Derek Miller - Fin de Stylus Magazine

2007 Year-end thoughts

Before Stylus, I’d never have believed you could become so close to people you’d never met. In space that lacks physique, you kind of meet as avatars. The board was a way for so many of us to piss away empty time at work or late at night, to gossip and needle and call-foul at music, sports, our jobs, drinks of choice. I think we all came to a persona of our own more than perhaps we were ourselves. A dress-up, extroverted place for what I expect are really a room-full of introverts (spoken like one. . .) It was dreamspace, the most virtual of realities, but it was also a place where those of us who’d been around for a while began to feel we could come, first-coffee in the morning, to put some kind of steady perspective back in place. But it only worked because we came to know at least a bit of something about each other by what we’d read and written. There was a frankness gained by putting so much of ourselves in pieces about music—or pieces about music which often had nothing to do with music. We pressed and confined each other, in turns, with a challenge of putting something in writing, formally or informally

Buddha Machine

FM3 Buddha Machine
La création la plus populaire de la scène underground electronique chinoise.

New York Times

The Evangelical crackup
Les mouvements d'opinions au sein des communautés evangelistes après les différentes défaites de George W. Bush et ses promesses non tenues.

These days, Westlink has found less confrontational ways to oppose abortion, mainly by helping to pay for a medical center called Choices. Housed in a cozy-looking white-shingled cottage next to Dr. Tiller’s bunkerlike abortion facility, Choices discourages women from ending pregnancies by offering 3-D ultrasound scans and adoption advice.

[...]

Of these, Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister before he became governor of Arkansas, stands out in the polls and in his rhetoric. [...] On the campaign trail, he criticizes chief executives’ pay and says his faith demands environmental regulation. “We shouldn’t allow a child to live under a bridge or in the back seat of a car,” Huckabee said in a recent debate. “We shouldn’t be satisfied that elderly people are being abused or neglected in nursing homes.”Huckabee told me that he welcomed a broadening of the evangelical political agenda. “You can’t just say ‘respect life’ exclusively in the gestation period,” he said, repeating a campaign theme.

But the leaders of the Christian conservative movement have not rallied to him. Many say he cannot win because he has not raised enough money. Perkins and others have criticized Huckabee for taking too soft an approach to the Middle East. Others worry that his record on taxes will anger allies on the right. And some Christian conservatives take his “gestation period” line as a slight to their movement.

[...]

Democrats, meanwhile, sense an opportunity. Now the campaigns of all three Democratic front-runners are actively courting evangelical voters. At a White House event to mark the National Day of Prayer that I attended in the spring, Senator Clinton even walked over to shake hands with Dobson. Visibly surprised, he told her she was in his prayers.

All three Democratic candidates are speaking very personally, in evangelical language, about their own faith. What does Clinton pray about? “It depends upon the time of day,” she said. Edwards says he cannot name his greatest sin: “I sin every single day.” Obama talks about his introduction to “someone named Jesus Christ” and about being “an instrument of God.”

[...]

In the Wichita churches this summer, Obama was the Democrat who drew the most interest. Several mentioned that he had spoken at Warren’s Saddleback church and said they were intrigued. But just as many people ruled out Obama because they suspected that he was not Christian at all but in fact a crypto-Muslim — a rumor that spread around the Internet earlier this year.

Rudy, the values slayer
Did we do that ? par Thomas Friedman

La revanche du nounours rose

Charlie White - Adicolor pink
Un clip d'une minute vingt sur un ours en peluche qui transforme sa patronne en poupet. Vous avez dit inquiétant ?

A lire, a résumer et a communiquer

Warren Ellis - A love letter to alternative culture, written in an era where alt culture no longer exists

Stanislas Lem - The chain of chance

Warren Ellis - Threat status

somedays, MySpace would be the very ironic image of stark existential loneliness within a sea of people if it wasn't for the users whose profiles have been hacked to send out waves of spam. Somewhere, a lonely boy's eyes are welling up with joy, his heart filled near to bursting with the feeling of someone wanting to communicate with him. Yes, he says. I do need a bigger cock that plays ringtones and ejaculates restaurant vouchers. Just keep talking to me.

Takashi Murakami

Takashi Murakami sur Wikipedia
Fondateur du mouvement Super flat au Japon. Un de ses élève les plus connu est Yoshitomo Nara. Takashi Murakami - Murakami sur Amazon

Alan Moore - Pornographie, magie et Promethea

Alan Moore - the Wondeful wizard of Northerhampton

'The basic stance that we were taking in Lost Girls is that the sexual imagination cannot be policed, you cannot shut areas of it off and I think that if you do, it actually becomes dangerous. I think that if you shut off parts of people's sexual imagination then that part becomes a dark space in which they can fester and become something generally appalling.'

What we wanted to say with Lost Girls was there's a big difference between pornography and art. Art makes us feel less alone. It makes us think: somebody else has thought this, somebody else has had these feelings. Pornography does the exact opposite: it's an isolating thing. Everybody thinks, ''I bet it's only me who has had these thoughts. I bet there's never been anybody as low as me in the entire history of the world." We wanted to say, "Look, it's OK. It's OK for you to have these thoughts.

[...]

The first step into magic is the human imagination. The world of the mind and the world of matter are both real, but in different ways. In fact, if one is more important than the other, it's probably the world of the imagination, where the world of human artefacts, well, all of it, actually originates. The basic paradigm of science tends to rule out consciousness, imagination, because they're not repeatable in empirical laboratory conditions. So it struck me that perhaps through magic there might be a different way to interact with the mind. This might in fact have been what magicians were talking about all along.

[...]

The 'tarot stuff' is the issue entitled 'The Magic Theatre', a history of the universe from pre-Big Bang to the present day told through the major arcana (the picture cards) of the tarot. Moore did it in rhyming verse. He gave each page a title and all 21 titles were anagrams of 'Promethea' ('Pa Theorem'; 'Ape Mother'; 'Me Atop Her'; 'Heart Poem'; 'Meet Harpo' etc). Gags and puns abound, and at the bottom of each page a long, rambling joke is told in segments, which will, we are told, if properly understood, explain magic. 'The Magic Theatre' is a virtuoso demonstration of what an Alan Moore comic can do that novels and films can't get near – provide multiple strands of simultaneous narrative and visual information that wind around each other in dizzying fashion, echoing and commenting on each other.

'It was one of the best things we've ever done. I was dead pleased with that. I was smug for months…' (Gebbie is quick to attest to the smugness.) 'We were haemorrhaging readers, but the ones who stayed behind had presumably sustained such neurological damage that they were no longer capable of cancelling their subscription – a hardcore readership who stayed with us right to the end and really appreciated it and really enjoyed it.

Mark Briggs - Guide du journalisme moderne

Journalism : How to survive and thrive
Un guide à l'attention des journalistes pour manipuler les nouveaux outils du web. 132 pages disponible en pdf. A imprimer pour un meilleur confort de lecture.

Blackwater : Des mercenaires en Irak

Hired gun fetish

As far as I can tell, America has never fought a war in which mercenaries made up a large part of the armed force. But in Iraq, they are so central to the effort that, as Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution points out in a new report, “the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined.”

And, yes, the so-called private security contractors are mercenaries. They’re heavily armed. They carry out military missions, but they’re private employees who don’t answer to military discipline. On the other hand, they don’t seem to be accountable to Iraqi or U.S. law, either. And they behave accordingly.

We may never know what really happened in a crowded Baghdad square two weeks ago. Employees of Blackwater USA claim that they were attacked by gunmen. Iraqi police and witnesses say that the contractors began firing randomly at a car that didn’t get out of their way.

What we do know is that more than 20 civilians were killed, including the couple and child in the car. And the Iraqi version of events is entirely consistent with many other documented incidents involving security contractors.

[...]

Yet even among the contractors, Blackwater has the worst reputation. On Christmas Eve 2006, a drunken Blackwater employee reportedly shot and killed a guard of the Iraqi vice president. (The employee was flown out of the country, and has not been charged.) In May 2007, Blackwater employees reportedly shot an employee of Iraq’s Interior Ministry, leading to an armed standoff between the firm and Iraqi police.

Iraqis aren’t the only victims of this behavior. Of the nearly 4,000 American service members who have died in Iraq, scores if not hundreds would surely still be alive if it weren’t for the hatred such incidents engender.

Deux mots de vocabulaire : Blackwater et I.E.D.

Blackwater shooting site was chaotic

“It raises the first question of why didn’t they just stay in place, since they are safe in the compound,” the official said. “Usually the concept would be, if an I.E.D. detonates in the street, you would wait 15 to 30 minutes, until things calmed down,” he said, using the abbreviation for improvised explosive device.

Blackwater : Entreprise de "mercenaires" employé par le gouvernement américain dans le conflit Irakien.
I.E.D. : Improvised explosive device