what if you were living in a science fiction world
and your skies were filled with alien machines
if alien beings ruled the earth
what if when you fought back with sticks and stones
the machines would slaughter you
but when you hid, they would come for your children
what if you were living in a science fiction world
with alien beings and their killing machines
and the only possibility of resistance
the only means of causing pain for pain…
what if the only aliens you could touch
were the alien children and what if
the alien children were as innocent
and sweet as your own
New York Times: Lobbyists Fighting Last Big Plans to Cut Health Care Costs
This is a dishonest article. The “Cadillac tax” is not a tax on the luxuries of some wealthy elite. It is a tax on working people who have relatively decent health care – the kind that everyone should have, the kind that most people in other industrialized countries already have. To equate the attempt to defend this health care with the strangle-hold that the Health Industry lobbyists have on our greedy money-grubbing lawmakers is to enlist on the side of those lobbyists in their effort to guarante only the health of Big Money’s bottom line.
Tax the Health Industry’s mega profits – not the small numbers of working people who have something like the health care that we should all have.
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/11/new-york-times-lobbyists-_n_316595.html
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize
I thought it was a joke at first. And with his ears sticking out and that silly little grin, i thought they had photoshopped the picture to make him look a bit like Alfred E. Neuman.
What, me worry?
No, that’s for the orphans of Afghanistan. Let them worry.
Another war criminal honored with a peace prize funded by the inventor of dynamite. How appropriate.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Arianna On “Morning Joe”: The Current Financial System Is Not Capitalism (VIDEO)
IT IS Capitalism!
Capitalism isn’t just pure competition. It never has been. Name a time when monopolies have not dominated the national economy. Their power waxes and wanes but it is always the domiant force. Pure competition is merely the fantasy that is used to justify the rule of the mega-rich.
Capitalism IS the drive for monopoly.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Hegel, Mao, Badiou and the subject as outsider
Hegel, Mao, Badiou and the subject as outsider
David Morgan, University of Newcastle
(paper presented at the 2009 Joint Conference of the Society for European Philosophy and the Forum for European Philosophy, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. 27-29 August 2009.)
Abstract:
Badiou’s project in Theory of the Subject can be read as an appraisal of Hegel’s dialectics in the light of Mao’s quite different dialectical approach as laid out in On Practice, On Contradiction and as further developed in the Cultural Revolution. But Badiou makes key changes in Mao’s terminology and uses this new terminology to develop a distinct revision of classical Marxism and a misreading of Mao. In Theory of the Subject, the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production is treated as essentially passive and structural, and the role of driving force in history is assigned to the proletariat in their confrontation with the bourgeoisie. However, when this confrontation is not understood as grounded in the creativity and initiative unleashed in productive activity, there are two consequences for Badiou’s theory of the subject, consequences that are carried over into his later work in Being and Event, and Logics of Worlds:
a) The subject is located outside the structure of the situation. In Theory of the Subject, this is described as the contradiction between the splace and the outplace.
b) The subject is essentially passive, reacting to oppression and exploitation, rather than driven by its own creative impulses.
Thus Badiou is unable to give an account of structural change that arises out of empirically identifiable internal forces and that places the subject at centre of this process.
For the complete paper, go to http://davidpalestine.wordpress.com/hegel-mao-badiou/ on this blog
spirit of woody at lincoln memorial
You may have seen this live or on the web – it’s been posted all over. But in case you haven’t, here it is
http://leninology.blogspot.com/search/label/woody%20guthrie
along with the lyrics and history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Land_Is_Your_Land
along with my comment:
until now, this has been my least favorite woody guthrie song. i know it was written as a counter to berlin’s god bless america, but the context i usually heard it in made it feel more like a twin.
but this moved me. it felt rebellious, and for the first time i could feel the fighting spirit of woody guthrie inside it. thank you for posting it.
And another cool comment from someone else:
I was at a concert in Tanglewood in Massachusetts (I think) in the early ’90s and that little gobshite Judy Collins came on a sang the song and made it out to be not only nationalist, but racist by saying how Japanese companies meant it wasn’t ‘my’ land any more. Fortunately, Arlo Guthrie came along later in the bill and said she was talking shit and that he once asked his father whether he was just referring to the land eastwards from California to New York and Woody said nope, that the same applied if you got there by heading west from California.
the church of the universal wow!
When you try to get back to the beginning, to what happened before things
started happening, you get to the point where there is no why. Science doesn’t
have an answer to this because it isn’t really a question. It’s bigger than a question.
All you can do is say WOW!
postscript
leibnitz asked why are there things rather than nothing?
why not? = the end of theology
there is only science and wow
everything else is gilding the lily
and actually, even gilding the lily is part of the wow
