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alt="3383724761_57912fba35" width="500" height="375" /></p> <p>I’m sitting in a cafe in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria,_British_Columbia" target="_blank">Victoria, British Columbia</a>, with a paper spread out in front of me and my hands hidden beneath the table. In them I’m holding a pair of chopsticks and a glass jar filled with steamed vegetables and brown rice. By telling myself I might get the boot for eating ‘outside food’ in here I’ve turned lunching into a daring game that gives me the light adrenaline kick I’ve missed since I quit shoplifting.</p> <div><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div> <p>There’s some excitement behind the counter now; something’s happening outside. Baristas and a couple regulars make a move to the window to check it out. With the cafe staff distracted I mash a recklessly large mouthful of carrots and kale. Next I step over to see what the fuss is about. Across the street a couple of junkies are making off with a huge pink I-beam that was propping up a freestanding stone wall. This was the climax of an epic struggle that began a few weeks before. The junkies would start sawing, the cops would show up and confiscate their saws, they’d steal another saw, go back to the I-beam and so on: a pointless sub-plot running parallax in the cycle of the addict.</p> <div><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div> <p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1083" title="3384537062_238c2b40391" src="http://pblks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/3384537062_238c2b40391.jpg" alt="3384537062_238c2b40391" width="500" height="375" /></p> <div><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div> <p>With the price of scrap metal shooting through the roof an economic bottom feeder can run some serious game these days. Check Laos: with so much ordnance hiding in the jungles (<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1100842.stm" target="_blank">more bombs were dropped on Laos during the Vietnam war than both sides dropped during the entire second world war</a>) and such cheap metal detectors to be had, rice farmers are finding dry season work in the jungle filling their baskets with bomb casings. So what’s the deal? Why are the prices high enough that Laos peasants are taking the risk of handling a live cluster bomblet and <a href="http://www.straight.com/article-238525/tribunal-will-hear-human-rights-complaint-against-downtown-ambassadors" target="_blank">drug addicts in BC </a>are willing to engage in behaviour that comes very close to resembling work? You already know the answer: <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jul2009/db20090710_219037.htm" target="_blank">China</a>.</p> <div><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div> <p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1084" title="3383724433_1b039dbdde1" src="http://pblks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/3383724433_1b039dbdde1.jpg" alt="3383724433_1b039dbdde1" width="500" height="375" /></p> <div><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div> <p>Yes, somehow importing all these building supplies and erecting clammy concrete cubes translates to having a booming economy. Apart from the cold floors and damp walls the best feature of these monuments would have to be the plumbing: your no-flush squat toilet taps right into the sewage mainframe. This means your toilet exhales the smell of the communal sewage directly back into your bathroom. It’s not all bad, though, not every Chinese building project is a misinterpretation of modern comfort.</p> <div><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div> <p>For example, last month while I was hanging out in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunming" target="_blank">Kunming,</a> I met up with these guys who told me about this huge statue of Optimus Prime that was plunked in the parking lot of an obscure car dealership. We checked the maps and jumped on the bus to check it out. Normally I don’t do sight-seeing because every time you do a piece of your soul breaks off and floats away forever, but fuck it, I made an exception for the king of all robots.</p> <div><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div> <p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1085" title="3384537586_ffc98e819b" src="http://pblks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/3384537586_ffc98e819b.jpg" alt="3384537586_ffc98e819b" width="500" height="667" /></p> <div><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div> <p>- <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/notendo1/sets/72157620766399323/" target="_blank">Willem Betts</a></p> <div class="sociable"> <div class="sociable_tagline"> <strong>Share:</strong> </div> <ul> <li class="sociablefirst"><a rel="nofollow" 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reply</a></span></span></h3> <form action="http://pblks.com/wp-comments-post.php" method="post" id="commentform"> <p class="contain"><input type="text" name="author" id="author" value="" size="22" tabindex="1" /> <label for="author"><small>Name </small></label></p> <p class="contain"><input type="text" name="email" id="email" value="" size="22" tabindex="2" /> <label for="email"><small>Mail </small></label></p> <p class="contain"><input type="text" name="url" id="url" value="" size="22" tabindex="3" /> <label for="url"><small>Website</small></label></p>  <p class="contain"><textarea name="comment" id="comment" cols="100%" rows="10" tabindex="4"></textarea></p> <input name="submit" type="submit" id="submit" tabindex="5" value="Submit Comment" /> <input type='hidden' name='comment_post_ID' value='1079' id='comment_post_ID' /> <input type='hidden' name='comment_parent' id='comment_parent' value='0' /> </form> </div> </div> </div> <div class="secondaryColumn"> <div id="tumblr-widget-13" class="widgetContainer Tumblr"><h3 class="widgetTitle">the wire:</h3><ul><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Der Spiegel</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,682852,00.html#ref=rss"><strong>The Soldiers Call It War Porn</strong></a>: <em>War used to be a very serious decision. Now we don’t even declare war anymore. We don’t pay war taxes, we don’t buy war bonds. Now we can carry it out without having to deal with some of the consequences of sending our sons and daughters into harm’s way. It also changes the way politicians think about war. You already have society’s barriers against war dropping, and now you have a technology that takes the barriers to the ground.</em></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/458645159" class="tumblr_link">03/19/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Foreign Policy</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/16/gazas_tragically_peculiar_economy"><strong>Gaza’s tragically peculiar economy</strong></a>: <em>When I was in Gaza in January I had an opportunity to both speak with tunnel operators and view the tunnels themselves. One can’t help but be struck by how ubiquitous the tunnel trade has become. Most of what one buys in Gaza seems to have come through a tunnel: shoes, clothing, chocolate bars, utensils, appliances. Even fiancés, livestock, automobiles, and a lion have been brought into Gaza this way. (The drugged but uncaged lion, it seems, woke up part way across. After puzzling how to recapture it, smugglers built two halves of a makeshift cage, which were then separately lowered into the tunnel from the Gaza and Egyptian ends, and very, very carefully pushed together.)</em></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/458644000" class="tumblr_link">03/19/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>The Nation</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://Coalition%20of%20the%20Shilling%20"><strong>Coalition of the Shilling</strong></a>:<em> As newspapers close foreign bureaus and shrink newsrooms—threatening independent national security reporting at a time when the United States is involved in two wars—think tanks like CNAS have moved to fill the void in new and old media. And while tightfisted newspaper publishers may be less than generous with book leave, think tanks like CNAS and ISW offer a place to work on long-form journalism free of daily deadline pressure. </em></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/448460949" class="tumblr_link">03/14/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Robert D. Kaplan</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/man-versus-afghanistan/7983"><strong>Man VS Afghanistan</strong></a>: <em>“Doubt,” T. E. Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), is “our modern crown of thorns.” The Special Operations forces that McChrystal led in Iraq were not so afflicted, despite a home front—especially a policy nomenklatura in Washington—that by 2006 had given up on the war. McChrystal, whom Williams called “the singularly most impressive military officer I ever served with,” has never submitted to fate. His oft-documented physical regimen—running eight miles a day, eating one meal a day, and sleeping four hours a night—itself expresses an unyielding, almost cultic determination.</em></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/448301016" class="tumblr_link">03/14/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Washington Post</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/11/AR2010031103653.html"><strong>CIA drone attacks produce America’s own unlawful combatants</strong></a>: <em>CIA civilian personnel who repeatedly and directly participate in hostilities may have what recent <a href="http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/direct-participation-ihl-faq-020609">guidance from the International Committee of the Red Cross</a> terms “a continuous combat function.” That status, the ICRC guidance says, makes them legitimate targets whenever and wherever they may be found, including Langley. While the guidance speaks in terms of non-state actors, there is no reason why the same is not true of civilian agents of state actors such as the United States. </em></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/448297488" class="tumblr_link">03/14/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Immanuel Wallerstein</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.iwallerstein.com/greek-mess-euromess-western-nations-mess-world-mess/"><b>Greek Mess, Euromess, Western Nations Mess, World Mess?</b></a> <i>Greece’s problems are indeed Germany’s problems. Germany’s problems are indeed the United States’ problems. And the United States’ problems are indeed the world’s problems. Analyzing who did what in the last ten years is far less useful than discussing what, if anything, can be done in the next ten years. What is going on is a world-wide game of chicken. Everyone seems to be waiting for who will flinch first. Someone is going to make a mistake. And then we’ll have what Barry Eichengreen has called “the mother of all financial crises.” Even China will be affected by that one.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/436874310" class="tumblr_link">03/09/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>The Nation</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100322/hari/single"><b>The Wrong Kind of Green</b></a>: <i>It has taken two decades for this corrupting relationship to become the norm among the big green organizations. Imagine this happening in any other sphere, and it becomes clear how surreal it is. It is as though Amnesty International’s human rights reports came sponsored by a coalition of the Burmese junta, Dick Cheney and Robert Mugabe. For environmental groups to take funding from the very people who are destroying the environment is preposterous—yet it is now taken for granted. </i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/436873263" class="tumblr_link">03/09/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Arts Technica</h3><p><p><b><a target="_blank" href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/how-nokia-helped-iran-persecute-and-arrest-dissidents.ars">How Nokia helped Iran “persecute and arrest” dissidents</a>:</b> <i>Journalist Hanna Nikkanen quotes Nokia’s Lauri Kivinen saying that “there’s been this perception internationally that we’ve supplied them [Iran] with internet surveillance equipment, but this is not true. The statement was made on February 20, 2010, but Nikkanen obtained leaked manuals to the equipment in question and concluded, ” The surveillance made possible by the Nokia Lawful Interception Gateway (LIG) extends to mobile internet usage. Either Kivinen was lying or his knowledge of his company’s core competence field isn’t quite adequate.”</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/428335015" class="tumblr_link">03/05/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Vanity Fair | Hitchens</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/04/hitchens-201004?currentPage=1"><b>The New Commandments</b></a>:<span class="dc"> <i>W</i></span><i>hat do we say when we want to revisit a long-standing policy or scheme that no longer seems to be serving us or has ceased to produce useful results? We begin by saying tentatively, “Well, it’s not exactly written in stone.” (Sometimes this comes out as “not set in stone.” By that, people mean that it’s not one of the immutable Tablets of the Law. Thus, more recent fetishes such as the gold standard, or the supposedly holy laws of the free market, can be discarded as not being incised on granite or marble. But what if it is the original stone version that badly needs a re-write? Who will take up the revisionist chisel?</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/428317449" class="tumblr_link">03/05/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Salon</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2010/02/23/counterculture/index.html"><b>Glenn Beck is the new Abbie Hoffman</b></a>: <i>Just as the New Left claimed that the New Deal era wasn’t really liberal, so the countercultural right claims that the Republican Party from Nixon to George W. Bush wasn’t really conservative. ’60s radicals like Carl Oglesby denounced John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as sinister “corporate liberals” in the same way that the radicals of the right claim that the two Bushes, if not the sainted Reagan, were inauthentic “big government conservatives.” The radical left had Ralph Nader. The radical right has Ron Paul.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/421868982" class="tumblr_link">03/02/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Granta</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/Borges-and-Me-and-Me"><b>Borges and Me, and Me</b></a>: <i>Was this the most significant moment of my life so far? Who knew if this collision with great literature would be the trigger of other stories, or the Fukuyama-esque end of my history as a writer – because what would be the point of writing anything if I went down in history as the person who killed Borges? Luckily for me, Borges was alive. I saw Borges, on his back, the stick across his chest, opening and closing his mouth like one of those canaries sent down into the bowels of coal mines to detect a lack of oxygen. It was poetic justice, I think: the plot that brought together two invisible men who managed to meet, and, upon not seeing each other, collide.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/413072559" class="tumblr_link">02/26/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>The Nation</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100301/alperowitz_et_al?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ArticlesFromTheNation+(The+Nation%3A+All+Articles)&utm_content=Google+Reader"><b>The Cleveland Model</b></a>: <i>Something important is happening in Cleveland: a new model of large-scale worker- and community-benefiting enterprises is beginning to build serious momentum in one of the cities most dramatically impacted by the nation’s decaying economy. The Evergreen Cooperative Laundry (ECL)—a worker-owned, industrial-size, thoroughly “green” operation—opened its doors late last fall in Glenville, a neighborhood with a median income hovering around $18,000. It’s the first of ten major enterprises in the works in Cleveland, where the poverty rate is more than 30 percent and the population has declined from 900,000 to less than 450,000 since 1950.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/393340217" class="tumblr_link">02/16/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>LA Times</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/14/local/la-me-blacktar14-2010feb14"><b>A lethal business model targets Middle America</b></a>: <i>Immigrants from Xalisco in the Pacific Coast state of Nayarit, Mexico, they have brought an audacious entrepreneurial spirit to the heroin trade. Their success stems from both their product, which is cheaper and more potent than Colombian heroin, and their business model, which places a premium on customer convenience and satisfaction.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/393323955" class="tumblr_link">02/16/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Le Monde</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://mondediplo.com/2010/01/05copenhagen"><b>What apocalypses are you nostalgic for?</b></a> <i>It’s clear now that, from her immoveable titanium bangs to her chaotic approximation of human speech, Sarah Palin is a Terminator cyborg sent from the future to destroy something – but what? It could be the Republican Party she’ll ravage by herding the fundamentalists and extremists into a place where sane fiscal conservatives and swing voters can’t follow. Or maybe she was sent to destroy civilisation at this crucial moment by preaching the gospel of climate-change denial, abetted by tools like the Washington Post, which ran a factually outrageous editorial by her on the subject on 9 December 2009. No one (even her, undoubtedly) knows, but we do know that this month we all hover on the brink.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/380731933" class="tumblr_link">02/09/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>The Guardian</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/23/cctv-sky-police-plan-drones"><b>CCTV in the Sky</b></a>:<a title="More from guardian.co.uk on Police" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/police"> <i>Police</i></a><i> in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ”routine” monitoring of antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state <a title="More from guardian.co.uk on Surveillance" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/surveillance">surveillance</a>. The arms manufacturer <a title="More from guardian.co.uk on BAE Systems" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/baesystems">BAE Systems</a>, which produces a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for war zones, is adapting the military-style planes for a consortium of government agencies led by Kent police.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/372637119" class="tumblr_link">02/05/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Mute</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.metamute.org/en/content/apocalypse_tendency_crisis"><b>Apocalypse, Tendency, Crisis</b></a>: <i>In a time of crisis apocalyptic desires and fantasies become pressing and real. Norman Cohn’s In Pursuit of the Millennium offers a secret history of the periodic emergence of a ‘revolutionary eschatology’ in the Middle Ages in response to a collapsing social order, immiseration, disease and war. Responding to crisis these dreamers dared to imagine an apocalypse that would turn the world upside down, and create a new heaven on earth in which Princes would bow to peasants. Of course the apocalypse that became real was often the apocalypse of repression.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/372634853" class="tumblr_link">02/05/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>The Nation | Lessig</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100222/lessig">How to Get Our Democracy Back</a>:<i> This is corruption. Not the corruption of bribes, or of any other crime known to Title 18 of the US Code. Instead, it is a corruption of the faith Americans have in this core institution of our democracy. The vast majority of Americans believe money buys results in Congress (88 percent in a recent California poll). And whether that belief is true or not, the damage is the same. The democracy is feigned. A feigned democracy breeds cynicism. Cynicism leads to disengagement. Disengagement leaves the fox guarding the henhouse. </i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/372571919" class="tumblr_link">02/05/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Slate | Hitchens</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.slate.com/id/2243112/"><b>A Nation of Racist Dwarfs</b></a>: <i>The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent “Constitution,” “ratified” last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian “military first” mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/366887219" class="tumblr_link">02/02/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>The New Republic</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.tnr.com/article/the-love-culture?page=0,1"><b>For the Love of Culture</b></a>: <i>Books—physical books, and the copyrighted work that gets carried in them—are an extraordinarily robust cultural artifact. We have access to practically every book ever published anywhere. You do not need to be a Harvard professor to enter the rare book room at the law library. You do not need to touch rare books to read the work those books hold. Older works—before 1923, in the United States—are in the public domain, which means that anyone, including any publisher, can copy and reprint that work without any permission from anyone else. There is no Shakespeare estate that reviews requests for new editions of Hamlet. The same is true for every nineteenth-century author in America. These works are freely and widely available, because no law restricts access to these works.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/359670188" class="tumblr_link">01/29/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Wired</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/all/1"><b>The Next Industrial Revolution</b></a>: <i>With the tools in place, the second part of this new industrial age is how manufacturing has been opened up to individuals, letting them scale prototypes into full production runs. Over the past few years, Chinese manufacturers have evolved to handle small orders more efficiently. This means that one-person enterprises can get things made in a factory the way only big companies could before.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/359639160" class="tumblr_link">01/29/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>The Guardian</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan/25/cudlipp-lecture-alan-rusbridger"><b>Does Journalism Exist?</b></a>: <i>In an industry in which we get used to every trend line pointing to the floor, the growth of newspapers’ digital audience should be a beacon of hope. During the last three months of 2009 the Guardian was being read by 40% more people than during the same period in 2008. That’s right, a mainstream media company – you know, the ones that should admit the game’s up because they are so irrelevant and don’t know what they are doing in this new media landscape – has grown its audience by 40% in a year. More Americans are now reading the Guardian than read the Los Angeles Times. This readership has found us, rather than the other way round. Our total marketing spend in America in the past 10 years has been $34,000.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/359634207" class="tumblr_link">01/29/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Wired | Danger Room</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/pentagon-master-plan-super-size-my-drone-fleet/"><b>Super-Size My Drone Fleet</b></a>: <i>The U.S. military already has plans in the works to grow its fleet of Predators and Reapers, the long-loitering, armed surveillance drones that have become a defining feature of the air war over Central Asia and the Middle East. Now, according to a draft version of the Pentagon’s new master strategy plan, the military wants to dramatically up the number of “orbits,” or air patrols, of the unmanned aircraft.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/359602909" class="tumblr_link">01/29/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>The Baffler</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.thebaffler.com/viewArticle/121/0/1/">Serfing the Net</a>: <i>And so we have our conversation about the enormous cultural restructuring that is going on, but we are having it in a senseless vocabulary where “content” takes the place of “art” and “information” substitutes for “culture,” “knowledge,” “literature,” “music,” “cinema” and “meaning.” All the mysteries of the creative process are flattened: the fickle nature of the muse, the idiosyncrasies of scholarship, and the tenacity required to compose a novel. All are reduced to nothing by analogies derived from the logic of computer code, data processing and high-tech business models. </i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/356773977" class="tumblr_link">01/27/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>The Nation</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100201/hayes/single"><b>System Failure</b></a>: <i>There’s a word for a governing philosophy that fuses the power of government and large corporations as a means of providing services and keeping the wheels of industry greased, and it’s a word that has begun to pop up among critics of everything from the TARP bailout to healthcare to cap and trade: corporatism. Since corporatism often merges the worst parts of Big Government and Big Business, it’s an ideal target for both the left and right. The ultimate corporatist moment, the bailout, was initially voted down in the House by an odd-bedfellows coalition of Progressive Caucus members and right-wingers.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/351513720" class="tumblr_link">01/24/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>David Harvey</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://davidharvey.org/2009/12/organizing-for-the-anti-capitalist-transition/"><b>Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition</b></a>: <i>Communists are all those who work incessantly to produce a different future to that which capitalism portends. This is an interesting definition. While traditional institutionalized communism is as good as dead and buried, there are by this definition millions of <i>de facto</i> communists active among us, willing to act upon their understandings, ready to creatively pursue anti-capitalist imperatives. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Capital-David-Harvey/dp/1846683084/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260895752&sr=8-1"><i></i></a>If, as the alternative globalization movement of the late 1990s declared, ‘another world is possible’ then why not also say ‘another communism is possible’? The current circumstances of capitalist development demand something of this sort, if fundamental change is to be achieved.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/344845167" class="tumblr_link">01/20/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>BLDG BLOG</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/they-will-build-clouds-for-us.html"><b>They Will Build Clouds For Us</b></a>: <i>A cloud of metal dust released by U.S. military airplanes in the skies 100 miles west of Los Angeles caused a temporary blackout in the city and “interfer[ed] with radar at airports in southern California” when it began to blow back toward land. What exactly was the purpose of this inadvertently weaponized offshore atmospheric event? “The Navy says it spread several thousand pounds of the particles of chaff in an operation 100 to 300 miles offshore designed to test its ability to jam radar,” the New York Times reported. </i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/344575842" class="tumblr_link">01/20/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>The Guardian | Charlie Brooker</h3><p><p><b><a target="_blank" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/18/augmented-reality-on-its-way">Batten down the hatches. Augmented reality is on its way</a>: </b><i>Years ago, I had an idea for a futuristic pair of goggles that visually transformed homeless people into lovable animated cartoon characters. Instead of being confronted by the conscience-pricking sight of an abandoned heroin addict shivering themselves to sleep in a shop doorway, the rich city-dweller wearing the goggles would see Daffy Duck snoozing dreamily in a hammock. London would be transformed into something out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/342849486" class="tumblr_link">01/19/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>New Statesman | Slavoj Zizek</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/08/haiti-aristide-lavalas"><b>Democracy versus the people:</b></a> <i>Denounced by Talleyrand as “a horrible spectacle for all white nations”, the “mere existence of an independent Haiti” was itself an intolerable threat to the slave-owning status quo. Haiti thus had to be made an exemplary case of economic failure, to dissuade other countries from taking the same path. The price - the literal price - for the “premature” independence was truly extortionate: after two decades of embargo, France, the old colonial master, established trade and diplomatic relations only in 1825, after forcing the Haitian government to pay 150 million francs as “compensation” for the loss of its slaves. <br/></i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/341834674" class="tumblr_link">01/18/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Financial Times</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/628a8500-ff1c-11de-a677-00144feab49a.html"><b>Moscow’s Stray Dogs</b></a>: <i>The stray dogs of Moscow are mentioned for the first time in the reports of the journalist and writer Vladimir Gilyarovsky in the latter half of the 19th century. But Poyarkov says they have been there as long as the city itself. They remain different from wolves, in particular because they exhibit pronounced “polymorphism” – a range of behavioural traits shaped in part by the “ecological niche” they occupy. And it is this ability to adapt that explains why the population density of strays is so much greater than that of wolves. “With several niches there are more resources and more opportunities.”</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/339147224" class="tumblr_link">01/17/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>BBC | Adam Curtis</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2010/01/yemen_the_return_of_old_ghosts.html"><b>Yemen - The Return of Old Ghosts</b></a>: <i>What I find so fascinating about the reporting of the War on Terror is the way almost all of it ignores history - as if it is a conflict happening outside time. The Yemen is a case in point. In the wake of the underpants bomber we have been deluged by a wave of terror journalism about this dark mediaeval country that harbours incomprehensible fanatics who want to destroy the west. None of it has explained that only forty years ago the British government fought a vicious secret war in the Yemen against republican revolutionaries who used terror, including bombing airliners.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/337692386" class="tumblr_link">01/16/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Maisonneuve</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://maisonneuve.org/pressroom/article/2010/jan/14/nakba-olives/"><b>A Nakba of Olives: </b></a><i>There is supposed to be a demonstration against the Wall today, but earlier this week, the IDF raided Jayyous. Soldiers entered the village at night, seized about a hundred young men and penned them in the school gymnasium. The troops also occupied several village houses and spray-painted a Star of David over a pro-freedom mural on a school wall. The IDF took about a dozen men with them when they left, and the men are still in custody somewhere in Israel. I wonder if the night action by the IDF will intimidate the young men out of their weekly protest and I ask Mohammed if anything is going to happen today. He says he doesn’t know. He says that the “street will decide.” I don’t believe him. His cell-phone has been ringing all morning. If anyone knows, it is Mohammed.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/334213165" class="tumblr_link">01/14/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Der Spiegel</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,670600,00.html"><b>Who Has the Right to Shape the City?</b></a> <i>Hamburg has been trying to woo the much-coveted “creative class” for years in a bid to secure its future. Now the city has become the front line in a bitter conflict over gentrification, with artists squatting buildings in protest against investment plans and members of the far-left scene attacking private property — and even police.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/325479800" class="tumblr_link">01/09/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Guernica</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.guernicamag.com/spotlight/1476/bubble_city/"><b>Sin City:</b></a> <i>The first time I saw the Burj, in 2006, was in the days following our pre-dawn meeting with Marilyn. It was still in the early stages of construction and was hard to make out exactly what was what in the dark. Excavation had commenced more than two years before, and now the first few levels of steel framing had begun to emerge from ground level. My friend, Darren, pointed it out to me from where we stood on the balcony of an old, soot-covered high rise, just opposite the site, off Sheikh Zayed Road—an anomaly on the luxurious thoroughfare, flanked by the Fairmont hotel and the two Emirates towers. It was nighttime, and we could see a constellation of lighted cranes and the steel frames of the construction sites in nearby Business Bay—a sixty-four-million-square-foot development that planners say will comprise 240 towers and house 191,000 people, originally slated for completion by 2015.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/325077511" class="tumblr_link">01/09/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>The Infrastructuralist</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.infrastructurist.com/2010/01/07/could-abandoned-strip-malls-be-a-boon-for-solar-energy/"><b>Could Abandoned Strip Malls Be a Boon for Solar Energy?</b></a> <i>The roof space of a strip mall or supermarket is often empty black space. Converting that space to a power plant maximizes its use, generating revenue from otherwise worthless space. And panels can shade a heat-retaining black roof, reducing the air conditioning load and increasing net energy efficiency.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/322829207" class="tumblr_link">01/07/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>k-punk</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011437.html"><b>“They killed their mother”: <i>Avatar</i> as ideological symptom</b></a>: <i>What we have in Avatar is another instance of corporate anti-capitalism such as I discussed in </i><i>Capitalist Realism in relation to </i><i>Wall-E. Cameron has always been a proponent of Hollywood anti-capitalism: stupid corporate interests were the villains in </i><i>Aliens and </i><i>Terminator 2 as they are in </i><i>Avatar. </i><i>Avatar is Le Guin-lite, a degraded version of the scenario that Le Guin developed in novels such as </i><i>The Word For World Is Forest, </i><i>The Dispossessed and </i><i>City Of Illusions, but stripped of all Le Guin’s ambivalence and intelligence. What is foreclosed in the opposition between a predatory technologised capitalism and a primitive organicism, evidently, is the possibility of a modern, technologised anti-capitalism. It is in presenting this pseudo-opposition that </i><i>Avatar functions as an ideological symptom. </i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/320235489" class="tumblr_link">01/06/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Eye</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.eyemagazine.com/review.php?id=170&rid=888&set=947"><b>Studio Scrutiny</b></a>:<i> Web 2.0 has done strange things to graphic design. It has rapidly popularised the discipline but it has also radically altered the boundaries of who and what is a designer. Many believe that anyone with a cracked copy of CS4 can design, while others cringe at the very notion of graphic design in the hands of non-professionals. And as cliché-ridden, press-release dependent blogs continue to increase their market share, quality analysis is often lost amidst the hype-cycle.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/319532709" class="tumblr_link">01/06/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>New York Times</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/world/americas/04havana.html?hp"><b>A Black Market Finds a Home in the Web’s Back Alleys</b></a>: <i>The offerings on this online bazaar run the gamut, although it is impossible to tell which sellers are legitimate, which are scam artists and which might even be government agents setting a trap. A recent posting offered illegal satellite dishes, which the authorities occasionally seize from rooftops to prevent outlawed foreign broadcasts from finding their way into Cuban homes. Also for sale were English classes, old typewriters, sex toys, purebred dogs and tooth whitening chemicals. People with permission to travel were sought out to buy clothing, electronics and other goods to bring back in their luggage.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/315826545" class="tumblr_link">01/03/10</a></p></li><li class="tumblr_post regular" style="padding:8px 0"><h3>Mute</h3><p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.metamute.org/en/questioning_capitalist_realism"><b>Questioning Capitalist Realism</b></a>: <i>But with the collapse of neoliberalism - and make no mistake about it, neoliberalism has collapsed, even though it continues to dominate political culture because of undead inertia - I expect to see capitalist realism under increasing pressure. A thirty year old reality system has just collapsed, and we’re in a kind of reality interregnum. It took a few years after the 1929 crash for new political forces to emerge, and just because nothing much has happened yet doesn’t mean it won’t ever happen. The terrain is strewn of ideological rubble, and it’s there to be fought over.</i></p></p><p><a href="http://neojournalismo.tumblr.com/post/314470419" class="tumblr_link">01/03/10</a></p></li></ul></div></div> <div class="secondaryColumn"> <div id="sp_image-476215143" class="widgetContainer widget_sp_image"><img class="widget_sp_image-image" src="http://pblks.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/sp_image-476215143-1264027850.gif" alt="image widget" /></div><div id="sideblog--4" class="widgetContainer widget_sideblog"><h3 class="widgetTitle">cult. intel:</h3><ul><li><p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-2907" title="ladies" src="http://pblks.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/ladies-300x599.gif" alt="ladies" width="300" height="599" /></p> <p><a href="http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/03/scot-southern-lowlife.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Americansuburb+%28AMERICANSUBURBX%29&utm_content=Google+Reader" target="_blank"><strong>LOWLIFE</strong></a></p> - 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