Recording Surface

“The dignified destruction of the Calais refugee jungle”

The Daily Mail’s decidedly more sensationalist take.

Also.

From David Graeber’s “Debt: The First Five Thousand Years“: (more…)

Eyal Weizman has an article on the how the IDF consulted military lawyers in its recent actions in Gaza, to both ensure that it acted within the constraints of international law and to expand those limits to Israel’s benefit. (more…)

And the people cheered, not because they did not understand, but because they wanted that death through the death of others. Like a will to wager everything you have every hand, to stake your own death against the death of others, and measure everything by “deleometers.”

I watched only four speeches at the Republican convention — Thompson’s, Giuliani’s, Palin’s, and McCain’s — and I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve just witnessed a well-lit, hood-free Klan rally. (more…)

While it might be overstating it to say that the Anglo-American response to the bloodletting in the Caucasus is one of glee, there certainly seems to be sense of satisfaction at the reappearance of a comfort zone. (more…)

So if Stringer Bell reads The Wealth of Nations, and President Jed Bartlett has a copy of “Society Must Be Defended” on his shelf in the Oval Office, and (in the real world, I guess) the Israeli army uses the Treatsie on Nomadology as a training manual, then that covers all the bases, right? The state has decisively captured the war machine, politics has officially declared itself to be war by (all) other means, and the law’s enemy/capital’s other earnestly mimics the legitimate, legal formations. All the paths have been blocked, no? What is to be done now, comrades?

I don’t know. Stop watching television and reading books?

On May 12, almost exactly as Berlusconi’s new government began fulfilling its promise to criminalize, hunt down, and deport migrants (accompanied by some only semi-official bloodletting), U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement raided a meat-packing plant in the town of Postville, Iowa, population 2,000. (more…)

We’ve been in election mode for some time now. Elections are not a particular locale, nor a particular day in the calendar. They are more like a grid that affects the way we understand and perceive things. Everything is mapped back on this grid and gets warped as a result. The particular conditions of the elections today have elevated the usual level of bullshit.– Gilles Deleuze

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. Allergyseason is upon central Texas (though really, it’s always that time in the allergy capital of the U.S.), and what for a couple of weeks has had a light grasp on me has in the last few days strangled my head: brutal, neverending headaches, snotgreen discharge, all that. Hopefully its deathgrip will pass soon. So my only tribute on James Joyce’s birthday will have to be the use of the word snotgreen and other created compound words.

The New York Times has an article on Bobby Fischer and the lessons we are supposed to learn from his life. (more…)