"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." - Woodrow Wilson, 1909

Again With The WikiLeaking

We all knew that the facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba was an immoral place where humans did grotesque things to other humans, and that many of the people indefinitely detained there had and have not been convicted or even formally charged with any crimes. But good god it is still horrifying to read something like this:

The files depict a system often focused less on containing dangerous terrorists or enemy fighters, than on extracting intelligence. Among inmates who proved harmless were an 89-year-old Afghan villager, suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim.

The old man was transported to Cuba to interrogate him about "suspicious phone numbers" found in his compound. The 14-year-old was shipped out merely because of "his possible knowledge of Taliban...local leaders"

Another prisoner was shipped to the base "because of his general knowledge of activities in the areas of Khowst and Kabul based as a result of his frequent travels through the region as a taxi driver".

The files also reveal that an al-Jazeera journalist was held at Guantánamo for six years, partly in order to be interrogated about the Arabic news network.

(via The Guardian)

holy shit

See more funny videos and TBT at Todays Big Thing.

French's Honey Mustard is BAD

Total waste of money. If you like this condiment, I recommend you take a different route.





You're welcome.

gimme one please

they can rip your face apart if you aren't careful.

Whale 'Pop Songs' Spread Across the Ocean

A new study reveals that, just like humans, humpback whales in the South Pacific follow musical trends that change by the season. Moreover, these songs always move from west to east across thousands of miles of ocean—from the east coast of Australia to French Polynesia—over the course of a year or two. The authors say it's one of the most complex and rapid patterns of cultural evolution across a region ever observed in a nonhuman species.

The findings are based on 11 years of recordings from underwater microphones slung over the sides of boats, which were collected by marine biologist Ellen Garland of the University of Queensland in Australia and colleagues. Picking out the patterns took a while; the team had to listen to 745 songs in total from six whale populations across the South Pacific over the 11-year period. The researchers identified 11 distinctly different styles. Sometimes the "hit song" contained snippets from previous seasons, sometimes it was entirely revolutionary. But at any given time and place, there was only one song. What's more, the popular song switched incredibly rapidly; it took only 2 to 3 months for whales in a given region to entirely change their tune, the team reports online today in Current Biology.

For male whales, singing is known to be a mating behavior, and Garland calls the results a "weird interaction of constrained novelty" where each whale wants to one-up the whale next to it but still feels pressure to conform enough that it doesn't stand out as an oddball. But whether a whale primarily intends its song to impress females or to intimidate other males with its swanky style remains unclear. Peter Tyack, a marine biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who was not involved in the research, says that to understand this, behavioral biologists "need to dive in a little more deeply to understand subtle details of how males respond to males and how females choose an animal for mating."



"There's something about these songs; if it were just novelty, then everyone would just do their own thing," Tyack says. Maybe whales, he thinks, have "a sense of aesthetic judgment."

SOURCED




Humpbacks frequently breach, throwing two thirds or more of their bodies out of the water and splashing down on their backs.

you dip it AND you lick it :)

See more funny videos and TBT at Todays Big Thing.

i am a robot

AND PROUD

Muzak

From the latest n+1, a very fascinating article on the uses of music in the iPod age, with a critical look at Adorno and Bourdieu's analysis of the same in pervious eras:

"Differences in what people listen to, in a Shuffled world, may have less and less to do with social class and purchasing power. Or, better yet, taste won't correlate to class distinction: the absence of taste will. As certain foodies score points by having eaten everything- blowfish, yak milk tea, haggis, hot dogs- so the person who knows and likes all music achieves a curious sophistication-through-indiscriminateness. The music magazine The Wire, which celebrates with equal abandon Cecil Taylor's pianism and Nicki Minaj's first things first, I'll eat your brains, represents the best product of this attitude. But the would-be escape from "distinction" more often becomes the highest and most annoying form of distinction there is."

"'I do love a new purchase!' says the Gang of Four outright- while all the other songs merely insinuate it. Around the holiday's, Banana Republic will alternate familiar hits like George Michael's "Last Christmas" with pounding C-grade techno, lulling you into a state of sickly nostalgia before ramping up your heart rate- a perfect way to goose you into an impulse buy. So too, as Adorno would be unsurprised to find out, has music become a common way for people to get through the workday. Your local cafe's barista may literally depend on Bon Iver's reedy lugubriousness to palliate a dreary job as you depend on coffee. Produce! Consume! Work! Buy! Cope! Endure! These can seem the common messages underlying the pluralistic proliferation of music."

"If recording and mechanical reproduction opened up the world of musical pluralism- of listening to other people's music until you and they became different people yourselves- digital reproduction expanded that pluralism to the point where it reversed itself. You have all the world's music on your iPod, in your earphones. Now it's "other people's music"- which should be very exciting to encounter- as played in cafes and stores that is the problem. In any public setting, it acquires a coercive aspect. The iPod is the thing you have to buy not to be defenseless against the increasingly sucky music played to make you buy things: the death spiral of late capitalism in sonic form.

"One radical option remains: abnegation - some "Great Refusal" to obey the obscure social injunction that condemns us to a lifetime of listening. Silence: the word suggests the torture of enforced isolation, or a particularly monkish kind of social death. [Some discussion of John Cage here, buy it to read it] What if we tried to listen to nothing? Silence is the feature of our buzzing sound world we enjoy least, whose very existence we threaten to pave over track by track. Silence is the most endangered musical experience of our time. Turning it up, we might find out what all our music listening is meant to drown out, the thing we can't bear to hear."

On another note, I'm fleeing the country for the next month or so, so posting will be scarce if not nonexistent. Pick up the slack suckers.

Fall on me like massive walls,
O barbarians of the ancient sea!
Rip me apart and wound me!
Streak my body with blood
From east to west!
Kiss with cutlasses, whips and rage
My blissful carnal fear of belonging to you,
My masochistic yearning to submit to your fury,
To be the sentient, impassive object of your omnivorous
cruelty,
Rulers, lords, emperors, pirates!
Ah, torture me,
Rip me apart!
And once I've been hacked into conscious pieces,
Strew me over the decks,
Scatter me across the waters, leave me
On the voracious beaches of islands!
Satiate in me all my mysticism of you!
Engrave my soul in blood!
Cut and slash!
O tattooers of my bodily imagination!
Beloved flayers of my fleshly submission!
Subdue me like a dog that's kicked to death!
Make me the vessel of your lordly disdain!

Who Says Animals Don't Feel?

Adorable little kitten gazes into the abyss and proves them wrong:

A Cool Thing

This is not new, but it is cool.

17 Years Ago Today

Kurt Cobain committed suicide.

We have forgotten him on this blog, as Brian has abandoned this digital space and I have run out of compelling ideas for Nirvana Mondays. Today we remember.

"Obama: Nobel Prize for Coup-supporting"

"On February 26, the National Popular Resistance Front had its first truly national assembly. Fifteen hundred delegates participated, representing each of the country's 298 municipalities ... The movement is unified by its call for a new constitution to replace the one written in 1982 under US-backed military dictatorship. It is also unified in its rejection of the current regime of Pepe Lobo, who took power in elections held under a coup government, with the military occupying the streets during a national boycott by all who opposed the coup, and with zero international observation and ample proof of fraud. Nonetheless, the elections were recognized by the United States, Canada, and a few others. And since the United States represents at least 60 percent of Honduras's international trade, their recognition alone was enough for Lobo to take office. The position of the US is that Lobo represents an end of the political crisis. But as president, Lobo has awarded those who led the coup and repressed those who opposed it. General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez was the head of the military that carried out both the coup and the repression of the movement that rose up in resistance. Lobo named Vasquez president of the country's state telephone company... Meanwhile, the political leader of the coup, Roberto Micheletti, has been rewarded with Honduras's first ever seat as a congressman for life. The Lobo regime is also upholding an amnesty law that forbids the legal prosecution of Vasquez, Micheletti, or anyone else who was involved in the coup. This impunity for the powerful sectors is a daily reality in post-coup Honduras, where dozens of political assassinations, including ten journalists in 2010 alone, along with illegal detentions, kidnappings, torture, and accusations of gross corruption are all left unpunished and largely uninvestigated."

Wisdom from one of my favorite authors

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

- John Steinbeck

Jokes For Yr April Fools

Let's face it: pranks are dumb, mean-spirited, and juvenile. So instead just enjoy some very good jokes from Congressman and probable future Mayor of New York City Anthony Weiner:

Such a good Michelle Bachmann joke! He also recently did an AMA on Reddit, so he'll have my vote when he does make that run for King of NYC.