Lauryn Hill - Lost Ones

Beastie Boys - Futterman's Rule

The Rover - Trailer

This Pleases Me

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Deerhunter - Vox Humana

Tame Impala - The Less I Know The Better

Platinum Plus

Big L - 8 Ix Enuff

Kali Uchis - Sycamore Tree

Carly Rae Jepsen - Run Away With Me

Mowgli's Mirror

The Mountain Goats - This Year

Fredo Santana - Just Be Cool (Feat. King L)

Prêt-à-Porter

It Follows

Every Nuclear Explosion

Mirah - Apples in the Trees

Everyone Loves Pac-Man

'...Pac-Man is a cultural icon. Everyone loves Pac-Man.
  But then you look a little closer, and there’s something … dark. While most players see a cute character chugging around a maze gobbling pills and running away from cute ghosties, others build a more sinister narrative.
  For some cultural commentators the sheer compulsion of the game, its almost narcotic effect, is the darkness at its heart. If you’re good at it, Pac-Man ostensibly never ends. When you clear a maze, another one appears and you continue munching, driven by the “wacka wacka” sound effects. When Martin Amis wrote his now fabled book on arcade games, Invasion of the Space Invaders, his thoughts on Pac-Man largely concerned its enslaving properties: “I have seen bloodstains on the PacMan joystick [...] I know a young actress with a case of PacMan Hand so severe that her index finger looked like a section of blood pudding – yet still she played, and played through her tears of pain.”' (source)

Fleetwood Mac - Gold Dust Woman (Live in Japan)

Ghostface Killah - Purified Thoughts

CHVRCHES - Lies (live)

Strong Objections

Seiichi Hayashi

Princess Mononoke

Sufjan Stevens - John My Beloved (repost)

Jihadist Poetry

Their bullets shattered our brains like an

     earthquake,

         even strong bones cracked then broke.

They drilled our throats and scattered

     our limbs—

         it was like an anatomy lesson!

They hosed the streets as blood still

     ran

          like streams crashing down from the

               clouds

(source)

The Thin Red Line

Tom Waits - Take One Last Look

Tom Waits Interview

Ghostface Killah - Nutmeg

Beach House - Wishes

I Want Your Eyes Pig

Neneh Cherry and The Thing - Accordion (Cover)

Families Can Be Very Particular About The Testicles

  "It began, as all autopsies do, with her inserting a needle into the side of each eye to collect fluid — a delicate procedure that Melinek perfected after once popping out a cadaver’s glass eyeball.
  Then Melinek made the “Y” cut, from the edges of the each collarbone down to the pelvis, to look for fluids that might indicate organ failure. Booker’s fluids were normal, but in other cases where a cadaver has an excessive amount, Melinek likes to scoop that out using a big ladle she found at a cookware shop on East 23rd Street. (She also favors pruning shears for rib-cracking and a cutting board for tissue samples.)
  Next, she removed all of Booker’s major organs and placed them between his legs — the best way to ensure they wouldn’t slip and fall to the floor. Then she removed Booker’s testes, took a sample from each, and put them back in the scrotum.
  “I had been taught to replace them unless there was a tumor or signs of injury,” Melinek writes. “Families can be very particular about the testicles.”" (source)

Au Pair - Armagh

Neon Indian - Should Have Taken Acid With You (Remix)

MH370

"And yet, once I started looking for evidence, I found it. One of the commenters on my blog had learned that the compartment on 777s called the electronics-and-equipment bay, or E/E bay, can be accessed via a hatch in the front of the first-class cabin.You can see how easily in this video. [youtube]15 If perpetrators got in there, a long shot, they would have access to equipment that could be used to change the BFO value of its satellite transmissions. They could even take over the flight controls. (Incredibly, an Australian graduate student named Matt Wuillemin had recognized the potential the hatch presented for hijackers and tried to warn authorities. He was ignored. [pdf])


I realized that I already had a clue that hijackers had been in the E/E bay. Remember the satcom system disconnected and then rebooted three minutes after the plane left military radar behind. I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how a person could physically turn the satcom off and on. The only way, apart from turning off half the entire electrical system, would be to go into the E/E bay and pull three particular circuit breakers. It is a maneuver that only a sophisticated operator would know how to execute, and the only reason I could think for wanting to do this was so that Inmarsat would find the records and misinterpret them. They turned on the satcom in order to provide a false trail of bread crumbs leading away from the plane’s true route."

Cyborg Life

Dr. Crozier's Eye

"ATLANTA — When Dr. Ian Crozier was released from Emory University Hospital in October after a long, brutal fight with Ebola that nearly ended his life, his medical team thought he was cured. But less than two months later, he was back at the hospital with fading sight, intense pain and soaring pressure in his left eye.

Test results were chilling: The inside of Dr. Crozier’s eye was teeming with Ebola." (source)

Jade Helm

"But even some Republicans say Mr. Abbott’s reaction, and the failure of any Republicans in office to clearly denounce what many see as extremism and paranoia, speak volumes about how far right the party has moved in a state in which it controls all the levers of power.

 “I have been an eyewitness to the sort of radicalization of Republican primary politics in Texas, but this was just a shocking extension of this fanaticism,” Todd A. Smith, a Republican lawyer and former state legislator, said in an interview. In a letter to the governor’s office, he criticized Mr. Abbott for “pandering to idiots.”

In the interview, Mr. Smith added, “I was really shocked to read that a governor was issuing press releases employing the Texas State Guard at taxpayer expense to protect us from the U.S. military, and that he felt like that was either something that was important from a policy perspective or necessary from a political perspective. Either one is unbelievable to me.”" (source)

What If?...

"If what is happening in Baltimore happened in a foreign country, here is how Western media would cover it:


International leaders expressed concern over the rising tide of racism and state violence in America, especially concerning the treatment of ethnic minorities in the country and the corruption in state security forces around the country when handling cases of police brutality. The latest crisis is taking place in Baltimore, Maryland, a once-bustling city on the country’s Eastern Seaboard, where an unarmed man named Freddie Gray died from a severed spine while in police custody.


Black Americans, a minority ethnic group, are killed by state security forces at a rate higher than the white majority population. Young, black American males are 21 times more likely to be shot by police than white American males." (source)

This Guy Sounds Like Biggest Dildo

Animal Collective - New Town Burnout

Camera Obscura - The Sweetest Thing

In Love With Da Coco

My Pussy's Been Locked Up For Eight Hours

Everything Changes

Low-Wage Occupations and Public Assistance Rates

(source)

How To Criticize Holocaust Denial

"4. Irving's writings on Hitler

• 4.1 Admiration
• 4.2 Exculpation

4.3 Historical method: case-studies

• (a) Irving's 'chain of documents'
• (b) Evidence at Hitler's trial in 1924
  • (i) Historical background
  • (ii) David Irving's argument
  • (iii) Inconsistencies and omission of references
  • (iv) Misrepresentation of documents; invention and falsification.
  • (v) Use of unreliable sources
  • (vi) Skewing reliable sources
  • (vii) Conclusion

(c) 'Reichskristallnacht' November 1938.

• (i) Background
• (ii) Irving's Account of the Events of the Night of 9-10 November 1938
  • (A) Misquotation and Skewing of Documents: The Goebbels Diary
  • (B) Suppression of relevant evidence: the Eberstein testimony and the Goebbels speech in the Old Town Hall
  • (C) Manipulation of evidence: The involvement of the SA in the pogrom
  • (D) Invention and manipulation of evidence: the Eberstein testimony
  • (E) Use of unreliable evidence, suppression of reliable testimony, and invention: von Below and Schaub
  • (F) False attribution of conclusions to reliable sources: the Heydrich telex
  • (G) Bending a reliable source to fit the argument: the Hess order
  • (H) Manipulation of evidence (Wiedemann testimony, Hederich testimony) and suppression of reliable documentation (Goebbels diary, Supreme Party Court Report)
  • (I) Use of insignificant evidence and suppression of important evidence: the Groscurth and von Hassell diaries
  • (J) Conclusion
• (iii) Irving's Account of Events After the Night of 9-10 November 1938
  • (A) Misquotation, manipulation, and discounting of reliable evidence to fit a preconceived argument: the Goebbels diary
  • (B) Suppression of important aspects and concentration on insignificant aspects of reliable evidence to divert attention from its significance
  • (C) Suppression of evidence: Memoirs of Hans Kehrl and Correspondence of Carl Burckhardt
  • (D) Misquotation and suppression of evidence: the von Hassell diaries
  • (E) Misrepresentation of reliable documents: the Communication of the SA Leadership
  • (F) Misconstrual of books that directly contradict Irving's arguments: the Goebbels diary
  • (G) Invention of evidence: the Ribbentrop memoirs
  • (H) Misrepresentation and presentation of irrelevant evidence: the Wolff memoirs
  • (I) False attribution of a conclusion to a reliable source: the Goebbels diary
  • (J) Misrepresentation of reliable sources: the reports to the British Foreign Office
  • (K) Use of a discredited and disreputable source: Ingrid Weckert
  • (L) Invention of evidence: testimony of Schirmeister and Fritzsche
• (iv) Conclusion"

"In dealing with Irving as a Holocaust denier, this Report has already noted a number of instances of Irving's misinterpretation and misconstrual of the sources, and subjected his inconsistent and unprofessional methods of dealing with historical evidence to critical scrutiny. However, the following case-studies, some of which are very extensive and extremely detailed, will show beyond all doubt that Lipstadt is correct in claiming that Irving misstates, misquotes, falsifies statistics, falsely attributes conclusions to reliable sources, relies on books and sources that directly contradict his arguments, quoting in a manner that completely distorts the authors' objectives, manipulates documents to serve his own purposes, skews documents and misrepresents data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions, bends historical evidence until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda, takes accurate information and shapes it to confirm his conclusions, and - a vital point not mentioned by Lipstadt - constantly suppresses or deliberately overlooks sources with which he is familiar because they contradict the line of argument he wishes to advance." (source)

WildC.A.T.S

Preserving Authenticity

  "And it means deploying conservators to preserve an inventory that includes more than a ton of human hair; 110,000 shoes; 3,800 suitcases; 470 prostheses and orthopedic braces; more than 88 pounds of eyeglasses; hundreds of empty canisters of Zyklon B poison pellets; patented metal piping and showerheads for the gas chambers; hundreds of hairbrushes and toothbrushes; 379 striped uniforms; 246 prayer shawls; more than 12,000 pots and pans carried by Jews who believed that they were simply bound for resettlement; and some 750 feet of SS documents — hygiene records, telegrams, architectural blueprints and other evidence of the bureaucracy of genocide — as well as thousands of memoirs by survivors.
  The job can be harrowing and heartbreaking, but it is often performed out of a sense of responsibility." (source)

The Ultimate Weapon of Democracy

Modern Mercenaries

The Future of World Religions

"The religious profile of the world is rapidly changing, driven primarily by differences in fertility rates and the size of youth populations among the world’s major religions, as well as by people switching faiths. Over the next four decades, Christians will remain the largest religious group, but Islam will grow faster than any other major religion. If current trends continue, by 2050 …

• The number of Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world.
• Atheists, agnostics and other people who do not affiliate with any religion – though increasing in countries such as the United States and France – will make up a declining share of the world’s total population.
• The global Buddhist population will be about the same size it was in 2010, while the Hindu and Jewish populations will be larger than they are today.
• In Europe, Muslims will make up 10% of the overall population.
• India will retain a Hindu majority but also will have the largest Muslim population of any country in the world, surpassing Indonesia.
• In the United States, Christians will decline from more than three-quarters of the population in 2010 to two-thirds in 2050, and Judaism will no longer be the largest non-Christian religion. Muslims will be more numerous in the U.S. than people who identify as Jewish on the basis of religion.
• Four out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa." (source)

Fuck Yeah, War

Genetics of Earth and Moon

"The giant impact theory echoes what we know about the formation of the entire Solar System, which coalesced from a disk of gas and dust around the young Sun. The Earth and the other planets grew in a series of collisions, starting from dust particles and culminating in massive impacts between planet-sized bodies. The last giant impact involving the growing Earth may have spawned the Moon by creating a disk of rocky debris in orbit around the planet. The giant impact model has become so popular that the two bodies involved in the impact even have names: the proto-Earth (the progenitor of Earth) and Theia (the impacting body, named for the Greek goddess who was the mother of the Moon)....


In the giant impact theory, the proto-Earth and Theia are generally assumed to have had different oxygen isotope signatures. That’s because each planet’s signature is determined by its orbit; presumably, the only way to get nearly identical signatures is for two planets to form on nearly the same orbit, which does not fit with how we think planets grow. So if Earth and Theia had different fingerprints, why do the Earth and Moon share the same one?" (source)

Chemical Weapons Munitions Dumped at Sea

The Unaware

“In the extreme case, it may be that whenever a software developer in Menlo Park adjusts a parameter, someone somewhere wrongly starts to believe themselves to be unloved,” wrote a team of researchers led by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign doctoral student Motahhare Eslami, in a new paper on Facebook’s news feed algorithm.


The new qualitative research study sampled 40 Facebook users and ran them through an in-depth examination of the ways that Facebook filters their experience. Twenty-five of the users—or more than 60 percent — had no idea that there even was a filtering algorithm, let alone one that looks at more than a thousand data signals to determine what to show a user. The researchers termed these innocent users “the unaware.” (source)

Sufjan Stevens - John My Beloved

That Wasn't Enough Now, Was It, Rudy?

Iran Nuclear Deal

"Under this agreement, however, Iran will only be permitted to enrich uranium with 5060 IR-1 machines at Natanz, which means the P-5+1 has frozen Iran’s enrichment program at existing levels for the next ten years.  Not only are the IR-1 centrifuges woefully out of date and prone to high failure rates, Iran has been using these machines for almost a full decade.  In other words, it has nothing further to learn from continued enrichment with this technology, and the next decade becomes a “lost decade” when it comes to the modernization of Iran’s enrichment program." (source)

Nemo: River of Ghosts

Toddlers Hate Him!

Sufjan Stevens - Fourth of July

Belle and Sebastian - The Boy with the Arab Strap

Sea Lions

Venus in Fur

Coast to Coast AM - Frantic Area 51 Caller

Tool - The Grudge

Father John Misty - Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)

It Pleases

The Swarm

"Swarms can be devilishly hard to target because they distribute combat capabilities across a wide number of dispersed assets and because they leverage mass to saturate and overwhelm defenses. That is, after all, one of their advantages. At the same time, nothing is invulnerable. Individual elements of a swarm can still be attacked directly, although cost-effective means are critical. Shooting down a thousand dollar drone with a million dollar missile is not a cost-effective strategy. Whole swarms can be targeted, however, through electronic warfare, high-powered microwaves, or cyber attacks. Furthermore, the cooperative nature of swarms can be used against them, by jamming a swarm to force it to “collapse” to individual uncoordinated elements, out-maneuvering a swarm to force it into a disadvantageous position, or even conceivably hijacking a swarm to take control of it." (source)

Magic and the Conspiracy

"The eye in the triangle of the security state is becoming self-aware. It has plotted your data points. It can predict your actions. It owns you and it molds you. We rebels have reason to be concerned. We are not considered the conscience of society nor transformative pioneers, we are the enemy of the corporate state which dismantles non-human and human communities alike. The state and the corporation are one and the same, the one percent. We are raw materials, production units, disposable assets or less politely, slaves.


Some will ask, what does this have to do with magic? The answer is of course, everything. The fact that such a question can even be asked shows how disconnected we have become from the world, and our perceived powerlessness in harnessing its occult virtues. Those who claim we should not be political need to answer this question: If the secret forces we connect with are sullied by acknowledging realpolitik, how can the Archons plunder the symbol set for their dramas with impunity.


So are we players, or pawns, ogling their superbowl spectacle? Are we stars or submissives? Do we pursue power or passively consume? Passive is the key word here. I will argue that we are being engineered into docility and that it is the docile body which is the enemy of magic.


Perhaps in a world of Julian Assange, Edward Snowdon, Chelsea Manning, Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Schwartz we have something to contribute. After all, we are heirs to the first and greatest game of secrets. Our adepts have always been in an entangled relationship with state power and the intelligence agencies, whether John Dee, Aleister Crowley, Cecil Williamson or even Michael Aquino. Ours is the cypher, the code word, the clandestine gathering, the secret plan, the powers of prediction and malediction, of striking at a distance. We have something to hide and we know how to hide it; or so we thought. In truth, we have lost out to the dealers, the activists and the anarchists with their antique nokia bricks and an understanding of security culture which is manifestly lacking in occult circles." (source)

Responsibility - Moral Obligation - Lots of Pressure to Put on Someone

Tatsuhiko Yamagami

Neko Case - Red Tide

Modest Mouse - Baby Blue Sedan

Valentina

The Mountain Goats - Palmcoder Yajna

Beirut - Scenic World

Magic vs. Science - Final Showdown

The Magic of Film

A Gangster is a Free Man

Broadcast - Message From Home

Politics of the Keyboard

"The Unicode Consortium has launched a very controversial project known as Han Unification: an attempt to create a limited set of characters that will be shared by these so-called “CJK languages.” Instead of recognizing these languages as having their own writing systems that share some common ancestry, the Han unification process views them as mere variations on some “true” form.

To help English readers understand the absurdity of this premise, consider that the Latin alphabet (used by English) and the Cyrillic alphabet (used by Russian) are both derived from Greek. No native English speaker would ever think to try “Greco Unification” and consolidate the English, Russian, German, Swedish, Greek, and other European languages’ alphabets into a single alphabet. Even though many of the letters look similar to Latin characters used in English, nobody would try to use them interchangeably. ҭЋаt ωoulδ βε σutragєѳuѕ." (source)

Drop the Mic and Teach Kids to Spell

"At this time in his life—around 1919, when he turned thirty—Wittgenstein wanted badly to transform himself. Convinced he was a moral failure, he took extreme steps to change his circumstances, divesting himself of his enormous family fortune (which he dispersed among his siblings, making sure he could never legally access it again); leaving the palatial family home he’d grown up in (it was literally called the “Palais Wittgenstein”); and looking for the kind of hard and honest work he hoped would distract him from his despair and allow him to do something of value. In choosing teaching he was influenced by a romantic idea of what it would be like to work with peasants—an idea he’d gotten from reading Tolstoy. His family was perplexed by his decisions. His sister Hermine told him that applying his genius to teaching children was like using a “precision instrument” to open crates. She reports his response:

You remind me of somebody who is looking out through a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements of a passer-by. He cannot tell what sort of storm is raging out there or that this person might only be managing with difficulty to stay on his feet.

In 1920, after a year of training, Wittgenstein took up a post at an elementary school in Trattenbach. It was a tiny farming and factory village in the mountains south of Vienna; Wittgenstein accepted the job there after rejecting one in a town he decided was too cosmopolitan. (It had a park with a fountain in it.)" (source)

Broadcast - Ominous Cloud

The hunt is on. My heart is racing with a purpose. I'm about to meet the other works of my favourite author. And he'll tell me about a great task. And give me a stodgy old man. His end will look like Texas, something used to compensate for your weak lungs.

Always Give Away Your Semen

"Forensic experts in Italy claim to have reconstructed the DNA of a national war hero and poet by analysing semen he left on a handkerchief, given to a lover 100 years ago. 

In a global first, the protofascist warmonger Gabriele d’Annunzio’s DNA was reconstructed without exhuming his remains, police forensics officers said, raising hopes the technique could be used to solve cold cases.

D’Annunzio (1863-1938) gave the semen-splashed hankie to his lover, Countess Olga Levi Brunner, in 1916 as a souvenir after a night of passion." (source)

Timber Timbre - Lonesome Hunter

Jenny Hval - That Battle Is Over

Matthew Dentith - On Conspiracy Theories

Multo Panicake-o!

Simon Schama - The Abolition of the Slave Trade 200 Years On

Head Explosion

Judith Butler - Good Life in Bad

Judith Butler Adorno Prize

Talal Asad

Basic Instinct