"ThinkProgress, using data on various social spending projects from the National Priorities Project – which does these calculations for the cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars – has estimated ten other possible policies we could’ve paid for at the same $2.5 trillion price of the Bush tax cuts. . . . For the same price as the Bush tax cuts, which did little to help the economy, we could’ve sent tens of millions of students to college, retrofitted every household in America with the capacity to generate alternative energy, hired millions of firefighters and police officers, effectively ended our national shame of having kids who lack health care coverage, or put millions of more teachers into classrooms. . . . " Details here.
June 7, 2011
Opportunity Cost: What the US Gave Up for 10 Years of Tax Cuts
June 4, 2011
Bloomsday at The Reading Room
"Bloomsday" is celebrated annually in Dublin, New York, and elsewhere on June 16, the day on which James Joyce's Ulysses takes place. Bloomsday celebrations sometimes feature a walking itinerary reproducing that of the book's main character, Leopold Bloom, as well as readings from the novel, which has been acclaimed by some critics as the greatest ever written.
Per Wikipedia, an unabridged reading in 1982 ran nearly 30 hours; but Bloomsday Dallas will last just a few. The celebration will begin at 6 PM with a screening of Harrell Fletcher's video art piece, Blot Out the Sun (wrangled by moi), which was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. In Fletcher's video, service station employees and patrons read lines from the novel concerning death, love, social inequality, and the relationship between individuals and the universe. This will be followed by readings from the novel by Jeff Whittington, Charles Dee Mitchell, and Diane Orr.
In addition, Jennie Ottinger's "book" sculpture, Ulysses, will be on view, courtesy of Conduit Gallery. The work is part of her larger library project, which was shown at the 2011 Volta Art Fair in NYC.
Bloomsday Dallas will take place on Thurs., June 16 at The Reading Room, 3715 Parry Ave. (between Exposition and Commerce), from 6 - 10PM.
More at The Reading Room.
UPDATE: Below is scholar Frank Delaney's rap tribute to Joyce (thanks, Karen!):
June 3, 2011
New Work by Mark Leckey
The trailer for his new show, See We Assemble, at Serpentine:
Leckey won the Turner Prize in 2008. Below is what I believe to be all of his Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999). All this should give you plenty to enjoy and digest; but if you want more, size your browser window so you can see both Fiorucci and Cassini Mission in the previous post below, keep Fiorucci on full volume, reduce the Cassini volume to one bar, and start both from the beginning, so they're running at the same time. Re-start Cassini as desired.)
More Leckey on his myspace page or on YouTube.
May 27, 2011
Why We Need Net Neutrality: ISP's Are Already Throttling the Internet
If you had any remaining doubt as to whether and how much this is happening, wonder no more. Two projects have shown that Comcast and Road Runner consistently engage in substantial, discriminatory slowing or throttling of internet traffic (euphemistically referred to as "shaping") both to and from users, and that "Comcast, Road Runner (from Time Warner Cable), and Cox all use downstream shaping." (More at Boing Boing)
They claim they only do it to help manage traffic volumes. But there are many examples of known, wrongful censorship of political or other content, within as well as outside the U.S.; see, e.g., here (Comcast and/or Symantec blocked all e-mails containing URL of site calling for investigation into whether Pres. Bush committed impeachable offenses in connection with the push to invade Iraq, successfully reducing the impact of activists' efforts), here (AT&T censored Pearljam concert by deleting lyrics criticizing Bush), or here (Mindspring and OneNet Communications, successively, blocked site hosting Nuremburg Files).
As Lawrence Lessig stated in a recent article, "The innovation commons of the Internet threatens important and powerful pre-Internet interests. During the past five years, those interests have mobilized to launch a counterrevolution that is now having a global impact."
Bad enough that, as "Napoleon said . . . it wasn't necessary to completely suppress the news; it was sufficient to delay the news until it no longer mattered." But worse, ISP's can suppress any info they choose in ways that make it unlikely that many users will ever become aware that anything's been filtered out.
And as stated at sp!ked-IT with reference to Wikileaks, among others, "when an ISP removes [or blocks] content, it invokes the cyber equivalent to the death sentence. When an ISP acts it can effectively destroy a business or censor a political campaign, by making access to that website impossible.
If you agree that protecting the internet as a source of uncensored political information is one of the most urgent issues of our time, please spread the word about it.
May 26, 2011
"The Lieder of the Pact"
. . . by Rebecca Carter and Andrea Goldman (3:08 min., 2011).
Goldman writes that the video was "inspired by both the 60s 'bad girl' band The Shangri-Las and radical philosopher Alain Badiou’s 1982 book The Theory of the Subject."
May 25, 2011
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