Search Results for: let the games begin

Samaranch & pals... --------------------------------------------------- A few disparate thoughts as the Olympics descend on us. The games of Dow Chemical, McDonalds, and British Petroleum. The games of UK swat teams on neighborhood roofs. The games of forced evictions. But anyway.... The "father" of the modern Olympics is Pierre deCourbetin. Born to parents Baron Charles Louis Frédy, Baron de Coubertin and Marie–Marcelle Gigault de Crisenoy, in 1863. Pierre's father was a royalist and dilettante painter; who's themes ran to the Roman Catholic Church and the royal family. Pierre developed an interest in education, fueled by a visit to England where he met Thomas … [Read more...]

"The hunter could have been the first 'to tell a story' because only hunters knew how to read a coherent sequence of events from the silent (though not imperceptible) signs left by their prey." Carlo Ginzburg "It is now necessary to ask ourselves a question: Why, in order to define the Nazi régime, should the argument regarding the one-party dictatorship be more valid than that of racial and eugenic ideology and practice? It is precisely from this sphere that the central categories and key terminology of the Nazi discourse derived. This is the case with Rassenhygiene, which is essentially the German translation of eugenics, the new science invented in England and successfully … [Read more...]

"In 1985, Postman, a friend and disciple of McLuhan’s, published Amusing Ourselves to Death. He argued that television had hijacked Americans’ attention and turned politics into cheap entertainment. “The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining,” Postman wrote. “Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself.” At the time, the average American household watched more than seven hours of television every day, a number that would rise to nearly nine hours by 2010." Rose Horowitch (The End of Reading is Here, The Atlantic 2026) "Evil denies the reality of death and all human … [Read more...]

"Well, the news of the saucer been a-flyin' around I'm the only one that seen it on the ground First thing I seen when I saw it land Cats jumped out and they formed a band [Chorus] Flyin' saucer rock and roll, flyin' saucer rock and roll I couldn't understand the things they said But that crazy beat just a stopped me dead." Billy Lee Riley (Flying Saucer Rock n Roll, 1957 SUN records) "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." Peter Thiel (Cato Unbound) “Dollars and cents? I don’t know. I want to do this job because I don’t know. It’s research. It’s pioneering. What’s the moon? Another North Pole, another South Pole. Why go there? We’ll let you know when … [Read more...]

"Science, generally speaking, costs the capitalist nothing, a fact that by no means hinders him from exploiting it." Karl Marx (Capital, Vol 1) "Language was dis-covered as its metaphysical cover was dissolved. Marx begins by noting that metaphysics is language concealed: ‘The philosophers would only have to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, to recognise it as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realise that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life.’" Harry Redner (The Ends of Philosophy) "What another person is thinking, believing or feeling is … [Read more...]

“How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?” was the question Wilhelm Reich famously asked in the wake of the Reichstagsbrandverordnung (Reichstag Fire Decree, February 28, 1933), which suspended the civil rights protections afforded by the Weimar Republic’s democratic constitution. " Ana Teixeira Pinto (E Flux, Male Fantasies: The Sequel) "The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the … [Read more...]

"Freedom … ? The land of the free! This the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that’s my freedom. Free? Why, I have never been in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as I say, they are free to lynch him the moment he shows he is not one of them." D.H. Lawrence (Studies in Classic American Literature) "As the descendants of the Puritans and other godly Protestants, they will submit to religious teaching, but as Republicans they will have no priestcraft. … They say their prayers, and then seem to apologize for doing so, as though it were hardly the act of a free and … [Read more...]

"For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in his presence." 1 Corinthians 26;29 "Although the power of making visible the forms of the dead has been claimed for one sort of incense only, the burning of any kind of incense is supposed to summon viewless spirits in … [Read more...]