Friday, December 23, 2011
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Budapest: Attila József Picnic
Brokenness is beautiful
The Chilean artist explores brokenness and recovery in her work, displayed in London at the House of Propellors Gallery.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Why yes, Virginia, there IS a reason to be concerned when the defense contractors who pimp our so-called 'government' start developing suffocating sound-guns for dispersing protestors.
Raytheon's recent patent application for a new choking sound-cannon has gotten a bit of attention since Gizmodo picked up the story from New Scientist.
http://gizmodo.com/5867984/future-riot-shields-will-suffocate-protestors-with...
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228425.300-riot-shields-could-scatter...
My soon-to-be-patent-attorney friend has chided me not to worry, because this is "just a patent application." And here's an example of how a little bit of legal education, which strictly de-emphasizes context and the analysis of power dynamics, can be a dangerous thing. There is a substantive difference between a patent application by a random would-be inventor working out of her garage and a patent application by Raytheon.
Raytheon is one of the largest arms dealers in the world. Raytheon has billions of dollars of US government contracts. Raytheon has current contracts to develop crowd control weapons, and is testing them on American prisoners. Raytheon has already developed crowd-control weapons from battlefield technology and sold them to domestic prisons for use here in the States.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129630188
Raytheon is girding itself for shifts in US government defense spending, partly by selling more war-weapons to other countries...
http://www.defenseprocurementnews.com/2011/12/01/saudi-patriot-deal-receives-...
...but also by increasingly marketing to 'non-military customers.' Such as the Department of Homeland Security and prisons, public and private. These 'non-military' customers buy a lot of crowd-control weapons.
http://technorati.com/business/finance/article/raytheon-illustrates-diversifi...
Another sonic weapon, developed by LRAD, has already been deployed against first amendment-exercisers here in the States.
http://gizmodo.com/5860592/what-is-the-lrad-sound-cannon
It's really not a giant leap of logic to imagine that this particular patent application might be something nasty, deployed for nasty purposes.
Oh, BTW? Raytheon has been repeatedly sanctioned for illegal and unethical practice - it's the 5th-worst government contractor, according to the Project on Open Government's misconduct database. Competing, of course, with the OTHER four major defense contractors.
http://www.contractormisconduct.org/index.cfm/1,73,221,html?ContractorID=46&r...
Your dad knew about irony before you did
Your dad knew about irony before you did and he had “Le...:
Your dad knew about irony before you did and he had “Le Car” to prove it. For $300 and a half roll of mint Lifesavers, he purchased rolling satire. His “chariot” cemented his place as “The Most Ironic Man in the World” because he bought a car that wasn’t a car, but called itself a car by writing car on the car. He was a visionary of irony that liked everything everyone else hated so once he made it popular he could hate on it and say he liked it before it was cool. He liked disco in the 60’s, hair metal in the 70’s, and wore Clarkston High School track shirts even though he’d never ran and didn’t go to that school. Everything he has ever done has been ironic, including loving you.
So hipsters, in 2012 when you’re claiming that you voted for Rick Perry after the elections and saying that it was cool because nobody else did it or growing a mustache and refusing to admit that it doesn’t look terrible, remember this…
Your dad is so ironic that after spending his entire youth rebelling against his father the most ironic thing he could do was become him by having you and being a dad himself (which is also the same track you’re currently on, and yet another example of something else he did before you).
Thanks to Jessica for today’s awesome submission via the Facebook fan page.