Sophianotloren

If you’re not me and you don’t live in a cave– unaware that World War II has ended– you’ve probably heard the Meghan Trainor song “All about that Bass.” If you have, perhaps you thought yourself, “Well, that’s refreshing and empowering song about ‘people of size’.” Because at first listen, it is. But listen more closely. The appeals to the male gaze are not empowering:

“Boys like a little more booty to hold at night”

“‘Cause I got that boom boom that all the boys chase”

And I don’t like referring to thin women as “skinny bitches.”

“I’m bringing booty back
Go ahead and tell them skinny bitches that”

Nope. I don’t like it. Women who are thinner than I am are not my enemy; they’re just women who are thinner than I am. That’s it. Women of all sizes should band together to fight body-shaming.

So, sorry, Meghan. Your song is super-catchy, but it’s not the empowering anthem you think it is. You squandered the opportunity to do something incredibly positive and joyful. Try to do better next time; I know you can.

That being said, the video is a sweet, funny, candy-colored treat.

In other news, I’ve just discovered the Sia video for “Chandelier.” (I’m barely kidding about that cave thing; I am *so* out of the pop culture loop these days.) Please watch it right away: the sets and cinematography are gorgeous and so is the choreography. This video haunts me.

What songs/videos are in heavy rotation for you these days?

 

 

This fall, an automated “shopper bot” called the “Random Darknet Shopper” purchased ten pills of MDMA from the dark web. The bot was the brainchild of the innovative !Mediengruppe Bitnik art collective, a group that uses “hacking as an artistic strategy” to “recontextualise the familiar,” according to their website.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik favors elaborate, interactive projects that probe our relationship to digital communication or surveillance technologies — previously, they’ve hacked CCTV cameras and replaced their footage with an invitation to play chess — and they told Marina Galperina of FastCoLabs that the shopper bot experiment was designed to explore alternatives to regulated, mainstream channels of online communication. What becomes of identity and interpersonal communication on the dark web, where anonymity is paramount? If we must choose between monitored interactions on the one hand and impersonal exchanges on the other, how can we forge meaningful relationships on the internet? Caught between the web and the dark web, we are left to choose between performance of the self and radical depersonalization.

Random Darknet Shopper was part of The Darknet — From Memes to Onionland. An Exploration, an exhibition that approached these urgent questions from multiple perspectives. The show, which appeared in Kunst Halle St. Gallen in Switzerland and closed last week, also featured a YouTube history of Anonymous and Eva and Franco Mattes’s “Emily’s Video” (2012), which depicts footage of volunteers reacting to a mysterious video. All the pieces in the exhibition hinged on questions of identity and anonymity.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik’s bot explored these issues at the level of economic exchange, taking depersonalization to its limits. Though Random Darknet Shopper was stripped of anything resembling human identity, it was able to participate without difficulty in the electronic marketplace on the dark web. The bot used its weekly budget of $100 bitcoin to make random purchases. In addition to the MDMA, it also ordered Lord of the Rings e-books, sneakers, and a Platinum Visa card.

In a recent article in the London Review of Books, Andrew O’Hanagan wrote about a similar experiment, in which he created a virtual life for a man who had died. Like the virtually resurrected subject of O’Hanagan’s article, Random Darknet Shopper is non-living proof that digital artifacts can take on the roles we typically reserve for humans. Our Twitter followers or Amazon accounts won’t notice the absence of a feeling, phenomenological self as long as our avatars continue performing their functions.

Philosopher David Chalmers is famed for a thought experiment that tests the boundaries of consciousness: he originated the notion of the philosophical zombie, a monster who resembles us in every way but lacks phenomenological experience. Although philosophical zombies are externally indistinguishable from humans with conscious experience, performing all of the same sorts of actions, they are not “conscious” in the way we typically use the word. As !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s bot demonstrates, the philosophical zombie apocalypse is upon us as digital identities proliferate.

sixpenceee:

The Skeleton located at the Norwich Cathedral. This is dedicated to Thomas Gooding. He asked to be buried standing upright to ease his step into the next world. 

When I’m in a happy state of mind, I often am in Los Angeles, recently you know those Fantasy Tour vans that go around, I don’t know what they’re looking at, they’re looking at studios and things like that, when I pass them in my car sometimes I roll down the window and point myself out to them. Sometimes they don’t notice me, and I’ll go “OK never mind”, but sometimes they go “Oh ladies and gentleman, to the right we have Jeff Goldblum.”

I like him so much.

cos-tam:

    ‘I am in fact a Hobbit in all but size.’

Happy Birthday J.R.R. Tolkien!

Excerpts from a thought-provoking TomDispatch essay by Ann Jones reposted at Salon:

Americans who live abroad... often face hard questions about our country from people we live among. Europeans, Asians, and Africans ask us to explain everything that baffles them about the increasingly odd and troubling conduct of the United States.  Polite people, normally reluctant to risk offending a guest, complain that America’s trigger-happiness, cutthroat free-marketeering, and “exceptionality” have gone on for too long to be considered just an adolescent phase...

Then recently, I traveled back to the “homeland.”  It struck me there that most Americans have no idea just how strange we now seem to much of the world...

At the absolute top of the list: “Why would anyone oppose national health care?” European and other industrialized countries have had some form of national health care since the 1930s or 1940s, Germany since 1880.  Some versions, as in France and Great Britain, have devolved into two-tier public and private systems.  Yet even the privileged who pay for a faster track would not begrudge their fellow citizens government-funded comprehensive health care...

In Norway, where I live, all citizens also have an equal right to education (state subsidized preschool from age one, and free schools from age six through specialty training or university education and beyond), unemployment benefits, job-placement and paid retraining services, paid parental leave, old age pensions, and more.  These benefits are not merely an emergency “safety net”; that is, charitable payments grudgingly bestowed upon the needy.  They are universal: equally available to all citizens as human rights...

In all the Nordic countries, there is broad general agreement across the political spectrum that only when people’s basic needs are met — when they can cease to worry about their jobs, their incomes, their housing, their transportation, their health care, their kids’ education, and their aging parents — only then can they be free to do as they like...

Other things I’ve had to answer for include:

• Why can’t you Americans stop interfering with women’s health care?
• Why can’t you understand science?
• How can you still be so blind to the reality of climate change?
• How can you speak of the rule of law when your presidents break international laws to make war whenever they want?
• How can you hand over the power to blow up the planet to one lone, ordinary man?
• How can you throw away the Geneva Conventions and your principles to advocate torture?
• Why do you Americans like guns so much?  Why do you kill each other at such a rate?

They’ve watched the United States unravel its flimsy safety net, fail to replace its decaying infrastructure, disempower most of its organized labor, diminish its schools, bring its national legislature to a standstill, and create the greatest degree of economic and social inequality in almost a century. They understand why Americans, who have ever less personal security and next to no social welfare system, are becoming more anxious and fearful...

What baffles so many of them, though, is how ordinary Americans in startling numbers have been persuaded to dislike “big government” and yet support its new representatives, bought and paid for by the rich.

There's more at the link.

Posted for my expat cousin Karl in Barcelona, who undoubtedly has to answer the same questions.

...the Mission, and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant”.  Yes, I finally finished this book and it took ...
Continue reading

I have moved the book review/rant segment over to Experiential Pagan for the New Year.  It should appear every Wednesday there!  This week’s book is the finally completed depressing reading task “American Spartan” by Ann Scott Tyson.  Yes, yes, it left me spitting nails…

The former Major Jim Gant lives in Seattle somewhere with his now wife Ann Tyson.  I admit, book rant aside, I worry about him.  But then, I worry about every veteran of the recent wars (and older ones).  I have three of them (4 if you consider Cold War me) under my roof — but I can’t shelter them all, and America doesn’t seem to give a shit about them.

Well, aside from New Orleans, that is.  That city, so embattled by so much since hurricane Katrina, found the heart and the way to house EVERY homeless veteran.  You know, I don’t give a good damn about how YOU feel about America’s wars.  Men and women are going because of a virtual economic draft — and they come home broken and broke.  They deserve better than life on the streets.  Knowing ALL that is why this week’s reviewed and ranted about book bothered me SO much.

Filed under: Books, War & No Peace Tagged: Afghanistan, war

Regulations being proposed by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) could clip the wings of artists who use drones in their practice. Laws currently on the books with regards to the use of drones (or Unmanned Aircraft Systems) only govern commercial use, but the new rules that will likely be put before Congress for approval in September could curtail artistic uses of drones, The Art Newspaper‘s Rachel Corbett reports.

Artists occupy an ambiguous place vis-à-vis the rules currently governing commercial use of drones, for which a license is required. While artists qualify as recreational drone users who are not subject to the current FAA regulations, if they try to sell works created with the use of a drone — like, for instance, graffiti artist KATSU’s drone paintings — they could in theory be considered commercial users and expected to procure the appropriate licenses and permits. The more stringent rules may seek to reduce such ambiguities. They will also be aimed at curtailing security and privacy risks associated with unmanned aircraft by formalizing the FAA’s best practices for drone use such as “Don’t fly above 400 feet,” “Keep your unmanned aircraft within sight,” and “Please respect the privacy of everyone. No taking pictures of people if they are not expecting it!” The regulations are expected to restrict drone flights to daytime.

“The price of unmanned aircraft has come down, and this newer and more powerful technology is more affordable to more people, yet many are not familiar with the rules of flying,” FAA Administrator Michael P. Huerta said last month. “In previous years, many model aircraft enthusiasts were drawn to the hobby by an interest in aviation and in developing stick and rudder skills and other aviation skills. Today, those enthusiasts are still among us and are using unmanned aircraft, but a large segment of the market for multi-rotor unmanned aircraft is photography enthusiasts.”

While the FAA has struggled to keep pace with the popularization of drones in the US, some cities have introduced municipal laws to ensure they are used safely and respectfully. Last week London’s Metropolitan Police Service issued a warning that the law prohibits citizens from operating drones within 150 meters (492 feet) of “any congested area” and within 50 meters (164 feet) of a building not owned by the drone’s operator, according to the Daily Mail.

In New York City there is no municipal ordinance currently regulating the use of drones, but if the NYPD rules that a particular drone pilot is putting the public risk, it could charge him or her with Reckless Endangerment. The days of lawless drone piloting may be numbered in New York, though. A bill introduced by Councilman Daniel Garodnick (D-Manhattan) would effectively ban flying unmanned aircraft within city limits, and it has caused an uproar in the model airplane community.

marxvx:

the “je suis charlie” marches in paris really just show how positively the media can portray street demonstrations when they want to, and, by comparison, how negatively they have been portraying every left-populist street protest movement of the past four years

Or even in the past.  A lot of social justice protests of the past are portrayed positively now in hindsight, and implied as if it had broad support from the dominant mainstream in the past when that usually wasn’t the case.

There’s something entirely too easy to slam about a “terrorism expert” appearing on Jeanine Pirro’s FOX News program absolutely fudging up a demographic fact like the proportion of Muslim people in Birmingham, UK. The funny old thing is, his particular overestimation of the number of Muslims or immigrants is sort of a weird example of a study done recently regarding the tendency of people to wildly overstate the number of immigrants or Muslims, and understate the number of Christians, in their home nation.

Jeanine Pirro, whose presence on the FOX network utterly obviates the entire concept of “sober as a judge”, devolved into a rant upon the killing of Muslims because they apparently freak her out by existing.  To hear old Jeanine blow it, the 1% of Muslims in the United States have led to the likelihood that the First Amendment will be altered (without congressional ratification?) to somehow not be mean to Muslims, and praying with them is weird and she doesn’t like it. And also—“We need to kill them”.  Nope—listen to it in all its sick glory. She really is hot about genocide.

Now, Steve Emerson is sorry about his comments, and realizes his credibility is in a bit of jeopardy.  Would Jeanine Pirro feel anything like the same thing over her genocidal and ill-informed rant, I wonder? Or even feel that her utter journalistic failure and immoral bigotry against an entire religion sort of disqualifies her from being a judge or you know—a reliable journalist?

Forget it, Jake, it’s FOX Mushroom Farm. She’s doing her real job, don’t you know?

(X-posted at Strangely Blogged.)

thebirdandthebat:

virginiagentlenerd:

GWENDOLINE. 

BRB blushing forever.

onlyblackgirl:

blackfemalejesus:

Only good joke

some them white folks were like “wait, it didn’t work?”

favillus:

incredible 

flowisaconstruct:

digg:

This is what people asked the library before Google. (via)

When I was in college, there was a service called KU info. You called a number and some poor student answered and had to look up answers. The night shift must have sucked beyond belief. “No, sir. None of my references tell me what gravity tastes like.”

kanayahummel:

theperksofbeingdornish:

ohanameansfamily24:

-behindbars:

the-grand-highboob:

thusmylife:

b1ush:

condescendingchristian:

oh my god

As a person from California, this is 100% accurate

As a person from Michigan, this is 100% accurate

As a person from England I was so confused because I forgot you use the Fahrenheit system 

50 degrees in England 

100 degrees in England

 

I don’t know why I found the skeletons so funny, it’s almost like they’re dancing really sarcastically?

they’re british skeletons of course they’re dancing sarcastically. 

lzbth:

swag won’t pay the bills but apparently neither will your degree

lunors:

this account is the realest account ever

blink-182-bashers:

funfrom4chan:

What the fuck do we do now?

take a picture,  thats it. 

there, i fixed it

The city of West Hollywood plans to require gender-neutral restrooms to accommodate individuals' whose gender identity conflicts with their ascribed biological sex.

kurovoid:

circuitbird:

Presented without comment.

The perfect poop.

#gothiccharmschool #I need your opinions on this #and pull Alex in too if he feels like it

I … wha? …

Well, this did provoke the first real laughter I’ve had all day, yay? Even if it was really ugly cackling.

If “health goth” means self-care, learning to love the body you have, and exercise because you like it (or like the results), I’m all for it.

HOWEVER, if “health goth” means looking the “right” way while wearing specific brands of black exercise gear, and making dismissive comments about different body types, then I will raise an eyebrow and look very, very disappointed in everyone. 

This piece is adapted from a December 17th speech the author gave this year. “You’re so lazy, you’ll never be anything but a whore. And you won’t even be a good whore because nobody wants to fuck a girl with a book in front of her face.” When I was about twelve, as I lay […]

Seriously, all the Republicans pretend angry at Obama for not going to march in France and are pretend supportive of the French in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks, go eat out the assholes of porcupines, you ludicrous fucks. First of all, you don't give a jolly rat shit about France. It's just an occasion to slam Muslims and show that you love Israel so much that even Israel says, "Whoa, back the fuck off. You're smothering me."

And how the fuck does the Rude Pundit know this is just a fuckin' joke, a little bit of political slap and tickle? Because Newt Gingrich had the fuckin' balls to call Barack Obama not going to France "cowardice." And then, in a smarmy little Facebook Q&A, Gingrich said, "France has not always been with us but they were decisively with us after 9/11 and we have been allies a long time. It is no accident that one of the two portraits in the united states house of representatives is a Frenchman, the marquess de Lafayette, the other is President Washington. That is how much we owed the French for helping us win our independence." (Sic all the errors - Gingrich apparently can't tell a Marquis from a Marquess, which explains a lot.)

This would be the same Newt Gingrich who, way back in 2012, in an accordion-scored ad titled, "The French Connection," found the link between Mitt Romney and John Kerry: Motherfuckers both speak French, like little bitches:


The Republicans drove John Kerry insane, an insanity that lasts to this day, with all the insinuations and accusations about his manhood and France or about his liberalism and eeevil French socialism. Or maybe that he's a snooty stereotype of a waiter or a cartoon skunk or something. Honestly, the Rude Pundit could never figure out why one would hate someone for having a connection to France once we got past the whole "Freedom Fries" bullshit just because France said, correctly, "Um, yeah, your Iraq War is fucking dumb." It was just a piece with the Great Stupiding of Our Nation at the hands of idiot Republicans and cowardly Democrats.

If Obama had gone to Paris, all the right-wing media would have talked about would have been if he had "disgraced" the nation by talking to the Palestinian president or by not rubbing Bibi's balls enough. Fox "news" dimwits and bullshit artists would have torn apart how he stood, who he stood next to, whose hands he shook, whether he gave too much love to Muslims, whether he did or didn't say anything about the murdered Jews, whether his clothes were proper enough, and it would have ended with them attacking him for going.

It was a fucking trap, either way, because the compulsive masturbators of the right would have been jacking it in one direction or another.

The other thing that's galling about this whole "debate"? It makes the tragedy there about us and our own derangement, like a bunch of selfish assholes.

(Note: Obama should have sent Biden, though. Just sayin'.)

Incarceration in the United States is often isolated and invisible. Data artist Josh Begley has created an online Prison Map that catalogues aerial photographs of prisons, jails, and other American detention centers to give the architecture of the growing prison population a tangibility and scale.

Last week, Pete Brook featured the project at Wired, writing:

Since 1980, the US prison population has exploded from fewer than 500,000 to more than 2.2 million. That’s prompted a prison building boom, mostly in rural America. As a consequence, many of these facilities are located in small towns, deserts, and remote corners of states with lots of space. They’re out of sight, and out of mind. Prison Map reveals this vast hidden infrastructure.

Prison Map will be part of Prison Obscura at Parsons next month, an exhibition curated by Brook, himself the editor of the website Prison Photography. Focused on the unseen world of prisons, the show has previously been on view at Haverford and Scripps Colleges.

Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post reported this month that 2.3 million prisoners were incarcerated in the US, according to the 2010 census, but we “tend to focus less on where we’re putting all those people.” Begley used a coded script run through the Google Maps API based on coordinates from the Correctional Facility Locator to image 5,300 sites. We overall have little idea what prisons — frequently out in the middle of nowhere or surrounded by impenetrable fences — look like, even if statistically it’s likely that more and more of us know someone who’s incarcerated.

Like Tings Chak, whose Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention visualizes the unseen migrant detention centers of Canada, Begley is interested in the cartography of this clandestine world. As he asks on Prison Map: “What does it mean to have 5,000 or 6,000 people locked up in the same place? What do these carceral spaces look like? How do they transform (or get transformed by) the landscape around them?” The aerial photographs reveal their stern structures as a growing, sequestered sprawl against the landscape.

“The trial of Gary Glitter was adjourned yesterday, with the 70-year-old appearing at London’s Southwark Crown Court to face 10 charges relating to historic sex abuse crimes committed in the ’70s and early ’80s.”

Link to article

If there ever was a Jesus, he may have been “gentle” as the word always attaches to his name, but his followers have certainly NOT followed in his gentle footsteps.  I am about sick of being told only brown skinned Muslims are capable of terrorizing actions and murder.

Just because our moronic media does a crummy job reporting it when Christianist terrors wreak havoc doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.  And no, they don’t get off saying “Well, that person was crazy.”

And yes, it is Monday, and I am so fed up with bullshit that I even boiled over on the other blog!  And if you don’t think there is reason to be fed up?  Well, you need to have a view from non-Americans perhaps, through the questions they ask an American?

Filed under: Religious Nuts & Bolts, War & No Peace Tagged: christian-is-as-christian-does, Christian-terrorists, murder, terrorism

I had to drive to the vet early this morning.  Nothing sets up the day like a scolding by phone FROM the vet for not already being there.   But the email said 0950 and I planned to be there at 0900.  But no, their “computer” doesn’t email the right times for surgical drop-offs and I should have known better.  Oh, really?  Well, take me off your fucking computer’s email list then, if it misinforms me and then the human staff scolds me before I’ve finished my coffee.  So, out I go with unhappy woozle.  Into fog.  Fog so heavy that anyone going over 30 mph is over-driving their headlights.

Fog like a shroud,

Over every tree,

Wrapping each house,

Dimming each light....

All the requisite idiots are at large.  The red sports-car roaring around you at a stop-light, the bus driver almost hitting a van — both driving with NO headlights, the bike-rider texting instead of crossing the road with HIS light and almost being hit when he belatedly pedals out, and the imbecile behind you driving with his high beams on, in your mirror, of course.

Crows sit disconsolate,

On dripping bare branches,

Pin your hopes on red,

Traffic lights for navigation…

The fog is so heavy it even mutes sound.  And on the backroads, you feel as if you’ve slipped into some human devoid twilight zone-ville.  My mind slips a bit into irrational: turning right at a four-way stop, I suddenly think, “Oh, what if this road does not meet my connecting road?” while absolutely knowing (right angles being as they are and all!) that it utterly DOES meet the correct road eight blocks east!  Yes, the fog is so dense and white that every looming shape might be something monstrous.  A bobbing yellow mass 100 feet away resolves into a brightly clad runner.  A distorted series of shadows is a mother and four children, seemingly unaware of the risks of fog-walking on the road.

Street signs vanish,

As mirrors in smoke,

A gray car on a gray day,

Passes out of sight…

I hear whistles off to my right, a school play-yard there is invisible.  How can you practice soccer or football when the ball vanishes when kicked?  Brake lights make a red plume of brilliance, like the Firebird’s tail…a dog had a narrow escape.  Just a bit further, and I hear sirens wailing.  Somebody did not escape?  That fool in the sports-car?

It is almost mid-morning,

But blindness prevails,

White nights or white days,

January in the Northlands….

I stop to pick up milk and fruit.  The store is so bright inside, I blink my eyes like something from a midnight cave dragged into the noonday sun.  Raspberries in January.  “Spring” lamb before the springtime.  Outdoors it is nearly medieval with the possibility of ghosts and monsters; indoors it is surreal with what technology supplies.  I want to escape both, on this, my “day off”.

White, but not snow-white,

Give me white, alright!

Take me back to my bed,

To warm feathers white as fog.

Filed under: Life, Poetry Tagged: monday, seasons

…there was a series of posts called “Tarot Tuesday”.  This is before I had the other ‘softer side’ blog, Experiential Pagan for that sort of speculative stuff!  The posts are still somewhere here…but henceforth, anyone seeking them will be disappointed with lack of images.  I am purging my media files and all the tarot pics are going to go away.

Lest card-carrying (harharhah!) pagans and such feel disrespected, I also got rid of a bunch of brewing and cooking pics from a couple years back.

Tuesday Tarot will resume at my other blog on aother-weekly basis.  Soon as I get motivated to play with cards and my own psychology at the same time again.

Filed under: Life, Religious Nuts & Bolts Tagged: psychology, symbols, tarot