You Will Suffer My Love

The Rolling Jubilee is Coming

rollingjubilee.org

The People’s Bailout

The People’s Bailout is Coming N15

Livestreamed at rollingjubilee.org

lepoissonrouge.com/events/view/3775
The People’s Bailout
11.15.12

Join Strike Debt for an updated version of an old classic, the telethon, to launch The Rolling Jubilee, a campaign that buys debt for pennies on the dollar and does away with it. Instead of collecting the debt, we will abolish it and help free the debtors!

People shouldn’t have to go into debt for an education, because they need medical care, or to put food on the table during hard times. We shouldn’t have to pay endless interest to the 1% for basic necessities. Big banks and corporations walk away from their debts and leave taxpayers to pick up the tab. It’s time for a bailout of the people, by the people.

It will be a wild night of music, comedy, magic, education, and the unexpected. This fast-moving variety show will mix well-known performers, intellectuals and activists from Strike Debt and Occupy Wall Street.

Special guests include Janeane Garofalo, Lizz Winstead, Frances Fox Piven, Max Silvestri, Hari Kondabolu, David Rees, The Yes Men, actor/director John Cameron Mitchell, Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel, Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Guy Picciotto of Fugazi, Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio, Climbing PoeTree, the Invisible Army of Defaulters, members of Healthcare for the 99%, Occupy Faith, and many more.

Doors 7pm // Show 8pm // All Ages

$25 (abolishes an estimated $500 worth of debt)
$50 (abolishes an estimated $1000 worth of debt)
$100 (abolishes an estimated $2000 worth of debt)
$250 (abolishes an estimated $5000 worth of debt)

For more information or to purchase tickets, please visit: http://lepoissonrouge.com/events/view/3775

The Rolling Jubilee is Coming N15

Stop and Frisk is Racism

Steve Lambert’s Wonderful Video

Steve Lambert explains: It’s Time to Fight from Steve Lambert on Vimeo.

I love Steve Lambert. He’s one of my favorite artists and he’s an all around great guy.

I haven’t had to deal with the success that he’s (thankfully) having, but I can relate to some of the questions he’s working through about why we should make art, who should we make art for, how should we make art in a world that is wired wrong, and how can we make the kind of work we want to make without going hungry.

I only once had a serious offer from a big time art collector. It’s a pretty funny story actually. I made this ginormous painting, 99in x 86in which you can see on my website here called “Zips.” I meant to make something that was funny. I didn’t realize that I was making something that was really totally beautiful. After finishing it and living with it in my studio for months I learned to appreciate Newman’s work so much more. I have a whole new understand of color field painting simply by spending my life in the same room with it.

Now sometimes I joke that I don’t make art, I make storage problems. It’s true, and having just moved 900 miles the hardest part of the move was trying to figure out what to do with all my artwork and art supplies. I felt terrible throwing away pieces that I think are still good and still showable, but…

So I made “Zips” and it is a huge painting. I didn’t want to keep it. It appeared in a couple good shows. I never sell anything I make (besides my tuition debt piece which I haven’t sold nearly enough of, it makes a great gift!) and I really wanted to sell “Zips” so that I could just get rid of it. I thought it was beautiful, I wanted someone to have it, and I didn’t want to have to store it. So when I exhibited it I put a funny price on it. I thought only one of my friends, or another moderately poor person like myself, would ever consider buying it, so I priced it at $299 (not $300, the 99 was important to me, it was part of the joke).

So I was pretty surprised when an art consultant called me up and told me they were representing a major collector (she never told me who) who really loved the piece and wanted to buy it. I thought this was great but it also sent me into a weird crisis about what it meant to, you know, actually sell a work of art to a real art collector. I didn’t want to sell it for $299 if it was going to some rich person, but it felt like a skeezy thing to do to try to up the price after publicly stating it was so cheap. The art consultant and I talked a few more times, but the collector never ended up buying it. I don’t know why but I kind of think it might have been because I put a playful price instead of a real price and that this might have contaminated the serious playfulness of the piece.

So I never sold “Zips.” I removed the canvass and rolled it up into a concrete form which is sitting in my new apt. I had moved the giant 99in x 86in stretcher from Chicago to Syracuse, but it didn’t make this most recent move with me. It’s too big to fit through a standard sized door, I didn’t know what to do with it.

I have a very small collection of “real” art by “real” artists that I’ve been trying to gather. I purchased a $200 Patty Chang photo/painting that I really love. She’s one of my favorites. And I have two of Steve Lambert’s “pay-whatever-you-want” prints which I highly recommend buying. You can get his “Time To Fight” print here.

Robotic Mirror Stage

From here:

“It is a spatial reasoning task for the robot to understand that its arm is on it not on the other side of the mirror,” Justin Hart, the PhD student leading the research told BBC News.

So far the robot has been programmed to recognise a reflection of its arm, but ultimately Mr Hart wants it to pass the “full mirror test”.

The Invisible Army of Defaulters

The same fate awaits the current system of mafia capitalism in America, an economic system driven by Wall Street CEOs who produce nothing, contribute nothing, who have bought our government and reduced it into a criminal enterprise whose main purpose is to support loan-sharking, gambling, extortion, and the slow reduction of every American citizen into debt peons. We cannot stop them through elections when both parties are bought and paid for. All we can do is to quietly withdraw our consent.

#strikedebt

It Has Begun: The First 3D Printable Assault Rifle

Someone has uploaded a design for the first working 3D printable assault rifle to Thingaverse. Let’s try to really think through the implications of this.

3D printing will democratize the means of production, but it will also democratize the means of destruction. Imagine 10 billion+ people who all have access to a 3D printer and therefore access to a potentially unlimited supply of advanced weapons. And we aren’t just talking about guns. You could print out weapons of mass destruction just as easily. Everyone would be able to print out a nuclear weapon.

Out of these 10 billion+ people how many would be mentally ill? Imagine the Aurora shooter had access to an advanced 3D printer.

Political scientists who have studied the issue have found that during economic recessions people care less about social issues like gay rights, abortion, etc and vote primarily on economic issues. In a truly post-scarse world all we will have left are these social issues. Presumably we will have fewer wars over resources. Instead we’ll have wars over what kind of society we want to have. Ideologically driven violence will rise. We will see a return of religious warfare. Imagine the middle ages with high-tech weapons. Material things might not be scarse, but ideological dominance will still be scarse. Control of Palestine will still be scarse. Imagine the Israeli/Palestinian conflict where both sides had an unlimited supply of weapons. A tit for tat cycle of violence could escalate quickly and result in millions of casualties within a week.

But how could you possibly stop this or regulate this? We’ve learned from brutal experience that you cannot win the war on drugs unless you are willing to completely militarize the police and live in a semi-fascist state. Singapore is winning the war on drugs. Likewise you are never going to be able to stop piracy unless the whole planet became like Singapore. There’s just no way to stop the proliferation of easily printable 3D designs.

So what might work? I’m imagining a kind of nanobot immune system. Nanobots that float through the air everywhere and are programed to find and destroy weapons when they see them. Of course this would set of an arms race of its own between new, never before seen, undetectable weapons that could evade these nanobots. And it would also lead to autoimmune attacks where the nanobots misidentify a weapon or are used as a weapon themselves to suppress ideological foes.

The future is going to be weirder than we can possibly imagine.

Nagel’s New Book “Mind and Cosmos”

It is fascinating to see that while at least some chunks of continental philosophers are moving into terrain that has been more traditionally analytic territory, there are some analytic philosophers who are moving in the opposite direct. Anytime the wires cross like this it gets me really really excited.

It looks like Thomas Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos is bound to be controversal, especially for its teleological aspect, but these are the bits that get me excited:

The modern materialist approach to life has utterly failed to explain such central features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, or value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology….In spite of the great achievements of reductive materialism, it is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least of being open to their possibility.

Are Rich People Unethical?

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