane Struck.

To Obtain Copies

Hard Cover ISBN 978-0-9868021-1-9
Paperback ISBN 978-0-9868021-3-3

Ebook (free)

Alternate Ebook with bookmarks (free)

Individual Chapter Files (free)

Introduction: Emergency as Security

The individual works in this volume of the New Imperialism are meant to contribute to a critical anthropology and sociology of security in the neoliberal context. Daniel Goldstein (2010) argues that the post 9/11 world has entered a new phase of global history characterized by the “security moment,” a state in which interactions at both international and local contexts are fundamentally influenced by concerns over individual and national security. That is to say anxieties over attack, disaster, and physical violence have become essential factors in political regulation, commercial interest, and public interaction. Perhaps no more emblematic of these concerns is the American led “war on terror,” about which George W. Bush stated during his address to the special joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, that,

“freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depends on us. Our nation, this generation, will lift the dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter and we will not fail”. (Bush, 2001)

Waged in the name of domestic and international security, the “war on terror” provides, in part, a contemporary definition of security as a social construct. Security concerns physical bodies, feelings of terror or of threat, and the destruction of property or interruption of commerce. Absent are additional understandings of security concerning stability of food sources as in food security to combat malnutrition or starvation, access to health care, or ensuring that everyone has full employment under the banner of job security (Goldstein, 2010, p. 491).

The war on terror and the aftermath of 9/11 cemented a new cultural understanding of security, the foundation of which is built upon a neoliberal capitalist ideology of individualized risk management and privatized response in conjunction with the retreat of societal safety nets and the privatization of the environment. However, Goldstein adds an important dimension to this: security understood in the narrow sense above, “is a characteristic of a neoliberalism that predates the events of 9/11” (2010, p. 487).

While there is always a risk of producing overdetermined accounts that also leave little room for the agency of the so-called powerless, it can be useful to think of neoliberalism as a globalized bundling of diverse concepts and concerns. These have a profound effect on how security is conceived and practiced in the contemporary period. It is a globalized bundle that includes,

“the dissemination of a universal culture (consumerist), enemy (terror), political system (procedural democracy), mode of hyperconsumption (transnational corporate power, global economy), development aid (substantial U.S. influence over the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization), and environmental security factors (ozone depletion, global warming), among several others”. (Astrada, 2010, p. 5)

The neoliberal context holds security to be that of stability of the market and the guarantee of unobtrusive state structures to economic development (for more on the relationship between neo-liberalism and the new imperialism, see Jalbert’s chapter in this volume). In effect, this model demands that a country be sufficiently prepared to deal with the turmoil produced by liberalization, in essence privatization and deregulation of the economy and the erosion of any kind of social safety net. States attracted/attractive to transnational capital then become increasingly aggressive in their enforcement of social stability. Too much trouble from popular movements could mean the flight of investment or additional market instabilities. As Goldstein puts it,

“‘Security’ calls on the power of fear to fill the ruptures that the crises and contradictions of neoliberalism have engendered and so functions as a principal tool of state formation and governmentality in the world today, albeit one that is constantly challenged and negotiated by a range of local actors and state subjects”. (Goldstein, 2010, p. 487)

As grassroots demand grows for state intervention for the protection and fulfillment of a more popular will, a fundamental contradiction emerges. The demands of the people represent a spirit the liberal democratic state is theoretically beholden to, yet at the same time the structures and individuals that comprise the state thrive on systems of unequal accumulation perpetuated through capitalism. When the disparity between the promises of the economic system and the reality grows, social movements or popular struggles begin to form in response, thus representing inherent insecurity in the continued accumulation of property and wealth (Harvey, 2005). Such contradictions, when amounting to crisis, plainly reveal the state’s true loyalties to financial or ideological interests as popular movements can quickly find themselves labelled as threats to national security (as discussed in McLoughlin’s chapter in this volume).

Goldstein, following Sawyer, thus notes what he calls a “key irony of neoliberalism” which lies,

“in the contradiction between its rhetoric—which depicts the state as a minor player in the open field of free capitalist activity—and its reality—in which the state operates as manager, actuary, and cop, maintaining this open field for transnational business by creating laws, enforcing policy reforms, and controlling dissent among citizens whose own economic interests run counter to those of industry and whose social rights impose unwanted and expensive restrictions on transnational industry”. (Goldstein, 2010, p. 494)

This understanding of the neoliberal context for security is increasingly relevant as more crises arise exposing the fundamental contradiction between the declared loyalties of state structures to their citizens and those states’ clear collaboration with transnational capitalist interests to continue to prosper at the expense of those same citizens, many if not most of whom are already marginalized by the reigning socio-economic system.

As identified by both Jalbert and Noel in this volume, neoliberal securitization “responsibilizes” citizens for their own security, even as state security infrastructures become bloated to hitherto unimaginable proportions. Some thus highlight this process through an analysis of the National Strategy for Homeland Security published under President George W. Bush in which “the state assumes for itself a ‘supportive’ role in administering security” (Goldstein, 2010, p. 492), while “making each of us ‘accountable’ for and accountants of our own security, calculating the many forms of risk and exposure” (Hay & Andrejevic, 2006, p. 337).

Instead of attending to what some call “human security” (with rights to employment, health care, education—see Goldstein [2010, p. 491]) the neoliberal state, especially as led by the dominating example/model of the U.S., pushes an “absolute security agenda”. This absolute security agenda is simply an inflated version of traditionalist concepts of security in the West, as in defence against the threat of external attacks. As Marvin Astrada explains, the absolute security agenda consists of: 1) hypermilitarization; 2) intimidation; 3) coercion; 4) criminalization; 5) panoptic surveillance; 6) plenary security measures; and, 7) unabashed interference in the domestic affairs of select states (Astrada, 2010, p. 3). This compounds the challenges mounted on societies undergoing neoliberal transformation outside of the U.S., in seeing their states increasingly working on behalf of private corporate interests, plus serving as instruments of U.S. power: “the U.S. ASA rests on the notion that the international system of states is an extension or an instrument of U.S. power rather than a system and/or society of states comprised of functionally sovereign entities” (Astrada, 2010, p. 3).

In the maintenance of daily needs such as work, housing, and food, the state withdraws. This fundamental lack of basic, “human security” exposes countless communities to the structural violence of poverty and environmental racism. Non-governmental organizations have sought to mitigate some of this disaster by shouldering the various needs that used to be under the purview of national government including vaccinations, food support, and emergency relief. In becoming akin to private, parastatal organizations, NGOs have been presented with multiple crises on which they build themselves further as prostheses of a state-in-absentia. This has caused some to characterize the formation of a new NGO-Industrial Complex where work by charity and aid organizations sometimes resembles profiteering (see Noel, this volume). Lucrative public funds for disaster relief feed the coffers of seemingly countless NGOs which in turn can exacerbate the human suffering of a crisis by providing the illusion of an effective response while in fact doing little to mitigate the suffering of others.

With these circumstances in mind and this all too brief exploration of some of the key factors in the neoliberal relationship to security, contributors to this volume explore the relationship of these concerns to some aspects of anthropological and sociological thought. Unique to this series of volumes, apart from the presentation of more theoretical works than in previous volumes, are the diverse refractions of imperialism considered by the contributors. These include contributions on the gendering of imperialism, as well as environmental or eco-imperialism. Others range from the military-industrial complex, to the nonprofit-industrial complex, to the militarization of media and entertainment, and the militarization of anthropology. The domestication, or re-domestication of the ideologies and technologies of imperialism also concerned more than one author in this collection.

Works Cited Above

Astrada, M. (2010). American Power after 9/11. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bush, G. W. (2001). Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, September 20. Washington, DC: The White House, Office of the Press Secretary.
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html

Goldstein, D. (2010). Toward a Critical Anthropology of Security. Current Anthropology, 51(4), 487-517.

Harvey, D. (2005). The New Imperialism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Hay, J., & Andrejevic, M. (2006). Introduction: Toward an Analytic of Governmental Experiments in These Times: Homeland Security as the New Social Security. Cultural Studies, 20(4-5), 331-348.

Homeland Security Council. (2007). National Strategy for Homeland Security. Washington, DC: Homeland Security Council.

Filed under: ANTHROPOLOGY, ANTI-IMPERIALISM, BOOK REVIEWS, IMPERIALISM Tagged: CAPITALISM, feminism, homeland security, HTS, Human Terrain System, Hurricane Katrina, militarization, neoliberalism, new imperialism, securitization, security, surveillance

Petroglyph Point, within the Lava Beds National Monument, California, USA. The rock art of the monument is located in the traditional territory of the Modoc people and their ancestors or predecessors.

With over 5,000 individual carvings, the Lava Beds National Monument contains one of the most extensive representations of American Indian rock art in California. Unlike the majority of cave art in the West, the petroglyphs of the site appear to be dominated by geometric patterns instead of depictions of animals and people. Interestingly, similar patterns have been found on household items up to 5,000 years old from nearby Nightfire Island. Could these have been created by the same people? 

Determining the age of rock art is difficult, particularly with petroglyphs, as material is removed in their creation, not added -although it is currently thought that some of these images made at the site are at least 6,000 years old. Majority of the Lava Beds pictographs are located near the cave entrances.

So what exactly do these petroglyphs mean? I’m personally no expert on American Indian rock art, but here’s what the NPS have to say on the subject:

Unfortunately, historic events in this area have made gathering information difficult. Before the Modoc War caused tribal fracturing and the removal of the Lava Beds’ band of Modocs to Oklahoma, no ethnographic study was ever done with Modoc peoples to record their stories about images they may have been familiar with or their beliefs about images left behind by even earlier peoples. Today, it is probable that some knowledge surrounding the rock imagery of the lava beds is not shared with those on the outside.

Still, many visitors to rock art sites come away feeling they are very special places, places that perhaps even reach across time and culture to speak to universal human experiences. Petroglyph Point is the center of a Modoc creation story, while other sites with pictographs hold traditional significance for some modern Modoc and Klamath people. Were only individuals holding important positions in the tribe permitted to create rock art at some places on certain occasions? Were other images created in association with special activities to mark important points in a a person’s life? Though each observer can imagine in his or her own mind what circumstances and meaning might have led to the creation of each image, only each original artist, long gone, knows for sure.

Photos courtesy & taken by Walter Parenteau. When writing up this post the National Park Service website was of great use.

[video] [h/t: cineraria]

In this series, I explore some of the practicalities of living in a van in the United States. For context, I am relatively privileged: white, perceived as male, raised middle class, able-bodied, in good physical shape. My advice may or may not be useful for others in my or similar situations.

So… I live in my van. I have for 3-4 years now.

Here’s where you say “Oh! Is it…. ‘down by the river!’”

Which is really a very clever reference to Saturday Night Live and definitely something I’ve never heard before. You’re very original. Congratulations.

Yes, I live in a way that is both unconventional and somewhat cliche. I’m comfortable with this.

Why Live In A Van

For me, van life is actually a step up in terms of stability and longterm access to resources. I’ve spent at least five or six years living out of one backpack or another. I’ve been nomadic more or less my entire adult life. So when I think about the advantages of living in a van, I’m likely thinking about it from the opposite point of view as others do.

• I live in a van because it offers me a sense of home. I have my own bed. You should see the look on people’s faces when I explain I’d rather sleep in my van than on their couch. It’s as though I’ve told them I’d rather sleep in brambles than in a hotel. But I like having my bed and my home.
• It offers me a sense of freedom. I know that at any point, if I needed to, I could leave almost any situation: just get in my van and go.
• It gives me a place to keep my stuff. I’ve got a million semi-professional hobbies, and by living in a van I can keep bins and boxes and bags of tools and supplies and equipment.
• I live in a van because I like to wander. I like forests and I like cities and I’d hate to have to pick between the two. I also tour a lot, usually as a writer, and a van is obviously quite good for such things.
• I live in a van because it’s awesome.

What’s Crappy About It

• Sometimes people break into your van and you’re stuck replacing the window and/or whatever was stolen. Also, very few people steal houses. (Banks do, though.) Also, getting your house towed is awful and stressful. You’ll never take parking lightly again.
• I can’t stand up in my van—some people can, I can’t. I also have a harder time curbing my wanderlust when getting from place to place is just so easy and convenient.
• There’s social stigma, which I feel more and more as I get older, but honestly I don’t really care. I’ve been a weirdo my whole life. Now I’m a guy named Magpie who lives in a van and wears women’s clothes. Whatever.
• It’s probably dangerous. But honestly, I apparently drive as many miles as the average american (15-30k a year), so maybe I’m not increasing my risk of dying in an accident at all. I do spend too much of my time sitting though, what with all the driving.
• It’s an anchor. If I want to leave the country or even just fly somewhere for awhile, I have to find somewhere to park my van and ideally someone to let the engine turn over once a week.
• It keeps me from getting a normal-people job. I’m not sure whether this goes here or the “Why Live In A Van” section.
• It’s a money pit. I throw almost all my money into my van, and then when I run out of money, I run out of van until I get more money to throw into the money pit. But then again, other people do this with their houses, so whatever.

Other Van Life posts

• Van Life: Green Remodeling: Planning
• Van Life: Weather
• Van Life: Money
• Van Life: Introduction

“She looked around the classroom. Twenty faces with the personalities of cheese and dial tones.”
—Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

toloveviceforitself:

kettugasm:

Large sharks off Western Australia are now doing their part to keep surfers and swimmers safe–by sending tweets warning of their presence.

Scientists have fitted 320 sharks, many of them great whites, with transmitters that automatically issue warnings to the Surf Life Saving Western Australia’s Twitter feed when the tagged sharks approach within a kilometer of the coast’s popular beaches.

[full article here]

Holy shit I can be twitter friends with a shark I love the future. 

Sad anniversary today, but also a celebration of life. Love you and miss you, Dad.

Look, Japan, I get it, OK? You’re a strange country. You don’t have to keep proving it to me. I know all about your jam bands who dress like giant shrimp and creepy singing robots and game shows where you have to play a harmonica inside a dead fish’s mouth. So you can relax already. You got this weird shit on lock.

But no…every time I open my inbox, I’m greeted with more “what the fuck is going on?” moments from the Land of the Rising Sun. The latest is a band called Babymetal that is, in fact, made up of babies who sing metal. Well, OK, they’re not babies; I think the oldest one is like 14 or something. But the point is, they’re sweet little Japanese schoolgirls who should probably not be allowed to watch any Dir En Grey videos for at least another four years…and yet, they kinda sound like Dir En Grey. Japan strikes again!

Apparently Babymetal is the metal-themed spinoff of another kiddie J-pop group called Sakura Gakuin. They call their music “kawaii metal,” which sounds like metal for surfers but actually translates to “cute metal,” which actually sums this stuff up pretty well. There are definite elements of pop and EDM and even the occasional hip-hop and dubstep…but it all comes back to the double kick drums and drop-D guitar riffs, which are played by a scary-looking masked backing band while the girls dance around in their Hot Topic finery. Never before has the devil’s music been this adorable.

Do I even need to tell you that this shit is huge in Japan? Here’s a link (embedding disabled…fuckers) to a video of them playing a song called “Headbanger!!” for approximately one zillion people at the Inazuma Rock Festival this past September. I believe this is part of a DVD they released last month called Babymetal Apocalypse, which I guess if you’re a metal purist is probably the most accurately named concert DVD of all time. Personally I can’t get enough of this shit, though. It’s like watching a Metallica show inside a Hello Kitty store.

I’ll leave you with one last video because it’s awesome. Spoiler alert: Her microphone houses a tiny samurai sword. In your face, Marilyn Manson!

Links:

• Babymetal official site (English and Japanese)
• Babymetal on Facebook
• Babymetal’s YouTube Channel
• Sakura Gakuin official site (Japanese)
• Babymetal catalog on Amazon.com

headwrapandcamera:

simchiller:

they outlawed this move just because she was the only woman who could do it. 

Surya Bonaly was infamous for (among other things) doing aone blade backflip in the 1998 Olympics, and is the ONLY figure skater who’s ever pulled that off. Not just the only woman, the only figure skater PERIOD. There’s like all ofthree Olympic-class male skaters who did backflips in their routines, and NONE of them could do it one blade.

But wait, there’s more.

Backflips were banned from the 1976 Olympics onward on the official justification that skating jumps are supposed to be landed on one blade, whereas backflips are landed on both blades. The unofficial justification was it was too dangerous, both to the athlete and to the rink — if you didn’t land it perfectly, you could not only break your ankle, but also punch THROUGH the ice surface.

Surya Bonaly was openly contemptuous of the figure skating judges, because they were a bunch of openly racist white men who always screwed her over by giving her lower scores than she deserved. That one-blade backflip was her ultimate FUCK YOU! to the Olympics judges, because she took an “illegal” backflip and made it legal by landing it on one blade. Pretty much DARING them to mark her down for being epic awesome and pulling a move that their precious coddled white girls didn’t have the guts to even think about.

They did, of course. White racism knows no bounds. But she utterly owned them with that move.

not only did she do a fucking backflip and land, she landed then went right into a triple loop. like holy fuck

Go SISTAH!! *raised fist*

new video babes!  in this episode I talk about how

✔society reduces women to things to have sex with
✔it’s so common it feels normal 
✔sexual objectification directly contributes to rape culture

(New Sex+: SEX OBJECT BS)

Moncler Gamme Bleu Fall 2014 Menswear Collection

 

 

 

 

 

[Photo Credit: IMAXtree]

Probably an urban legend.  But it sounded plausible when I listed to last week's podcast of episode 484 ("Dopplegangers") of This American Life (transcript here).

The story started in the classic way, with an email from a stranger. Calhoun heard it from a fan of This American Life who wrote in to say that she had heard it from a guy who worked in pork production. When Calhoun followed up, the farmer told him that he'd learned about faux mollusk from a guy he knows who manages a meat-processing plant. That manager, for his part, told Calhoun that he was 95 percent sure the claim was true, though he admitted that he'd never seen the fakes himself—he only knew of them from the people that he worked for at the plant. And while no one at the plant had ever seen a rectum packaged as a squid, employees there confirmed that they had heard the story, too.

There were no eyewitnesses at all, in fact, and all the other evidence was circumstantial: A recent activist report found signs of modest seafood fraud—one kind of fish mislabeled as another—and a taste test showed that switching rectums for calamari might indeed go undetected. Calhoun did not try to hide the weakness of his case: "Just to repeat one last time," he said at the close of his radio script, "I have no proof that anyone, anywhere, has ever tried to pass off pork bung as calamari in a restaurant … " 

If you want something to get upset about, turn your attention instead to real seafood fraud.

 Photo credit.

Toller Artikel auf Slate über die Geschichte des Whoa! und seine Mutation ins Woah!

“Whoa” is hardly a new word; it dates back to at least the early 17th century. At that time it was used mostly in shouted form and was intended to garner the attention of someone in the distance. Around the the mid-1800s, people began using “whoa” to halt forward-moving horses, and by the latter half of the 20th century it had morphed into an expression for conveying alarm, surprise, or advanced interest. (Messrs. Bill and Ted solidified the strength of this usage in 1989, Joey Lawrence sealed the deal during the ’90s, and Keanu Reeves reappeared without Bill S. Preston, Esq. to help usher the word into the new millennium via The Matrix.)

Whoa! Woah?! Whoah. – How an old exclamation became the Internet’s most variously spelled word. (via Coudal)

“There is a bird’s
nest inside of
my body,
and I am so sick
of turning myself
into a home
for things that
only know how
to fly away.”

- Y.Z  (via sagmirwo)

130186:

Hu Sheguang Haute Couture S/S 2014

In case you missed it, this week (Jan 13-18, 2014) is Copyright Week. The EFF and partners are using this time, the week leading up the two-year anniversary of the SOPA blackout protests, to talk about the current trends in copyright, and what's at stake.

Read more here, but the real meat is at https://www.eff.org/copyrightweek - each day focuses on a single issue within the world of copyright, and they post resources related to that issue. Here's the topics:

• Transparency
  Copyright policy must be set through a participatory, democratic and transparent process. It should not be decided through back room deals or secret international agreements.
• Building and Defending a Robust Public Domain
  The public domain is our cultural commons and a public trust. Copyright policy should seek to promote, and not diminish, this crucial resource.
• Open Access
  The results of publicly funded research should be made freely available to the public online, to be fully used by anyone, anywhere, anytime.
• You Bought it, You Own It
  Copyright policy should foster the freedom to truly own your stuff: to tinker with it, repair it, reuse it, recycle it, read or watch or launch it on any device, lend it, and then give it away (or re-sell it) when you're done.
• Fair Use Rights
  For copyright to achieve its purpose of encouraging creativity and innovation, it must preserve and promote ample breathing space for unexpected and innovative uses.
• Getting Copyright Right
  A free and open Internet is essential infrastructure, fostering speech, activism, new creativity and new business models for artists, authors, musicians and other creators. It must not be sacrificed in the name of copyright enforcement.

So definitely, check it out - at least with a cursory glance to see what the top issues are.

Also related to copyright, I highly recommend following Alan Wexelblat's Copyfight blog. Alan provides great summaries (and details) of emerging issues and how they actually affect people.

rinattante:

wait

isabelasbooty:

oh no sherlock fandom ur fine totally fine keep on keepin on u do u 

Dinner Dress

late 1870s

The Kyoto Costume Institute

foie:

laughingsquid:

Husky Verbally Refuses to Go Into His Kennel

OH MY GOD

“Girls are trained to say, ‘I wrote this, but it’s probably really stupid.’ Well, no, you wouldn’t write a novel if you thought it was really stupid. Men are much more comfortable going, ‘I wrote this book because I have a unique perspective that the world needs to hear.’ Girls are taught from the age of seven that if you get a compliment, you don’t go, ‘Thank you’, you go, ‘No, you’re insane.’”

- Lena Dunham, in an interview with The Guardian (x)

boiledleather:

The sync for the second gif is really remarkable.

kinkyturtle:

temporarily:

phiremangston:

frozencrafts:

MareShop

Say what you want, but all I see is…dragon scale gloves.

UGH the color gradients on these are TO DIE FOR

TO DIE FOR!

dagny you need to see this