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kitchen Created by bertrand sereno @ flickr.com

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How to Make Fried Oreo Cookies
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the sandwich project

monkey pops

mugshots
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p r o p a g a n d a

The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear

thank god for Adam Curtis. a rare and vitally refreshing tv presence.

Adam Curtis' excellent previous tv series was the century of the self. an acclaimed examination of the rise of the all-consuming self against the influential backdrop of the Freud dynasty.

Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis; his nephew Edward Bernays, credited as the inventer of public relations; Anna Freud, Sigmund's devoted daughter; and Sigmund's great grandson and present-day PR guru Matthew Freud. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests? the me generation, self-help movements, gurus, and mottos such as "change yourself and you'll change the world". corporations and politicians soon realised that this new self was their greatest opportunity. It was in their interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality.

now, starting next Wednesday, BBC2 is to broadcast Curtis' latest three-part documentary series The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear.

"Terrorism is the best political weapon, for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death". ...hitler

Much of the currently perceived threat from international terrorism, the series argues, "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media." The series' explanation for this is even bolder: "In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power."

During the three years in which the "war on terror" has been waged, high-profile challenges to its assumptions have been rare. The sheer number of incidents and warnings connected or attributed to the war has left little room, it seems, for heretical thoughts.

Adam Curtis, who wrote and produced the series, acknowledges the difficulty of saying such things now. "If a bomb goes off, the fear I have is that everyone will say, 'You're completely wrong,' even if the incident doesn't touch my argument. This shows the way we have all become trapped, the way even I have become trapped by a fear that is completely irrational."

"Almost no one questions this myth about al-Qaida because so many people have got an interest in keeping it alive," says Curtis. He cites the suspiciously circular relationship between the security services and much of the media since September 2001: the way in which official briefings about terrorism, often unverified or unverifiable by journalists, have become dramatic press stories which - in a jittery media-driven democracy - have prompted further briefings and further stories. Few of these ominous announcements are retracted if they turn out to be baseless: "There is no fact-checking about al-Qaida." not in the mainstream media at least.

"Insecurity is the key driving concept of our times," says Durodie, director of the international centre for security analysis at King's College London. "Politicians have packaged themselves as risk managers. There is also a demand from below for protection." The real reason for this insecurity, he argues, is the decay of the 20th century's political belief systems and social structures: people have been left "disconnected" and "fearful".

meanwhile...

Poll reveals world anger at Bush
George Bush has squandered a wealth of sympathy around the world towards America since September 11 with public opinion in 10 leading countries - including some of its closest allies - growing more hostile to the United States while he has been in office. in britain alone 73% of British voters say that the US now wields an excessive influence on international affairs. A majority in Britain also believe that US democracy is no longer a model for others. and a majority of British voters - 51% - say that they believe that American culture is threatening our own culture.

archive...

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM by Emmanuel Goldstein

"Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability In An Uncertain Age" by Frank Furedi

"Creating the enemy" by Brendan O'Neil

GROOVY POPULAR TERRORISM
the angry brigade, the weatherman, and Baader-Meinhof

d e a t h

EXITS AND ENTRANCE: WESTERN AND SHAMANIC XSTRUCTIONS OF DEATH

When one of Plato's friends came to his deathbed and asked him to state his philosophy in one simple sentence, Plato is said to have replied: "Practice to die"

"Most people think life sucks, and then you die.  Not me.  I beg to differ.  I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty five years and you pay it back and then one day you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then one day you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe."  .....Denis Leary

what brand are you

plus.....

clothes

the bland leading the blind.

the prevalent cult of labels is something i will never understand. why do so many people want to ally themselves with prominent brands?. theres a man on the telly showing us some of his wardrobe. he pulls out a very ordinairy looking t-shirt and he feels it nescessary to mention whatever label it is and how it cost whatever excessive amount of money. he pulls out an ordinairy looking striped shirt and tells us its paul smith and however much it cost. he pulls out a stripey jumper, tells us its d and g and that it cost another kerzillion pounds. etc etc. his entire wardrobe is drab and non-descript. it could have been bought from anywhere, at any time, at any price.

he ends the segment by saying "all my life i've felt the need to fit in, but..." he points to his open wardrobe.... "i like to stand out aswell."

i guess that for him the specialness is contained in the brand names and the expensive price tags, but the irony is that those very ingredients make it all the more uniform and mass-meaningless.

NAKED PROTEST

"When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened."
.....Sir Winston Churchill

Servers seized by FBI returned - but who wanted what?

The Indymedia hardware seized in London last week were put back in place over the last 24 hours. the circumstances of the seizure still remain unclear: who took them, why were they taken, and under which court order? Indymedia is not aware as to whether Rackspace is still under gag order.

Although the data on the drives appears intact, Indymedia is treating them as potentially compromised, and won't boot them or take the servers live until they've been verified.

Richard Allan, Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield Hallam, has tabled a Parliamentary question to the Home Office asking David Blunkett "what recent discussions he has had with US law enforcement agencies concerning the seizure of material from UK-based internet hosting providers; and if he will make a statement." This is to be dealt with tomorrow. MPs in the National Union of Journalists' Parliamentary Group are also tabling questions.

plus... Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties

Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties (UK) is a non-profit civil liberties organisation founded on January 10, 1997. Its main purpose is to promote free speech and privacy on the Internet and raise public awareness of these important issues.

the most cash-drenched presidential battle ever

The US presidential contest is set to be the first billion dollar election in political history and a crass reminder of what so called "democracy" is really all about.

c y b o r g

Shares of Applied Digital Solutions soared early Wednesday after the company and its majority-owned partner Digital Angel received approval of the VeriChip implantable microchip for use with humans from the Food and Drug Administration.

About the size of a grain of rice, the radio frequency identification (RFID) microchip is implanted in the triceps area between the elbow and the shoulder of the right arm. Inserting the chip involves a brief, painless procedure using local anesthetic, and once under the skin, the VeriChip is invisible to the naked eye, the companies said.

archive...

Barcelona clubbers get chipped
VIP clients have syringe-injected microchip implanted in their upper arms. gives them special access to VIP lounges, also acts as a debit account from which they can pay for drinks.

human trials are set to begin on a brain-computer interface involving implants
four-square-millimeter chips will be placed beneath the skulls of paralyzed patients. If successful, the chips could allow patients to command a computer to act -- merely by thinking about the instructions they wish to send.

Micro-robots capable of manipulating human cells are no more than a year away, scientists have claimed

Analog Chips Mimic Retina
Efforts to overcome blindness with artificial devices. a new approach that uses analog chips instead of digital chips to replace defective areas in the human retina, the optic nerve and the wiring of the brain itself.

Microchip promises smart artificial arms

Synapse chip taps into brain chemistry
"A microchip that uses chemicals instead of pulses of electricity to stimulate neurons has been created. It could open the way to implants that interact with our nervous system in a far more subtle way than is possible now."

WORLD'S FIRST BRAIN PROSTHESIS
an artificial hippocampus. Unlike devices like cochlear implants, which merely stimulate brain activity, this silicon chip implant will perform the same processes as the damaged part of the brain it is replacing.

local bbc tv news reported the trial chip-implant tagging of children.

kevin warwick

modified meat

the bbc site asks..... Who watches murder videos?

"Footage of Ken Bigley's murder is widely available on the internet, along with that of other hostages killed in Iraq. Who is watching the videos and why?....."

well heres the response i sent in, (which as usual probably won't get published. i guess the bbc receives thousands).....

"democracy is all about diversity and recognising that different people have different tolerance levels and differing priorities about what is or isn't taboo. death, along with sex and excretion, are facts of life that we are too overly and unnescessarily "protected" from. the war industry continues to be our biggest money spinner perhaps only because it remains distant and sanitised. in a media dominated age i want to personally experience and be able to deconstruct source messages that are influencing and manipulating the world i exist in."

two points that i didn't bother trying to include are the fact that the horror in these poor quality videos is contained in the soundtrack. the sound they make as their throats are being slit. turning the sound off is a different experience and highlights for me how easily such emotive videos can be faked. and i've forgotten the second point for now..... oh yes, i don't automatically assume that the men carrying out the executions are arabs or the specified terrorists. they could just as easily be a bunch of fat americans (or israelis) on a day off from torturing other "innocent" "folk" at Abu Ghraib Prison (or Facility 1391). keeping us terrorised is all that matters, to somebody, but exactly who that somebody is i'm not sure.

meanwhile i've sifted out a selection from the replies that the bbc has so far published...

I regularly watch the execution videos on the Internet. I don't enjoy them. I watch them to get a glimpse of reality. I try to imagine myself in his position, to imagine his fear, so I can understand that killing is wrong. So tell me, why should we blame the people who watch execution videos, when we elect (and re-elect) those that drop bombs and kill thousands of people in more gruesome ways? The hypocrisy is obscene.
Adam, Yokohama, Japan

I have watched an American and Korean execution and feel that it is an important part of what is happening in the world. Although foul, we cannot shy away from real events happening to real people. It is just as important to watch the hostage takers in these videos and listen to what they say as most describe in great detail the reasons for the execution.
anon, anon

I think a lot of it does have to do with curiosity. I haven't seen the videos, nor do I want to. However, I have in the past seen pictures of gruesome accidents/bodies on the net. I found them by accident (misleading Google search), then couldn't take my eyes away!
Sarah, Brussels, Belgium

I've seen many videos of this ilk. It makes you feel sick, yet sometimes it's hard to not look for them. It makes you realise just how sick life can be. I don't think you can be angry about people watching the videos out of curiosity, it is after all, real life.
Mark, Leeds

I think the fact that most of the downloads come from the UK, USA and Canada is important. A puritanical official attitude towards such imagery exists. The media self censors images because 'we might find them offensive'. Other countries manage not to descend into moral turpitude when such images are shown in their media. The upshot of all this is that we have developed a morbid curiosity towards this material.
Iain Buchanan, Cumbernauld, Scotland

It's awful but we have no option but to watch because it's happening.
Sichipolo Gas, Lusaka, Zambia

on this day 1988: uk Government loses Spycatcher publication battle

Law Lords ruled the media can publish extracts from former MI5 officer Peter Wright's memoirs, because any damage to national security has already been done by its publication abroad.

In his memoirs as an MI5 officer Mr Wright alleges the security service operated ....wait for it...... beyond the law. gasp!

Some of his more controversial revelations include the claim that Prime Minister Harold Wilson was the target of an MI5 conspiracy and that ex-chief of MI5, Roger Hollis, was a Soviet mole in the 1960s.

The Spycatcher affair began in 1985, when the British Government started proceedings against the book being published in Australia. It lost the action in 1987.

By late 1987 Spycatcher was the number one hardback bestseller in the US, selling 400,000 copies.

Although the government had succeeded in gagging the British media for a time it failed to prevent the book's disclosure anywhere abroad.

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." ....Aldous Huxley

"Music is essentially useless, as is life." ....George Santayana

the PAPERFORMERS universe
more than fifty PDF versions of paper cutout models of various Autobots and Decepticons.
(via memepool)

p r o p a g a n d a

rewind: brian eno on.. "Lessons in how to lie about Iraq"

The problem is not propaganda but the relentless control of the kind of things we think about.

"When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it's done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

When I first visited Russia, in 1986, I made friends with a musician whose father had been Brezhnev's personal doctor. One day we were talking about life during 'the period of stagnation' - the Brezhnev era. 'It must have been strange being so completely immersed in propaganda,' I said.

'Ah, but there is the difference. We knew it was propaganda,' replied Sacha.

In the West the calculated manipulation of public opinion to serve political and ideological interests is much more covert and therefore much more effective. Its greatest triumph is that we generally don't notice it - or laugh at the notion it even exists.

It takes something as dramatic as the invasion of Iraq to make us look a bit more closely and ask: 'How did we get here?' How exactly did it come about that, in a world of Aids, global warming, 30-plus active wars, several famines, cloning, genetic engineering, and two billion people in poverty, practically the only thing we all talked about for a year was Iraq and Saddam Hussein?

It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'. (What else can the spat between the BBC and Alastair Campbell be but a prime example of this?) weapons of Mass Deception."

"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind" ....Ralph Waldo Emerson ("Self-Reliance," 1841)