pieto\the\media\ecologist

For Walter Benjamin the city assaults the urban dweller.  This onslaught of big and small shocks diminishes the urban dwellers ability to process the ephemeral, delicate traces of experience, vital to the accumulation of “aura”.   For Benjamin the memory rooted in the consciousness of shock versus the memory rooted in the accumulation of experience or Erfahrung are exclusive even antagonistic forms of cognition.  What Benjamin takes from sections of Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle leads him to view a certain type of consciousness as a protective screen containing within memory trauma’s pain.

ziatroyano:

A phase of civil disobedience ensued as workers conducted sit down strikes and formed blockades to stop scab trucks on the roads leading to the mines. The Daughters of Mother Jones, a group formed by miners’ wives and other supporters, organized a sit-in at Pittson’s headquarters,…

A German tech company is selling the ability to track “political opponents.” An Italian company promises to remotely seize control of smartphones and photograph their owners. A U.S. company allows security services to “see what they [the targets]see.” A South African company can store recordings of billions of phone calls, forever.

Welcome to the new covert world of surveillance contractors. Shining a light on this $5 billion (and growing) industry, Wikileakstoday released “Spy Files”: hundreds of secret sales brochures. The companies involved hand this  promotional material only to key contacts — often government agencies and police forces — at trade shows that are closed to the public and the press.

The following court documents were filed on November 20, 2011 by the attorney of Sirhan Sirhan, the alleged assassin of Robert F. Kennedy.  The documents claim that Sirhan was a hypno-programmed assassin and that another person fired the gun that killed Kennedy.  For more information on the documents, see CNN’s article on the case.