The Gospel of Consumption

From Orion Magazine:

By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption”—the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”

It's like dunking a heated soda can into ice water

Defaced money

Theremin Cat

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ONJfp95yoE

Just like the old saying goes...

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and he doesn't need to work in your factories eight hours a day for the rest of his life.

The draconian terms of Apple's iPhone developer program

APIs and Functionality:

3.3.1      Applications may only use Published APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any unpublished or private APIs.

3.3.2      An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).

3.3.3      Without Apple's prior written approval, an Application may not provide, unlock or enable additional features or functionality through distribution mechanisms other than the iTunes Store.

3.3.4      An Application may write data on a device only to the Application's designated container area, except as otherwise specified by Apple.

User Interface and Data:

3.3.5      Applications must comply with the Human Interface Guidelines and other Documentation provided by Apple.

3.3.6      Any form of user or device data collection, or image, picture or voice capture or recording performed by the Application (collectively "Recordings"), and any form of user data, content or information uploading, syncing, or transmission performed by the Application (collectively "Transmissions") must comply with all applicable privacy laws and regulations as well as any Apple program requirements related to such aspects, including but not limited to any notice or consent requirements. In particular, a reasonably conspicuous visual indicator must be displayed to the user as part of the Application to indicate that a Recording is taking place.

Location Services:

3.3.7       For Applications that use location-based APIs:

-  You and the Application must comply with all applicable privacy and data collection laws and regulations with respect to any collection, transmission, maintenance, processing, use, etc. of the user's location data by the Application.

-  Applications may not be designed or marketed for the purpose of harassing, abusing, stalking, threatening or otherwise violating the legal rights (such as the rights of privacy and publicity) of others.

-  Applications may not be designed or marketed for real time route guidance; automatic or autonomous control of vehicles, aircraft, or other mechanical devices; dispatch or fleet management; or emergency or life-saving purposes.

-  Applications may not use any robot, spider, site search or other retrieval application or device to scrape, retrieve or index services provided by Apple or its licensors, or to collect information about users for any unauthorized purpose.

3.3.8      Applications that offer location-based services or functionality must notify and obtain consent from an individual when his or her location data is being collected, transmitted or otherwise used by the Application.

3.3.9      Applications must not disable, override or otherwise interfere with any Apple-implemented system alerts, warnings, display panels, consent panels and the like intended to notify the user that the user's location data is being collected, transmitted, maintained, processed or used, or intended to obtain consent for such use. If consent is withheld, Applications may not collect, transmit, maintain, process or utilize the user's location data.

Content and Materials:

3.3.10      Any master recordings and musical compositions embodied in Your Application must be wholly-owned by You or licensed to You on a fully paid-up basis and in a manner that will not require the payment of any fees, royalties and/or sums by Apple to You or any third party. In addition, if Your Application will be distributed outside of the United States, any master recordings and musical compositions embodied in Your Application (a) must not fall within the repertoire of any mechanical or performing/communication rights collecting or licensing organization now or in the future and (b) if licensed, must be exclusively licensed to You for Your Application by each applicable copyright owner.

3.3.11      If Your Application includes or will include any other content, You must either own all such content or have permission from the content owner to use it in Your Application.

3.3.12      Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgment may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.

3.3.13      Applications must not contain any malware, malicious or harmful code, program, or other internal component (e.g. computer viruses, trojan horses, "backdoors") which could damage, destroy, or adversely affect other software, firmware, hardware, data, systems, services, or networks.

3.3.14      If Your Application includes any FOSS, You agree to comply with all applicable FOSS licensing terms.  You also agree not to use any FOSS in the development of Your Application in such a way that would cause the non-FOSS portions of the Apple Software to be subject to any FOSS licensing terms or obligations.

Cellular Network:

3.3.15      If an Application requires or will have access to the cellular network, then additionally such Application:
-  Must comply with Apple's best practices and other guidelines on how Applications should access and use the cellular network;
-  Must not in Apple's reasonable judgment excessively use or unduly burden network capacity or bandwidth;
-  May not have Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) functionality.

This is insane

Humanity is literally filling the Pacific ocean with plastic:

A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Repress U

The police state is infiltrating our universities. Stand up for yourselves and give it a good boot to the head.

I find this exceptionally amusing

Last month's Get your war on

Toyama Koichi

AND YOUR NAME, WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR NAME?!

welcome home

yes, virginia
there's a boogyman
the boogyman is me

sofa bed
castkadonms
lazy boy souffle
waitin' on pompeii//
my brain's a war machine.
waitin' on the next
another shoe's another day
as long as it don't fall
i'm okay.

welcome home

(too late)
(to be alone)
(i know it)
(there's a such a thing)
(to be alone)

double headed
friends embedded
someone said, 'california smells like this in dreams.'
to me in visits, LA's a workman city
worn out dinkies and rocket sheets
little glitter

IF MAN MAKES WORLD AS CONSTRUCTION SITE
DEMOLITION TEAMS WORK BEST AT NIGHT
We hunt you down.

she said there's something so america about california
california's so third world - so's america
the tentacles of cinder blocks
with studs as thin as dimes
the material of contract-mundo
the soul and heart of concrete floors
that boom and crack the concrete floors
baghdad by toothbrush, san diego.

new york can barely fake a bombay charm
in the streets of this
mega-debacle-opolis

i give my hand
you take my arm.

your heartbeat and helicoptors
dust here ent the same, but oh, so similar

goin down on you is a bouquet of burning tires
we 69
have a ball of fire mushrooms, yeah
it's all confused when i think of you now
but i got space time and more
and the largest limousine in the traffic jam to paradise
televised and rip fuel
so many familiar faces
some i left faceless myself..

there's no mystery in the murder clouds
it's the abnormality of normal
you see,

i smell roast beef
i smell taco bell
i smell cordite in the metal.

i smell new car
i watch south park
i clutch the sofa
quake and tremble

welcome home.

1991 Church of the SubGenius documentary introduction

http://www.devilducky.com/media/61392/

The power of voodoo. Who do? You do.

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=15187

Federal Reserve to make how much money they're printing a secret

How will we know the true rate of inflation? The value of the dollar is expected to drop so much that we won't even want to know. Remember, the Federal Reserve is privately-owned. You don't actually believe that We-The-People, by whose consent the government of the United States is empowered, actually print our own money, do you?

http://www.beloitdailynews.com/articles/2006/03/03/editorials/letters/let02.txt

I've found my new ride

The portal to non-determinism is now HOSTED

Come visit scrod.nfshost.com and be amazed for maybe two to three seconds. The site is hosted from nearlyfreespeech.net, and with a deposit of $5, approximately one million people should be able to load it.

Population control and guaranteed profits

Could there be any other reason? With 40 million people carrying HIV worldwide and infection rates in some African countries as high as 15%, the pursuit of profit above the goal of immunization is nearly a genocidal crime. And when holding to the light the wax-paper-thin excuse that pharmaceutical conglomerates require enormous monetary incentives before pursuing new drug research, the senseless, transparent greed of man is stupefying. Not only does taxpayer money fund drug research, but the wealthy--through corporations--are reaping nearly the all of the benefit. What is it called when the government transfers wealth from the public sector to the private? To have anything less than the full socialization of medicine is an obscenity heaped upon the human race.

The Daily Northwestern's front page

features among others these two articles, with headlines in very bold type:

Around Evanston, millions struggle to find health care
Survey ranks college heads' compensation / Bienen among highest paid private-university leaders

Henry Bienen, the president of Northwestern University, lives in Evanston--his house is actually located there—just blocks from these unfortunate people. What the hell kind of world are we living in where access to physicians is restricted to those who have sufficient units of a specific medium of exchange that is thrown at people whose primary responsibility involves soliciting even more of it? Sure, it helps fund a private university--a center of enlightenment and truth. I wonder if these millions of people near Evanston and Skokie were able to attend Northwestern.

The madness of the sony digital rights management infection/rootkit/trojan horse

Here's a map displaying the approximate locations of people who:

a) are stupid enough to buy Celine Dion, Switchfoot, or Ricky Martin albums, among others

b) are stupid enough to run windows

c) have put one of these discs into their windows-burdened PC

I won't bother to discuss the details of Sony's infected discs--you can read Slashdot yourself if you haven't heard about it.

Meanwhile, real security experts point out the hypocrisy of corporations that sell anti-virus software, as if it were a surprise that the wealthy collude to maintain their dominance.