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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

24 May - The Forgettery

 Do you Pinterest ?

The Internet Is Forgetting

How amnesia is built into the network.

http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/blackspot-blog/internet-forgetting.html

 Bush is confident that the Memex will be a permanent memory-index and that all information added to the Memex will last forever. He is careful to play up this feature because he believes that the permanence of its memory will finally allow humans to "free their brains" from stupid thinking such as remembering facts or formulas. In fact, Bush ends the essay by making the ability to forget a central benefit of the Memex: "[Mankind] has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important." In other words, the machine remembers so that we may forget.

In Memex II, an unpublished follow-up essay Bush drafted in 1959, he revises the claim that the Memex will have a permanent memory. Like the editable record of human knowledge that he imagines, his own text is copied, chopped and seamlessly rewritten. Now, we learn that "the records in our [Memex] will be exact in detail, and will not fade, when properly protected, although they may be intentionally erased and alterations and substitutions made." (emphasis added) And in 1965, when Bush rewrote the Memex essay for a third time he was even more open about the possibility of permanently deleting memories that had been outsourced to the machine. He was not blind to the political, cultural and ethical consequences of this development. Instead he addressed these questions openly:

"For the purposes of Memex we need a readily alterable record, and we have it. But alteration of records has a sinister connotation. […] Advancing technology is making it easy to fool people. It would be well if technology also devoted itself to producing forms of records, photographic, printed, sound-recorded, which cannot be altered without detection, at least to the degree of a dollar bill. But it would be still more effective if the code of morals accepted generally rendered it a universally condemned sin to alter a record without notice that it is being done."

 

Wednesday, November 11, 2009


Cochabamba’s Poorest Neighborhoods Take on the Challenge of Water


http://www.democracyctr.org/blog/2009/11/cochabambas-poorest-neighborhoods-take.html

 

  • Tar Sands and Water: Fort MacKay and Fort Chipewyan

    Syndicated from Oil Sands Truth on Sat, 2011-06-25

    Interviews with residents of Fort MacKay and Fort Chip, regarding cultural and environmental situations for their communities, especially with respect to the water coming from tar sands operation areas that are allegedly responsible for statistically impossible rates of cancer.

Canada’s election--stupid is as stupid does

 By any rational standard, Stephen Harper and his minions should have been obliterated at the polls on May 2; instead, they will form a majority government based on 40% of the popular vote. Canada’s antiquated electoral system has produced many “minority majorities” and managed to survive, but never one so contemptuous of the law, Canadian institutions or Parliament itself. As I said last time, “until now no government had been so brazenly unethical and criminal that Parliament, itself, deemed it unfit to rule.”

 “The actual explanation for the Conservative majority is more sinister than mere feeblemindedness. Canadians, in droves, turned up their noses at democracy, choosing a party that has attacked it at every turn. These voters made their electoral decision with one hand holding their wallets and the other flailing around from their eyes to their ears, willfully shutting out the endless evidence that it is the people, and not just Parliament, that Harper holds in contempt.”

 May/June 2011: Precarious labour: a special issue
http://canadiandimension.com/magazine/issue/may-june-2011

 LIST OF U.S. GOVERNMENT ASSASSINATION PLOTS POST WWII
http://fma7.wordpress.com/2009/08/08/list-of-u-s-government-assassination-plots-post-wwii


Susan Richardson on Reclaiming Futures and What's Next
by BENJAMIN CHAMBERS

Background: On May 18 and 19, 2011, Reclaiming Futures hosted its biannual Leadership Institute for its participating sites. Held in Miami, the Institute featured presentations from leaders in the fields of youth work and juvenile justice.

 Why Contrails Are Not Chemtrails

( Speaking to the question not asked )

 

China gives Pakistan 50 Fighter Jets

The End of the “Blog from Bolivia”
http://democracyctr.org/blog/archives/1620#comments

15 incredible sites to visit for design inspiration

 

Killer Fashion: An Industry in Denial

Eating disorders are rampant, and models are dying.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/7072/killer_fashion

Resistance Is Fatal
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/7308/resistance_is_fatal
A deadly supergene, New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase-1 (NDM-1), has emerged. It produces an enzyme that helps bacteria withstand even the most powerful of antibiotics. The World Health Organization (WHO) is warning of “a doomsday scenario of a world without antibiotics,”

 
Aerial view of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, Canada.Image via Wikipedia

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