A religious group in Israel convinced of the literal truth of the Old Testament that the Messiah will come when a totally red calf is born is spending great amounts of energy to produce, through genetic manipulation, such a red calf.
John Grey, “Straw Dogs.” “The religious fundamentalists see themselves as having remedies for the maladies of the modern world. In reality “they are” symptoms of the disease they pretend to cure.
City Art Meltdown 2015 / Hector Ahumada and many others local writers.
SLC Library 4th floor. City Art Reading Series.
Money – paying the analyst – is necessary in order to keep him/her out of circulation, to avoid getting him/her involved in the imbroglio of passions which generated the patient’s pathology. This is why a psychoanalyst is not a Master-figure, but rather, a kind of “prostitute of the mind,” having recourse to money for the same reason some prostitutes like to be paid so that they can have sex without personal involvement, maintaining their distance – here, we encounter the function of money at its purest.
Happiness and Torture. S. Zizek.
Salt Lake City local poets coming.
To live, to be able to exist, the mind must connect itself with some kind of order. It must apprehend reality as an independent whole… it must bind itself in a stable fashion to certain features of what we call reality.
The mind lives, and we live, in a relationship of faith with reality itself.
We live and exist in this relationship of confidence, which is always by its nature “uncertain” and “insecure.”
Pall Skulason. “Reflections at the Edge of Askja.”
Until a few generations ago, all food was organic; now this is an additional, expensive selling reality. Health food co-ops in wealthy suburbs offer the latest fads in nutrition while other neighborhoods do not have grocery stores, only taco-stands and little corner markets.
Is this an irreversible process in the economy of our society?
ex-Workers’ Collective p. 237
3. Voluntarism (the only way to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe is by means of large-scale collective decisions which run counter to the “spontaneous” immanent logic of capitalist development)
4. Trust in the people (the wager that a large majority of the people support these severe measures, sees them as its own, and is ready to participate in their enforcement)
The presence of global capitalism is presented to us as such a Fate, against which one can not fight- one either adapts oneself to it, or one falls out step with history and is crushed. The only thing one can do is to make global capitalism as human as possible… Zizek. Unbehagen in der Natur.
1.Strict egalitarian justice. All people should pay the same price in eventual renunciation, namely, one should impose the same world-wide norms per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and so on; the developed nations should not be allowed to poison the environment at the present rate, blaming the developing Third World countries, from Brazil to China, for ruining our shared environment with their rapid development.
2. Terror. Ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures, inclusive of severe limitations on liberal “freedoms,” technological control of prospective law-breakers.
3 and 4 next post. Unbehagen in der Natur. S. Zizek
A million gallons of contaminated water spilled into the Animas River in southern Colorado.
“The main production of the modern and postmodern capitalist industry is precisely waste. We are postmodern being because we realize that all our aesthetical appealing consumption artifacts will eventually end up as leftovers, to the point that it will transform the earth into a vast waste land. You lose the sense of tragedy, you perceive progress as derisive.(contemptuous, ironic)
Jacques-Alain Miller, “The Desire of Lacan,” in lacanian ink, 14, (1999) p. 19.
Within fifty to a hundred years, a new class of organisms is likely to emerge.
These organisms will be artificial in the sense that they will originally be designed by humans. However, they will reproduce, and will evolve into something other than their initial form; they will be “alive” under any reasonable definition of the word. these organisms will evolve in a fundamentally different manner than contemporary biological organisms, since their reproduction will be under at least partial conscious control, giving it a Lamarckian component.
J. Doyne Farmer and Alletta d’A Belin
Artificial Life II. Edited by Christopher G. Langton, Charles Taylor, J. Doyne Farmer and Steen Rasmussen.
Santa Fe Institute in the Science of Complexity.
It is very possible
That the Eastern Bunny and Santa Claus do not exist.
That the intellectual capacity of the human brain can not be measured.
That making French Fries at Mac Donald you can make a million dollars.
That racism in America is just another illusion.
That gravity does not exist, the earth sucks.
That the oceans are not increasing in volume, is the American continent the one is sinking.
That scientific truth manipulates and define existential truth.
That any extreme is malignant, except in materialism, competition and individualism.
That military capitalistic democracy is the ideology of choice of the in coming Messiah.