human galaxy
October 2011
63 posts
On January 29, 2011, Hillary Clinton told Hosni Mubarak: “We urge the Egyptian authorities not to prevent peaceful protests.”
On October 25, 2011, Oakland Police told peaceful protesters: “I hereby declare this to be an unlawful assembly. If you refuse to go now, chemical agents will be used.”
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“In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair—the only thing unavailable is red ink.” And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants—the only thing missing is the red ink: we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict—’war on terror,’ “democracy and freedom,’ ‘human rights,’ etc—are FALSE terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. You, here, you are giving to all of us red ink.”
—Slavoj Žižek in a speech given on October 10, 2011 at Occupy Wall Street (via hfml)
Drugs: Two new scientific studies reveal hallucinogens are good for your mental health(via @io9) →
io9.com
LSD and ketamine, two powerful hallucinogens, are also potential cures for depression, OCD, and anxiety. Two studies published this week, in Science and Nature, confirm that hallucinogenic drugs stimulate healthy brain activity, even promoting the growth of neurons. Ketamine and depression The…
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