Via: brian carroll

(resending...)

// inspired by Houdini i've managed to wrest one arm free from my
// straightjacket and am running from cybercaf? to cybercaf? to type
// this latest dispatch and send it out, all-the-while dodging Haldol darts
// shot from Marlin Perkins Junior hovering above this Wild Kingdom in
// his helicopter, while escaping butterfly nets of ambulance drivers, ETC.

Via: brian carroll

[this is a preface for BLACKFLAG OPERATIONS outside the .US, which is
to provide context for a map of the Mideast Circuit and a plan for
turning things around. there are some big inversions in basic
assumptions related to such an approach and thus the following words
seek to preempt the conflicts of ideas, so that it separates out a
clear plan with a complex situation in which it is placed. as such,
the following is attempting to convey that .US grand strategy itself
is failing, not just the latest .US administration, though it is
failing catastrophically in how it is going about governing, and that
another approach (based on another logic, and another representation
of reality, no less) will offer a view that is basically an inversion
of what now is going on, in terms of decision-making and perspective.
and it may be a bit startling and it may be considered to be against
the existing goals-- and this is to suggest that, if trying to get to
place 'B' that this is a feasible/viable way of moving in such a
direction, whereas the existing approach is unable to even find any
movement in relation to these very same ideals. and so it could be
debated, the legitimacy of such an approach, though I wanted to
dispel a sense that there is a shift 'in direction' of the 'ends' -
which is a better world which exists in peaceful relations, should
that be achievable in ways more realistic than approached today. as
such, this is part of the bureaucracy of words in relation to ideas
that people make decisions based on, historically, and provides a bit
of context to offer additional details as to why this approach (next
post/map/plan) is both viable and responsible, in-line with
traditional values and historical ideals of the .US as a
constitutional democracy and its governance, both internally and
externally, in the world and its affairs.]



if accepting that the binary ideology of the 'War of Terror' only
leads to more war and limited options as to how to proceed via its
debilitating bias as to equating .US decision-making with a
Neoconservative worldview, it becomes apparent how a change in this
overriding black-and-white logic can transform this basic situation.

it is by allowing a 'gray-area' to exist, and modeling it, that other
interconnections can be seen that were not previously allowed in
decision-making. and, in this way, the situation in the Mideast can
be seen in ecological terms beyond the boundaries of nation-states,
where the region could be considered as a circuitboard in which
machineries of state and peoples are short-circuiting. and thus, to
question what can be done about it.

it becomes a showdown between dueling realities, one which is based
on the binary "War of Terror" which is failing to model the situation
accurately, and a paradoxical "Mideast Peace" which is complex and
multilinear.

so too, it could be said that the existing .US flag with all its
colors represents the failure of the "War of Terror" to accurately
model events as they exist, beyond false constructs -- whereas
the .US BLACKFLAG would be symbolic of this failure, and a beginning
point in which to engage the reality of events as they now exist. (it
is to attempt to say that, this duel of flags is also the duel of
logics and how to model current events: and ultimately what this duel
of flags is about is a duel about the nature of reality and its
symbolic representation. that is, is it based on lies and fiction and
ungrounded, or is it based in truth, facts, logic, and reasoning? the
BLACKFLAG thus would establish the latter as the foundation upon
which to restart .US decision-making in its policy so that 'the truth
is on its side' and truth and reality are not divorced from
eachother, as now exists.)


the most important point to make is that basic .US grand strategy
(historical) is cataclysmic failure and it is unsustainable to
continue on this path, and it is increasingly likely that what
currently exists as extensions of this strategy will also not be able
to sustain the current failures, and will have to be dealt with
sooner rather than later. as such, either the .US will undergo total
collapse whereby its core processes cannot function to sustain
themselves, less their internationalist extensions around the world,
and that if this were to totally collapse under its own weight, that
even these extensions would begin rapid deterioration - which becomes
chaos if this is the existing ordering which is based on leveraging
imbalances between nations. as such, if a collapse were to occur,
there may be little left to regain much of the ordering that had
existed at world-scale, and could automatically usher in new and more
complex conflicts by the sheer nature of nations competing at world-
scale. else, this situation could be dealt with in a controlled-
collapse to soft-landing/redirection of hat exists, into an improved
and evolved formation whereby greater ordering could be established
in a shared world circuitry, by which to evolve new multipolar world
organization and infrastructural ordering in which the problems of
nationalism (and the .UN) could be reconfigured in a new relation of
states at this world-scale, based on human-rights, and taking into
account governance of machineries of state, in relation to citizens,
etc.** that, in this crisis, there is an opportunity to evolve new
global institutional framework to transcend the limitations that now
exist, and to go beyond the .UN and nationalism, using the .US
redirection of policies as a way to do this in an environment that
goes beyond considering these events only in terms of nation-states.
and instead, it is to consider the shared human interest in dealing
with problems that exist at world-scale, as with global warming,
poverty, illiteracy, genocide, and decide to make this our attempt to
change the course of human development on the planet, at world scale,
together, beginning with .US moves in this direction...


as such, this is to say that basic .US grand strategy is required to
change if the world is to live in peace and not in endless war - in
terms of decisions related to how to get from A -> B at the world-
scale, if B is to engage policy issues as they exist at world-scale,
yet beyond the problems of nationalism and bureaucracy. it thus
becomes a duel between warmaking and peacemaking as a route for
moving the machineries of state.

and, in the current world environment, that this existing method of
the 'war of terror' is short-circuiting, as is the basis for this war
and its origin in the conflicts between .IL and .PS and issues yet to
be resolved by the .UN nor by internationalism, - and possibly
irresolvable by these formations, as they created the situation in
which the current decline _is ushering in World War III,
automatically, until the basic configuration is changed.

this is to say that the current global environment is modeled on its
being out-of-balance and in terms of nationalism (and colonialism,
imperialism, fascism, etc) that this may be considered a 'good
thing', relatively speaking, according to a given position. say, with
the .US as a superpower. unless, of course, this position changes,
and the imbalances start to work both ways, which is what is the
price that is and will be exacted upon .US grand strategy which now
forces reconciliation of a failed unipolar ideology in a multipolar
reality, and how to navigate such a situation. which becomes
impossible if the captain refuses to change direction of the ship of
state, and thus, as it crashes and is breached and begins to sink,
this is somehow declared as a validation to continue into to sink
into this grave as if divine mission: the shipwreck of state as
governance.

a 'choice' exists between directions, and acknowledging where the
state exists is necessary so as to navigate beyond this situation and
not to sink entirely, and make it back to safer waters and to
eventually to a new shore on the shared horizon. it is proposed that
it is self-evident that this shared horizon is not the 'War of
Terror' which is a Neoconservative construction which serves to
promote and extend their ideology, and it is instead 'mideast peace'
which would transform the existing situation from one of waves of
turbulent chaos to one in which ships of state can progress through a
shared ordering, and thus all proceed to a new horizon, in which
peacemaking and prosperity of the 'world ship' of state becomes the
basis for governance at world scale, and not nationalist competition
as it current exists, and necessitates war, even by fiat of the .UN
itself.


as a context then, for .US grand strategy, then, it would be to say
that the 'historical trajectory' of the .US as a dominator of world
affairs and as a singular 'superpower' are ideologically unhelpful to
navigating in such a situation as it now exists, and a different
mindset which is based on cooperation and shared endeavors which
engage world issues in a shared world perspective would be much more
useful and helpful, at home and abroad, if to secure energy supplies,
decrease pollution, address climate change, among myriad other issues
which are currently beyond the reasoning and logic of those in the
engine rooms of these ships of state. or, 'chips' of state,
whathaveyou. where the transistors/individuals now exist primarily in
binary logic and cannot engage paradoxical situations and thus bias
the decision-making to certain limited views and patterns which work
against the very issues seeking to be addressed-- thus creating the
problem that is trying to be resolved. and, as such, that changing
the basic logic, and thus the reality, would given new options by
which to proceed as the processing of states are linked in with
eachother in a shared circuitry, etc. the point of trying to envision
it in such ways is to make tangible the fact that the basic
conception that exists and is failing to engage this situation is
divorced from the reality of events themselves, in a tangible sense
which models the situation in an intelligent way that can allow for
cybernetic feedback and adaptation in the environment, and instead it
is this lack of modeling this situation, conceptually, that
everything exists instead in terms of the events it creates that need
to be described: crashes, shipwrecks, and short-circuiting as the
status-quo route, and the result of staying on the present course-
ultimately toward only increasing entropy and destruction.

so, as grand strategy, it is an issue of a historical failure and
also a failure of present .US administration which takes this to the
level of extreme bloodsport, and then calls it political art, and
beyond description.

this is simply not good enough. millions are suffering as a result of
this maladaptive and unenlightened .US strategy, and hundreds of
thousands are dying - and this is said to be the freedom the .US
gifts the world.

and instead of such an approach, based on destruction, there is the
potential for 'building' this new ordering based in infrastructure,
and electromagnetic infrastructure in particular which becomes an
architectural order which can begin forming these new relations in
this circuitry, using tools, buildings, and systems to concretize
these ideas into material form, to solidify the goals into something
that will endure through centuries even, yet the existing state of
affairs is ideologically opposed to the basic notion of a shared
responsibility to be addressing such world concerns, even of its own
public citizens, which have been turned into its subjects.

it is this aspect of the .US government as it now exists - that this
'transparent codevelopment' of Mideast Peace through development of
electromagnetic infrastructure and architectural ordering are placed
outside the special interests of corporate government, and it is here
that the ideals of democracy are demoted to those of a dictatorship
and its narrow worldview. thus, while an organic approach to
'solving' the existing crises is put on the table, the
Neoconservatives ignore all these options so as to continue to move
in the pre-planned direction, regardless of facts or public will. it
is to say that 'decison-making' is so biased and distorted that this
public reality is basically censored out of .US governance and its
relation to the world, and that this is how the .US ship of state is
being governed/steered in this very moment. in other words,
basically, the wheel has been broken off, and the masts are snapped
and the sails are ripped and the hull is cracked and it is taking on
water and it is noticeably sinking and the waves are only increasing
in size and then Captain Ahab still stands on the deck, pointing at
the whale, and demanding to pursue it into the depths of total oblivion.

(this may be a allegory as to the end of imperial America as an idea,
in terms of the limits of modernism, machines, ideas, versus another
reality altogether, that may exist in another scale of (cosmic)
planning.)

in any case, this is the context in which BLACKFLAG OPS (outside.US)
are being proposed:::

Via: "Patrice Riemens"

(thanks to/bwo Teotonio de Souza/ Goa Research Net mailing list)
(my previous post, Jane Jacob's Obit, was thanks to/ bwo roger Keil and
the INURA mailing-list- sorry for late credit)

....................................

http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CB030.htm

Nepal: now that's what I call democratisation

Why are those who bang on about bringing 'people power' to foreign lands
so ambivalent about the people demanding power on the streets of Nepal?

by Brendan O'Neill

For the past two weeks youthful protesters fought running battles with th e Royal
Nepalese Army and police, demanding an end to the autocratic rule of King
Gyanendra. An 18-day general strike virtually paralysed the small Himalayan nation
and brought Gyanendra's kingdom to its knees. The protesters defied stringent
daytime curfews and did their best to dodge the army and police's 'shoot-on-sight'
policy (which claimed 14 lives) in their desire to see the King ousted and
democracy installed. So why did many in the West either remain silent about these
mass protests, or go al l ambivalent about them? Why did Western officials and
thinkers who talk endlessly about 'regime change', 'democratisation' and 'change
advocacy' in foreign affairs view the Nepalese protests with disapproval, even
disdain?

The protests reveal two things: first, that people still desire
self-determination, to be treated as autonomous adults rather than as big kids who
need a caring King, or anybody else for that matter, to look after them; and
second, that this is not the kind of 'people power' many in the West have in mind
when they talk about enabling democracy in far-off lands. Western leaders and
commentators like the idea of people power until it involves real people demanding
real power - then they come over all panicky and squeamish. They like to
'encourage good governance' and install 'people participation programmes' in
various African, Eastern European and Asian states, but they balk at the sight of
thousands of people demanding their democratic rights.

The protests have not only exposed the isolation of a clapped-out and archaic
Hindu monarch - they have also exposed the West's empty rhetoric on democracy and
its fear and loathing of the masses.

At root these were protests for self-determination. Nepal is a strange and
unstable kingdom; it is the only Hindu state in the world, ruled over by monarchs
who fancy themselves as reincarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu. Until 1990 it was
an absolute monarchy under the executive control of the King; then King Birendra
initiated political reforms which created a parliamentary monarchy, with the King
as head of state and a prime minister as head of government. Things have remained
deeply unstable. As one report says: 'No Nepalese government has survived for more
than two years, either through internal collapse or parliamentary dissolution by
the monarch.' (1) In 2001, King Birendra, his wife and several other members of
the royal family were shot dead by Birendra's son. For the pas t 10 years there
have been clashes between royalist and government forces and Maoist guerrillas
demanding an end to the monarchy. It was under the pretext of crushing the
guerrillas that King Gyanendra unilaterally declared a state of emergency in
February 2005, shutting down parliament, placing elected ministers under house
arrest, and assuming all executive powers.

The protesters have sought to overturn this backward state of affairs. One
protester declared: 'The King is like the foreign people85he thinks we are
ignorant temple-dwellers, that all we need is food and God and to be ruled.' Here,
we can glimpse the protesters' demands: they reject both the idea that people
should be happy with their lot, and also old backward notions about God-appointed
monarchs knowing what's best. 'We know that Gyanendra is not a god, that he is
just a man and that we can end him', said another protester (2). Many of the
protesters are young and Westernised - people in their late teens and early 20s,
many of them professionals, who talk about watching MTV and wishing to earn a
decent disposable income. These will be the children of the Nineties, that brief
period when there was something approximating democracy in Nepal, who wil l not
stand for a return to the arbitrary rule of Kings. There is an admirable fury to
their protests.

Western officials and policymakers view it differently. For all their talk about
supporting democracy around the world they have spent the past two weeks trying to
put a lid on the Nepalese protests, encouraging the King and the various political
parties (most of which, to some extent, support the anti-monarchy protests) to
come to a compromise that will 'end the crisis'. The Bush administration and the
Blair government pose as the deliverers of democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet
they said little about the pro-democracy protests in Nepal. In fact, they viewed
them as deeply problematic. US diplomats put pressure on the parties to accept the
King's offer at the end of last week to name a new prime minister, even though
this would have left the King with the power to dissolve parliament.

The British ambassador to Nepal, Keith George Bloomfield, also encouraged the
parties to accept this compromise; protesters branded him as 'naive' and told him
to 'mind his own business' (3). (Bloomfield was also put in the awkward position
of having to cancel a planned celebration for his own Queen's eightieth birthday
at his Nepalese Embassy because, as one report from India put it, 'Right now, a
lavish bash, with Nepali ministers and bureaucrats as guests, would not gel with
the Nepali people who are demanding the abolition of the monarchy.') The UK
Department for International Development has a programme in Nepal that encourages
'change advocators' and 'pro-poor stakeholders' to take more control. Yet since
the protests broke out, DfID officials have hidden from view; this, clearly, is
not the kind of 'change advocacy' they have in mind.

Britain and America's intentions in relation to Nepal become clear when you
consider that both have offered military assistance to the regime in recent years.
According to Amnesty International, in the year prior to the King's coup Nepal
received 20,000 M16 rifles from America and small arms from the UK. It is reported
that two Islander fighter aircraft supplied from Britain to Nepal in 2004 have
been used in attacks on Maoist guerrillas and also civilians in Maoist-controlled
territory (4). Britain and America want stability over democracy in Nepal. Before
the King overthrew parliament that meant supplying military assistance to crush
the armed opposition; following the King's coup, which was condemned by Washington
and London, it has meant US and UK officials leaning on the King and the parties
to strike a deal. These interventions, where Western officials have sought to
dampen the protests by pushing the politicians into a relationship with the King,
give the lie to the Bush and Blair governments' claims to be international
warriors for democracy. Their idea of 'democratisation' is in fact little more
than posturing, designed to boost their own moral authority rather than install
anything like democracy around the world.

Whether the King's concession will satisfy people's desire for more choice and
control remains to be seen.

Even commentators who are critical of Bush and Blair and sympathetic to the
protesters have described the protests as a 'crisis' which only democracy,
assisted by a better kind of international intervention, can resolve. This gets
things the wrong way around. Instead of seeing the protests as an attempt by the
Nepalese to build a democracy, some commentators see them as a violent and
destabilising outburst which 'installing democracy' might put an end to. So Isabel
Hilton in the Guardian criticises the interventions of America, Europe, India and
China for being 'inglorious', and suggests that these external powers should
encourage democracy instead, since 'only democracy can end the crisis in Nepal'
(5). Here, democracy is discussed as a kind of appeasement for the masses - not as
something they earn and shape themselves, but as something graciously provided to
them in order to keep in check their potentially unpredictable behaviour. More
radical commentators look to the language of the past to describe and justify
events in Nepal. Tariq Ali, unable, it seems, to see what is new and different
today, says the protests are 'refreshingly old-fashioned' (6).

And consider the contrast between Western media coverage of these protests and its
coverage of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2005 or the Rose Revolution in
Georgia in 2003. Those events were immediately described as 'revolutions' and
celebrated in newspaper columns and breathless TV reports. In truth, they were
largely stage-managed affairs, often orchestrated by Western intervention. They
may have involved large number s of people taking to the streets and attending
pro-democracy pop concerts, but they would best be described as the consequence of
Western pressure t o replace one dubiously-elected political party with another.
They were media events, too, staged as much for the international press corps as
to put pressure on the incumbent regimes. The Nepalese protests, by contrast ,
were massive, often vigorous, and they took place regardless of whether o r not
photographers were there to capture them. Yet they have been largely ignored by
newspaper columnists, or referred to as a 'crisis'.

It seems that many in the West are far more comfortable with carefully planned
'revolutions' that last a few days and which win the support of the US State
Department and the UK Foreign Office, than they are with the fury of masses who
have had as much as they can take. It seems to me that some in the West are even
more comfortable with suicide bombings than they are with mass protests like those
in Nepal. Acts of individual and nihilistic terrorism, such as those by
Palestinians against Israel or by a handful of disgruntled men from Leeds, seem to
have been discussed more sympathetically than the Nepalese protests have been (and
to have receive d as much, if not more, media coverage). There is a kind of
vicarious pity and self-indulgent empathy for suicide bombers who apparently have
no choice but to kill themselves and a few civilians; they are seen as victims of
powerful forces understandably lashing out. Yet a more meaningful lashing out by a
mass group of people that might have real consequences - that is viewed as
something scary and suspect.

The protests exposed to ridicule King Gyanendra. He has now announced that he will
restore parliament - certainly a step in the right direction towards democracy,
though whether this concession will satisfy people's desire for more control and
choice in their lives remains to be seen. The protests also exposed the West's
flimsy attachment to democracy and its fear of mass and unpredictable actions.
What really unnerved Western officials and commentators was that they felt they
could not meaningfully influence events in Nepal; instead of sitting in some plush
committee room devising and enforcing a 'governance plan', they were reduced to
watching the protests and wondering how they would end. UN secretary general Kofi
Annan called for the 'transfer of power in a timely, orderly and responsible
manner' - that's how they like things to be done, in an orderly fashion and to a
clear deadline, probably to be followed up by annual reports on targets reached
and developments made.

Our leaders cannot handle the messy business of real people in Nepal loudly
demanding some real power over their lives. Yet this is what struggles for
democracy look like. It may not be pretty, but it can be pretty inspiring.

Via: "Jon Ippolito"

As in many news stories about the latest legislative vote, it's not
immediately obvious what the following news means. In this case the vote
cast by the relevant committee wasn't against the monopolistic bill
itself, but against an anti-monopolistic amendment to said bill.

In other words, it was a vote in favor of monopolies.

In other words, the good guys lost.

Despite my eloquently worded petition statements, passionate earfuls to
my Congressman's hapless administrative assistant, and whining on
nettime.

http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0502/msg00067.html
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0512/msg00047.html

Double Negatives 1, Net Users 0.

jon

+++++++

Net Neutrality Provision Rejected
Committee votes down a provision that would prohibit ISPs from blocking
or slowing customers' connections.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,125567,00.asp
Grant Gross, IDG News Service
Thursday, April 27, 06

WASHINGTON -- Internet companies and consumer groups calling for a new
U.S. law that would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or
degrading some connections lost a major battle this week when a U.S.
House of Representatives committee voted
down such a provision.
09
The House Energy and Commerce Committee, during debate on a
telecommunications reform bill, rejected an amendment that would write
so-called net neutrality provisions into U.S. law. Backers of a net
neutrality law want Congress to prohibit U.S.
broadband providers from blocking or slowing their customers'
connections to Web sites or services that compete with services offered
by the providers.

The committee rejected the amendment, on a vote of 34-22, largely along
party lines, with all but one Republican opposing the net neutrality
amendment offered by Representative Ed Markey, a Massachusetts
Democrat....

Via: "tobias c. van Veen"

dear Nettime:

WE NEED YOU.

This 30th of May 2006, we have confirmed a space and time for a flesh
gathering of Nettimers in Montreal, Canada.

The Gathering will officially launch the seventh edition of Montreal's MUTEK
festival [ http://www.mutek.ca ] as well as the second year of the Upgrade
International [ http://www.theupgrade.net ].

WE NEED YOU TO PARTICIPATE.

- talk (we're good at that): speakers & presenters, panelists, ranters,
poets, net.verbiage & word.age, writers ...

- perform: sound, video, dance, code, djs, musicians .. we are technically
prepared. We hope.

- intervene ... ... ...

Moderator Ted Byfield will be there. We may supply pies for the occasion.
Others will be confirmed shortly.

SEND US YOUR PROPOSALS by POSTING THEM TO THE LIST
and cc:ing them to: tobias @ techno . ca .

We will try & accomodate as many of you as we can in the space of
approximately 18 hours. We are not here to judge your proposals: there's
been flurries of interest, so now we nominate Nettime to come through with
bodies in attendance. Once we can confirm your particular presence, we can
begin fitting everyone in.


IN THE WORKS : IDEAS ARE CIRCULATING FOR A NETTIME PRINT-ON-DEMAND
PUBLICATION. BUT FIRST WE NEED THE EVENT TO COME TOGETHER.


ALSO, this is a great chance to :

a) see the sites & sounds of Mutek (we are inquiring about receiving limited
festival passes for participants...)
b) see Montreal
c) get away
d) see Canada
e) see North America
f) learn French, drink on a terrasse, enjoy healthy smoke, etc.


yours,

tobias
sophie
anik

[ http://theupgrade.sat.qc.ca ]

Via: Patrice Riemens

>From The Globe&Mail (Toronto), full article & links at:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060425.wjanejacobs0425/BNStory/National/home

JANE JACOBS
by Sandra Martin

Globe and Mail Update, April 25, 2006

Jane Jacobs, the urban expert and social activist who wrote The Death and
Life of Great American Cities, died Tuesday morning at Toronto Western
Hospital after about a year of up and down health problems.

She was taken to Toronto Western Hospital on Saturday after having
suffered what appeared to be a stroke.

The American-born Canadian was 89 years. She was considered one of the
most influential critics of urban planning.

As a public speaker she was feisty and outspoken, as a citizen she helped
bring the Spadina expressway to a screeching halt, but what most people
will remember about Jane Jacobs is the way she thought about issues.
Largely self-educated, she was an acute observer of the complexity of
life. She loved to walk the streets, storing information and insights in
her prodigious brain, facts and incidents that she would then analyze,
seeking patterns to explain why some neighbourhoods flourished and others
declined.

A free thinker, who loathed the modern tendency to credentialism, she took
on the rigid thinking of post-war urban thinkers in her most famous book,
The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She believed implicitly that
there was no such thing as a straight line in the way people thought, or
in the way people lived. Even the smallest organism is affected by many
different stimuli, so it is impossible to predict behaviour with any
accuracy.

Although born and raised in the United States, she came to Canada with her
late husband, architect Robert (Bob) Jacobs, in 1969 because they had two
sons approaching draft age and they were opposed to the Vietnam War. She
arrived in Toronto and almost immediately became embroiled in desperate
struggles between developers who wanted to tear down historic properties
to erect high rises and politicians who wanted to build expressways to
bring cars from the suburbs into the downtown core.

Many people tried to label her, calling her everything from an amateur to
an economist. She hated being pinned down, but the designation she allowed
was urbanologist, a thinker about cities.

In the course of a long life she wrote several major books including, The
Economy of Cities (1969) The Wealth of Nations (1984), a controversial
book advocating Quebec sovereignty. The Question of Separatism (1980),
Systems of Survival (1992) The Nature of Economies (2000) and Dark Age
Ahead (2005).

Intensely private, she disliked public attention focused on her, rather
than the causes she espoused. A dozen institutions offered her honourary
degrees, but she turned them all down, because she feared that in
accepting their accolades, she would have to give up something of herself
for fundraising purposes. What she wanted, as she approached her 90th
birthday this May, was more time for thinking and writing and being with
family.

When she was appointed as an officer to the Order of Canada in 1996, her
citation said "her seminal writings and thought-provoking commentaries on
urban development have had a tremendous effect on city dwellers, planners
and architects."

It continues: "By stimulating discussion, change and action, she has
helped to make Canadian city streets and neighbourhoods vibrant, liveable
and workable for all."

In a 1997 profile, The Globe's Doug Saunders wrote she is known as the
"lady who resurrected The Neighbourhood: the whole notion of the city as a
good and self-sustaining entity. Her epochal 1961 book The Death and Life
of Great American Cities made millions of North Americans realize that
"urban renewal" and government-planned development were hurting cities,
and that bustling streets, tight-packed neighbourhoods and downtown
clutter were actually good things."

A Jane Jacobs bookshelf

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961): Cities rely on access
to sidewalks and parks, high-density housing with a mix of incomes, uses
and ages of buildings, and hands-off planning.

The Economy of Cities (1969): Urban economies are based on replacement of
imports with indigenous products. Cycles of trade and entrepreneurship are
vital to urban life.

The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle for Sovereignty
(1980): Like Norway's separation from Sweden, Quebec's from Canada can be
good for both parties if they maintain separate currencies.

Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life (1984):
National economies are in fact the economies of urban regions, and
national economies work best when cities are given maximum autonomy.
Backward cities should trade with one another and consider secession.

Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and
Politics (1992): Human societies rely on two distinct systems of morality:
"commercial" and "guardian." Both are vital, but troubles arise when the
two are combined.

A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska: The Story of Hannah Breece (1995): Jacobs
reconstructs the journals of her great aunt, part of the U.S.
"civilization" of Alaska at the turn of the century, and annotates them
with short essays on the civil and political life of a fledgling society.

Via: brian carroll

[fugue for armageddon in D by Secretary Rumsfeld]

Via: "tobias c. van Veen"

Apologies if this has already been posted, but it's rather... well written.
best, tV

The Theory of Counterinsurgency in Six Easy Paragraphs
By William Christie
January 31, 2006

Special to Defense and the National Interest

Via: "porculus"

> In hierarchies, power operates through coercion. In networks, it
> works through exclusion.


gotcha, you mean to pardon blessed human hierarchie for bringing black slaves in
new orleans god scourges & plagues with katrina enuf for kicking them up alabama &
riogrande. Hach internet schedule of being in typing 'to be or not' just on an low
bandwiz, I mean it's justice since internet tries to pardon oneself of being as
somezing dried bar i.e. wiz no cognac nor the de la menthe, I supoz one tries to
fatten each ozer with words as bordel de pompe cul as would ubu chez matrix said,
in zuch dried bar pornographix would lay just as a no flesh & bones oxymoron so in
zis puritan noosphee we would be just all kinda Lautrec in pigalle eating handful
of shrinkment pill aginst our will

> we can and should say what networks are. otherwise networks sink into
> the landscape as inscrutable, natural forms. such is the trick of power.

for sure ein 'sein oder nichtsein' but wizout cellphone deep in the schwarzforest
ziegfried would have a stinking zmell of dasein for ze death already, but what
sticking up in this deterraformed nettime: this guy baudrillard wanting to screw
my mother & jeer at my rapeseed oil vw, make so much noise as he wanted to upgrade
himself as the third riders of the apocalypse..he is not sexy at all enuf for
that.

hey hauffeur step on the gas & run over the frog

Via: Karl-Erik Tallmo

At 15.46 -0400 06-04-24, Alan Sondheim wrote:

>What is it that people speak about, in these days of dead-film, dead-
>cinema? It is not what people spoke about. Cinema is what they spoke
>about. Cinema is history, networking is speaking, video is what they speak
>about. Listen to a conversation, well it is not the same conversation, it
>is always already a future anterior, already a dead conversation, people
>speaking from the dead. Among living networks, video, living performance,
>organisms. The dead are a carapace on the living. Cinema is popular, is
>always popular, if not film, the enormous screen, eye, darkened theater,
>imagination, comfort of infinite speakers.


I somehow come to think of this McLuhan quotation:

"The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always
to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look
at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land."

(The Medium is the Massage, 1967)


/Karl-Erik Tallmo