The Icelandic Phallological Museum!

Go get poked I mean poke around.

JIHADI RETROCAUSALITY

"The punditocracy knew who was responsible. It wasn’t pretty to see the righteous certainties of Islamic savagery crumble in the face of mere truth. The efforts to continue to apportion blame where all blame must lie have been fervent but disappointing. The attempt to defend Breivik as a paladin of The West displays a regrettable lack of savoir faire: one may indulge such strategies, but one does not speak of it at table. Insinuations that multiculturalism is to blame feel a little oblique. Insistences that yeah but still Islam is the enemy have the whiff of fire-fighting.

We’ve come to a pretty pass if court experts are going to allow bagatelles like irrefutable proof that they are talking bullshit to undermine the baiting on which their livelihoods depend. Fortunately, we can build on by far the most ambitious of the rhetorical strategies deployed in rearguard defence against the terrorist’s white Christianness: the impressively ex nihilo insistence that the Muslim-hating fascist learned his craft from Muslims, ‘adopted the language’ of jihad. In fact the perfidy is worse even than that.

Avant-garde physics is open to the idea that the future can affect the past. It is not disputed that Breivik technically did it: the question, surely, is who is going to have made him do it?

Europe awake. Yestermorrow there will was be going to have been Jihadi retrocausality to contend with."

-respectfully lifted from China Mieville's Rejectamentalist Manifesto

Capital Punishments

Oh, and below is a slide show of the prison where Anders Breivik (killer of 90+ people) is staying for 21 years.

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1989083_2137368,00.html

Paperback vs. Hardcover, Plus Deception

Cool article from the NY Times on publishers releasing paperbacks sooner after the hardcover editions are released, tying it to the rise of e-books, which are closer to paperback prices and are easier to carry around than a large hardcover book. Personally, I take this as fantastic news. I hate hardcover books and the prices that come with them (And the jackets? Ugh.), and I look forward to the day when I won't have to wait a year or more to read a book that's already out. I also just got a Kindle for my birthday a couple of weeks ago, and it's not as unpleasant of a reading experience as I thought, though it certainly doesn't challenge my preference for the paperback.

Also, the picture they use for the article (above) is from one of my top 5 favorite bookstores in the world, Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle. Stop by if you're in Capitol Hill, it's a gem. I'm also reading one of the books on that table right now. Cool, right?

Similarly, this article on Salon about the fact that everything we hear these days about Al Qaeda and Bin Laden's death comes from "unnamed government sources" (a tendency Glenn Greenwald has bemoaned at great length), and how that leaves us more or less in the dark where the truth is concerned is well worth reading.

The Nadir of Food Marketing

ORGANIC WATER!!!!!!!

Even inorganic compounds can now be called organic. There is no possible direction to go from here but up, right? Can we just press the delete button on this whole "marketing" thing now?

This Is How Corporations Work

Remember the gulf oil spill? Things like that tend to be forgotten rather quickly these days if they aren't periodically shoved back in our faces, which, given the predominance of sensational headline chasing over in-depth reporting in the media landscape, tends to come from alternative media outlets much more frequently than traditional ones (Thanks, Harry Shearer and David Simon). Or maybe you do remember, thanks to those BP commercials that emphasize how, thanks to their help, the gulf economy is back "stronger than ever."

Right now, according to the New York Times, the tourist-backed economy in the region is indeed pretty strong. Which turns out to be bad news, because BP is now attempting to back out of the remainder of their reparation payments to families and businesses in the region, citing one strong tourist season as definite proof that things are all totally better foreversies. Who says you can't trust corporations to do the right thing without any sort of oversight?

Am I naive for thinking that this is shocking? It has been barely over a motherfucking year, and BP thinks that public opinion is sufficiently tilted back in their favor that it will be totally cool if they cut and run on what is indisputably their responsibility? This is disgusting.

From the article:

"BP has been arguing that this “future factor” is too generous. That argument is revisited in its 29-page filing, pointing out the strong revenue figures for lodging in coastal tourism areas in the fall and spring, most surpassing figures from comparable times in 2009 and early 2010.

"BP makes the same argument in regard to the strong performance of much of the seafood industry, though the filing devotes less attention to it — possibly because unresolved questions about the long-term ecological effects of the spill, as well as a lingering nationwide skepticism about gulf seafood, have made its recovery more debatable."

"While initial BP payments and a strong fall and winter helped, some business owners are still carrying around bad credit ratings from those lean days, or paying off loans, or working under franchise agreements that were renegotiated to their disadvantage."

"It was the topic of another document sent out last week, this one to state and local officials from the command center of the spill cleanup operation in New Orleans. It is a draft version of a “decision matrix,” a list of several factors to consider in deciding when and when not to remove submerged mats of oil that are still being found, some even in recent days, sitting just offshore.

"The prospect of not removing a mat for just about any reason is unacceptable to Taylor Kirschenfeld, an environmental officer for Escambia County, Fla. If a tropical storm or hurricane comes through and whips up those mats, sending tar patties onto the beach, 'it could be the whole thing all over again.'

"Thus the gamble that really keeps business owners here on edge: if this happened, it could be devastating, and a business’s final settlement with BP might fall far short."

shit

FLICK

I found out about Flick back in November when Cults opened for Best Coast at Georgetown University. The Georgetown radio station doesn’t play vinyl anymore so they said that we could dig through their collection and take whatever we wanted. In the fit of drunken excitement, I grabbed the first stack of singles within reach. On top of the stack was a single called “The End” by Flick. I had never heard of Flick before but judging by the ’90s style black and white press shot on the back, I had a feeling that I would really dig it. After just a few listens I was hooked. There’s not much information available about Flick but you can still download their debut album “The Perfect Kellulight” from iTunes. Below is their press kit.