What blogs/websites are you reading now?

[MacCruiskeen]

Strange Company
A walk on the weird side of history

http://strangeco.blogspot.de/

[conniption]

Strange Company
A walk on the weird side of history

http://strangeco.blogspot.de/

*

Thx Mac.
Good stuff.
Plenty of cats. >^^<



*

Libya 360°

[MacCruiskeen]

Tom Clark: Beyond the Pale

http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.de/

[MacCruiskeen]

DORIAN COPE PRESENTS
ON THIS DEITY
COMMEMORATING CULTURE HEROES & EXCAVATING WORLD EVENTS

http://www.onthisdeity.com/18th-october ... d-ensslin/

CATEGORIES
ANARCHISTS ATROCITIES CURIOSITIES DISSENT HEROES HEROINES REVOLUTION TYRANTS UNCATEGORIZED WORLD EVENTS

[conniption]

Bark Bark Woof Woof

Friday, November 8, 2013

Ten Years

Ten years ago today — Saturday, November 8, 2003 — I wrote this:

Here Goes…

Welcome to Bark Bark Woof Woof, a blog dedicated to my take on life, the universe and everything with my unique sense of dry amusement. The title comes from a guy I once worked for who said “bark bark woof woof” instead of “et cetera, et cetera,” and in memory of my dog, Sam, who was my best friend for 13 years.

Since then, I’ve moved to two different places, been through three computers, I’m on my second Mustang, and written close to 20,000 posts here. Three presidential elections, ten Detroit Tiger seasons, a couple of hurricanes, one off-off-Broadway production, over a thousand music videos, theatre festivals, car shows, innumerable cultural references to Mel Brooks, M*A*S*H, and the Marx Brothers, and all — I hope — with the sense of humor and insight that I aspired to when I said that I was just “trying to get through life without bumping into the furniture.”

Something like this does not happen in a vacuum, even when some of my posts suck. I started out by being a commenter at other blogs and met like-minded people who amazed and inspired me to try it for myself. That’s how I met NTodd, who, it turns out, spent his childhood in my home town, and who served — and still does — as mentor and touchstone for what’s worth writing about. Soon I met a lot of other bloggers and made friends and actually met a couple of them in person. That is one of the enigmas of this craft: you form close bonds with people you’ve never met.

Among those are Melissa McEwan at Shakesville, who one day casually dropped me a note inviting me to be a contributor. I was stunned and honored beyond words, and from that has grown a bond that has taught me so much about being a better person, a listener, and a feminist. There is so much to admire about Melissa’s strength, courage, and just plain Liss-ness.

Michael J.W. Stickings at The Reaction has been a good friend and teacher, and being a part of his group is both an honour (the blog is based in Canada) and a welcome challenge to keep up to the standards that he sets for liberalism unbound. Every year when I go to Stratford we talk about meeting in person, and some day it will happen.

None of what you see here would be possible without the help and guidance of my brother CLW. Not just on the technical side — the countless hours of design work front and back and support when hackers attack — but also for the brotherly love and inspiration of topics and views that go way beyond C++.

I know that if I listed all the people who have been a part of these ten years, I’d be rattling off names for a long, long, time, and the cake would get stale. So let me say to each of you who has been with me since 2003 or if you just clicked on the link last week: thank you. I appreciate you more than you know, and as Bilbo Baggins famously said, “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

And with that… here’s the cake.



~

Friday, November 8, 2013
Friday Catblogging

Madam, the boneless cat, fills the spa.

[brainpanhandler]

http://nthmind.wordpress.com/

[MacCruiskeen]

http://www.ruthlesscriticism.com/RCoverview.htm

Criticism – what’s that?

Shouldn’t criticism be constructive, helping to improve what it criticizes? Do we just want to be negative? It is not our program to contribute well-intentioned suggestions for the success of what we criticize:

that people have to work for an employer because they need money to survive, and anybody who seeks employment has to live under the constant pressure of making themselves completely suitable for the demands that a capitalist economy makes on them;

that if they lose their lousy job they don't have enough money to live on and need to find a new job right away – because employees gain nothing by working for others and their poverty is never escaped;

that this endangered existence is the necessary basis for wage labor;

that this dependence is reproduced on a worldwide level as the whole planet is subsumed to its logic and there is more and more absolute impoverishment as the free-market economy sorts out those who are useless for it;

that the entire globe is analyzed for what is good for business, so that some areas are useful for industry and four fifths of the world have no other use than supplying raw materials;

that nature and the sources of life are also resources for business, so the air, water, food supply and even the weather are ruined in a sustainable way.

These are not unfortunate side effects, “problems” that our politicians must continue to work on. The causes are also not:

something called “neoliberal,” “financialized,” “hyper-,” or other hyphenated capitalisms;

a moral defect of the capitalists called “profit greed”;

corrupt and irresponsible politicians;

and certainly not the unwillingness in each of us “to begin with one's self” in order to improve the world.

All these are inevitable consequences of an economic system, the so-called free market economy, which aims at nothing as trivial as providing for human needs, but only and exclusively the accumulation of capital.

Because one cannot make this system better – on the contrary, it already functions too well! – we have no suggestions for improvement. We insist that these problems exist because of the system.

contact: ruthless_criticism@yahoo.com

[MacCruiskeen]

Website of the sociologist Peter Frase, editor of Jacobin magazine:

http://www.peterfrase.com/blog/

e.g.

Manufacturing Stupidity

Four Futures

Workin' It

Idiocracy’s Theory of the Future

Anti-Star Trek: A Theory of Posterity

Anti-Star Trek takes these same technological premises: replicators, free energy, and a post-scarcity economy. But it casts them in a different set of social relations. Anti-Star Trek is an attempt to answer the following question:

Given the material abundance made possible by the replicator, how would it be possible to maintain a system based on money, profit, and class power?

[conniption]

link

~

Anna Raccoon

They’ll be Coming Round the Mountain…

by Anna Raccoon on April 24, 2014


everest

Or rather they won’t! Was I the only person who raised a silent cheer at the news that the Nepalese Sherpas had walked off Everest, and that thus ‘this year’s Everest expeditions had been forced to cancel’?

Not that the Sherpas actually ‘own’ Everest or have any legal means to stop people climbing the mountain, but their actions have thrown into sharp relief that the wealthy American bankers who sign up to companies with names like ‘Adrenaline Junkies’ are incapable of climbing that mountain without a nanny in the form of a Sherpa to carry their equipment, cook their food, nurse their cuts and bruises and generally shepherd them up and safely down the mountain – to the waiting helicopter which flips them back to the airport and Manhattan where they can extoll their colleagues with tales of their bravery and enterprise.

There are genuinely experienced mountaineers still using their expertise to find new and ever more dangerous routes up Everest, but the vast majority of people who arrive with their brightly coloured kagoules and hand-plucked duck feather sleeping bags which they majestically hand to a waiting Sherpa are tourists with no more climbing ability than your average Minsk whale. Some of them don’t even make it past Base Camp, despite having paid £50,000 to one of the several ‘luxury expedition’ companies now in business.

I do concede that you need to be physically fit to even make the attempt. Personally, I didn’t even make it to Base Camp – not that I was planning an assault on the summit, but I had the mad idea that I would celebrate my 50th Birthday with a hot air ballon flight to see the sun rise over Everest(!!!). Sounded wonderful; but even at the first ‘tea-house’ I was wheezing like an arthritic donkey, and delighted to hear that the balloon flight company had packed up early that year due to bad weather. I allowed myself to be talked into descending the quickest way possible, by white water rafting – another adventure available on the slopes of Everest these days. An unforgettable adventure. Five hysterical gung-ho Americans screaming ‘paddle Goddammit, woman’ at a Raccoon clinging maniacally to the guide ropes with no intention of doing anything so daft as letting go and picking up a paddle….they did volunteer to put me ashore early as we raced past a forest clearing bearing the sign ‘Tiger sanctuary – enter at your own risk’. Bloody comedians…that is the last time I voluntarily enter a washing machine on full spin cycle.

I spent the rest of my time in Nepal wandering round Katmandu just listening to the conversation around me. It is a clash of the cultures. What follows is not a particular desire to knock American culture, its just that Katmandu was full of Americans, many ‘high’ after the obligatory visit to ‘Freak Street’ where once cannabis was legal for the religious sadhus, but is now kept under the counter for the hippy saddos - and I didn’t happen to meet any other British people.

Language that may seem perfectly ‘safe’ and acceptable when addressing a Ukrainian taxi-driver in downtown Manhattan lands like a lead ballon in the gentle world of Buddhism. ‘Oy, Tonto’ isn’t a phrase that I would use when I want a waiter to bring me another beer. You may have become desensitised to the meaning of the phrase ‘motherfu*ker’ – but they haven’t. Personally I’d question the wisdom and manners of addressing your Manhattan Ukranian taxi-driver thus, but it is utter madness to use that term towards a Sherpa guide and expect it to be taken as a term of endearment when you are half way up Everest.

In fairness, Ueli Steck, the offending westerner, was a) Swiss, and b) an experienced mountaineer attempting a traverse of the mountain without oxygen and without a sherpa guide. The principle still holds though – ‘Motherfu*ker’ is a term capable of giving great offence. Especially when the Sherpa is earnestly engaged in fixing guide ropes on the lethal Lhotse Face, the better that another season’s worth of western idiots can just ‘walk’ up Everest; he thinks you are responsible for the lump of ice that just landed on his head; and an apology would have been a better idea under the circumstances. Ueli Steck ended the day leaving all his equipment behind and being chased out of Base Camp Two back down the mountain by a 100 strong group of Sherpas hurling rocks and knives. It must have been a terrifying experience, and I’m sure he is, as reported, ‘traumatised’.

A century ago, the Sherpas were, literally, uneducated mountain goats, hauling the merchandise of traders across mountains where no one else could go. Edmund Hillary changed all that for them – 60 years ago. Since then, they have earned good money shepherding westerners up and down ‘their’ mountain; in the 1970s it was only a handful of experienced climbers each year – then the ‘commercial companies’ stepped in with their ‘Everest experience’. Now the Sherpas have responsibility for getting some 500 people a year to the peak – many of whom are not best suited, mentally or physically for the challenge. They are no longer the cream of the mountaineering crop. Many are people who have paid a lot of money for ‘their’ Sherpa to deliver their ‘Everest experience’. That change in the clienteles attitude has coincided with the benefit of good education for the current Sherpas over the past 20/30 years, courtesy of western money.

Last week, an avalanche buried 16 Sherpas, engaged in fixing the ropes and ladders that would allow this year’s crop of climbers to traverse the mountain safely. 16 times helicopters ferried limp bodies down the mountain for ritual burial as their fellow Sherpas watched in silence. Base Camp One was already full of extreme sports enthusiasts who had paid up to £50,000 each for the authentic ‘Sherpa risking his life for you and then calmly cooking your dinner’ experience.

They are furious that they won’t get a refund. The Sherpas have simply walked off the mountain and don’t intend to return.

Good for them. Sometimes money is insufficient compensation.

{ 16 comments }

[Elihu]

http://infrakshun.wordpress.com/article ... nological/