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 What’s up with: The Sun - Boing Boing

“See that little bright spot on the plume on the left, just above the Sun’s edge? That spot is the same size as the Earth. Our planet is about 13,000 km (8000 miles) in diameter, so that one minor prominence is roughly 50,000 km high. That’s 30,000 miles. And it’s positively dwarfed by the Sun itself. A million Earths could fit inside the Sun.”

DuuuuuuuUUUUUUuuuuuuude…

fffffff not now science.

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today:negevrockcity:

In the Eldritch Kitchen, the sous-chef-who-shall-not-be-named prepares tentacle pot pie. The unspeakable silence that stirs mens’ souls to remember dark secrets forgotten by the collective unconscious in moments of stark terror prepares and dices the chicken. A shadowy, unearthly figure whose face is etched in lines that recall non-Euclidean geometry gets the pastry dough just right. Then… and only then, Cthulu eats.

 In honor of Paul, the psychic octopus.

Why Gladwell is Wrong

https://www.adbusters.org/blogs/blackspot-blog/why-gladwell-wrong.html

But can techno-activism accomplish an emancipatory, egalitarian social revolution?

This is a tricky question because technology is accomplishing a social revolution everyday by changing the ways we communicate, live, work, etc. Digital technologies are, by their nature, socially revolutionary. So we must invert the question and ask whether the kind of social revolution that technology is bringing forth is the one that we desire. This question forces us to address the underlying ideology of clicktivist technologies, which Gladwell does not do.

As I argued, that underlying ideology is consumerism, marketing and advertising. And any technology built on the foundation of those three ills will only bring us updated forms of consumerism, marketing and advertising. If we fail to see the connection between clicktivism and advertising, as Gladwell fails to do, then we will be without a coherent critique. Worse still, we will, like Gladwell, endorse the wrong solution.

Gladwell offers activists the wrong advice. He proposes a return to an anachronistic, authoritarian, and hierarchical model of activism. This may work from a political revolution perspective, but it will never bring about the necessary social revolution. Instead, what is needed today is a new breed of activists who “jettison the consumerist ideology of marketing that has for too long constrained the possibility of social revolution.”

We know that nearly all the financial conditions that led to the economic crisis were the same in Canada as they were in the United States with a single, glaring exception: Canada did not deregulate its banks and financial sector, and, as a consequence, Canada avoided the worst of the economic crisis that continues to warp the infrastructure of American life. Nothing but fierce and smart government regulation can head off another American economic crisis in the future. This is not a matter of “balancing” the interests of free-market inventiveness against the need for stability; nor is it a matter of a clash between the ideology of the free-market versus the ideology of government control. Nor is it, even, a matter of a choice between neo-liberal economic theory and neo-Keynesian theory. Rather, as Hegel would have insisted, regulation is the force of reason needed to undo the concoctions of fantasy.

Hegel on Wall Street - NYTimes.com (via otto-obrien)

Socialist Canuckistan.

(via standardgrey)