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please don’t touch anything...
homines enim et vindicaverunt vindicta contra naturam
Gusius Leoniskus
"and humans decided to take revenge on nature…"
---------------
As a fairly wonky species, with dodgy genes and lacking most natural survival skills and protections, the human species has taken revenge on nature for this. We have become “homo numulariorum”, the modifiers. The modifiers of nature. Nature was laughing at us. We did not like it. Who's laughing now?
But in general the depth of our understanding of what we’re doing is somewhat very limited — and in one word: our understanding is shit. Our threat until now was not terminally dangerous to nature. Until humans bred beyond a critical number. Have we? Have not?
————————
The surreal scene, worthy of Doctor Why, is that of an underground dance hall where the trodden, the forgotten, the old and the not-so-good-looking — those ordinary un-heroes who would never make the gossip magazines not even as freaks — these magazines designed to let them know about the “beautiful people” on the surface — dance to amuse themselves, as their little life is about to end or not, at the mercy of a tax decree, an enemy bomb or a war tweet.
The scene is definitively surreal, full of cigarette smoke, yet, real without worries, as amusement is the only remaining key to pay no notice to the morons, the thieves and the fascists who run the roost. As the music of George Formby's orchestra gets louder and louder, more distractions are on offer. About twelve silent giant TV screens give the Keno running time before you can win a few million dollars, until the not-won prize goes back into the jack-potting kitty minus the 10 per cent taken by the banks. A couple of other screens are hooked up directly to the headquarters of Big Brother with a set of cameras looking at you. Other screens are dedicated to soccer (running score 2-nil), rugby league and basketball shown simultaneously, interspace with frothy advertisement about ways to get further into debt by buying the latest useless hair-removal machines or the latest bakélite radio… or why you need a war.
The lack of fur is one of nature’s failings for the human species. And yet we work hard at removing any trace of follicles. We shave. Meanwhile, dear nature, we had to kill other species to steal their fur, don't you ever forget it! Then we improved the nature of clothing by growing crops, as killing bears and mammoths was dangerous at first, and second, we ran out of beasts to kill.
Same with forests, we cut trees to burn for warmth (since we are naked apes) and make shelters. Then we ran out of trees, so we made bricks and we dug holes to get coal and invented big pumps or drilling machines to get oil. And now we have a glut of plastic that we cannot burn because this would toxify the air we breathe and we have run out of holes and oceans to bury the stuff. So the plastic floats like a huge island the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific, killing the wildlife.
Our burning of coal and of oil has changed the gaseous composition of the air we breathe. It still is breathable but it’s warming up due to weird laws of physics and we have little clue about what’s coming next, despite our superb technologies designed to find by how much exactly we can precisely muck up the system a bit more…
Already we are cataloguing the debris. Many species have become extinct and many more are on the way. And we still destroy the "Orange men"’s forests in Borneo for palm oil. We invent redemptory concepts such as “sustainable” when we know that, in the end, we’re destroying the planet with our needs. We’re stuffed, but we can still fight between ourselves and destroy some extra something, but...
We are not really destroying the planet, we are modifying it. We are the modifiers with little understanding that there are specific limits to our ventures. Not all of us are equally limited though. Some of us, especially us with a big bank account, will survive the successive traumas we’re inflicting with the “modifications” while others, mostly poor, won’t. This, when averaged, gives us more leeway to push the envelop, yet the rich need the poor… And by and large, apart from a small minority of concerned people, we don’t care, as we follow the lead of the most moronic and dangerously powerful country on the planet.
Sometimes, we try to solve some of the troubles we create but it’s an unfair race as we invent more ways to destroy than to protect our space. We’re in a race against ourselves, running backwards, carrying the flame of hope that our glorious technological farts are trying to extinguish.
The “Nuit de Bakélite" is a perfume for men and women, that was created by an Australian, Naomi Goodsir, living in France and got a gong at a perfume contest. The name is weird, yet it has been decreed as a good perfume. Perfume was used a lot in centuries past because most people could not clean their clothes (nor themselves, unless one was king with a bathroom decorated with the Mona Lisa) to the degree we do. A king's jacket would have been smelly and heavy with gnats and flees, should people not use things like camphor and aromatic plants to “refresh” them…
Bakélite is the precursor of this curse we call plastics but one can understand that the name means the "night of polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride” — an early plastic. funny.
The name Bakélite is dear to European people, who became fond of the stuff. Advertising made them even fonder of such novelties. The wheels of consumerism had been set in motion. Selling novelties was the new way to make money. Hard yakka on the land became a notion from the past, now a chore for machines and farmers, in debt up to their eyeballs, praying for rain — a rain that has become more erratic as we burt more and more coal and oil.
And the music goes on, species disappear and we, the “useless" people, carry on dancing.
Please good people, carry on dancing dancing dancing… Please don’t touch anything. Get dizzy from the tunes, get mad with happiness and fall asleep.
Gusius Leoniskus...
- By Gus Leonisky at 20 Apr 2018 - 3:32pm
- Gus Leonisky's blog
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gone fishing with daddy in new orleans...
Barbara Bush is fondly remembered... OF COURSE THE PICTURE IS FAKE! GEEZ!...
with an oversized red flower in her hair...
Randa Jarrar, a tenured professor who is on leave this semester, wrote that she would never be fired because she has tenure and free-speech rights. She encouraged anyone who objected to contact the university’s president. They did, in droves.
The president, Joseph I. Castro, issued a statement offering condolences to the Bush family on the former first lady’s death and saying Jarrar was commenting as a private citizen, not as a representative of Fresno State.
“Professor Jarrar’s expressed personal views and commentary are obviously contrary to the core values of our university, which include respect and empathy for individuals with divergent points of view, and a sincere commitment to mutual understanding and progress,” Castro wrote.
His statement drew an angry backlash from some people who questioned why he didn’t condemn Jarrar’s remarks more forcefully.
The president later told The Fresno Bee that the university was investigating the matter and that he considered Jarrar’s statements disrespectful.
“A professor with tenure does not have blanket protection to say and do what they wish,” Castro said. “We are all held accountable for our actions.”
Screen shots of Jarrar’s comments were captured and shared on Twitter before she made her account private, with a note that she is on leave from Fresno State and the opinions are her own. In one, she wrote, “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal.”
Read more:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Professor-s-Tweet-That/243158?cid=tren...
See picture above and read from top...
the humanities professor who thinks he goofed...
Can the average humanities professor be blamed if she [why blame women] rises in the morning, checks the headlines, shivers, looks in the mirror, and beholds a countenance of righteous and powerless innocence? Whatever has happened politically to the United States, it’s happened in stark opposition to the values so many philosophers and English professors, historians and art historians, creative writers and interdisciplinary scholars of race, class, and gender hold dear.
We [humanities professors] are, after all, the ones to include diverse voices on the syllabus, use inclusive language in the classroom, teach stories of minority triumph, and, in our conference papers, articles, and monographs, lay bare the ideological mechanisms that move the cranks and offices of a neoliberal economy. Since the Reagan era our classrooms have mustered their might against thoughtless bigotry, taught critical thinking, framed the plight and extolled the humanity of the disadvantaged, and denounced all patriotism that curdles into chauvinism.
We’ve published books like Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity — treatises that marshal humane nuance against prejudice, essentialism, propaganda, and demagogic charisma.
We’ve cast out Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Steve Bannon, but also Allan Bloom, Jordan Peterson, Richard J. Herrnstein, and Charles Murray. Our manner has been academic, but our matter has been political, and we have fought hard. So how have we ended up in these ominous political straits?
The easy answer is frightening enough: We [humanities professors] don’t really matter. The hard one chills the blood: We [humanities professors] are, in fact, part of the problem.
Read more of this [possibly catholic] professor at:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Dear-Humanities-Profs-We-Are/243100?ci...
And of course. But as one critic, called "academic ranter" sprouts:
This is just silly. How can the author not know that we do not have a functioning court system -- 94% of cases are plead out under prosecutors' threats of throwing maximum sentences at people too poor to pay for a lawyer and thus too poor to risk being tried by a jury -- that the FBI has never been part of a democratically oriented state; that the CBO and GAO are ignored? More importantly, what we do not have is a functioning Left to scare the bejeezus out of the lords of capital. The so-called Left of today, with a few noble exceptions -- the longshoremen, the Immokalee Workers, the Water Protectors, the nurses, maybe the teachers now -- is content to mount bagatelles on the Mall and farcically call them radical, rather than throwing bodies on the wheels of commerce.
The vaunted professors of yesteryear sat by while the Right, financed by elites, destroyed the Left with impunity. The US has always been a vicious slaveocracy, but in the 1970s the greedy elites took the gloves off. Everything was fine with them as long as the lit profs were the high priests of the elite, spewing nonsense about noblesse oblige and teaching vile works of empire like the Iliad and Aeneid. The radicals of the '60s withdrew elites' sympathy from the universities. Hannity and O'Reilly weren't kicked out of the academy, they are creatures of elite propaganda mills like Fox News. The normal functioning of capital to create great inequalities of power produced them. You will now find the academy's high priests of the elite in the schools of economics, where mathematical propaganda masquerades as science.
Another critic (called jaled Red) of this long and self-mauling essay says:
Oh dear gods. Another exercise in academic narcissism.
"For the republic to survive, higher education must emphasize similarity as well as difference, continuity as well as rupture, collective sustenance as well as individualistic emancipation, you as well as me. "
Sweetheart, no republic -- imaginary or real -- ever depended on what we do. The disciplinary, epistemological and existential crises you outline are only the skin-deep quandaries of theory are as decades-long ingrown as our own rancid humanities toe-nails. Not exactly avant guard. No. Rather, ugly, pedestrian, boring.
The humanities cannot defend ourselves, b/c we cannot articulate ourselves to either skeptical students or the venal politicians who destroy our colleges. That's on us.
We exploit TA's and adjuncts to do our sh--work. We, the TT, virtue-signal and display, do call-out culture about authors long dead. Did they not "check their privilege?" Did they not act as anti-racist allies, and stuff, in 1822? Never mind that we ourselves would never have acted so.
Our most passionate papers and conferences debates can not in fact act as proxy for the political hard lines we might have taken, and sacrificed for.
Humanities academics are hypocrites, sell-outs and cowards. Face it, move forward. or don't.
WHATEVER.
Either way, the world moves on. It does not care about your brilliant analyses of authors' texts long dead.
Stretch or drown, evolve or die. Contribute, do, act, or die out. Your choice.
Gus: the acrid stench of religion is still hanging in the air after the humanities bomb shelter has been destroyed. Read from top.
STEM improvements...
Dr Finkel backed a "phased in" reintroduction of mathematics prerequisites for relevant courses on the basis that "mathematics is the language of science, and that mathematics skills need constant development and cannot be acquired effectively in a short bridging course".
The chief scientist also recommended introducing a national "unique student identifier" to track student outcomes in tests such as NAPLAN from birth to death. A similar tool is already used in schools in Victoria, the ACT and Western Australia.
The data would be de-identified for aggregation and analysis at a national level, but could also be used by students at an individual level. "Strict access and privacy controls" would need to be built in to the scheme, the report acknowledges, much like eHealth records.
Last month, NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes sparked fresh debate over STEM when he called it a "buzzword" and a fad driven by "intellectual snobbery". He accused politicians, journalists and business leaders of "piling in" to denounce the value of humanities, the arts and philosophy.
Dr Finkel's report repudiates that view without addressing those comments specifically. It says industry is concerned about graduates' capabilities in the areas of science and maths, and urges: "Student attitudes to STEM are established in primary school and this is when the work on engagement and excitement needs to begin."
The report did not recommend making mathematics or science compulsory all the way through to year 12, which Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has previously supported. Shortly before the last election he said it was a "big priority" that "maths or science should be a prerequisite school subject to have completed to go onto university".
Among the other recommendations of Dr Finkel's review are:
The STEM Partnerships Forum, headed by Dr Finkel, was briefed with improving school-industry partnerships and conceded it took "a broad view of our mandate". Federal and state education ministers are expected to respond to the recommendations shortly.
Read more:
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/stem-review-schools-
Read comment above and from top.
yes jonathan, ask yourself about the real shit...
Donald Trump did not attend Saturday’s funeral of Barbara Bush in Houston, Texas. Reporters were told that was because Trump generously wanted to spare the mourning Bush family the “disruptions due to added security” that would have come with his presidential presence. But that same White House statement may well have given the game away when it added that Trump did not attend “out of respect for the Bush family and friends attending the service”. Normally, the way you pay your respects to a grieving family is to show up, not stay away. Unless, of course, you know that the bereaved family in question hates your guts – in which case the greatest courtesy you can pay them in their hour of distress is to leave them alone.
Which might explain the unstated emotion that seems to join everyone in this picture. It’s an unusual group photo: they’re not family, they’re not friends, and they’re not a team. Rather, the official connection between them is that they have all lived in the country’s most important residence, whether as president or first lady – or in Hillary Clinton’s case, having attempted the double. They are there to honour the missing member of this exclusive club, the woman whose death has brought them to this moment.
Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/shortcuts/2018/apr/23/why-are-the-bu...
----------------
In this very chummy clumsy report in which Melania got the most gossip for being alone with this exclusive club, Jonathan Freedland does not mention the obvious. In the picture there are FIVE WAR CRIMINALS — Americans who should have been in front of war tribunals a long time ago, but have been feted like Hitler was at a Nuremberg Rally for bombing something while mentioning "freedom" for the motherland.
I name:
Barak Obama
Hillary Clinton
Bush Junior (G W)
Bill (William) Clinton
Bush Senior (G H W)
The appendages such as Michelle Obama, Laura Bush and Melania Trump only makes this photograph an insult to the decency of being human. Melania can smile though. She has not killed anyone yet, nor supported a killer president from what I know, though her husband, busy with problems around him like flies around a turd, is trying his best. And I forgot: god bless Yamerika... a vengeful god being the fluky centre-piece of their common happiness.
Read from top.
the club of US war criminals...
Some elegant rubbish coming to you via some online US woman passing as a journalist or a professor of something. Micheline Maynard is an American journalist, broadcaster, author, public speaker, and professor, a contributing writer for Medium on women's issues who also writes The Check blog at Forbes.com. She is the editor and founder of Curbing Cars, a crowdfunded journalism project that looks at the future of transportation. She previously worked as a reporter at The New York Times, made regular appearances on PBS NewsHour, and has written several books, including The End of Detroit, How The Big Three Lost Their Grip On The American Car Market. She lectures at the University of Michigan, and taught at the university's Ross School of Business.
Fuck! This is the CV of a saint! Hell, but does not she write some RUBBISH!
Here it is:
I hadn't noticed this until a friend pointed it out, but look at the four people on the left hand side of the photo, the Bushes and the Clintons. George W. Bush has his arms around two people, while Bill Clinton is standing very close to that group, signalling that he is part of it.
To be sure, the Bushes and Clintons have become friendly since the Bushes succeeded the Clintons in the White House. But, they're also four people who lived in hospitable places, Texas and Arkansas.
It's kind of a contrast to the Obamas and Mrs Trump, although there's nothing in their bearing to show any kind of hostility, far from it. All three are smiling, as if the photographer interrupted a conversation to have them pose.
Likewise, President Bush Sr looks perfectly pleased to be there, although it is a very sad day for the family. He's pulling it together, as my late mother used to say when it was time to go out and give a speech or meet a crowd.
...
This world — the world I grew up in — still exists, and this photo proves it. Someday, I hope this photo will no longer seem like a rarity, but the way we've become, again.
read more:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-23/barbara-bush-funeral-obamas-clinto...
This is utter crap. And our ABC promotes this shit! Most of the people in the photograph are psychopaths, murderers and war criminals... Yes, they are chummy because they all BELONG TO THE SAME FUCK-THE-WORLD CLUB!
Read from top. Angry? Me? Sure.
a dishonest mistake...
A photo of four past presidents and three first ladies at former First Lady Barbara Bush's funeral on April 21, 2018 went viral. The image quickly went viral -- a symbol of the strength and continuity of American democracy said a reporter for CNN Chris Cillizza.
The man who took the original photo, Paul Morse is a New Orleans-based photographer.
According to CNN, the photo was organized at the reception prior to the funeral service. It was taken before they walked into the service.
Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack and Michelle Obama and Melania Trump joined George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Laura Bush in the photo.
The day after the photo went viral, the Lubbock County Democratic Party Headquarters posted the photo without a caption - however, it was missing one person. The photo had been cropped to show everyone except Melania Trump.
When KCBD reached out to the Lubbock County Democratic Party Headquarters to learn why the photo was cropped, Leo Flores, the Vice Chair said, "It was an honest mistake."
Read more:
http://www.kxxv.com/story/38043229/melania-trump-cropped-out-of-viral-ph...
who do these Democrat morons take us for?... read from top.
confident of a place in heaven...
Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, revealed that his mother, former first lady Barbara Bush, talked to him about Jesus Christ in their last meeting before she died last week.
Speaking before close to 1,500 attendees at his mother's funeral at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston on Saturday, Bush said that in their last visit together, they talked about their Christian faith.
"Jeb, I believe in Jesus and he is my savior," she told him when he asked her about her feelings on death, according to CNN.
"I don't want to leave your dad but I know I'll be in a beautiful place."
The Saturday service included high-profile former political figures, including first lady Melania Trump, Barbara Bush's husband and son (former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush), along with other past presidents and first ladies, namely Barack and Michelle Obama, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Read more:
https://www.christianpost.com/news/jeb-barbara-bush-last-words-jesus-chr...
I did not know that Melania Trump was a high-profile former political figure, but this could be a question of punctuation and the wrong order of appearance... She's looking good though. the others, the Clintons, Bush senior and Bush minor, and Obama, are mostly a bunch of war criminals...
Read from top.
no hell on earth for professor...
A California State University, Fresno, professor will not be punished for calling Barbara Bush "an amazing racist" and cheering her death.
The university's president condemned Randa Jarrar's statements as "insensitive, inappropriate and an embarrassment to the university." However, he stated that she was acting as a private citizen using her personal Twitter account, so her statements didn't violate school policies.
In other California news, a former police officer has been identified as the so-called "Golden State Killer." He is believed to have committed twelve killings and at least fifty rapes across California from 1976 to 1986.
Read more:
https://www.christianpost.com/voice/professor-who-called-barbara-bush-am...
Read from top...