"Millions of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die, but inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will no longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when the human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will finally no longer find even there enough heat for life; when gradually even the last trace of organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the moon, will circle in deepest darkness and in an ever narrower orbit about the equally extinct sun, and at last fall into it. Other planets will have preceded it, others will follow it; instead of the bright, warm solar system with its harmonious arrangement of members, only a cold, dead sphere will still pursue its lonely path through universal space. And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the earth while there is a living human eye to receive it. And when such a solar system has completed its life history and succumbs to the fate of all that is finite, death, what then? Will the sun’s corpse roll on for all eternity through infinite space, and all the once infinitely diverse, differentiated natural forces pass for ever into one single form of motion, attraction? ‘Or’ - as Secchi asks – ‘do forces exist in nature which can re-convert the dead system into its original state of an incandescent nebula and re-awake it to new life? We do not know’." - Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature

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Fuck election season.

"You see, Obama is running a re-election campaign using Occupy Wall Street’s language. He won’t say the 99% or 1% outright. That would be too divisive, or so the media owned by the 1% say. But the attacks on Bain capital outsourcing and Romney’s secret tax returns are tapping into the volcano of anger that Occupy gave life to. Late last year an official in the AFL-CIO’s national office told me that Romney was their 'dream candidate,' and in April Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn told me that Mitt Romney was 'Mr. 1%.' Unions like SEIU and liberal groups such as MoveOn and Rebuild the Dream carry the water in flogging the message that Romney will be the president of the 1% who will turn the screws even harder on the rest of us.

"That assessment is not untrue. The right would unleash a world of pain on most Americans. But the nature of our endless electoral process, which sucks all the oxygen out of the brain, blinds most Obama supporters to how the Democratic Party is complicit in pushing our politics to the right.

"With close to one third of the population in or on the cusp of poverty,  46 million on food stamps , 51 million uninsured , a 'real' unemployment rate  stuck at 15 percent , millions of families doubled up and millions of homes still entering foreclosure, Obama can’t run on his economic record. Sure, much of the fault is the guy before him, but that excuse wears thin after four years. Particularly because Obama rode into office with a congressional super majority and a road paved with political capital.

"But just as Clinton turned Reagan-era extremism into a bipartisan consensus, Obama doubled-down on the 'war on terror,' and endorsed cutting Social Security and Medicare and enacting austerity policies within a year of taking office. Obama thus helped enable the next stage of right-wing extremism that he is now running against.

"So it’s not really ironic that Obama has swiped the language of Occupy, even as his FBI and Homeland Security have made Occupy’s anarchists into Public Enemy #1. That’s how politics work." - Arun Gupta, The 99% Take on the Republican National Convention
 

---

"The Republican vision of the 21st century--one part austerity, one part reactionary social policy, one part latent racial resentment--doesn't seem like a winning gameplan. The fact that Romney has a chance is testament only to the weakness of a neoliberal Obama adminstration." - Bhaskar Sunkara, 10 Planks the GOP Doesn’t Want You To See

---

"Trumka still had a tough sell ahead: AFL-CIO’s endorsement of Obama. Many in organized labor fault Obama for opening the attacks on public sector workers. In a famous speech at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in 2009, the president called for the getting rid of 'bad teachers'; the next year, he endorsed the mass firing of unionized teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Campaign for America's Future Co-President Bob Borosage has likened Obama's decision to freeze the pay of federal workers to Reagan's devastating 1981 break-up of the air traffic controllers' strike, which opened the door for more demands for cuts from other workers. Most recently, the president signed a bill in February making it more difficult for airline workers to unionize, which resulted in an unprecedented anti-union ruling by a federal district court that blocked 10,000 American Airlines customer service agents from holding an election.

"Moreover, the rally was initially seen by many as a protest of the DNC, a notion that participating unions had attempted to dispel. Union members were upset that the Democrats chose to hold their convention in Charlotte, N.C., a right-to-work state with the lowest union density of any in the country (2.9 percent). North Carolina also has in place a law dating from the Jim-Crow era that denies public employees the right to collectively bargain. The law, which has been condemned by the UN's International Labor Organization, forbids union dues from being voluntarily deducted from public employees' paychecks. Its effect is similar to one of the most controversial provisions of Scott Walker’s anti-union bill, which a federal judge recently ruled unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

"In advance of the DNC, public-sector workers in Charlotte’s United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) Local 150 are campaigning to get Mayor Anthony Foxx to help Charlotte’s public workers gain union representation. The UE says that non-union sanitation workers in Charlotte are already being forced to work dangerous amounts of mandatory overtime in order to prepare for the convention. In contrast, the Republican National Convention is being held in Tampa, Fla., where public employees who are helping put together the convention do have collective bargaining rights." - Mike Elk, At 35,000-Member Rally, AFL-CIO Attempts the Herculean

Barf barf barf.

Nope, not going anywhere.

"A real American Caesar would be no 'Hitlerite maniac'. Rather, while attracting 'all the true believers', he would 'oversimplify some difficult but vital issue, putting himself on the side of the majority'. His manner would be 'just plain folks, a regular guy, warm and sincere'.  And 'while he was amusing us on television, stormtroopers would gather in the streets'."

Gore.

Still here, fuckers

Marc Ribot, interviewed in 2004:

"[M]y opinion on file sharing is, well again this is not going to make me particularly popular, well I mean nobody really objects to people who are actually sharing, OK? The problem is that with the technologies for sharing it is very difficult to control the difference between sharing, trading, and selling. And if we want to do away with copyright law lets not start with musicians. I'm all for the great anarchist utopia, but that means my telephone costs should be reduced to nothing because I don't pay for any of those patents, my computer is a bunch of plastic, I should get it for five dollars because I don't pay for any of those patents and this phone line should go down to something very close to free.... So when all these people are writing in utopian terms about the brave new world of free stuff, I want there to be a brave new world of free stuff, I just don't want my stuff to be the only stuff in the brave new world. So I'm in favor of copyright protection... Basically let me put it this way: I reject the kind of utopian language of it, and I'm basically aligned with Future of Music Coalition's attempts to find some way in which composers, artists, and side musicians need to get paid. Let me put it bluntly: I see it from a different perspective from consumers; I'm a producer of music and a consumer. I think the arguments that have been made that file sharing has not hurt record sales are a little disingenuous. I mean the industry is down by 30 percent or something like that. And maybe you think, 'Oh well 30 percent is not that much.' Well it has not fallen on all music equally. When 30 percent was cut out it was not cut out from Madonna's record budget. What happened was all of the majors cut out all of their weird music departments. So it wasn't as if budgets went down 30 percent across the board, no, budgets in the most predictable, most boring music stayed just where they were or went up, and budgets for music that was anything of a risk were gone, simply gone! So I think it sucks, that's what I think. Having said that I'm not sure the tactics of yelling at people and saying, 'Don't burn a CD for somebody' are going to work. The tactic that may ultimately work might be making the corporate beneficiaries of the profit from the sale of this technology pay into funds for composers and artists. There may be ways to make it work, I think the problem needs creative thinking, but let's be clear, people will get the culture they pay for and right now they are not paying much." 

The rest here.

"Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet, fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism." - Leon Trotsky

Time Began in a Garden

"In order to attain an adequate conceptual grasp of the unitary nature of physical reality, it is necessary to achieve a complete theoretical suspension of the image of the world derived from perceptual intuition. In other words, physical theory has to effect a rigorously mathematical circumvention of those imaginative limitations inherent in the physiologically rooted cognitive apparatus with which an aleatory evolutionary history has saddled us. Thus, the chief obstacle standing in the way of a proper scientific understanding of the physical world would seem to be that of our species’ inbuilt tendency to process information via epistemic mechanisms which invariably involve an operation of subtraction from the imperceptible physical whole. Phenomenology remains a function of physiology. Perhaps not least among the many startling philosophical consequences of superstring theory is the way in which it seems to provide a rigorously physicalist vindication of Plato: phenomenological perception would seem to be akin to that of the prisoner in the cave who mistakes flickering shadows for ‘the things themselves’." - Ray Brassier, Alien Theory

Is Anyone Up?

 "A determinist standpoint - or any more up to date conception of causality which, while acknowledging the inadequacy of the old determinism, does not deny causality itself nor confer on human thought and will the divine power of being 'uncaused causes' - necessarily involves an uncompromising rejection of so-called free will and of any ethics that is contaminated by voluntarism or moralism: non ridere, non lugere neque detestari, sed intellegere! ('neither ridicule, nor grief, nor hatred, but understanding!') The study of neurosis, in particular, ought powerfully to aid us to understand that it is not possible to apply the notion of 'guilt' in the traditional moral sense to neurotic behaviour, even in its most anti-social forms. This does not mean that we abandon the struggle against all agents of oppression or tenants of privilege of whatever kind, starting with the capitalist class and its watchdogs; or that we can abstain from anger or passionate hostility towards them. But such anger is only the emotional reaction to the extraordinary improbability, if not impossibility, of persuading them to retire voluntarily from the defence of an iniquitous social order, and to the painful necessity, once an attempt of that kind has failed, of countering reactionary violence with revolutionary violence. It is also a reaction to the difficulty of initiating any revolutionary action - whether because of the strength of the dominant class or the acquiescence of the oppressed class (an important element in which is the more or less compelling temptation that each of us experiences to comply with the status quo). Anger of this kind does not involve any mythological belief that there is a range of 'free choice' for the oppressor, who might have elected to play the role of altruist and benefactor but opted instead, who knows why, for that of overlord." - Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Freudian Slip

Righteous

Dan Savage on public homophobes' (specifically in this case, Rick and Elizabeth Santorum) claims that they have gay friends and their perceived victim status:

Opposed to same-sex marriage herself, Elizabeth said she has gay friends who support her father's candidacy based on his economic and family platforms. But her father's doctrinaire opposition to change on these fronts has made her the occasional target at school and on the trail—"never aggressively," she said, though "obviously, there are certain people that aren't [respectful]."

Yeah, Elizabeth, it's tough out there for a 'phobe. You know what else is tough? Losing your home after the death of your spouse because your marriage isn't recognized by the federal government. Seeing your husband deported because your marriage isn't recognized by the federal government.

What really interests me about the HuffPo interview, however, is Elizabeth's claim to have gay friends. Elizabeth Santorum—follow her on Twitter@esantorum2012—has gay friends. Just like her father. And Rick Warren andJoel Osteen and Donny Osmond and Sarah Palin. All the high-profile homophobes seem to have gay friends. Or at least they claim to have gay friends. No one has ever met—and no reporter has ever asked to verify the existence of—one of Rick Santorum or Elizabeth Santorum or Rick Warren or Joel Osteen's gay friends.

Um... political reporters? Stop accepting homophobes' claims of gay friendship at face value. Elizabeth Santorum says she has gay friends who support her dad based on his family platform? That is an astonishing assertion. Who are these gay people who support Rick Santorum for president despite his having compared sex between consenting adults of the same sex to child rape and dog fucking? Who are these gay people who support Rick Santorum for president despite his having asserted that gay relationships are a threat to "homeland security"? Who are these gay people who support Rick Santorum for president despite his opposition not just to gay marriage, but to any legal recognition of same-sex relationships at all (no civil unions, no domestic partnerships)? Who are these gay people who support Rick Santorum for president despite his promise to write anti-gay bigotry into the US Constitution, forcibly divorce every same-sex couple that has gotten legally married in the US over the last decade, and reinstate DADT? Who are these gay people who support Rick Santorum for president despite his opposition to adoptions by same-sex couples?

Who are these faggots?

Political reporters? When Elizabeth Santorum says, "I have gay friends and they support my dad because they agree with him about family issues," i.e. her dad's opposition to gay people having a families of their own, your immediate response should be a request for the names and phone numbers of some of these gay friends. Because that claim requires checking out before you put it in print or pixels. Reassure Elizabeth you'll quote her friends anonymously to protect them from potty-mouthed gay bloggers, they can talk to you on background or whatever, but tell her that you're going to need to verify the existence of these gay friends. Because you're a journalist, not a stenographer. You'll either catch Elizabeth Santorum in a revealing lie—what does it tell us about this moment in the struggle for LGBT equality that even homophobes like Elizabeth and her dadperceive a political risk in being perceived as homophobic?—or you'll land a fascinating interview.

And then there's this:

She is aware of her father's so-called "Google problem," part of a campaign by columnist Dan Savage to redefine the candidate's last name after he compared same-sex relationships to bigamy, polygamy and incest. "Savage and his perverted sense of humor is the reason why my children cannot Google their father's name," Rick Santorum wrote in a letter to supporters earlier this year. "That just makes me sad. It's disappointing that people can be that mean," she said,

I'm sorry I gave Elizabeth Santorum a sad. You know what gives me a sad? This does:

Ed Watson wasn't a "policy thing." He was a human being. And he died in December, still waiting for the Prop 8 decision to come down, still denied the right to legally marry the love of his life.

And you know what, Elizabeth? Making a dirty joke at the expense of a politically powerful elected official with designs on the White House—a man who has pledged to do everything in his power to make sure that gay people continue to lose their homes, see their spouses deported, and watch their partners die while waiting for their full civil equality to be recognized—is whole lot less mean than attacking a minority group and pledging to strip members of that minority group of the few rights they have secured.