AB

"The masses love to have a new cause to rise to. There’s a whole market out there for locos who have..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:14:15 -0400

“The masses love to have a new cause to rise to. There’s a whole market out there for locos who have enough money and are willing to cry on tv and radio and sing the national anthem off key while selling you their clothing brand and vacations where you can join them in learning about Americana History. There’s people telling you to call your congressman and Senators to demand answers on “Benghazigate” and for someone’s job to be lost over the IRS “scandal.” There are people who keep you on the hamster wheel of doom and gloom, sudden death and destruction, sucked to the constant streams of twitter feeds, twitchy, and Facebook posts of the “next shoe to drop,” or the next “big breaking scandal” that will reveal what a Cretan Obama is. You must admit it, all the while, you simply love it and gobble it down like it’s manna from heaven rather than raise an eyebrow as to why they would have you on the constant opiate of falsity. There’s a certain media personality who has close to One Billion hits a month. He supposedly “reports” the news headlines, but often times you’ll notice he also creates them. With that many readers/visitors to his site he’s often the one Breaking the News to the cable MSM news outlets. His site consists of RSS feeds from all major information ‘disseminators.’ He doesn’t simply tell you what’s going on, he’s also very capable of swaying public opinion. I don’t believe that he’s fueled by a desire to provide information for the masses for their benefit, but I would take a huge guess and submit that his motives are not altruistic but are part of the problem. And with 1 Billion hits a month why wouldn’t he prove to be working for the machine?”

- The Era of Manufactured Crises: Orwellian Nation State Politics and Media Controls are the Opiates of the Masses (via azspot)

Photo

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:28:43 -0400

contemporaryartdaily: Merlin Carpenter at dépendance

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:42:28 -0400

contemporaryartdaily:

Merlin Carpenter at dépendance

"We win when we engage those who disagree or are still working it through. Indeed, the only way to..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 15:56:15 -0400

“We win when we engage those who disagree or are still working it through. Indeed, the only way to win our freedom to marry is by exercising our freedom of speech, sharing our stories and the truth that does indeed set us free—and then translating that persuasion into legal and political change. There is no marriage without engagement, and gay people and the majority of non-gay people who, like Kinsley, support our freedom to marry need not be afraid of speech—the more the better.”

- Gay Marriage Hasn’t Won Yet by Evan Wolfson (via thenewrepublic)

museumuesum: Bas Jan Ader All my clothes, 1970 Gelatin silver...

Mon, 20 May 2013 15:09:37 -0400

museumuesum:

Bas Jan Ader

All my clothes, 1970

Gelatin silver print, 28 x 35.5 cm

‘All My Clothes’ recalls an affecting biographical moment: the frantic actions of the artist’s own mother when given 15 minutes to prepare for detainment by the German Army during WWII resulted in her flinging her clothes out of the windows.

showslow: Mark McEvoy, Five words

Sat, 18 May 2013 09:36:45 -0400

showslow:

Mark McEvoy, Five words

Archaeological News: Human ancestors had taste for meat, brains

Wed, 08 May 2013 12:05:23 -0400

Archaeological News: Human ancestors had taste for meat, brains :

archaeologicalnews:

Human ancestors living in East Africa 2 million years ago weren’t a steak-and-potatoes crowd. But they had a serious hankering for gazelle meat and antelope brains, fossils discovered in Kenya indicate.

Three sets of butchered animal bones unearthed at Kenya’s Kanjera South site provide the…

neuromorphogenesis: Age-defying: Master key of lifespan found...

Wed, 08 May 2013 11:18:59 -0400

neuromorphogenesis:

Age-defying: Master key of lifespan found in brain

The brain’s mechanism for controlling ageing has been discovered – and manipulated to shorten and extend the lives of mice. Drugs to slow ageing could follow

Tick tock, tick tock… A mechanism that controls ageing, counting down to inevitable death, has been identified in the hypothalamus – a part of the brain that controls most of the basic functions of life.

By manipulating this mechanism, researchers have both shortened and lengthened the lifespan of mice. The discovery reveals several new drug targets that, if not quite an elixir of youth, may at least delay the onset of age-related disease.

The hypothalamus is an almond-sized puppetmaster in the brain. “It has a global effect,” says Dongsheng Cai at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Sitting on top of the brain stem, it is the interface between the brain and the rest of the body, and is involved in, among other things, controlling our automatic response to the world around us, our hormone levels, sleep-wake cycles, immunity and reproduction.

While investigating ageing processes in the brain, Cai and his colleagues noticed that ageing mice produce increasing levels of nuclear factor kB (NF-kB)   – a protein complex that plays a major role in regulating immune responses. NF-kB is barely active in the hypothalamus of 3 to 4-month-old mice but becomes very active in old mice, aged 22 to 24 months.

To see whether it was possible to affect ageing by manipulating levels of this protein complex, Cai’s team tested three groups of middle-aged mice. One group was given gene therapy that inhibits NF-kB, the second had gene therapy to activate NF-kB, while the third was left to age naturally.

This last group lived, as expected, between 600 and 1000 days. Mice with activated NF-kB all died within 900 days, while the animals with NF-kB inhibition lived for up to 1100 days.

Crucially, the mice that lived the longest not only increased their lifespan but also remained mentally and physically fit for longer. Six months after receiving gene therapy, all the mice were given a series of tests involving cognitive and physical ability.

In all of the tests, the mice that subsequently lived the longest outperformed the controls, while the short-lived mice performed the worst.

Post-mortem examinations of muscle and bone in the longest-living rodents also showed that they had many chemical and physical qualities of younger mice.

Further investigation revealed that NF-kB reduces the level of a chemical produced by the hypothalamus called gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH)  – better known for its involvement in the regulation of puberty and fertility, and the production of eggs and sperm.

To see if they could control lifespan using this hormone, the team gave another group of mice  – 20 to 24 months old  – daily subcutaneous injections of GnRH for five to eight weeks. These mice lived longer too, by a length of time similar to that of mice with inhibited NF-kB.

GnRH injections also resulted in new neurons in the brain. What’s more, when injected directly into the hypothalamus, GnRH influenced other brain regions, reversing widespread age-related decline and further supporting the idea that the hypothalamus could be a master controller for many ageing processes.

GnRH injections even delayed ageing in the mice that had been given gene therapy to activate NF-kB and would otherwise have aged more quickly than usual. None of the mice in the study showed serious side effects.

So could regular doses of GnRH keep death at bay? Cai hopes to find out how different doses affect lifespan, but says the hormone is unlikely to prolong life indefinitely since GnRH is only one of many factors at play. “Ageing is the most complicated biological process,” he says.

“There are dozens of pathways that people will look at thanks to this work,” says Richard Miller at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Miller has previously demonstrated that an immunosuppressant drug called rapamycin can also extend life in mice (see “A guide to defying age”).

Since the hypothalamus  – and GnRH in particular  – regulate several major biological processes, it may be possible to influence ageing through related mechanisms, says Miller. He wants to look at possible dietary interventions, such as the indirect effect that spikes in glucose may have on the hypothalamus.

Stuart Maudsley at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, Maryland, agrees that the hypothalamus could be the route in for age-controlling drugs. “The body is all one big juicy system,” he says. The ideal drug would hit that system at its centre. “Activate that keystone and everything falls into place,” he says.

Though this is the first time that an explicit role has been found for GnRH in the ageing process, previous studies in humans have hinted at a link between longevity and fertility – in which the hormone is known to play a significant role.

As GnRH levels drop, so too does egg production and fertility. In a study presented this month at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America in New Orleans, Graziella Caselli at the University of Rome, Italy, and colleagues found that mothers in Sardinia who’d had their last child over the age of 45  – so were still fertile at a late age  – were significantly more likely to reach 100 than those who’d had their last child at a younger age. Since late fertility could be linked to higher levels of GnRH, Cai says those findings are a good match for his own. “There is likely to be some kind of biological correlation between ageing and reproduction,” he says.

“There are maybe 10 steps to controlling ageing,” says Miller. “We’ve taken the first two or three.” The first is simply accepting the idea that ageing can be slowed down, he says. “Many think it can’t. They are wrong.”

Maudsley reckons that we could see drugs that slow ageing in the next 20 years. Initially, though, research is likely to focus on delaying the onset of age-related diseases. “That could solve some real problems,” says Cai.

But since the hypothalamus has an effect on every cell in the body, Maudsley warns that interfering with it could lead to unwanted sequences of events. “You’re playing with fire,” he says.

Journal reference: Nature, 10.1038/nature12143

The Democracy Project: An Occupy Manifesto

Wed, 08 May 2013 10:32:51 -0400

The Democracy Project: An Occupy Manifesto:

Making this case, of course, means making the case against the system of “democracy” that OWS was protesting. Graeber does this by placing what he calls “mafia capitalism” in the context of centuries of history. Like he did in Debt, Graeber jumps through history to identify the way certain features of American life—like, say, the student loan industry—are really just modern incarnations of historical systems of servitude. Sometimes he moves through history with haphazard restlessness—and he seems at times too dismissive of economic arguments—but he’s always enlightening and clever, and often slyly funny. By the end, even a reader less inclined to embrace his style of anarchism will have a new view of the historical role OWS plays.

cavetocanvas: Diane Arbus, Child with Toy Hand Grenade, 1962

Wed, 08 May 2013 09:46:35 -0400

cavetocanvas:

Diane Arbus, Child with Toy Hand Grenade, 1962

shortformblog: Matt Groening’s mom recently passed, though she...

Tue, 07 May 2013 18:14:11 -0400

shortformblog:

Matt Groening’s mom recently passed, though she fortunately lived a full life. But check out the obit. Any names you recognize here? Hint: Marge is short for Margaret. (ht @pourmecoffee)

Photo

Tue, 07 May 2013 17:28:38 -0400

YES.

Tue, 07 May 2013 16:42:17 -0400

YES.

speakingparts: “Italy epitomizes the social contradictions of...

Tue, 07 May 2013 15:56:02 -0400

speakingparts:

“Italy epitomizes the social contradictions of the whole world, and tries, in a manner we are familiar with, to amalgamate in a single country the repressive Holy Alliance of class power, bureaucratic-totalitarian and bourgeois, which already functions openly across the face of the earth in an economic and police State solidarity; although, of course, not without some discussion and settling accounts in the Italian manner. As the most advanced country at the moment in its slide toward a proletarian revolution, Italy is also the most modern sort of laboratory for international counter-revolution. Other governments coming out of the old bourgeois democracy, “pre-spectacular” in nature, look on with admiration at the Italian government for the impassiveness which it can maintain at the tumultuous center of its degradation, and for the calm dignity with which it sits in the mud. It is a lesson which they will have to appy in their own countries for a long time.”

Guy Debord, from the 4th Italian edition of La Société du spectacle

*****

«L’Italia riassume le contraddizioni sociali del mondo intero, e tenta, nel modo che si sa, di amalgamare in un solo Paese la Santa Alleanza repressiva del potere di classe borghese e burocratico-totalitario»

Stills: Il divo, 2008, Paolo Sorrentino

hyperallergic: A WWD photo of the replica of the toilets at...

Tue, 07 May 2013 15:09:39 -0400

hyperallergic:

A WWD photo of the replica of the toilets at CBGB for the Metropolitan Museum’s Punk exhibition.

Hmmm … something doesn’t seem right. Wasn’t there more graffiti and broken (or missing) toilet seats half the time?

A hidden world, growing beyond control

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:23:20 -0400

A hidden world, growing beyond control :

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive …

Download free fucking books!

Tue, 07 May 2013 13:37:19 -0400

Download free fucking books!:

pinkphilosopher:

thegoddamazon:

A fuckload of classic literature:

1984 by George Orwell

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Aesop’s Fables by Aesop

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll

Andersen’s Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne

Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Dubliners by James Joyce

Emma by Jane Austen

Erewhon by Samuel Butler

For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Grimms Fairy Tales by the brothers Grimm

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard by Joseph Conrad

Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen

Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

Swanns Way by Marcel Proust

Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Great Gatsby

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Iliad by Homer

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

The Odyssey by Homer

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Tales of Mother Goose by Charles Perrault

The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Duma

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Ulysses by James Joyce

Utopia by Sir Thomas More

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Within A Budding Grove by Marcel Proust

Women In Love by D. H. Lawrence

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Click on the motherfucking Hypelinks bitches.

Here! Have a fuckload of modern literature, too!

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

A Study In Scarlet - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith

An Abundance of Katherines - John Green

Artemis Fowl - Eoin Colfer

Bossypants - Tina Fey

Breakfast At Tiffany’s - Truman Capote

Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger

Charlie And The Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

City of Bones - Cassandra Clare

Clockwork Angel - Cassandra Clare

Damned - Chuck Palahniuk

Darkly Dreaming Dexter - Jeff Lindsay

Dead Until Dark - Charlaine Harris

Ender’s Game - Orson Scott Card

Everything Is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk

Go The Fuck To Sleep - Adam Mansbach

I Am America (And So Can You!) - Stephen Colbert

I Am Number Four - Pittacus Lore

Inkheart - Cornelia Funke

It - Stephen King

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

Lolita - Vladmir Nabokov

Marked - Kristin Cast

Memoirs Of A Geisha - Arthur Golden

My Sister’s Keeper - Jodi Picoult

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

One Day - David Nicholls

Paper Towns - John Green

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightening Thief - Rick Riordan

Pretty Little Liars - Sara Shepard

Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Snow White And The Huntsman - Lily Blake

The Book Thief - Markus Zusak

The Bourne Identity - Robert Ludlum

The Giver - Lois Lowry

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

The Notebook - Nicholas Sparks

The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton

The Perks of Being A Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky

The Princess Diaries - Meg Cabot

The Things They Carried - Tim O’Brien

The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams

Tuesdays With Morrie - Mitch Albom

Uglies - Scott Westerfeld

Vampire Diaries: The Awakening - L.J. Smith

Water For Elephants - Sara Gruen

Wicked - Gregory Maguire

Saving for later use.

This is a great usage of my time!

fromagecottage: trainer-vortex: ＴＲＥＥＳＴＡＲＳ T̷̨̨́̋͒́̽ͩ͒̈́ͣ̾̒ͪ...

Tue, 07 May 2013 12:51:18 -0400

fromagecottage:

trainer-vortex:

ＴＲＥＥＳＴＡＲＳ

T̷̨̨́̋͒́̽ͩ͒̈́ͣ̾̒ͪ͞҉̙̻̰̖̞̖̝̟̝̱͚̳̙͍͈̥̟̜ͅR͓̺͚͔̱͕͚͔̟̥̥̗̹̲̖͉͖̈ͤͣ̃̈́͠E̸̛ͫͦͧ̒ͫͯͧ̂̐̎ͬ̒͌̄̉̋̊̀҉͈̤̩̦͓̠̳̠͚͎͎̮̜̠̥̺͚Ȩ̴͂ͯ̊̔ͧ͒̈̔ͫ͆ͨ҉̡̻̣̹͇̺̮̼͇͈͜S̡͓̦̼̻̟̖̽͐̑ͤ̈́̅͗ͥͭ͋̊͟͡ͅT̸̶͎͇̜̜̱̯̜̮͇̗̟͈͇̓ͬͩͩͦ͐̋̿̉ͧͩ̎ͧͫ͛ͦ̀̚̕͜A̵̛̤̪̮͍̠ͯ̐̃͛̈̂̍̿̌ͦ̊̋ͨ̓̅͟͜͡R̴̨̡̧͇̝̣̱̳̰͈̯͕̫̻̫̱͓̩̪̖̆͒ͪ̓͟ͅͅS̒ͮ́ͫ̅̉̽̋̃̇̂̏ͥ̋ͫͨ͠͏͙͓̺͇̬͓̞̘̲̹͎͍̤̫̟̩́͢ͅͅ

I was not ready for that

iamasoulofmischief: buzzfeed: Mama June had the wedding of the...

Tue, 07 May 2013 12:05:32 -0400

iamasoulofmischief:

buzzfeed:

Mama June had the wedding of the century.

yeah, bubby! this is how my second wedding it going down. instead of exchanging rings, we’re firing shots of into the air. any takers?

"Wearing a hijab isn’t inherently liberating – but neither is baring one’s breasts. What is..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 11:18:59 -0400

“Wearing a hijab isn’t inherently liberating – but neither is baring one’s breasts. What is liberating is being able to choose either of these things. It’s pretty ludicrous to think that oppression is somehow proportional to how covered or uncovered someone’s body is. Both sides of this argument present a shallow understanding of women’s empowerment, which only drowns out the substantive challenges facing all women – issues that cannot be encapsulated in a debate about a piece of fabric.”

- Sara Yasin, Is the Hijab Worth Fighting Over?

(via rcabbasi)