Bizarro Blog has a troubling hilarious new take on the phrase ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.’ A picture is worth a thousand words and this one speaks volumes.
Below is another illustration from Bizarro illustrating our obsession with electronic devices. Sort of sad, eh?
(via The High Definite)
This lovely synth/psych single from 1968 is a collaboration between former Left Banke, future Woodstock performer Bert Sommer, the then Walter (soon to be Wendy) Carlos and the band Childe Harold. Dig those signature Clockwork Orange pre-cursors ! This is nearly too good to be true. A really dark and woozy bad trip.
Hear the flip side after the jump…
Timothy Noah, writing on wealth inequalities on Slate, lays out some astonishing facts about just how much of America’s wealth is owned by the mega-rich:
I noted that in 1915, when the richest 1 percent accounted for about 18 percent of the nation’s income, the prospect of class warfare was imminent. Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation’s income, yet the prospect of class warfare is utterly remote. Indeed, the political question foremost in Washington’s mind is how thoroughly the political party more closely associated with the working class (that would be the Democrats) will get clobbered in the next election. Why aren’t the bottom 99 percent marching in the streets?
One possible answer is sheer ignorance. People know we’re living in a time of growing income inequality, [Paul] Krugman told me, but “the ordinary person is not really aware of how big it is.” The ignorance hypothesis gets a strong assist from a new paper for the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science: “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time.” The authors are Michael I. Norton, a psychologist who teaches at Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist (and blogger) at Duke. Norton and Ariely focus on the distribution of wealth, which is even more top-heavy than the distribution of income. The richest 1 percent account for 35 percent of the nation’s net worth; subtract housing, and their share rises to 43 percent. The richest 20 percent (or “top quintile”) account for 85 percent; subtract housing and their share rises to 93 percent. But when Norton and Ariely surveyed a group whose incomes, voting patterns, and geographic distribution approximated that of the U.S. population, the respondents guessed that the top quintile accounted for only 59 percent of the nation’s wealth.[Emphasis added]
Sickening, huh? If you threw up a little in your mouth as you read that, I think you’re in good company. SOCIALISM NOW!
Read more of Theoretical Egalitarians: Why income distribution can’t be crowd-sourced (Slate)
Your exam question for today:
Can Trading Market patterns be represented in a perceptually weighted experience?
That’s the question Marco Donnarumma (aka The Sad), a new media artist based in Edinburgh, has answered with his project Invisible Suns.
Invisible Suns is an autonomous system that every day analyzes the historical stock prices of a variable selection of major corporations, compresses in few minutes over 8 years of economic transactions and eventually produces a generative and self-organizing audiovisual datascape.
Donnarumma has used culled data from the real and virtual world to create a beautiful, visual interpretation of the stock market, its cyclical pattern of boom and bust as miniature suns. But don’t be fooled by their beauty, for it is akin to that acknowledged by Italian Futurist poet Marinetti, when he described the beauty in clouds of dust that blossomed from the devastation of an explosion.
Like Marinetti’s vision of warfare, Invisible Suns is deceptively beautiful, for what is implicit is the terrible human cost of each sun’s, each market’s devastating rise and fall.
Everyday since the 1st August 2010 the system retrieves from the Internet up to date stock prices of selected companies and adds new values to its set of databases. The oldest figures date back to January 2002 while the newest are being collected today.
At the moment the system is analyzing historical stock prices of six companies which boast the highest market capital in defense and oil industry: BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron Corporation and General Dynamics Corporation.
Data are processed in real time to generate a panoramic synaesthetic scape which demonstrates an auditive and visual sensation of expansions and falls of companies shares as well as the overall movement of the trading market.
With thanks to Mark MacLachlan
They probably just should have spelled out Portland, Maine.
(via TDW)
I see four mobile scooters here. Four! I wish I could unsee this. I wonder what the holiday aisle ‘scooter traffic’ will look like? *shudders*
(via EPICponyz)
It took me a while before I could tell—even in a general sense—exactly what the fuck this angry, angry man was going on about and by the end I still wasn’t sure. One thing that’s for certain is he is really, really angry. Spitting mad, you might say. Bring an umbrella.
Thank you Redacted!
Once again, Matt Taibi shows why he is, beyond all doubt or argument to the contrary, the best writer in America today, as he describes, with surgical precision, his Tea-party “epiphany.” What more can I add to the perfect prose contained in the following six paragraphs?
It’s taken three trips to Kentucky, but I’m finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you’d expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin — who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate — is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh.
“We’re shaking up the good ol’ boys,” Palin chortles, to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. “Buck up,” she says, “or stay in the truck.”
Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean?
Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn’t a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — “Government’s not the solution! Government’s the problem!” — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.
“The scooters are because of Medicare,” he whispers helpfully. “They have these commercials down here: ‘You won’t even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!’ Practically everyone in Kentucky has one.”
A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can’t imagine it.
Tea & Crackers: How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster (Rolling Stone)
Carrot ejaculating from ‘Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion’ (with Marion Faller) (1975)
There’s more wacky GIF images from Hollis Frampton and Marion Faller’s ‘Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion’ that can be found here.
(via Everlasting Blort)
Fuck me:
A wonderful book of The Tea Party for Kids! Teaches children (and parents) about the origins of the Tea Party and what it involves. A very pleasant song, coloring and activity book on Liberty, Faith, Freedom and so much more! Get involved, participate, self reliance, freedom of choice, work, government-of-for-by the people, Leadership, Ingenuity, Jobs and responsibilty!
The Tea Party Coloring Book for Kids!