>Why monarchy sucks

>Victoria, the Crown Princess of Sweden, will marry Daniel Westling in the summer of 2010. That’s great! I wish them the best of luck.
And that’s about it.
Now check the video below (it’s not a joke!). This is Sweden 2009. It’s like Monty Python in the 1970’s, making fun of King Arthur in the early 6th century!
That should be enough to clarify why monarchy sucks.



>Banksy and The Cans Festival

>People in Sweden are upset over some old clip called “Territorial Pissing“. The debate is ridiculous – as always in the land where it’s illegal to carry a spraycan. (If you want my opinions on the matter, read Hynek Pallas’ column (in Swedish) here and here.)
Last year, London decided to hail its’ street artists with the awesome Cans Festival by transforming a whole street into an art exhibition, free for everyone to enjoy and where the public was encouraged to add to the exhibition with their own art. “Make your mark!”
The exhibition took place in an abandoned tunnel formely used by taxis which was vacated when the owner Eurostar shut it down. Banksy – world famous graffiti artist – found the tunnel and with the help of Eurostar turned the idea into reality.
Banksy: In the space of a few hours with a couple of hundred cans of paint I’m hoping we can transform a dark forgotten filth pit into an oasis of beautiful art.
Watch more photos here.










And as a tribute to NUG, here’s a previously posted video.

>The Selfish Gene

>I know absolutely nothing when it comes to evolutionary biology and zoology or whatever it’s called. I know I love sex, but that’s about it. I believe sex is a part of evolution… ;)
Nevertheless, having read Richard Dawkins‘ amazing book The God Delusion (I wrote a bit about it here. Also check steve austin’s runthrough (in Swedish) here.), I decided to try his old masterpiece The Selfish Gene. I’ve come across the title several times when reading about religion, and especially when reading what the Young Earth creationists have to say. These comedians seriously believe that the universe is less than 10,000 years old. It is estimated that 47% of Americans hold this view, and almost 10% of Christian colleges teach it. No wonder the world is a fucked up place!

However, when reading The Selfish Gene I’m so fascinated by this whole thing called existence, I’m almost willing to submit to the idea of Intelligent Design and whatever the hell these crazies (EDIT: the creationists) are talking about. It’s really that amazing. There’s a lot more to evolution than many people realise. And I mean a lot more!
Dawkins, just as in The God Delusion, argues like the professional he is, but it’s never a dull read and even people who aren’t the slightest interested in the theory of evolution should enjoy this book if they only gave it a fair chance. It’s not hard going and Dawkins provides a lot of interesting examples that’ll make your brain flip because they’re pretty mindbending and thought-provoking.
I don’t know, maybe die hard biologists think Dawkins’ simplifying and dramatising ideas, often using sweeping statements, are laughable. I like it, though.
But what struck me, me being a Spenglerian (or at least having read a lot of Spengler stuff and liked it), is that Dawkins’ argumentation leaves little room for the influence of culture and individuality when it comes to human development. Even so, he apparently coins the term ”meme” in this book, meaning ”a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, suggesting that such “selfish” replication may also model human culture, in a different sense” – or ”a unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices; such units or elements transmit from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena”.
I have the feeling I will return to this book when reading Spengler further on…

Anyway, this is probably the best popular science book I’ve ever read. If you decide to read it, make sure you get the 30th anniversary edition (yes, it was originally published in 1976!), since it includes a very large selection of notes which offer an additional perspective to many topics.
As for the title, The Selfish Gene: it’s kind of a metaphor describing the behaviour of genes, where altruism is an integral part of the so called ”selfishness”.

I read Charles Darwin‘s On the Origin of Species some 15 years ago, and I think that kind of got me started on the anti-Christian (left hand) path, and I’m re-reading it right now.
Still, I feel I know nothing. Like Manuel.

>Dead morality

>

Let us consider the other case of so-called morality, the case of breeding, a particular race and kind. The most magnificent example of this is furnished by Indian morality, sanctioned as religion in the form of “the law of Manu.” Here the task set is to breed no less than four races at once: one priestly, one warlike, one for trade and agriculture, and finally a race of servants, the Sudras. Obviously, we are here no longer among animal tamers: a kind of man that is a hundred times milder and more reasonable is the condition for even conceiving such a plan of breeding. One heaves a sigh of relief at leaving the Christian atmosphere of disease and dungeons for this healthier, higher, and wider world. How wretched is the New Testament compared to Manu, how foul it smells!
Yet this organization too found it necessary to be terrible–this time not in the struggle with beasts, but with their counter-concept, the unbred man, the mishmash man, the chandala. And again it had no other means for keeping him from being dangerous, for making him weak, than to make him sick–it was the fight with the “great number.” Perhaps there is nothing that contradicts our feeling more than these protective measures of Indian morality. The third edict, for example (Avadana-Sastra I), “on impure vegetables,” ordains that the only nourishment permitted to the chandala shall be garlic and onions, seeing that the holy scripture prohibits giving them grain or fruit with grains, or water or fire. The same edict orders that the water they need may not be taken from rivers or wells, nor from ponds, but only from the approaches to swamps and from holes made by the footsteps of animals. They are also prohibited from washing their laundry and from washing themselves, since the water they are conceded as an act of grace may be used only to quench thirst. Finally, a prohibition that Sudra women may not assist chandala women in childbirth, and a prohibition that the latter may not assist each other in this condition.
The success of such sanitary police measures was inevitable: murderous epidemics, ghastly venereal diseases, and thereupon again “the law of the knife,” ordaining circumcision for male children and the removal of the internal labia for female children. Manu himself says: “The chandalas are the fruit of adultery, incest, and crime (these, the necessary consequences of the concept of breeding). For clothing they shall have only rags from corpses; for dishes, broken pots; for adornment, old iron; for divine services, only evil spirits. They shall wander without rest from place to place. They are prohibited from writing from left to right, and from using the right hand in writing: the use of the right hand and of from-left-to-right is reserved for the virtuous, for the people of race.”

These regulations are instructive enough: here we encounter for once Aryan humanity, quite pure, quite primordial–we learn that the concept of “pure blood” is the opposite of a harmless concept. On the other hand, it becomes clear in which people the hatred, the chandala hatred, against this “humaneness” has eternalized itself, where it has become religion, where it has become genius. Seen in this perspective, the Gospels represent a document of prime importance; even more, the Book of Enoch. Christianity, sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of race, privilege: it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence. Christianity–the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base, the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favored, against “race”: the undying chandala hatred as the religion of love.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight Of the Idols (1889)

>The power of P2P

>As The Pirate Bay trial – one of the biggest trials of the Internet age – continues, the power of P2P grows stronger for every day.
About a month ago Ordfront Publishing House released the book Piraterna – De svenska fildelarna som plundrade Hollywood (The Pirates – The Swedish file sharers who pillaged Hollywood). A couple of days ago projO uploaded the audiobook version at The Pirate Bay (thanks mom, for letting me know!). The thing is there is no official version of the audiobook – projO decided to make her/his own version simply by reading the book out loud and recording at the same time and then making it all available via trackers. A perfect example of the power of file sharing!

Me, I’ve been a pirate for as long as I can remember.
Commodore 64, Turbo 250 by Mr.Z, Jan Listerud, the demoscene, Paradox, hundreds of games on one c-90 tape, floppy discs, swapper, Amiga 500/1200, BBS, StarNet, US Robotics HST, The Final Cartridge III, hiphop, double cassette decks, mixtapes, copy parties, the library (!), VHS piracy, Hong Kong movies, graffiti, Foucault, the concept of hacking, trades, death metal, punk, tape trading, IRC, anarchism, Chomsky, Flashback, Napster, CD-R, Audiogalaxy, slsknet, DC++, torrent sites, mp3-blogs, private trackers, and last but not least: Google – the very best tool the world of piracy has ever known… Sort of.
I give thanks to piracy for my huge interest in music, movies, art and literature. Piracy is the reason for my quality collection of records, DVD:s and books (not counting piracy material, of course).

Information wants to be free.

>Electronica (bc)

>In case you ever wondered what these DJ:s actually do when turning them knobs back and forth, here’s a video that might give you an idea of what’s going on. This is live beatmaking with the KORG Electribe MX.


I was heavily into the electronic music scene back in the early 90’s and I still enjoy a lot of that stuff, such as the old Warp classics: Sabres of Paradise Sabresonic, B12 Electro-Soma and Time Tourist, Black Dog Productions Bytes, Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works 85-92, Autechre Amber, everything by Plastikman… “Intelligent techno” or “Intelligent Dance Music” as it was called back then. Cheesy as fuck.
Here are some cool tracks that still kill.


Plastikman – Pakard
from the Artifakts (bc) album (1998)
Although released in 1998 the music was composed in 1994-95,
to be featured on an album called Klinik, which was scrapped by Hawtin. The (bc) is actually an acronym for “Before Consumed”, Consumed (1998) being the album that followed Musik (1994).
Richie Hawtin aka Plastikman – such an amazing producer,
a dark acid minimalist genius if there ever was one!


The Sabres of Paradise – Clock Factory
from the Sabresonic album (1993)


B12 – VOID/Comm
from the Time Tourist album (1996)


Black Dog Productions – Object Orient
from the Bytes album (1993)


Aphex Twin – Hedphelym
from the Selected Ambient Works 85-92 album (1992)
This is not really an ambient album in its true sense.
Selected Ambient Works II (1994) is more like it,
and it’s also one of the darkest and best electronic albums ever.
Check out the video below for a quick album walkthrough.


by Mattias Indy Pettersson