of shampooing and the art of symmetrical anthropology...

shampoo shampoo

As we survey the 2017 Oscars from the eminent sociological source of Mad Magazine December 1975, in regard to the value of entertainment versus reality, reality TV President, fake news, Wikileaks dump of strategical CIA cyber nosing, we can only wonder about our worth, measured in peanuts, gold and afterlife demerit points.

This is where we need to do a detour via Bruno Latour:

"Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?"[edit]

In a 2004 article,[32] Latour questioned the fundamental premises on which he'd based most of his career, asking, "Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies?" He undertakes a trenchant critique of his own field of study and, more generally, of social criticism in contemporary academia. He suggests that critique, as currently practiced, is bordering on irrelevancy. To maintain any vitality, Latour argues that social critiques require a drastic reappraisal: "our critical equipment deserves as much critical scrutiny as the Pentagon budget." (p. 231) To regain focus and credibility, Latour argues that social critiques must embrace empiricism, to insist on the "cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude -- to speak like William James". (p. 233)

Latour suggests that about 90% of contemporary social criticism displays one of two approaches which he terms "the fact position and the fairy position." (p. 237) The fairy position is anti-fetishist, arguing that "objects of belief" (e.g., religion, arts) are merely concepts created by the projected wishes and desires of the "naive believer"; the "fact position" argues that individuals are dominated, often covertly and without their awareness, by external forces (e.g., economics, gender). (p. 238) "Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind?” asks Latour: no matter which position you take, "You’re always right!” (p. 238-239) Social critics tend to use anti-fetishism against ideas they personally reject; to use "an unrepentant positivist" approach for fields of study they consider valuable; all the while thinking as "a perfectly healthy sturdy realist for what you really cherish." (p. 241) These inconsistencies and double standards go largely unrecognized in social critique because "there is never any crossover between the two lists of objects in the fact position and the fairy position." (p. 241)

The practical result of these approaches being taught to millions of students in elite universities for several decades is a widespread and influential "critical barbarity" that has—like a malign virus created by a "mad scientist"—thus far proven impossible to control. Most troubling, Latour notes that critical ideas have been appropriated by those he describes as conspiracy theorists, including global warming skeptics and the 9/11 Truth movement: "Maybe I am taking conspiracy theories too seriously, but I am worried to detect, in those mad mixtures of knee-jerk disbelief, punctilious demands for proofs, and free use of powerful explanation from the social neverland, many of the weapons of social critique." (p. 230)

The conclusion of the article is to argue for a positive framing of critique, to help understand how matters of concern can be supported rather than undermined: "The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between antifetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour

Here we must read an other of the post-something: Jean Braudillard...

Simulacra and Simulation[edit]Main article: Simulacra and Simulation

As he developed his work throughout the 1980s, he moved from economic theory to mediation and mass communication. Although retaining his interest in Saussurean semiotics and the logic of symbolic exchange (as influenced by anthropologist Marcel Mauss), Baudrillard turned his attention to the work of Marshall McLuhan, developing ideas about how the nature of social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a society employs. In so doing, Baudrillard progressed beyond both Saussure's and Roland Barthes's formal semiology to consider the implications of a historically understood version of structural semiology.

Simulation, Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of the simulacrum: all is composed of references with no referents, a hyperreality.[19] Progressing historically from the Renaissance, in which the dominant simulacrum was in the form of the counterfeit—mostly people or objects appearing to stand for a real referent (for instance, royalty, nobility, holiness, etc.) that does not exist, in other words, in the spirit of pretense, in dissimulating others that a person or a thing does not really "have it"—to the Industrial Revolution, in which the dominant simulacrum is the product, the series, which can be propagated on an endless production line; and finally to current times, in which the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.

The end of history and meaning[edit]

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, one of Baudrillard's most common themes was historicity, or, more specifically, how present-day societies utilise the notions of progress and modernity in their political choices. He argued, much like the political theorist Francis Fukuyama, that history had ended or "vanished" with the spread of globalization; but, unlike Fukuyama, Baudrillard averred that this end should not be understood as the culmination of history's progress, but as the collapse of the very idea of historical progress. For Baudrillard, the end of the Cold War did not represent an ideological victory; rather, it signaled the disappearance of utopian visions shared between both the political Right and Left. Giving further evidence of his opposition toward Marxist visions of global communism and liberal visions of global civil society, Baudrillard contended that the ends they hoped for had always been illusions; indeed, as The Illusion of the End argues, he thought the idea of an end itself was nothing more than a misguided dream:

The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.[20]

echoing about...

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche

By Gus Leonisky at 11 Mar 2017 - 9:38am
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the knuckles of his countrymen...

H.L. Mencken has a conservative problem. The Baltimore journalist became the poster boy for literary modernism thanks to his literary criticism and nationally syndicated op-ed columns, in addition to his work as a magazine editor, most notably at American Mercury. But he ranks well behind the modernist poets T.S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens as an acceptable literary figure for conservative consumption. The reason has much to do with Mencken’s skepticism and irreverence. He mocked Puritanism famously as the cultural force that gave Americans a moralistic squint. Worse, he recommended the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as an antidote to Victorian morality and then promoted Theodore Dreiser, whose novels offended censors. Mencken proved his heretical ways at the Scopes Trial, where he mocked the prosecution led by William Jennings Bryan and the “simian faithful” who hung on the Great Commoner’s every word. Everywhere Mencken turned, his mantra seemed to be “just say no” to inherited moral, intellectual, and literary standards.

The most recent conservative complaint about Mencken is that he was an elitist who ridiculed his fellow Americans. Kevin D. Williamson of National Review objected that the debunking mentality prevalent in Mencken’s work represented a “genuine fervor to knock the United States and its people down a peg or two.” For Mencken, “the representative American experience was the Scopes trial, with its greasy Christian fundamentalists and arguments designed to appeal to the ‘prehensile moron,’ his description of the typical American farmer.” Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute registered a similar complaint in his book The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Undermined the Middle Class. He charged that Mencken was part of a company of liberal thinkers who wanted to create an American aristocracy that could “provide the same sense of hierarchy and order long associated with European statism.”

It doesn’t help conservatives who have a soft spot for Mencken that Gore Vidal took inspiration from the Baltimorean. Vidal’s own moralism could be as priggish as any fundamentalist’s, but that did not stop him from recognizing Mencken as another writer who was too good for America. Vidal applauded Mencken’s ridicule of Americans’ intelligence: “The more one reads Mencken, the more one eyes suspiciously the knuckles of his countrymen,” Vidal wrote, “looking to see callouses from too constant a contact with the greensward.” How grass produces callouses is anyone’s guess, but that imagery’s challenge did not stop Vidal from recommending Mencken’s unbelief. Mencken viewed religion, Vidal contended, “as a Great Wall of China designed to keep civilization out while barbarism might flourish within the gates.” Vidal was convinced that only the few, the proud promoters of licentiousness like himself could recognize Mencken’s charms.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/mencken-for-conservatives/

of the democrats' farts...

Have you ever been around someone who has a bad case of gas, but always finds ways to blame the noxious fumes on those around them?

Democrats are masters of the "whoever smelt it, dealt it" game which is really nothing more than psychological projection.

Psychologists define psychological projection as a protective defense mechanism whereby someone dishonestly attributes his or her bad behavior to someone else by inventing false accusations to divert attention away from themselves to avoid blame and punishment.

Undeniably, the Obama administration and Democrats are obsessed with Russia. Their Russia musings were amusing — until it became almost a daily ... weird ... sociopathic, psychological projection ... kind of thing. It's uncanny that it didn't let up until Trump made it known he suspected Obama might have listened to his private conversations.

Until then, Democrats' Russian ramblings were baseless, so the more they talked about Trump and Russia, the more curious their intentions became. After all, there are plenty of dots to connect to make the case for why Russia would've wanted Hillary to win in 2016.

Uranium One would be a good place to start. Uranium One is a Russian-owned uranium mining company that lobbied the Obama State Department through a firm co-founded by Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign chairman, John Podesta.

The Daily Caller reports "Uranium One is significant because it fell under the corporate control of Rosatom, Russia's atomic energy agency, through a series of transactions approved by Hillary Clinton's State Department."

http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/29/firm-co-founded-by-hillarys-campaign-c...

Note: Gus has no way to verify this story veracity but it makes a whiff of a bad smell. It could be fake news or false fact or real shit. Who knows.

By Gus Leonisky at 15 Mar 2017 - 12:46pm
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the truth died a long time ago...

Beneath the civil war of official narratives, cognitive space opens for truth long suffocated by ‘the Washington Consensus’. Even the US-led G-20 has recently agreed not to automatically condemn ‘protectionism’ as an economic evil. The battle slogan of transnational corporate rule over 30 years has been quietly withdrawn on the global stage.

Is the big lie of ‘free trade’ finally coming to ground? It has long led the hollowing out of societies and life support systems across the world in a false mass promotion as “freedom and prosperity for all”. In fact beneath the pervasive fake news, a closed-door transnational corporate command system forces all enterprises across borders into a carbon-multiplying trade regime with thousands of rules to protect the transnational corporate looting and ruin of home economies and environments as the only rights enforced.

Propagandist names and fake freedoms are proclaimed everywhere to conceal the reality. The corporate-investor regime has stripped out almost all evolved protections of workers, ecologies and social infrastructures. Non-stop liquidations and roboticizations of local jobs and enterprises are reversed in meaning to ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ and ‘higher living standards’, the very opposite of the facts. Destabilization and bombing wars attack resource-rich and air-defenceless societies outside the circle of treaty subjugation.

False news allows every step. Even the happy-face Trudeau regime is taken aback by the tidal shift to national priorities. Its ministers scuttle around the US in near panic to find common cause for restoring the unaccountable regime. Multiplying carbon, disemployment and ecological plunder are ignored throughout in the longest standing fake news of all –‘economic growth”.

In fact, there is no real economic growth in universal life necessities or reduction of waste. The only growth is of volumes and velocities of transnational money exchanges, foreign commodities, and private profits to the top.

‘More prosperity for nations and the world’ means, decoded, more transnational corporate-state treaties to deprive nations of their rights to organization and production for citizens’ real needs as well as organically regulated protection of environments and ecosystems.

The consequences covered over by pervasively false cover stories are speeded-up ecocidal extractions, permanent disemployments, and wastes hemorrhaging into cumulatively more polluted oceans, air, atmosphere and life habitats. Corporate-state solutions of carbon markets for pollution rights have nowhere reduced any of these life-and-death crises, but only further and selectively enriched transnational corporations.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/fake-news-the-unravelling-of-us-empire-from...

By Gus Leonisky at 1 Apr 2017 - 8:59am
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taking a long time...

In regard to the article in the New York Times (a lesson in presidential "philosophy") regarding the way Trump lies, one has to say that a lot (ALL) of philosophical discourse IS NOT SCIENTIFIC, despite trying to place a scientific value on our general deceptions, especially beliefs.

This brings a lot of "flexibility" in interpreting the methods and the art of deception. This is why the book "The Age of Deceit" by Gus is taking so long to finalise. I am presently studying how deception works in nature from the cellular/DNA level to the natural human lying in survival mode, developing into a stylistic deceptive mode of conducting "business".

It's complicated... And as one of the philosophers asked above in a more eloquent manner: "am I lying to myself about the price of fish?"

Irrelevant altogether, unless people die. This is where the President is a dangerous imbecile.

By Gus Leonisky at 18 Apr 2017 - 9:10am
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she thought he was joking...

Faye Dunaway thought Warren Beatty was just "joking" for effect when he hesitated before handing her the wrong envelope in the agonising Oscars mix-up that saw La La Land mistakenly handed Moonlight's Best Picture award.

The 76-year-old actress has spoken for the first time about the February awards show debacle, which caused chaos at the Hollywood ceremony and stunned millions of live TV viewers.

Dunaway said she failed to pick up her co-presenter's unease before mistakenly reading out "La La Land" for Best Picture when "Moonlight" had won.

"I thought he was joking," Dunaway told NBC.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-25/dunaway-thought-beatty-was-stallin...

read rom top...

By Gus Leonisky at 26 Apr 2017 - 6:24am
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a radical politico-economic change is necessary...

From Zizek

....

So in order to establish this new mode of relating to our environs, a radical politico-economic change is necessary, what Sloterdijk calls "the domestication of the wild animal Culture."

Until now, each culture disciplined or educated its own members and guaranteed civic peace among them in the guise of state power, but the relationship between different cultures and states was permanently under the shadow of potential war, with each state of peace nothing more than a temporary armistice. As Hegel conceptualized it, the entire ethic of a state culminates in the highest act of heroism - namely, the readiness to sacrifice one's life for one's nation-state, which means that the wild barbarian relations between states serve as the foundation of the ethical life within a state. Today, is North Korea with it ruthless pursuit of nuclear weapons and rockets advanced enough to reach distant targets not the ultimate example of this logic of unconditional nation-state sovereignty?

However, the moment we fully accept the fact that we live on a Spaceship Earth, the task that urgently imposes itself is that of civilizing civilizations themselves, of imposing universal solidarity and cooperation among all human communities, a task rendered all the more difficult by the ongoing rise of sectarian religious and ethnic "heroic" violence and readiness to sacrifice oneself (and the world) for one's specific Cause.

The measures Sloterdijk proposes as necessary for the survival of humanity - the overcoming of capitalist expansionism, achieving broad international solidarity capable to forming an executive power ready to violate state sovereignty, and so on - are they not all measures destined to protect our natural and cultural commons? If they do not point towards some kind of reinvented Communism, if they do not imply a Communist horizon, then the term "Communism" has no meaning at all.

This is why the idea of the European Union is worth fighting for, despite of the misery of its actual existence: in today's global capitalist world, it offers the only model of a trans-national organization with the authority to limit national sovereignty and the capacity to guarantee a minimum of ecological and social welfare standards. Something that directly descends from the best traditions of European Enlightenment survives in it. Our - Europeans - duty is not to humiliate ourselves as the ultimate culprits of colonialist exploitation but to fight for this part of our legacy as vital for the survival of humanity.

Europe is more and more alone in the New World Order, dismissed as an old, exhausted, irrelevant, contingent, reduced to playing a secondary role in today's bit geo-political conflicts. As Bruno Latour recently put it: "L'Europe est seule, oui, mais seule l'Europe peut nous sauver." Europe is alone, yes, but Europe alone can save us.

Slavoj Zizek is International Director at the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities, University of London, and Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His most recent book is Disparities.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2017/05/11/4667236.htm

By Gus Leonisky at 11 May 2017 - 11:59am
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latour does a detour to bat for sciences...

Summary

French sociologist Bruno Latour, 70, has long been a thorn in the side of science. But in the age of "alternative facts," he's coming to its defense. Central to Latour's work is the notion that facts are constructed by communities of scientists, and that there is no distinction between the social and technical elements of science. In the 1990s, such relativist and "social-constructivist" views triggered a heated debate known as the "science wars." In later writings, Latour acknowledged that the criticism of science had created a basis for antiscientific thinking and had paved the way for the denial of climate change. Latour, who retired last month from his official duties at Sciences Po, a university for the social sciences in Paris, spoke to Science about his goal of helping rebuild confidence in science.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6360/159

Read from top... Here at YD, we know that there is uncertainty in sciences, but most of it is due because that is the inherent basis of sciences that THERE IS NO DOGMA IN IT. Sciences are hypothesis confirmed by observations driven until refinement of study and bracketing of problems with solutions. Some scientists for example will claim that Quantum Mechanics is a hoax that "works". There is no alternative explanation that tells you that MRIs, Cell phones and atom bombs work, except the hand of god which is tickling your gonads. Sciences are actually more precise than you atomic driven gold watch. So it's a big step for Latour who, not by design but by exploring the uncertainty in sciences, gave the denialists of global warming some pétards, ever so mouillés (wet crackers)...

By Gus Leonisky at 30 Oct 2017 - 1:47pm
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tetrasomethings...

To get to the idea of a tetraquark one must first dive deep into the atom, composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons are further divided (the electron stands alone) into subatomic particles called quarks.

There are, according to physicists, six types of quarks, and they have been assigned names, masses, and electrical charges.

Here's where an arbitrary sorting regime — necessary to explain the unexplainable — takes over.

Those atomic building blocks, the protons and neutrons, are themselves comprised of ‘up' and ‘down' quarks, and those two have been shown to have the lightest mass of any subatomic particle.

The four less common — and heavier — quarks in the six-quark lineup are referred to as 'strange,' ‘charm,' ‘bottom,' and ‘top' (denoted in mass from lightest to the heaviest).

Each of the six known quarks has an antimatter mirror image called an antiquark (of course!), and it is the same subatomic particle, but with an opposite electrical polarity.

Currently, the best theoretical understanding of quarks and antiquarks posits that they can only be aligned in groups of two or three. They cannot exist alone.

But what about that aforementioned four-particle arrangement, the tetraquark, we hear you ask?

This is where the weird gets weirder, as researchers with Switzerland's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced in July the discovery of a new three-quark alignment, which they promptly dubbed the ‘Ξcc+++‘ (for a "doubly charged, doubly charmed xi particle," natch).

The amusingly named Ξcc++ arrangement consists of a light ‘up' quark and two heavy ‘charm' quarks. There remains some debate, however, as "most of these particles" (the ones with three quarks) "containing two heavy quarks, ‘charm' or ‘beauty,' have not yet been found," according to physicist Patrick Koppenburg of Nikhef, the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics, in a July conversation with Gizmodo.

"This is a first in a sense," Koppenburg asserted.

Now, bolstered by the expectation that a three-quark particle exists, coupled with a more-or-less precise determination of its mass, two separate groups ran two different equations to confirm that a four-quark particle — the tetraquark — could also exist.

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201711201059246852-teams-independently-pr...

Strange... While waiting for the rain to stop this morning, I was reading about the "recombination" event some 380,000 years (earth years though the earth did not exist) after the BIG Bang. Quite funny and so far quite accurate in regard to all observations made of the background "heat" of the universe. Though the first calculations made about the "recombination" were made in the 1950/60s with a 10 per cent error margin, the latest measurements are at 0.01 per cent error which is not too bad. Hard to know when the soup of quarks combined to form protons and neutrons, because the universe was "opaque" until photons could travel "freely" after the recombination event which combined electrons and protons to form hydrogen atoms, the most abundant atomic format by far in the universe, as we all know.

Read from top...

Note: this article above by Sputnik is actually quite accurate though simple and entertaining at the same time.

and the winner is...

And the winners are… Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway?

Beatty and Dunaway have reportedly been selected to present the 2018 Oscar winner for best picture, despite the two presenters’ botched announcement last year.

The actor and actress arrived at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood to do some necessary rehearsing, TMZ reported Thursday evening.

A source told the website that the pair quickly ran through their bit, and that Dunaway began by saying, “Presenting is better the second time around.” Beatty then responded, “The winner is ‘Gone with the Wind.”

Both Beatty and Dunaway could use the extra practice after announcing the wrong best picture winner at the end of last year’s show, saying “La La Land” won the award instead of “Moonlight.”

Beatty was presented the wrong envelope before taking the stage, creating one of the most awkward Oscars moments of all-time.

https://pagesix.com/2018/03/01/warren-beatty-faye-dunaway-will-reportedly-present-best-picture-oscar-again/?

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By Gus Leonisky at 2 Mar 2018 - 2:23pm
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using the golden statuette as a dildo...

A reader writes to ask if I’m going to do an Oscars post. The answer is no; I didn’t watch the show, or see the movies nominated. He responded by saying that I really ought to write something. “The Academy used to play it safe with controversy, but now it’s moving the Overton window faster than in real life,” he wrote. “Who’d have thought one decade ago that the most prestigious award in the film industry would go to a film about bestiality, and casting it in a positive light?”

He’s talking about The Shape Of Water, a movie in which the female protagonist falls in love with a humanoid amphibian, and has sex with it (“cod coitus,” according to Sonny Bunch). The reader continues:

Even more astounding is that no one seemed to care: the critics, the media and now the Academy all applauded at director Guillermo Del Toro’s “boldness”. The Best Screenplay and Best Foreign Film winners — respectively about a pederastic love story and a trans woman fighting prejudice — look almost tame in comparison, though they’re symptomatic too.

The Oscar-winning director Alejandro Iñarritú has praised The Shape Of Water like this, in Daily Variety:

“Shape of Water” is a love letter to love. And a love declaration for cinema. And Guillermo changed the paradigm of the monster tale because no monster or princess has to change. The only real transformation comes from within, by loving and accepting each other as they are.

A film that loves, without conditions, the marginalized, the rejects, those beings that are “different” and have no voice. It has a perfect villain that embodies those ideologies from the past, but are so relevant, recycled, and even more dangerous today. The fear of the otherness. Blinded by fear and ignorance, he cannot see the others for what they really are, but loses control and reason with the idea they represent for him.

In other words, you can have sex with anyone or anything you want, because love is love, and love wins.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/sex-with-fish-triumph-of-t...

Like the author of this piece —Rod Dreher — Gus did not watch the "Oscars". Gus sees Hollywood as the centre of fake news, fake dresses and fake boobs. This is where the Weinstein beasts lurk in the water... or in Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989). Rod sees the movie The Shape of Water as complete elegantised debauched bestiality... and he could be right... And the kids from this fishy union, turn out to be the symbol of Singapore — the red-haired lion-head on a cod's tail...

Ah, Hollywood... you're a tart using the golden statuette as a dildo...

Read from top...

By Gus Leonisky at 7 Mar 2018 - 7:11am
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happy birthday...

The world’s premier dirty joke-telling philosopher celebrates his 70th birthday by giving his unique take on Catholic perversity, on the “racism of political correctness” and on hardcore pornography, in a film by RT.

Referred to by some as the “Elvis of cultural theory,” the sniffing Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek is no ordinary intellectual. With his unique blend of pop culture references and irreverent takes on taboo-subjects, Zizek has, in the words of Foreign Policy, “given voice to an era of absurdity.”

Watch RT’s birthday gift to“the world’s most dangerous philosopher.”

Read (see) more:

https://www.rt.com/news/454438-zizek-birthday-film-interviews/

By Gus Leonisky at 22 Mar 2019 - 12:17pm
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arming both sides of the war...

by Philip Roddis

Three years ago, Global Research showed that interests backing Trident also finance Russia’s nuclear programme.

This news, relayed a few months later by the Canary, should have caused a storm in anti-war circles. In fact few noticed. Debate around Trident continued to centre on whether or not it was (a) insurance against a credible threat, (b) worth a price tag running to hundreds of billions,[1] (c) a diversion from more efficient uses of arms spend, or (d) intrinsically deranged.

That last comes closest to the truth, to be sure, but too few of those who see nuclear weapons as monstrous are taking in the full picture. That ‘deterrence’ industries operate to a rule book written by Catch-22’s Milo Minderbinder, aka the demented laws of capital accumulation, is an aspect frequently lost sight of when discussion is confined on the one hand to pragmatics, on the other to moral absolutes.[2]

Bear with me a moment. Back in the eighties, with the world again on the brink of realising its worst nightmare, Socialist Workers Party had the strap line, “Neither Washington nor Moscow”. Other left sects denounced this as a sop to popular sentiment created by market driven media in what Herman and Chomsky would later call the manufacture of opinion.

Those sects were no less dismissive than SWP of a USSR leadership they saw as freeloading on the property gains of 1917 while incapable of defending said gains against a Western imperialism that would never accept – could never accept, other than as a temporary setback – the closing off of one sixth of the world’s land mass to profit.

All the same, SWP’s left critics rejected the moral equivalence implicit in ‘neither Washington nor Moscow’. There were many aspects to this but what matters here is that the very natures of capitalism on the one hand, top-down economic planning[3] on the other, have hugely different implications for their arms sectors. Every dollar spent by the US on arms is:

enabled by a unique advantage conferred by Bretton Woods and altered but in no way negated by Nixon’s 1971 removal of the dollar from gold parity[4]
a boost to its grotesquely distorted economy
a transfer of wealth within the USA from the many to the few
a means, with US military bases across the globe vastly outnumbering those of all other states combined, of enforcing its imperialist will, defined in the last analysis by the export of monopoly capital and repatriation of profits.

By Gus Leonisky at 17 May 2019 - 11:56am
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showmanship is passing by...

...

Lowering his massive eyebrows for dramatic effect, Latour says that science has “always had to theatricalise proof” in order to change perceptions. “Pasteur was quite a showman, flogging a non-vaccinated laboratory sheep to prove it had really died of its ailments, taking a crowd into a vineyard to prove – to an incredulous Burgundy winemaker – that he could sterilise bad bacteria. Unfortunately though, in France, our rationalism has now flattened out this kind of thing.”

...

These formats have indeed been diverse: besides the knockabout, sketch-driven Gaia Global Circus, and Inside (in which Latour was presented as a tiny figure adrift in massive projections of geological strata and astronomical diagrams), the pair convened a parallel-reality COP 21 over three days at the Nanterre-Amandiers theatre in 2015, in which fictional delegates of the soil, air and seas rubbed shoulders with students role-playing the representatives of nation states. Their hard-debated summit protocol was ceremonially handed to the president of the “real” COP 21.

...

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/feb/04/bruno-latour-moving-earths...

Read from top.

Yes, Trump is in the "genius spectrum" (com'on, this is satire if you don't get it), while Greta Thunberg is in the Asperger's... Bruno Latour is a joker with a philosophical stick or schtick:

"In his strange performance-cum-lecture Moving Earths he depicts “social and cosmic order lurching towards a parallel political and ecological collapse”. Latour has extensively used theatre to communicate arguments concerning microbiology, political speech, geology, cosmology, democracy, theology and all the aspects of existence that – he states in this show – are “trembling” to their roots because of the climate crisis.

Gus: Nothing is trembling apart from the trousers of scientists that are becoming brown. They are shitting themselves... The rest of us, the plebs, just coast along with no comprehension whatsoever of whatever science is telling us: okay we're getting more bushfires, floods and more weather bizoids... but we had them before and what's a few koalas singed to crips in dead trees... Let's start the chainsaws and rearrange nature so we can grow hamburgers. No, we're not trembling yet... So I suppose that the Latour spectacle is to tell us we should tremble...

On this little site, we've been telling you should tremble since its inception in 2005. May be we should have gone on stage and burn a few sets down to spike the drama and be noticed. In fact we should not tremble, we should act and start digging...

oscar moments...

Nothing draws people to the screen like a good old-fashioned scandalous incident on air. For the 94th Academy Awards ceremony, it was Will Smith who propelled the event’s ratings by slapping "the s**t out of" Chris Rock for making an offensive joke about his wife.

With the Internet unable to get enough of the altercation between Will Smith and Chris Rock, one should remember that the incident is definitely not the first - and hardly the last - shocking moment to take place during the Oscars.

Here is a quick look at several other bizarre Academy Awards incidents that have prompted buzz. Some of them happened even before the Internet - otherwise they would have definitely dominated Twitter trends.

Marlon Brando Rejecting His Oscar in 1973

While some people might be too cool to show up at the ceremony to collect their Oscars, Marlon Brando went one step further. He never even bothered to go and reject his award. Instead, he sent a Native American woman named Sacheen Littlefeather, who delivered a fiery speech about Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans - and, of course, mentioned that Brando would not be attending or receiving his Oscar.

Angelina Jolie Kissing Her Brother

There are a lot of Oscars stories that involve kissing, but this one is definitely among the weirdest, because Angelina Jolie happened to share a passionate kiss with her brother at the 2000 ceremony.

The move certainly got people talking, but the family insisted at the time that the kiss was nothing more than sibling love. So maybe not incest, but the moment definitely sparked drama around the 2000 ceremony.

Another Kissing Story

When Adrien Brody received an Oscar for his role in "The Pianist", he apparently got so excited that he could not contain his emotions, but had to share them with someone else. It was then-presenter Halle Berry who wound up on the receiving end of Brody's over-the-top reaction, as he grabbed her by the waist and gave her a passionate kiss.

The problem was that not only did Barry not expect it, she also did not seem to want it very much. Years later, she revealed that she was "totally shocked" by Brody's move, and her only reaction could be described with the phrase “What the f**k is happening?”

Jennifer Lawrence Fall

In 2013, Jennifer Lawrence won an Oscar for Best Actress for her role in "Silver Linings Playbook", and had to overcome some obstacles (stairs) when she was on her way to collect her award.

That sounds weird, one might say - among such people were many of Lawrence's colleagues, even Jared Leto. However, the actress claimed that her fall on the stairs was genuine, as it was really difficult to walk up the steps while wearing her ballgown.

La La Land Mix-Up [see toon at top]

The winner of the 2017 Oscars' Best Picture was "Moonlight", but in order to find that out, viewers had to first witness one of the most embarrassing moments in the history of the Academy Awards.

The presenters - Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway - received the wrong envelope, and therefore announced "La La Land" as the winner instead of "Moonlight". After several moments of shock and horror that took over the stage, the actual victor was eventually revealed. However, the mix-up inevitably stole all the headlines and social media threads in the days that followed.

Living Jan Chapman Features in 'In Memoriam' Segment

Producer Jan Chapman - who is still alive and obviously was in 2017 - discovered herself in the "In Memoriam" segment of the Oscars ceremony. Her photo appeared in the slideshow instead of a picture of late costume designer Janet Patterson, who passed away in 2016.

"I was devastated by the use of my image in place of my great friend and long-time collaborator Janet Patterson", Chapman told Variety at the time. "I had urged her agency to check any photograph which might be used and understand that they were told that the Academy had it covered".

Neil Patrick Harris in Underwear

In 2015, Neil Patrick Harris, who was the ceremony's host at the time, appeared on stage wearing nothing but his underwear.

The bold look turned out to be inspired by the movie "Birdman", which wound up as an Oscar winner that year. Neil Patrick Harris' nod to the film now seems to be more than appropriate (the main character in "Birdman" enjoys a promenade in nothing but his underwater at one point in the movie).

Will Smith vs. Chris Rock

The 2022 ceremony obviously joins the list after Will Smith walked up on stage and slapped Chris Rock in the face after the latter made a joke about Smith's wife's hair condition.

The Smith-Rock altercation stole Sunday's show, with all eyes drawn to the now-iconic picture of Smith's hand striking Rock's face. And even though Smith, who at the very same ceremony secured his first Oscar, (but who cares now?) apologised for his enraged outburst, his behaviour has been condemned by the Academy. Naturally, the incident immediately went viral.Hours before the ceremony, Smith posted a short video on his Instagram* that showed him and his wife Jada-Pinkett getting ready for the event. But the caption now looks somewhat prophetic: "Me ‘n @jadapinkettsmith got all dressed up to choose chaos".The two undoubtedly lived up to the caption. *Instagram is banned in Russia over extremist activity.

https://sputniknews.com/20220328/incest-half-naked-host--mix-ups-oscars-weirdest-moments-as-will-smith-slap-joins-the-list-1094267960.html

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By Gus Leonisky at 29 Mar 2022 - 7:21am
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