How to Turn on Subtitles in YouTube Videos

Via the New Nationalism.

Word for the Day

Per Wikipedia:

Fnord is the typographic representation of disinformation or irrelevant information intending to misdirect, with the implication of a worldwide conspiracy. The word was coined as a nonsensical term with religious undertones in the Discordian religious text Principia Discordia (1965) by Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill, but was popularized by The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) of satirical conspiracy fiction novels by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.^[1]

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In these novels, the interjection "fnord" is given hypnotic power over the unenlightened. Under the Illuminati program, children in grade school are taught to be unable to consciously see the word "fnord". For the rest of their lives, every appearance of the word subconsciously generates a feeling of uneasiness and confusion, and prevents rational consideration of the subject. This results in a perpetual low-grade state of fear in the populace. The government acts on the premise that a fearful populace keeps them in power.

In the Shea/Wilson construct, fnords are scattered liberally in the text of newspapers and magazines, causing fear and anxiety in those following current events. However, there are no fnords in the advertisements, encouraging a consumerist society. It is implied in the books that fnord is not the actual word used for this task, but merely a substitute, since most readers would be unable to see the actual word.

To see the fnords means to be unaffected by the supposed hypnotic power of the word or, more loosely, of other fighting words. A more common expression of the concept would be "to read between the lines." The term may also be used to refer to the experience of becoming aware of a phenomenon's ubiquity after first observing it. The phrase "I have seen the fnords" was famously graffitied on a railway bridge (known locally as Anarchy Bridge) between Earlsdon and Coventry (U.K.) city centre throughout the 1980s and 1990s, until the bridge was upgraded. The bridge and the phrase were mentioned in the novel A Touch of Love by Jonathan Coe.

(Some links removed.)

A Few Recent Headlines

Been out of town; so, in cased you missed these (more re- each item at the headline link) . . .

1. Don't Forget to Sign Up for the "Do Not Kill" List

A number of sources (including the Wall Street Journal) report that someone has used the White House's "We the People" website to start a petition asking it to create a "Do Not Kill" list similar to the "Do Not Call" list that has been reasonably successful against telemarketers. This follows the New York Times report that every week or so, a bunch of National Security People get together to flip through some PowerPoint slides and "recommend to the President who should be the next to die." The President, who you may recall won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, then personally approves names on the "kill list" for execution targeted killing by drone.

Sign the "Do Not Kill" Petition here. (For more on the "Kill List," see here and links therein.)

2. Occupy Buffalo Helps Convince City to Divest from JPMorgan Chase

City Comptroller Mark J.F. Schroeder has agreed to transfer $45 million . . . from a JPMorgan Chase account to local bank First Niagara Financial Group after Occupy Buffalo raised concerns about leaving the money at JPMorgan, the Buffalo News reports. The move comes with a number of benefits, including a higher interest rate and more local branches that make it easier for employees to cash paychecks . . . .

“It also sends a crystal-clear message to JPMorgan Chase that the City of Buffalo is not happy with their business practices," Schroeder told Buffalo News.

3. Collateral Damage in the War on Protesters: Neighbors of the NATO3 Cuffed, Held at Gunpoint

The . . . officer came up to me and told me he had a hard time believing I wasn’t associated with the people downstairs. His quote exactly was that I had ‘hateful revolutionary things’ in my house. He asked me why I had so many red-colored things (Olli got similar accusations because he was wearing his red work uniform). They were commenting about the red color – I have red curtains and my brother’s an artist, so all his paintings are hanging up, and they found that very suspicious and were trying to say it was part of some kind of conspiracy.

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“They acted like asking for a warrant and a lawyer was unreasonable . . . ” Ben said, “but they didn’t seem to realize that they had kidnapped us in our own home. We were handcuffed on the ground in our own living room."

4. The US Government Is Running a Massive Spy Campaign on Occupy Wall Street

The US Dept. of Homeland Security finally released some docs in response to repeated Freedom of Information Act requests by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. Although the docs are partially blacked out,

[Per the PCJF's Director, "t]hese documents show not only intense government monitoring and coordination in response to the Occupy Movement, but reveal a glimpse into the interior of a vast, tentacled, national intelligence and domestic spying network that the U.S. government operates against its own people."

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In particular, the role of the “Fusion Centers,” a series of 72 federally-funded information hubs run by the NOC, raises questions about the government’s expansive definition of “Homeland Security.”

Created in the wake of 9/11, the Fusion Centers were founded to expedite the sharing of information among state and local law enforcement and the federal government, to monitor localized terrorist threats, and to sidestep the regulations and legislation preventing the CIA and the military from carrying out domestic surveillance (namely, the CIA ban on domestic spying and the Posse Comitatus Act).

5. Speaking of JPMorgan Chase . . . the bank's risk committee lacks any members who've actually worked at a bank or as risk managers; one of them was on AIG’s governance committee in 2008.

6. Congressmen Seek to Lift Propaganda Ban

An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.

The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the independent Broadcasting Board of Governors . . . . The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.

The bi-partisan amendment is sponsored by Rep. Mac Thornberry from Texas and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington State.

7. US E-Voting System Cracked in Less than 48 Hours

Researchers at the University of Michigan have reported that . . . . "Within 48 hours of the system going live, we had gained near complete control of the election server", the researchers wrote in a paper that has now been released. "We successfully changed every vote and revealed almost every secret ballot." The hack was only discovered after about two business days – and most likely only because the intruders left a visible trail on purpose.

(Yes, electronic voting and/or tabulation is still a very, very bad idea.)

Sources on Occupy, Assange

F.w.i.w., based on admittedly hurriedly searches, the best source I've found on the ongoing hearing in the UK Supreme Court on Assange's proposed extradition to Sweden for questioning is The Guardian's blog on Assange; and a good source on ongoing Occupy activity, aside from Tim Poole's livestream coverage, is Greg Mitchell at The Nation.

UPDATE: Apparently the core of Assange's appeal at this point is the argument that the person who issued the warrant for his extradition is not a genuine "judicial official," as required by the European applicable treaty – since the person who issued it was not a judge or other member of the judiciary, but the prosecutor in the case (which is sufficient under Swedish law but not under British law, and it's unclear whether it suffices under the treaty). (Assange recently gave a great summary of the case from his point of view, as well as his current situation, in his interview in Rolling Stone, by the way.) No decision is expected on Assange's appeal for at least a few weeks.

Wikileaks-esque Sites

As of today, LeakDirect lists 23 of them (with links).

Somebody had to be first.

WikiLeaks: Why It Matters. Why It Doesn't?

This video has been around for a few months and is long, but it's very good – I'm not aware of a better summation of many of the issues involved (I just went back to it as a source for an essay I'm working on). If you can't make it through the whole thing, my faves were the moderator, Paul Jay; Neville Roy Singham; and every bit of Daniel Ellsberg (including his comments near the end).



UPDATE 2011-03-07: Greg Mitchell celebrates his 100th day of blogging the WL story today with an article on his top Cablegate revelation picks; see also Kevin Gosztola's top 100 leaks in 100 tweets.

Report from NYC: NYFF, "Greater New York," Conflux, "The Last Newspaper," & the Creative Time Summit

There was a lot going on.

Went to some gallery shows in Chelsea; some visuals here. The works I enjoyed most were by Pipi Rist – her installations at Luhring Augustine were gorgeous – Matthew Day Jackson, and Sarah Sze. Also came across work by Aaron Kang (see also here), quoting Kant; c.f. the Perpetual Peace project, near the end of this post below.

I caught one day of the "Avant Garde" at the New York Film Festival. Seemed a bit heavy on the watery reflections, leaves in breeze, and texts coming in and out of focus. But very worthwhile; among other things, I was glad to see new work by Lewis Klahr (see also here) and Dani Leventhal (whose work I've recommended to the VideoFest, but it hasn't been picked up here in Dallas yet; but the NYFF curator indicated there's been a bit of a craze for her work in NYC). I also loved the idea of one video by David Gatten, screened at the marriage ceremony at his own wedding in lieu of speaking any words to his bride (making me think about conducting a semi-legitimate, mass-wedding-via-video here in Dallas – something spectacular, if you know what I mean!)

Saw about 50% of the Greater New York exhibition at P.S. 1 – not only does the show fill that good-sized facility, but much of the work is video – visuals here (shot under, shall we say, extremely adverse circumstances, so apologies for the extra-low production values) – including substantial, recent works by Matthew Barney (Guardian of the Veil), Ryan Trecartin, Kalup Linzy, and many others – one artist new to me whose work I especially liked was Deville Cohen. If you want more than a cursory acquaintance with the works in this show, allow two days. The show offered evidence that whatever media artists may be losing with the death of hardcopy news (see The Last Newspaper, below), they're finding plenty of new material online. (B.t.w., those interested in my reports on Temporary Services' ART WORK project might appreciate this.)

Then caught the last half of the opening presentation at Conflux 2010, New York's psychogeographic art festival, on the subject of little-seen urban ruins and underground spaces – the speaker, Steve Duncan, shared lots of great info accompanied by lots of great photos – my visuals, starting here, don't begin to do it justice (it had already been a long day). Did you know that many of the world's great cities, including Paris, Moscow, London, and New York, paved over and built on top of the rivers that originally sustained them, transforming the rivers into arteries in their storm water and sewage systems? And they did something similar w.r.t. the quarries from which the stones used to build their buildings were extracted. If you're adventurous, you can explore these old, underground quarries and sewers, and see some amazing things. And the speaker mentioned he cut his hand down there once, and by the next day his hand was the size of a baseball mitt, infected with four kinds of deadly bacteria; so don't get cut down there.

Saw the NYC premier at The Kitchen of a "live documentary," Utopia in Four Movements, by Sam Green; he directed The Weather Underground, which I loved. His new project contemplates our relationship to utopias, which he semi-facetiously defined as places that do not exist, where everyone has a good job and a good standard of living. He mostly showed footage of/talked about (1) Esperanto (2) communist states, esp. Cuba, although he consistently used the term, "socialism," in talking about them; and he more or less assumed we agree that our own capitalist democracy has also proved disappointing, if not quite the failure of communist states, and (3) forensic archaeology, i.e., where they dig up mass graves and attempt to identify remains.

During the Q&A afterward, I asked if he'd considered talking about socialist democracies, and what he might have said about those. I asked because I'm genuinely curious about whether their systems work as much better than ours as they seem to. E.g., I have the impression that pretty much everyone there has a good job and a good standard of living – like Green's definition of utopia, only they do exist!

He answered along the lines of, that he was interested in exploring our feelings and attitudes about utopias; and the socialist democracies, well, they're just there, and there didn't seem to be much of a story there. And yet more than once in his talk, he'd mentioned his deep disappointment, and wishing there were a solution or way forward. So, um, like, Sweden and Norway . . . ?

Went to the New Museum's new exhibition, The Last Newspaper; visuals here. It's big and terrific; and also interesting in what it did not do. It did not particularly inquire into what it is that we might be losing with the death of paper news, apart from a cheap, wonderful, ready-made medium; it did not ask, for example, what we may be about to lose in the way of hard archives, or modes of thinking; and it came nowhere near any issues re- what's displacing hardcopy new, i.e., virtual news. Also interestingly, the exhibition was larded with Kant quotations. As I learned later, these quotations were thanks to the Perpetual Peace project – more below.

Possibly coming up in a later post: a few remarks inspired by the Creative Time Summit (a few visuals here). For now I'll just mention, first, that they have a great website with, I believe, videos of more or less all the presentations, here; and second, that the instigator of the Perpetual Peace project (see pics sprinkled among the New Museum vizis, such as this one) was among the speakers, and he explained that it was a "secret" article by Kant that was the foundation for the U.N., and that the little booklet displayed at the New Museum contains this secret article.

It's Just News.

But, without the turquoise tie.