500 Years Later

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10

Part 11

Owen 'Alik Shahadah award winning film 500 Years Later (www.500yearslater.com), produced by M.K. Asante,Jr.

"To understand the entire Eurocentric discourse on Africa and African people is a vivid exercise in the removal of agency from a people. The almost primary purpose of this study, new and old, is the continuous reassertion of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness ." This is the Eurocentric tradition in anti-African scholarship that provides the moral-academic justification for the slave trade; the most successful commercial venture in the history of humanity. In Europe's bid to protect their trade interest it is clear the marriage between racist academia and the exploitation of Africa were not strangers. The need for the continuation of this tradition is not lost in today's markets which are heavily dependant on sustaining the impoverishment of Africa. "

The Coming Insurrection

Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination, but by resonance, according to this report by Sarah Nardi in Adbusters.

...Officially authored by “The Invisible Committee,” an anonymous group of activists and intellectuals, The Coming Insurrection is a slim manual that predicts the imminent collapse of capitalist culture and outlines a plan for the regeneration of collectivist values. Written in the wake of widespread riots that gripped French suburbs in 2005, the text is interpreted by some as an anarchist manifesto, a situationist-inspired call to arms. The French government sees it as a “manual for terrorism.” The move against Coupat and the rest of the Tarnac 9 was intended as a preemptive strike against the burgeoning anti-capitalist movement in France. While the others were released with relative speed, Coupat was held under “preventative arrest” until May of 2009 and labeled by the government as a “pre-terrorist.”

And there, buried within the idiom of conservative fear – leftist, anarcho, collectivist, commune – is the word that points to the real danger in this story: pre. Preemptive. Preventative. Pre-terrorist. The French government, fearing the societal upheaval that a mass rethink of capitalism would spawn, exercised the principles of preventive medicine as the doctrine of law. It suspected the presence of renegade cells, mutating into malignant tumors of dissent and threatening the health of the entire body politic, so the government acted preemptively by swiftly excising the tissue in question.

The one ray of hope shining down on this brave new world – in which people can be detained for transgressions they have yet to commit – is the massive show of solidarity that has grown around Coupat and the others. Groups have sprung up across France, Spain, the US and Greece. In Moscow, supporters marched in protest outside the French embassy. And in June an unauthorized reading of The Coming Insurrection at a Barnes & Noble in New York City sparked a spontaneous – albeit brief – insurgency that flowed through the streets and nearby shops...

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The coming insurrection - The Invisible Committee

Apparently that text can't wait -- not even during sex

Report Reveals Surprising News About Social Media and Its Grip on Our Lives

Beth Snyder Bulik  reports for AdAge:

Would you answer a text during sex? If you're younger than 25, one in 10 of you would.

How about during a meeting? While you're eating? Or even while, as the Retrevo Gadgetology Report recently asked, when you're "on the john"? Some 22%, 49%, and 24%, respectively, of online under-25-year-olds agreed they "could be interrupted by an electronic message" while doing any of those things.

The older 25-plus age group was only half as tolerant to electronic interruptions -- 6% could be bothered during sex; 17% during a meeting; 27% during a meal; and 12% in the bathroom. But that's still a lot of people of all ages engaging in social media anywhere and anytime.

"Social media is embedded in our lives. It's why people go to a restaurant and check Foursquare before they sit down with their friends, then take a picture of their food before they eat and upload it to Facebook," said Manish Rathi, co-founder and VP-marketing at Retrevo, a consumer electronics shopping and review site. "We've started asking these questions because we wanted to know how social media is contributing to gadget buying and usage."

While not that many people actively engage in social media during sex, they do in bed. Retrevo found that almost half of social-media users check in via phone while lying in bed. About 48% of those polled said they check or update Facebook or Twitter after they've gotten into bed at night and/or before they get out of bed in the morning. That number jumps to 76% for the 25-and-younger set, with a whopping 19% of those millennials saying they also check in whenever they wake up during the night.

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Union of Conscientiously Work-Shy Elements

The Union of Conscientiously Work-Shy Elements (Danish: Sammenslutning af Bevidst Arbejdssky Elementer) was an unusually successful frivolous political party in Denmark. It was founded in Aarhus in 1979 by a comedian, Jacob Haugaard (born 1952), and a few friends. Haugaard stood as a candidate in Aarhus in each parliamentary election, until in September 1994 he was very unexpectedly elected to the Folketing with 23,253 personal votes, thereby winning a "kredsmandat" (1 locally based seat in parliament).

He made the following promises in the 1994 election:

• Tail winds on all cycle paths
• Better weather
• Better Christmas presents
• Less sex in school staff rooms (withdrawn during the campaign - he said it had been brought to his attention that sex in the staff room was a long-established privilege for teachers and as such could not be abolished)
• More whales in the fjord of Randers
• The right to impotency
• More pieces of Renaissance furniture in IKEA
• 8 hours of spare time, 8 hours of rest, 8 hours of sleep
• Nutella in army field rations
• The placing of a public toilet in the park in Aarhus where he after each election spent his state party funding on serving beer and sausages to his voters.
• More bread for the ducks in parks

(The last three promises were actually fulfilled during his term in office.)

While the party had been intended as a joke, he found himself often having the deciding vote in a hung parliament, and took his duties seriously until the parliamentary election in March 1998. He was afraid of being in the parliament, and he really respected the parties. He then announced his retirement from politics.

Quotes

* "If work is so healthy, then why not give it to the sick?"

* "Work? We can't be bothered, That's what we have the Germans for." (from a song)

See also

• List of frivolous parties

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45 percent of world's wealth destroyed: Blackstone CEO

Private equity company Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman said on Tuesday that up to 45 percent of the world's wealth has been destroyed by the global credit crisis.

"Between 40 and 45 percent of the world's wealth has been destroyed in little less than a year and a half," Schwarzman told an audience at the Japan Society. "This is absolutely unprecedented in our lifetime."

But the U.S. government is committed to the preservation of financial institutions, he said, and will do whatever it takes to restart the economy.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner plans to unfreeze credit markets through a new program that will combine public and private capital in a fund that would buy bank toxic assets of up to $1 trillion.

"In all likelihood, that will have the private sector buy troubled assets to clean the banks out in terms of providing leverage ... so that we can get more money back into the banking system," Schwarzman said.

He expects the private sector to end up making "some good money doing that," but added there were complex issues on how to price toxic assets.

He put part of the blame for the financial crisis to credit rating agencies.

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