Inside Job trailer

Bureaucracy Joke

from http://www.smilespedia.com/glossary/countries_jokes/usa_jokes/

Bureaucracy lives forever – [Smilespedia]

The US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that’s the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English expatriates.

Why did the English people build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.

Why did “they” use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that’s the spacing of the old wheel ruts.

So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

Thus, we have the answer to the original questions. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification (Military Spec) for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. MilSpecs and Bureaucracies live forever.

So, the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse’s ?%! came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war horses.

—

There’s an interesting extension of the story about railroad gauge and horses’ behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.

The railroad line to the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses’.

So a major design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a horse’s ass!

From: backdoorbroadcasting.net

Slavoj Žižek – Screening Thought: The Media’s Philosophical Problem

Event date: 4 May 2011
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH

Slavoj Žižek

Screening Thought: The Media’s Philosophical Problem

Continental philospher Slavoj Žižek and Paul A. Taylor

(author of Žižek and The Media) explore the difficulty

of conveying philosophical ideas within today’s media.

Increasingly, intelligence is only tolerated in pre-approved

and reassuringly non-challenging forms – deprecatory

humour (Stephen Fry), decaffeinated reasoning

(Alain de Botton), or suspiciously grand narratives

(Simon Schama). Žižek himself is constantly

pigeonholed by such media clichés as

‘the Elvis of cultural theory’ and

‘the Marx Brother’. This event sets out to question

‘what can be done?’ by serious thought in a

culture of sound bites. Is the best that media

philosophers can hope for to ‘Try again, fail again, fail better’?

Video: Living in the End Times

song by Dead Milkmen

Commodify Your Dissent
Commodify Your Dissent
Who will sponsor my green revolution?
Will you buy the rights to my class war?
Purchase the t-shirts and the audio version of the book
They took your anger and polished up
Then they sold it back to you
They took your anger and repackaged it
And there's nothing you can do

Put your name on my new army's designer uniforms
Rebellion and subversion will make your Rom-Com cool
You'll capture that "indie" feel that the kids are crazy for
They took your frustrations and dressed them up
Before a focus group
They painted your frustrations in earth tones colors
And there's nothing you can do

Country music used to be about music and not about the county
There once was a time when rap was dangerous
Now flag-waving idiots and millionaire illiterates dance across the screen
Johnny Cash died for you

This sense of outrage can be yours if the price is right
Galleries and Poetry readings Jingles and cartoons
This is the river in which we've learned to swim
Sub-culture vultures circle above
The great unread white and blue
And there's nothing you can do

Country music used to be about music and not about the county
There once was a time when rap was dangerous
Now flag-waving idiots and millionaire illiterates dance across the screen
Jam Master Jay died for you

C'mon Bourgeoisie and get behind me
Captains of industry I'm waiting for your calls
Operators are standing by so don't delay
Your parents are reading hipster lit
And they try to dress like you
They took your anger and repackaged it
And there's nothing you can do

Punks, Goths, and Rivetheads disappeared into the mall
Just like the yippies, and the beatniks, and freaks
This is the river in which we've learned to swim
And this is the river in which we will all drown

new Living in the End Times afterword in Jacobin

from VersoBooks.com

at http://www.versobooks.com/authors/2-slavoj-zizek

Žižek and the Jacobin spirit unite in the latest installment of Jacobin magazine. In their Summer 2011 issue, the young quarterly publication known for its consistent quality and invigorating critical spirit will feature a timely excerpt from the new paperback edition of Slavoj Žižek's Living in the End Times.

The excerpt, part of an extensive new afterword written especially for the paperback edition, explores the de-fetishisation and de-mystification of both violence and democracy as necessary conditions for revolutionary Truth.

[....]

The excerpt ("The Jacobin Spirit") is online in Jacobin

http://jacobinmag.com/archive/issue3/zizek.html

Slavoj Zizek – Masterclass – The Limits of Hegel

Slavoj Zizek – Masterclass – The Limits of Hegel


http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/03/slavoj-zizek-the-limits-of-hegel/