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Khlyst - VI featuring Runhild Gammelsæter (Video)

Sunn O))) - Báthory Erzsébet (Video)

Endlessly Slanted and Distorted Coverage by Associated Press in Palestine

PM Media Watch (Palestinian Media Watch) action calls against the Associated Press:

AP's Ibrahim Barzak adopts IDF version of events on Rachel Corrie's killing
http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/mediocrity/displayCall.asp?essayID=134

Enough AP Distortions
http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/mediocrity/displayCall.asp?essayID=131

Shocking AP distortions of Belgium court ruling
http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/mediocrity/displayCall.asp?essayID=81

AP misrepresents the world consensus on Palestine
http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/mediocrity/displayCall.asp?essayID=69

AP squeamish about Israeli violations of international law
http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/mediocrity/displayCall.asp?essayID=64

AP still uses 'alleged' to talk about Israeli human rights violations
http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/mediocrity/displayCall.asp?essayID=54

AP calls Israel's response "muted"
http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/mediocrity/displayCall.asp?essayID=46

AP still talks about "period of relative calm"
http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/mediocrity/displayCall.asp?essayID=45

For AP, only Israeli deaths deserve a chronology
http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/cast/ap.asp

For AP, "Illegal" only when Israel says so
http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/cast/illegaloutposts.asp

Gross distortions of UN Jenin report by AP
http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/cast/jenindistortions.asp

The Associated Press: Uprising Without Explanation
http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/reports/ap/ap061702.html

Please let the Associated Press know that we have had ENOUGH of their whitewashing of war-crimes.

Please take the time to call the Associated Press and express your feelings. This is the very, very least we can do in support of the brave human rights activists who are literally now risking their lives against the blind brutality of the Israeli army.

Contact information for the Associated Press:

New York Headquarters:
Tel 212-621-1500
Fax 212-621-7523

Washington Bureau:
Tel 202-776-9400
Fax 202-776-9570

You can also email them via:

http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/mediocrity/displayCall.asp?essayID=131

Please do take the time to make the calls and send the emails. It is a crime that people are willing to risk a great deal only to have their heroic actions either ignored, distorted and twisted, or outright lied about. We, as media monitors and activists, have the crucial role to play of ensuring that the American public and the world is told the truth about their struggle and the suffering of the Palestinians they are trying to protect.

Palestine Media Watch
http://www.pmwatch.org
(610) 993 - 0608

Associated Press Blatantly Lies about IMF/World Bank Role in Haiti "Food Crisis"

Three articles from the Associated Press, BBC News and Democracy Now that clearly demonstrate the criminally irresponsible level of disinformation and gatekeeping by the corporate media in the U.S.

---

The U.S. government is sending $29 million in food aid and humanitarian assistance, and countries like Colombia have airlifted food and clothing. U.N. agencies have delivered food to more than 240,000 people, aided by soldiers of its 9,000-strong peacekeeping force and military ships like the USS Kearsarge and Canada's HMCS St. John.

Haiti always struggled to feed its people. Now, it's getting to be impossible.

On a helicopter tour on Tuesday, Fore saw that floodwaters still covered much of Haiti's rice-growing region. Crops were covered with brown mud or lay crushed in ruined fields stretching far as the eye could see.

...the agriculture minister, estimates that 60 percent of this year's food harvest has been wiped out by the storms, which hit just as farmers were preparing to collect corn, plantains and yams from their fields. The fall rice harvest was lost as well.

http://sfchronicle.us/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2008/09/19/international/i124157D70.DTL

Jonathan M. Katz
Associated Press Writer
19 September 2008

---

Haiti often comes across as one of the most wretched and hopeless places on the planet. But that is not the complete picture and the way out of the multiple crises the country faces is much simpler and less expensive than it might seem.

The country tends to hit the headlines in times of flooding or civil strife and most of the photographs and videos that appear are shot in cities. This also gives a false impression.

More than 65% of Haitians live in rural areas and 82% of these live in poverty. Even before four storms in as many weeks destroyed hundreds of hectares of crops on the point of harvest, Haiti's farmers were surviving on very little.

There are many reasons for this poverty. But one of the most significant is trade policies imposed on the country by international financial institutions. In 1994 the tariff on rice imports was lowered from 36% to 3%.

This led to much rice coming from US farmers who had subsidised surpluses to offload.

Haiti became dependent on food imports because local farmers could not compete with imported rice and home production shrank considerably.

So soaring prices of rice and other staples this year have hit the Haitian population particularly hard.

Viewpoint: How To Help Haiti

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/7634135.stm

---

Thirty years ago, Haiti had all the rice it needed. Then in 1986, Haiti turned to the IMF for a loan. Now, after cutting tariff protections on local rice, Haiti imports most of its rice from the United States, which in turn remains heavily subsidized. US rice farmers get one billion dollars a year in government subsidies. Meanwhile in Haiti, hungry people are rioting in the streets because they cannot afford to buy rice.

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans. His latest article is about the situation in Haiti. It’s called “The US Role in Haiti’s Food Riots.”

...

The problem really is, is that the United States and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, all of which we, the United States, dominate, have for the last twenty-five, thirty years have insisted that in order to get the loans, which Haiti and these other countries, agricultural countries, need, in order to get those loans, Haiti had to change their economic system so that their country was open to competition from other countries on agriculture, trade, a number of other things.

It’s so clear in the case of rice. As you said, thirty years ago, Haiti imported almost no rice, was an exporter of sugar and other things. Today, Haiti imports nearly all of its rice. It even imports sugar, even though it was the sugar-growing capital of the Caribbean. And the reason is, is that the powers that be said, in order to get these loans, which they need desperately to be able to survive, that they had to open up their markets to competition.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/24/the_us_role_in_haitis_food

...

George Galloway: UK Celebrity 'Big Brother' ?

Pete Burns karaoke, Dennis Rodman, a Jennifer Lopez 'double' (?) and miscellaneous random tossers, including what might vaguely be a pathetic Paris Hilton look-a-like 'knock-off' and a  representative from the baby booming New Age optimism Gestapo. Note the 'Toilet' is displayed rather prominently in the background. What's Galloway doing on a UK CBB4 episode featuring Pete Burns?  And what's the story with that nobby headed nodder in a Red Sox baseball cap and laughing Hitler mustache? Quite deplorable. 

Dave Neiwert (aka 'Hunter') Daily Kos, Left 'Gate Keeping,' the CIA and Two Minutes Hate

Hunter by Andrew Macdonald (aka Dr. William Pierce) founder of the National Alliance and author of the Turner Diaries.

"Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, owner of the DailyKos website, now admits that he spent six months in the employ of the US Central Intelligence Agency in 2001," writes Holland. "In a one-hour interview on June 2, 2006 at the Commonwealth Club, Moulitsas, also known as 'Kos,’ admitted that he was a CIA employee and would have 'no problem working for them’ in the present."--Kurt Nimmo

I don't have time at the moment to put together a cohesive entry on the connections between Daily Kos, the CIA and some of the 'left gate keeping' that goes on at Markos Moulitsas Zúniga's blog; specifically from that long-winded, blowhard, 'pseudo anti-fascist,'  and highly annoying Dave Neiwert.

Even when Dave Neiwert is 'left' he's 'right.' As a privileged Baby Boomer, it's Dave's God-given birthright to always be 'right.' He is a 'diarist' at Daily Kos (a possible CIA front) and posts as 'Hunter,' which is also a book published by the National Alliance, founded and formerly run by the now deceased Dr. William Pierce. As stated, Neiwert is a 'pseudo anti-fascist' and his research into the Bush Family and Nazism is, at best, abysmal and shoddy misinformation.

Here is an excerpt:

In the end, it should be fairly clear that the grounds for claiming that the Bush forebears were "Nazis" are thin and largely nonexistent. However, that does not relieve them of culpability, moral and otherwise, for their roles in the rise of the Nazis.

Prescott Bush should have been tried and executed--hung by the neck from the gallows at Nuremberg--along with all the IG Farben 'executives' and the other miscellaneous subhuman US corporatist-fascist trash who financed the Third Reich. I suppose that trading with the enemy, money laundering, collaborating, aiding and abetting and acting as an enabler for enemy Nazi agents is not 'Nazi' enough for the 'high-brow' Mr. Neiwert. What a load of 'bourgie' shinola:

This is its essence [quoting from Leggiere]:

There are sharp distinctions between the "Bush is a Nazi" vulgarizations of the conspiranoia-ists, and the documented corporate-Nazi connections delineated by Simpson or Aaron. Where one sees ideology, the other sees opportunism. Where one sees intention, the other sees unintended consequences. The theorists who see this historical episode not as evidence of Nazism but of business-as-usual are clearly the more sophisticated of the bunch, but this is small comfort. The results were (and are) the same.

Peter Levenda most eloquently elaborates on a concept in Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft (Book One: The Nine) that I have also referred to in the past, and it's worth repeating again, because it is a very basic idea that Mr. Neiwert (in his unnecessary role as 'solicitor') fails to comprehend:

...the late investigative journalist Gary Webb once wrote that research into the spectral realms of covert operations and parapolitics (or deep politics) will, in many instances, never really yield the cut and dry empirical data as evidence required, for example, in a court of law. There is no judge or jury here; therefore, the subject of this particular investigation need not be found guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. Such is the nature of this particular Beast. Unfortunately, many 'consumers' of what basically constitutes speculative inquiry do not understand this concept.

As mentioned above, Peter Levenda does a more thorough and comprehensive job explaining this concept, and it is my intention to reproduce his words here in a subsequent entry.

Also see Carl Bernstein's article from a 1977 edition of  Rolling Stone magazine on the The CIA and the Media (aka Operation Mockingbird).

Please refer to the following 'interaction' (more precisely... an intentionally futile and absurdist exercise in 'frequency jamming') with Mr. Neiwert (aka 'Hunter') himself from Daily Kos of May 10, 2006.

(As a side note, I was summarily banned from Kos after this 'altercation--' and this is classic.)

No one should trust these fuckers or give them the time of day... or a fucking cent.

Gate Keeping 101 (0+ / 0-)

Quite a massive diary...eh...'Hunter.' Lots of 'thick meat' to cut into there.

But I would caution whiners of the petulant angry left talking point that you might spend a wee speck of time contemplating the reasons for that anger, because it's not going away anytime soon.

Reasons? Do you address the actual reasons in your diary. No.

My own objection to the Iraq War -- and the objection of nearly every other so-called "serious" critic of the war, in fact -- is that it fundamentally and quite predictably doomed the actual war on terrorism from the start...

Oh really? Serious critics eh? I see...

I suppose this reason isn't serious enough...for so-called 'serious' critics as yourself.

The above is a textbook example of something called Gate Keeping.

There are many more examples hidden away in the supposed 'bleeding heart liberal bias' of 'Hunter' here.

Here's a little hand in the form of a keyword:

Kadavergehorsam

I could spend the rest of the afternoon dissecting your 'diary' for little 'Gate Keeping' tricks.

Who's going to clean up the autopsy table of ‘body parts’ after such a procedure, sir?

Someone once told me that there’s no such thing as a ‘former’ military man...or something to that effect. Those might have been very prescient words.

BTW...why are you called 'Hunter?'

by Fraulein Anna on Wed May 10, 2006 at 03:31:45 PM PDT

Fraulein Anna, may I ask what (0 / 0)

the meaning of gate keeping is? I am not familiar with that expression and don't know what you liked to express with it.

"False language, evil in itself, infects the soul with evil." ----Socrates

by mimi on Wed May 10, 2006 at 07:35:33 PM PDT

[  Parent  ]       

Here (0 / 0)

http://www.tcw.utwente.nl/...

Think for Yourself.

by Fraulein Anna on Wed May 10, 2006 at 08:26:52 PM PDT

[  Parent ]

Gate Keeping 101a (0 / 0)

I'd say that the Republican party is pro-war to an astonishingly homogeneous degree, but opinions in the center and on the left are decidedly more nuanced. You won't find too many in those days who argued against a military response to 9/11, though you will find large numbers who warned against an ineffective military response.

What exactly is this suppose to mean, 'Hunter?'

Let me guess...does it have something to do with beer, pretzels and Super Bowl Sunday?

by Fraulein Anna on Wed May 10, 2006 at 03:38:55 PM PDT      

Gate Keeping 102 (0 / 0)

"Minutemen" culled from hate groups

Oh yes, from the 'antifascist' 'researcher' who never once mentions Zionism and Israel. And makes it a habit of deleting valid reader comments when they contradict his version of the 'truth.'

Behind every Bush lurks an Emmanuel Goldstein.

You’re all **&^%$% Neocons as far as I’m concerned.

There is no opposition party in the good ole' US of A.

by Fraulein Anna on Wed May 10, 2006 at 03:45:28 PM PDT      

You know, (0 / 0)

You're going to have to back that one up.

Yes, I understand -- my last two posts make me Hitler, because I didn't mention Zionism or Israel.  My last post about the obvious failures of conservatism, after all, pegged me as a member of the "National Alliance", in your book. Kos, Kerry, and the YearlyKos volunteers are also Hitler, and the purity of your position hurts my eyes in its dazzling lily-white brilliance, etc., etc. Fine. But you're going to have to explain that "deletes posts" accusation. I'm known as one of the frontpagers who almost never even troll-rates obviously stupid comments -- to a fault, I admit -- so I'm dying to hear this one.

by Hunter on Wed May 10, 2006 at 04:18:32 PM PDT

[  Parent  ]      

Flatline (0 / 0)

...my last two posts make me Hitler, because I didn't mention Zionism or Israel.

My Zionism comment was a reference to your 'embedded' link. Are you one in the same?

My last post about the obvious failures of conservatism, after all, pegged me as a member of the "National Alliance"

You still fail to answer the question, sir. What was the inspiration for your screen name?

...the purity of your position hurts my eyes in its dazzling lily-white brilliance, etc., etc.

Your arrogance betrays a more sinister banality. I invoked the Nuremberg Tribunals. You did not. Millions died in WWII as a result. If that makes my position 'dazzling lily white and brilliant,' then YOU sir, are on HARDCORE COGNITIVE BLUNTING PHARMACEUTICALS--AS IS THE REST OF THE US of FUCKING A.

But you're going to have to explain that "deletes posts" accusation.

Again, that was in reference to your 'embedded' link. Are you one in the same? Yes or no?

...never even troll-rates obviously stupid comments...

This is the same tired tactic I get on Neocon blogs all the time. Don't agree? You're a stupid troll.

Thank you very much. Proves my point.

...so I'm dying to hear this one.

Aren't we all. Quite a  bipartisan Futurist Cacophony.

Is this one of the best ‘diarist’ you have on here Kos?

Waste of bandwidth.

Fucking Pathetic.

by Fraulein Anna on Wed May 10, 2006 at 04:56:23 PM PDT

[  Parent  ]

the hell? (1+ / 0-)

Recommended by:cookiebear

What are you talking about?  Are you accusing me of deleting posts on Orcinus? Are you saying some other post somewhere got zeroed out? Are you figuring my screen name to be some sort of secret reference to white supremacist groups? Really?

Seriously, if both right and left think you're a troll, you might want to rethink your, um... whatever it is you're going for. Try again somewhere else, K?

by Hunter on Wed May 10, 2006 at 05:27:33 PM PDT

[  Parent  ]       

you might want to rethink your, um... (0 / 0

Sobriety?

The revolution will not be televised, but we'll analyze it to death at The Next Hurrah.

by DHinMI on Wed May 10, 2006 at 05:36:17 PM PDT

[  Parent  ]      

Yeah, that's RIGHT! (0 / 0)

Supporting War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity is the RATIONAL and SOBER thing TO DO!

Back to the assembly line SEN 5241 !

http://www.virtuquest.com/...

by Fraulein Anna on Wed May 10, 2006 at 08:51:22 PM PDT

[  Parent  ]       

Congratulations (1+ / 0-)

Recommended by:   cookiebear

You must be trying really hard to be that big an asshole.  Congratulations, you've succeeded.

The revolution will not be televised, but we'll analyze it to death at The Next Hurrah.

by DHinMI on Thu May 11, 2006 at 06:01:01 AM PDT

[  Parent  ]

Babal...on (0 / 0)

What are you talking about?

Oh, I don't know...guess I'm just delusional. Just forget it. Carry on as if there is no illegal war going on that contravenes every principle of the Nuremberg Tribunals. Hey! Let's not even ever include that concept in any discussion of the Iraq war! Ever! That would be very bad news for the idiotic Democrats that voted for this illegal war. It would set a bad precedent for future 'unintentional' Caliphate building by 'Democrats' as well. And bad for the morale of the US workforce. After all,that's all that really matters, isn't it? We can't have the drone workforce going around thinking that they're complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity on a daily basis, now can we? That would be very very bad for General Dynamics and Raytheon.

 

:X

 

Are you accusing me of deleting posts on Orcinus?

I don't even know who 'you' are pal. I've been trying my darndest to bloody well find out here, but you've made it completely impossible. Who are you Mr. Hunter? You fail to answer the question from above regarding your identity. Seems to me as if you're coming undone at the seams here, Mr. Gate Keeper.

Are you figuring my screen name to be some sort of secret reference to white supremacist groups? Really?

It was merely a question--one that you have repeatedly failed to answer. And it is not a secret reference at all:

http://www.nnsb.net/...

Seriously, if both right and left think you're a troll,

That's right! Don't EVER EVER think for yourself! Just mimic what everybody else is doing! Guess that makes it morally and intellectually valid!

Btw, there is no left or right here. Just right and extreme right. And a shitload of *&^% GateKeepers.

you might want to rethink your, um... whatever it is you're going for.

Try again somewhere else, K?

Perhaps it's time for you to retire, pal. Seems as if you're brain is getting a little... um...shall we say...rusty. Like the Tin Man. [Rusty brain and no heart.]

by Fraulein Anna on Wed May 10, 2006 at 06:34:52 PM PDT  

[  Parent  ]

---

 Hunter? (0 / 0)

Are you a Kos diarist from the National Alliance wrapped in Neocon clothing?

Is this where your screen name came from?  Hunter by Andrew MacDonald (aka William Pierce)

This 'debate 'is obviously a ridiculous waste of time.

by Fraulein Anna on Sat May 06, 2006 at 09:04:52 PM PDT       

Sorry, I didn't get that? (0 / 0)

Um, why is this debate a waste of time?    

No more lies - IMPEACH!

by Fabian on Sun May 07, 2006 at 03:36:47 AM PDT

[  Parent  ]

 

? (0 / 0)

Because it should be fucking obvious to anyone who has a fucking brain that Neocons are not 'conservatives.' Study Strauss, study Kristol. C'mon, it's not that bloody hard pal.

by Fraulein Anna on Wed May 10, 2006 at 05:03:51 PM PDT

[  Parent  ]

View Story

The Hilton Sisters: Chained for Life

"Pretty. Open. Hor Authority"

click to 'enlarge'

click to 'enlarge'

'Pretty.Open.
July

Sephora
The Beauty Authority'

"There's No Rest for the Dead"

Managua, Nicaragua. 1978.

He might think of leaving work,
But no, he wouldn't like a shirk.
He'd much prefer to stay
And get his honest days pay.
He's got a life of work ahead,
There's no rest for the dead.
--Crass, Systematic Death (1981)

Bramble Bees and Others (c.1911) by Jean Henri Fabre

Of the various insects that like to make their home in our houses, certainly the most interesting, for her beautiful shape, her curious manners, and her wonderful nest, is a certain Wasp called the Pelopaeus. She is very little known, even to the people by whose fireside she lives. This is owing to her quiet, peaceful ways; she is so very retiring that her host is nearly always ignorant of her presence.

...

I once saw a Bee-eating Wasp, while carrying a Bee to her storehouse, attacked and caught by a Mantis. The Wasp was in the act of eating the honey she had found in the Bee’s crop. The double saw of the Mantis closed suddenly on the feasting Wasp; but neither terror nor torture could persuade that greedy creature to leave off eating. Even while she was herself being actually devoured she continued to lick honey from her Bee!

Le Fantôme de la Liberté (1947)

Theatrical Release Information

* US Theatrical Release Date: November 1974
* MPAA: Safe::Root0::PI::Media::Description=HASH(0x9f97c1e4)
* Production Company: Euro International Film (EIA) S.p.A., Greenwich Film Productions
* USA Box Office: $0 Million

Translating...

Translating...

May 03, 1808...

CHAPTER 6.

INSTINCT AND DISCERNMENT.

The Pelopaeus (A Mason-wasp forming the subject of essays which have not yet been published in English.--Translator's Note.) gives us a very poor idea of her intellect when she plasters up the spot in the wall where the nest which I have removed used to stand, when she persists in cramming her cell with Spiders for the benefit of an egg no longer there and when she dutifully closes a cell which my forceps has left empty, extracting alike germ and provisions. The Mason-bees (Cf. "The Mason-bees": chapter 7.--Translator's Note.), the caterpillar of the Great Peacock Moth (Cf. "Social Life in the Insect World" by J.H. Fabre, translated by Bernard Miall: chapter 14.-- Translator's Note.) and many others, when subjected to similar tests, are guilty of the same illogical behaviour: they continue, in the normal order, their series of industrious actions, though an accident has now rendered them all useless. Just like millstones unable to cease revolving though there be no corn left to grind, let them once be given the compelling power and they will continue to perform their task despite its futility. Are they then machines? Far be it from me to think anything so foolish.

Bramble Bees and Others by Jean Henri Fabre

Chapter 5: Experimental Techniques

The Counter Fearful Thing

Alfred Jarry

Jean Baudrillard. Pataphysics. London: Institute of Pataphysics and Atlas Press, 2005.

Reviewed by Joseph Nechvatal (Professor of Theory of Art at The School of Visual Arts in New York City and The Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey, USA).

There is for me an evidence in the realm of flesh which has nothing to do with the evidence of reason.1--Antonin Artaud

For Pataphysics all phenomena are totally gaseous.2--Jean Baudrillard

Eadem mutata resurgo: I arise again the same though changed.3

We are nothing more than a state of virtual fart.4--Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard at the “Chance Event”5

There is no deal to be made with death.6

The first remarkable thing about Jean Baudrillard’s limited edition text Pataphysics is its passé, handmade, deckle-edged, luxury cover. I say remarkable in that I still tend to identify Baudrillard with the small, slick black covers in which Semiotext(e) introduced him to America; covers which implied more of a techno aesthetic than this solemn neo-gothic one. The second remarkable thing about this book is its slim size: it is only 14 pages long.

I was immediately struck by the nonsensical pairing of a distinguished looking façade that supposedly signified some kind of venerable “authenticity” with an interior teensy-weensy substantive content. But as I gleefully plunged past the books sign-value packaging and into the distinguished Simon Watson Taylor’s English translation (his final) of this circa-1950 text (ostensibly on the subject of Pataphysics, which Baudrillard here defines as “the philosophy of gaseous states”7, as “tautology”8 –  the use of redundant language that adds no information and as “the mind’s loftiest temptation”) this pairing made a peculiarly drôle sense, as immediately I started reading about “fake” “stucco” “self-infatuation” and “vast flatulence”, followed soon after by talk of “fake universes”.9

I had first encountered this slim but fascinating text, which Baudrillard wrote at the tender age 21, when it appeared unexpectedly in Baudrillard’s collection of art-related essays which Sylvère Lotringer’s Semiotext(e) released in 200510 (it is a different translation, however). But lacking the kind of provocative packaging Atlas (in association with The London Institute of Pataphysics) has given this version, it made a rather minor impact on me at the time. But this new stucco-coated version, with the what one might be tempted to say is rather pretentious outside packaging, has focused my mind sympatheticly by actualizing some of the significant pataphysical concepts raised within the text itself. And for that its idiosyncratic design intelligence must be appreciated.

Of course this style choice is internally consistent with Baudrillard’s notion that systems of signification and meaning are only understandable in terms of their ambivalent interrelationships. How better to reinforce his iconic concepts of viral seduction, simulation, and hyperreality than this paradoxical presentation of the blatantly conservative with the imaginative far-out?

One might first be tempted to point to the traditionalist signifiers being played with here as substantive affirmation of what some of his readers have identified as Baudrillard’s rather thinly veiled conservative longing for a lost originality in face of digital virtuality; an impulse which verges on the nauseating nostalgic. Indeed this impression is enhanced when reading in the prelude that the publisher pulled out the old rare book ploy here. There are only 177 numbered copies of this letterpress-printed book and 44 numbered copies signed by the hand of Baudrillard himself. What a rare and valuable commodity –  if one dances to that sort of consensus trance.

Undeniably, such a comic example of self-imposed rarity in the age of virtuality can be infuriating – but that would be taking this project way too seriously. Assuredly Baudrillard here puts forth that “Pataphysics is not serious” but that it possesses a silliness that perhaps “constitutes precisely its seriousness”.11 Better to just scan it and pass it around up on the internet. Better still to just concentrate on its intangible pleasures.

First off, there is the pleasure to be found in examining Baudrillard backwards (so to speak) in terms of hyperreal nonsense.12 Backwards in that we already know considerably well his mid-career and recent oeuvre, but poorly, if at all, such early formative texts. And following this backwards flip, we may examine him circularly and hence self-pataphysicly in that Baudrillard also defines Pataphysics as that which “revolves around itself”.13 So we can now regressively time trip and spin-view retrospectively his various observations, theories and analyses of technological communication through a young and delirious metaphysics deeply inspired by French and German poetry, the pataphysical anti-concepts developed by Alfred Jarry and the brilliant ravings of Antonin Artaud. These last two associations are explicit, as the reader is clued into these two contextual references in the text’s prelude, most importantly the text’s lapidary reaction to the publishing of key Artaud texts and the formation of the Parisian Collège de Pataphysique.14

By way of the understanding Artaud’s impact on the young Baudrillard, it may be valuable to recall Artaud's proposal in Le Théâtre et Son Double (The Theatre and its Double) that art (in his case drama) must be a means of influencing the human organism and directly altering consciousness by engaging the audience in a ritualistic-like trance. Even though in his essay The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation Jacques Derrida describes how Artaud's theory may be seen as impossible in terms of the established structure of Western thought15, this is precisely why Baurillard’s youthful creative text can be placed in position to Artaud's hypothesis and well within the College de Pataphysique. Indeed Baudrillard writes here that “Artaud demands a re-evaluation of creation, of coming into the world”.16

The Collège de Pataphysique was founded on May 11th, 1948 by an anarchic group of artists and writers interested in the philosophy of Pataphysics. These zealots devoted their time to perpetuating (and often distorting) Jarry's philosophical pranks. In 1959 Marcel Duchamp agreed to be a satrap in the Collège de Pataphysique17 and there have been numerous links established with the Oulipo literary movement – specifically through the participation in both groups by the poet Raymond Queneau. The fabulous wordsmith Jean Genet has described himself as following in the pataphysical tradition, and so Baudrillard seems now retrospectively like a fitting young candidate for the Collège (he evidently became a transcendent satrap there) as he, like Jarry and Genet both, obsessively circumnavigate around absurd mocked-up topographies.

For anyone who may not know, Pataphysics is the absurdist pseudo-philosophy/ideology devised by Alfred Jarry. The term first appeared in print in Jarry's article Guignol in the April 28th (1893) issue of L'Écho de Paris littéraire illustré. It is a form of conceptual flatulent hot air that hinges on the idea of utter nonsense. A practitioner of Pataphysics is a pataphysician or a pataphysicist.

For Jarry, Pataphysics is the anti-scientific realm beyond metaphysics that examines the laws which preside over exceptions – an attempt to elucidate an imaginary cosmos. Jarry specifically defined Pataphysics as the “science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments”.18

Alfred Jarry

So we recognize here some rhizomatic roots that may have nurtured Baudrillard's hyperbolic and jaded view of an incongruous virtual-reality drenched world. In Jarry we already relish an artificial Baudrillardian simulated world created by an hallucinatory social structure where shimmering objects decree in odd ways what people can and cannot do within the vast void of virtuality. Indeed, like Jarry, Baudrillard mostly arrives at this social examination without demonstrating any sustained systematic analysis. Poof! Voila: a gaseous bon délire: an airy imaginary solution. But in Pataphysics, every occurrence in the universe is established to be an extraordinary event. No simulation possible.

Of course this aim of creating an inorganic world ex nihilo and luxuriating in its rarefied artificiality was not unique to Jarry. Indeed it was perfectly articulated in 1884 with the publication of Joris-Karl Huysmans's decadent novel; A Rebours (Against Nature), a story of a recluse art worshiper who yearns for new sensations and perverse pleasures within a transcendental artificial ideal. Recall that decadent French theory, which is almost equivalent to Fin-de-Siècle Symbolist theory, aspired to set art free from the materialistic preoccupations of industrial society.

But what struck me as most exact to the young Baudrillard text’s bizarre propositions was its deep reflection (one might even say brooding) on the theme of ignobility, and this shoddily shifted something in my appreciation of Baudrillard’s total word production. Notably, already evident is Baudrillard’s display of a mordantly witty obsession with language, a flatulent smoky language that tests the limits of form and stretches the bounds of meaning by recasting our experiences of encountering wildly disjunctive ideas into the sumptuously physicality of total negation.

This reality-rejecting text delivers an airy irrational punch of nonsensical negation by tying together methods of insouciant informality with a visceral camp irony: at turns hip and flamboyant, then turning towards the morally outrageous. At times the text simulates the disappearing ephemeral we associate with electronically provided information today on the internet, and the flickering of its translucent form. Still the reader is expected to work devotedly to solve the absurd flatulent conundrums supplied here, to supply mental transitions between the diverse and massive assortment of irrational elements which supply the text its pataphysical hooks. One must fabricate a complicated forensic fairy-tale out of this flatulent melange, which keeps slipping in and out of idiosyncratic narration. And that recitation keeps turning back into one about stinking death, that strange, incurable and deeply irrational affliction. Baudrillard in fact defines here the rules of the pataphysical game as narcissism of death, a lethal eccentricity”.19 Yes, I read this text as a meditation on humiliating death in all its undifferentiated fabulousness, by which I mean its essentially nasty comedy. So this is a young man’s text about funny, difficult death then, which while pulling down our pants and revealing our soiled undies, keeps everyone laughing (or at least gurgling) till the bitter end.

According to Baudrillard, in Pataphysics “all things become artificial, poisonous, resulting in a schizophrenia induced by pink stucco angels…”.20  But also there is here an awareness of impertinent splendor in the tranquility of flatulent decomposition, which makes it all seem faintly heroic in face of death’s inexorability. Thus this irrational text implies an antiphilosopher’s knowledge of dumb death’s putrid ignobility – but Baudrillard will not give in to that parody either. And this is what gives the work its extraordinary sense of dignity, a dignity which asserts life’s primacy over death because death is beyond narration and words.

So this text’s irrational gaseous hypothesis is actually fine absurdist Ubu art.21 But an Ubu art which does not merely help us pass the time away; it enlivens time if we surrender to its fearful pataphysical difficulty. A vertigo intricacy of which Baudrillard says is “anaemic” and “impossible” as its “procedure is a vicious circle within”.22

So Baudrillard’s work here provides the chance to do the counter-fearful thing then, to look at what we fear so that such an effort will help release us from fear’s irrational grip. Then we can pataphysically expand into the airy void and see beneath the stucco surface of Maya23 and so enjoy absurd life all the more. So that the ignobility of death can be ignored and nonsensical dignity restored – for the fleeting moment.

International Journal of Baudrillard Studies

ISSN: 1705-6411

Volume 4, Number 1 (January 2007)

Endnotes

1 Antonin Artaud. Manifesto In Clear Language.

2 Jean Baudrillard. Pataphysics. London: Institute of Pataphysics and Atlas Press, 2005.

3 Motto of The Collège de Pataphysique.

4 Jean Baudrillard. Pataphysics. London: Institute of Pataphysics and Atlas Press, 2005.

5 The “Chance Event” was produced by Cris Krauss at Whiskey Pete’s In Las Vegas from November 8-10, 1996. Baudrillard is photographed reading the text of a song he wrote a decade earlier called “Motel-Suicide”.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.:8.

8 Ibid.:7.

9 Ibid.:7-8.

10 Jean Baudrillard and Sylvere Lotringer (Editor). The Conspiracy of Art. New York: Semiotexte and MIT Press, 2005.

11 Jean Baudrillard. Pataphysics. London: Institute of Pataphysics and Atlas Press, 2005:10.

12 A. Sokal and J. Bricmont. "Jean Baudrillard" in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science New York: Picador, 1998:147-153.

13 Jean Baudrillard. Pataphysics. London: Institute of Pataphysics and Atlas Press, 2005:8.

14 Ibid.:5.

15 Jacques Derrida. "The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation" in Jacques Derrida Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978:232-250.

16 Jean Baudrillard. Pataphysics. London: Institute of Pataphysics and Atlas Press, 2005:10.

17 M. Sanouillet. "Marcel Duchamp and the French Intellectual Tradition," in Marcel Duchamp, Philadelphia: The Museum of Modern Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973.

18 Alfred Jarry. "What is Pataphysics?" Evergreen Review, Number 13, 1963:131

19 Jean Baudrillard. Pataphysics. London: Institute of Pataphysics and Atlas Press, 2005:8.

20 Ibid.:11.

21 Ubu is defined by Baudrillard in this Pataphysics text as “the gaseous and caricatural state…” (page 7), (among other things). Baudrillard builds here on Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roi, a play that created a famous scandal when it was first performed at the Theatre de l’Oeuvre in Paris in 1896. It is an important precursor of Dada. Through a language of shocking hilarity, Ubu Roi tells the farcical story of Père Ubu, an officer of the King of Poland who is a grotesque figure who epitomizes the mediocrity and idiocy of middle-class officialdom. It was through writing Ubu Roi that Jarry became the creator of the science of Pataphysics, his absurd a-logic which defined the science of imaginary solutions as enshrined since 1948 in the Collège de Pataphysique.

22 Jean Baudrillard. Pataphysics. London: Institute of Pataphysics and Atlas Press, 2005:10-11.

23 The concept of Maya in Indian philosophy refers to the purely phenomenal, insubstantial character of the everyday world.

From:  http://www.ubishops.ca/BaudrillardStudies/vol4_1/nechvatal.htm

The Counter Fearful Thing

Preface to The Theatre and Its Double

"911 is Not a Working Number"

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Phone Recording Archive

RE/Search Interview with William S. Burroughs (1982)

I say all these words are not premature, these words may be too late.--William S. Burroughs

R/S: Do you think they could take a disoriented person out of prison and program him to become an assassin and the person wouldn't really know exactly what he's doing?

WSB: I think it's possible, but it seems to me it's more trouble than it's worth. If you really want the job done you don't want a disoriented person--of course you've got an alibi there, no one can pin it on you, but...still, it's an around-the-world-oxcart way of doing it! But it's certainly within the range of possibility.

R/S: What about telepathic suggestion to the subject while they're asleep?

WSB: Well they wouldn't have to be telepathic--they could do that with microphones, sort of subliminal microphones. As to how effective the suggestions would be I just don't know. All these people are talking about hearing voices, telling them to do these things. Now where do the voices come from? Well this is one of the symptoms, of  course, of schizophrenia, and we know now that the voices come from a non-dominant brain hemisphere, whichever that is. In fact you can produce voices  by electronic stimulation of the non-dominant brain hemisphere in normal subjects. So that's the line to take--if you can get it into the non-dominant brain hemisphere, then it has this terrific power: people can't disobey it. But only certain people would be subject to that kind of conditioning...

R/S: How can we strengthen our psychic defenses?

WSB: There are whole books on that. Dion Fortune wrote a fairly good book, Psychic Self-Defense, It's not a bad book--old-fashioned--but there's some good tips in there. How to know when you're under psychic attack, what to do about it, and so on. There are quite a few--that's a fairly good one. There's something by David Conway called Magic:  An Occult Primer--that's a very good book.

RE/Search # 4/5: William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Throbbing Gristle

You're Already Dead (Pamphlet) by Crass

Book Description
This text¿laying out where Crass saw punk, politics, and the world¿was handed out free, as a small pamphlet by members of Crass at their gigs in 1984 (the last year of the band's existence).

You're Already Dead

The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980 to 1984 by Ian Glasper

Book Description
If the bands in Burning Britain were loud, political, and uncompromising, those examined in Ian Glasper's new book were even more so. With Crass and Poison Girls opening the floodgates, the arrival of bands like Zoundz, Flux of Pink Indians, Conflict, Subhumans, Dirt, The Mob, Omega Tribe, and Icons of Filth heralded a new age of honesty and integrity in the 1980s underground music scene. It was a time when punk stopped being merely a radical fashion statement, and became a force for real social change. Anarchy in punk rock no longer meant "cash from chaos"—it meant "freedom, peace, and unity." Comprehensively covering all the groups and names, big and small,  The Day the Country Died also features exclusive interviews and hundreds of never-before-published photos.

The Day the Country Died
The Day the Country Died (DVD)