Artist and writer, or writer and artist. Sometimes other things, too.
Tag: USA
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden answering* some of the “unmerrrrkan, traytor!” accusations that have been flying around in the usual reckless, unsupported, contra-factual and rabble-rousing way in the US media:
“This is a predictable smear that I anticipated before going public, as the US media has a knee-jerk “RED CHINA!” reaction to anything involving HK or the PRC, and is intended to distract from the issue of US government misconduct. Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.”
What a conspiracy revelation. The US military-industrial-entertainment complex knows phoenixes are real and there’s a massive Sino-American phoenix-petting race that they don’t want the public to know about.
But seriously, if you’ve been obtaining any of your knowledge about Snowden and the US government appointing itself Big Brother from some American Ken and…
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“To be worn over head and rest on shoulders. Full size. Fine natural painted. Heads kept in stock can be shipped on short notice.”
Freemasons: plotting in secret to run the world and conceal an age-old conspiracy, or getting drunk and running around wearing a donkey head? On the evidence of this old catalogue of “Burlesque and Side Degree Specialties, Paraphernalia and Costumes” by De Moulin Bros. & Co., I’m afraid the latter scenario seems much more likely. Sorry, conspiracy fans.
OR MAYBE I’M A NWO REPTOID TOO AND I’M IN THE PAY OF THE ILLUMINATI. STAY ASLEEP.
This is more hard drive detritus. I don’t know where these images came from or why I originally stored them. I know only that they’re from late 2001 or early 2002, and they therefore predate the books or sites that came out over the past few years with nutty material from…
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A delightfully nihilistic quote attributed to physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the main architects of the Manhattan Project and of the first atomic weapons, although it’s probably apocryphal. It seems to originate in French from Michel Houllebecq’s book H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. The English translation of Houllebecq actually mentions in a footnote that the quote is untraceable.
Houllebecq is, shall we say, a not uncontroversial writer who may conceivably be projecting his own profound misanthropy and negativity onto Oppenheimer; Lovecraft’s, too. Even so, it’s in character for a man who made it possible for the human race to render itself and most other life on the planet totally extinct within a matter of minutes.
It’s also in character for Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “The first ten million…
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A footnote to the previous post about Americans being the weirdest people in the world: the image above is the first one thrown up by a Google image search for “fat Americans”. It’s been reposted, Reddited and ripped off so many hundreds of times that I wasn’t able to track down its original photographer or origins. If you know or by some weird quirk of fate you are in fact the photographer himself or herself, leave a comment. It’s also been used by mainstream American magazines and blogs to illustrate articles about American obesity.
I’m not saying that many Americans aren’t obese, because they are and contrary to some particularly shrill and screwed up segments of obese American society it’s not “fat-shaming”, “hate speech” or whatever to tell people that it’s unhealthy, self-destructive and a needless drain on the state’s and the planet’s finite resources to eat so…
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Although I’ll be the first to admit that it’s an example of confirmation bias because I’ve been saying and writing similar things for years, I just read a lengthy but very interesting article about the ways in which social sciences like anthropology, economics and behaviourism may be even more ethnocentric, subjective and ideological than all but the chippiest post-colonial theorists have portrayed them.
In short, social science and its “truths” have been dominated by people from the USA and their culture. And the citizens of the United States are the weirdest and most subjective people in the world. US dominance means that Weird Japan or Weird Asia are internet genres, while Weird USA is just the internet in general. Hollywood films and US TV shows label Paris as “Paris, France”, implying that most people in the world think of the Paris in Texas first of all. They don’t. Studies of…
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Control panel and plugboards of the British Colossus computer, 1944. It was not programmable, had 2500 vacuum tubes, and it had only one hardwired purpose and algorithm: to crack the encryption of Germany’s Enigma machines, processing up to 5000 characters per second. Based on the work of mathematicians and cryptographers such as Alan Turing at the top secret Bletchley Park facility, the ability to break German codes was one of the factors that eventually turned the Second World War in favour of the Allies.
Another notable thing about this photograph is the strangely timeless/time traveller style of the woman on the left. I think she could walk down the street anywhere in the developed world at any time between about 1930 and 2030 and look like she belongs there.
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The TRS 80 home computer, USA, 1978. In these thrilling advertisements, a man does the household budget (on paper, while looking at the numbers on the screen) and some kind of prepubescent Oedipal classroom psychodrama is played out through the medium of multiplication tables.
Basically it’s a jumped-up pocket calculator, only much less convenient.
Don’t worry, puritans of America, you can’t do anything fun or interesting with these computers!
Alistair Gentry 