*You will find the pacific ocean:*
*next to the pacific sun:*
*the low caldera has flown:*
*all violence has gone past us.*
*
*
* *PRINCE BEEN, THE PACIFIER

*Ped-antic: *
the foot antique.

*Sem-antic:*
the seed antique.

****/v *

>From the guilded armor of the astrological totem:
from the ironic purity of gold (acoustic) leaf:
emerges:
the “fitted together”:
*bread:*
the electronic papacy of the tessellated
(pixellated) coin-incident:
astern:
as it jambs up: sus-pends: frames:
the (sanitary) (souled) (syntactic):
Terminus of [*arT*].

****/v*

The Labour Party:
mother courage:
festivals of parturition.

****/v *

The Future:
hair extensions:
winged apotheosis:
the gambol of the flosses:
(sartorial reel):
*the dreamt: *
redemptive suture.

****/z*

The garden of Eden:
already functions as an *after-* life:
the bibles cannot tell:
of *the numberless time:*
before the wall:
the building of the wall:
*the moment* of their confinement.

****/A*

just the first of three stanzas, the latter two seemingly thinner than this first one. gloomy a bit, but the evident strength is marvelous.

This article/essay by Michael Pollan is an extremely well-framed case-in-point about how a techno-social system (TSS) will — with science leading the way — reconfigure the energy flows (FOOD!) that we are immersed within. And how evolved sub-systems with a Machiavellian stake in the distribution of power in the TSS will fall all over themselves to retain the power they already have, or will develop new ways to siphon the power away from individuals participating in the system. Individual participants, aggregated as “the population” are still the main source of accumulated hierarchic power in the system. Anyone hoping to accumulate a power-base has to, at some level, attract the attention (life-energy/life-time) of that base. The food industry (and its constituent sub-industries) is no exception, nor is the ‘big science’ sector (which has to justify its existence through churning out ‘sensible’ information (nutrition research: always filtered, dumbed-down, by intercessory media voices)) — and neither of these ‘players’ are willing to be ‘regulated’ by the government which subsidizes their existence. Remember all those “drink milk” ads some years back? All the subsidies have gone underground, so is mostly invisible to the undiscerning eye. The consumer only sees the contents of the grocery-store shelves.
(more …)

52 Finance and Insurance
521 Monetary Authorities – Central Bank
5211 Monetary Authorities – Central Bank
52111 Monetary Authorities – Central Bank
521110 Monetary Authorities – Central Bank
522 Credit Intermediation and Related Activities
5221 Depository Credit Intermediation
52211 Commercial Banking
522110 Commercial Banking
52212 Savings Institutions
522120 Savings Institutions
52213 Credit Unions
522130 Credit Unions
52219 Other Depository Credit Intermediation
522190 Other Depository Credit Intermediation
5222 Nondepository Credit Intermediation
52221 Credit Card Issuing
522210 Credit Card Issuing
52222 Sales Financing
522220 Sales Financing
52229 Other Nondepository Credit Intermediation
522291 Consumer Lending
522292 Real Estate Credit
522293 International Trade Financing
522294 Secondary Market Financing
522298 All Other Nondepository Credit Intermediation
5223 Activities Related to Credit Intermediation
52231 Mortgage and Nonmortgage Loan Brokers
522310 Mortgage and Nonmortgage Loan Brokers
52232 Financial Transactions Processing, Reserve, and Clearinghouse Activities
522320 Financial Transactions Processing, Reserve, and Clearinghouse Activities
52239 Other Activities Related to Credit Intermediation
522390 Other Activities Related to Credit Intermediation
523 Securities, Commodity Contracts, and Other Financial Investments and Related Activities
5231 Securities and Commodity Contracts Intermediation and Brokerage
52311 Investment Banking and Securities Dealing
523110 Investment Banking and Securities Dealing
52312 Securities Brokerage
523120 Securities Brokerage
52313 Commodity Contracts Dealing
523130 Commodity Contracts Dealing
52314 Commodity Contracts Brokerage
523140 Commodity Contracts Brokerage
5232 Securities and Commodity Exchanges
52321 Securities and Commodity Exchanges
523210 Securities and Commodity Exchanges
5239 Other Financial Investment Activities
52391 Miscellaneous Intermediation
523910 Miscellaneous Intermediation
52392 Portfolio Management
523920 Portfolio Management
52393 Investment Advice
523930 Investment Advice
52399 All Other Financial Investment Activities
523991 Trust, Fiduciary, and Custody Activities
523999 Miscellaneous Financial Investment Activities
524 Insurance Carriers and Related Activities
5241 Insurance Carriers
52411 Direct Life, Health, and Medical Insurance Carriers
524113 Direct Life Insurance Carriers
524114 Direct Health and Medical Insurance Carriers
52412 Direct Insurance (except Life, Health, and Medical) Carriers
524126 Direct Property and Casualty Insurance Carriers
524127 Direct Title Insurance Carriers
524128 Other Direct Insurance (except Life, Health, and Medical) Carriers
52413 Reinsurance Carriers
524130 Reinsurance Carriers
5242 Agencies, Brokerages, and Other Insurance Related Activities
52421 Insurance Agencies and Brokerages
524210 Insurance Agencies and Brokerages
52429 Other Insurance Related Activities
524291 Claims Adjusting
524292 Third Party Administration of Insurance and Pension Funds
524298 All Other Insurance Related Activities
525 Funds, Trusts, and Other Financial Vehicles
5251 Insurance and Employee Benefit Funds
52511 Pension Funds
525110 Pension Funds
52512 Health and Welfare Funds
525120 Health and Welfare Funds
52519 Other Insurance Funds
525190 Other Insurance Funds
5259 Other Investment Pools and Funds
52591 Open-End Investment Funds
525910 Open-End Investment Funds
52592 Trusts, Estates, and Agency Accounts
525920 Trusts, Estates, and Agency Accounts
52593 Real Estate Investment Trusts
525930 Real Estate Investment Trusts
52599 Other Financial Vehicles
525990 Other Financial Vehicles

NAICS code

Your skin is translucent in the still air of this room.
Clay is prerogative; eyes are derivative.
We live in the shadows of immense hands
like death that will take our sex away.

Bridal days and wedding nights of grace and youth
and doors opening in women.

Music is a child of the grass
and teaches us the cost of frostbite.
We can’t separate the misunderstandings
or wash dishes in the music-box.

We talk too much and spend the word on our burning hands.
A cinder of a joke catches in our throat
and you laugh to hold onto the hurrying waters.

A fern is a fan that resembles a rainbow
and the last ghosts of Indians are asking for food
in the amber waves of dying grain.

– Daniela Gioseffi

The greatest joy, and the greatest triumph, in art, comes at the moment when, realizing to the fullest your grip over the medium, you deliberately sacrifice it in the hope of discovering a vital hidden truth within you. It comes like a reward for patience — this freedom of mastery which is born of the hardest discipline. Then no matter what you do or say, you are absolutely right and nobody dare criticize you. I sense this very often in looking at Picasso’s work. The great freedom and spontaneity he reveals is born, one feels, because of the impact, the pressure, the support of the whole being which, for an endless period, has been subservient to the discipline of the spirit. The most careless gesture is as right, as true, as valid, as the most carefully planned strokes. This I know, and nobody could convince me to the contrary. Picasso here is only demonstrating a wisdom of life which the sage practices on another, higher level.

This morning, awake at five o’clock, the room almost dark still, I lay awake quietly meditating about the essay I would get up to write, and at the same time, as though playing a duet, watching the gradual change of colors in my paintings beside the bed, as the light slowly increased. I had the strange sensation then of imagining what might happen to those colors should the light continue to increase in strength beyond full daylight. And from thinking about the unknown color gamut to the forms themselves and then to their significance — what a world of conjecture I explored. In that moment I was able, so to speak, to place myself in a future which may one day be realized. I saw not only what I might one day be able to do, but also I saw this — that the anticipation of the event was an augur of the deed itself. Suddenly I realized how it had been with the struggle to express myself in writing. I saw back to the period when I had the most intense, exalted visions of words written and spoken, but in fact could only mutter brokenly. Today I see that my steadfast desire was alone responsible for whatever progress or mastery I have made. The reality is always there, and it is preceded by vision. And if one keeps looking steadily the vision crystallizes into fact or deed. There is no escaping it. It doesn’t matter what route one travels — every route brings you eventually to the goal. “All roads lead to Heaven,” is the Chinese proverb. If one accepted that fully, one would get there so much more quickly. One should not be worrying about the degree of “success” obtained by each and every effort, but only concentrate on maintaining the vision, keeping it pure and steady. The rest is sleight-of-hand work in the dark, a genuine automatic process, no less somnambulistic because accompanied by pains and aches. — Henry Miller

ALPHANUMERIC
Character set including both letters and numerals and usually other characters. (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
CONTROL CODE
A fixed length machine encoding of a control code name.
CONTROL CODE NAME
The English alphanumeric expression of security classification and any need-to-know restrictions for an entity of data or program,
CONTROL MODE
Mode in which a processor can execute the full set of operation codes,
DATA BASE
The store of information records being maintained’ for users; includes programs as well.
DESCRIPTOR
Instruction for input/output control processor execution,
ELECTRONIC DATA PROCESSING (EDP)
Data processing by equipment predominantly electronic.
ENTITY
A string of bits, characters, or words having an associated control code.
EXECUTIVE CONTROL PROGRAM (ECP)
Program mat controls the secure execution of user programs by assigning hardware and performing security related operations.
FAIL SAFE
Program or processing operation terminates automatically whenever proper responses to positive checks are not received.
FILE
A related information grouping, e, g, logical records, card images, etc.
FLAG BIT
A bit contained in memory words and used for control purposes rather than actual user processing.
FORMATTED FILE SYSTEM
An information storage and retrieval system using a file design having fixed, periodic, and variable parts.
INPUT/OUTPUT CONTROL PROCESSOR (IOCP)
A limited purpose processor serving as intermediary between main memory and terminal units.
LOGICAL RECORD
A group of related items stored in one or more related physical records, depending upon length.
MODE
Processor condition as determined by state of a redundant set of flip-flops.
MULTIPROCESSING
Executing one or more programs simultaneously on more than one processor.
MULTIPROGRAMMING
Executing more than one program, time interleaved.
OBJECT
A contiguous string of instructions, data, or working storage required by a program.
ON-LINE
A terminal unit having direct connection with a unit buffer in the input/output control processor.
PERIPHERAL UNIT
Any type of input/output equipment connected with a unit buffer in the input/output control processor.
PHYSICAL RECORD
The smallest directly addressable portion of the data base.
PRIVILEGED INSTRUCTION
One executable by a processor only in control mode.
PROGRAM REFERENCE TABLE
Contains the name and/or descriptor for each object referenced by a program, and the base address and memory bounds for objects in high-speed memory.
SECURITY LEVEL
The maximum security classification authorized for information handled by an equipment, as determined by the equipment characteristics or its location.
TERMINAL UNIT
An input or output device in a work station.
THIN-THREAD ANALYSIS
Description of complex system operation or theory by following a single line, step-by-step, from start to finish, ignoring the
secondary branches or ideas involved.
USER
Any authorized equipment operator, maintenance person, or intelligence research analyst. The system supervisor (or supervisors) is an authorizer as well as user.
USER’S CONTROL PROFILE
Completely describes each user’s access authorization for information in the system in terms of control code lists by access type (read only or read and write). It also includes the user’s key pattern information for identification plus authentication information for validating that the user really is who the user’s key pattern indicate.
he is.
USER’S KEY
A physical card or key unique to a user which must be present in the user’s key pattern generator at a work station to permit information
flow with any terminal unit in that work station.
USER’S KEY PATTERN
An electrical logical bit pattern resulting from the user’s key pattern generator at a work station which initiates user identification
and is required for information interchange with any terminal unit in that work station for that user.
USER’S KEY PATTERN GENERATOR
A transducer from user’s key to user’s key pattern.
USER MODE
Mode in which a processor can execute only a partial set of operation codes; excluded are the privileged instructions.
WORK STATION
A separate, physically secure, area with its own user’s key pattern generator in which the terminal units can be operated by only one user at a time.

– SECURITY TECHNIQUES FOR EDP OF MULTILEVEL CLASSIFIED INFORMATION (RADC-TR-65-415)

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
– Randall Jarrell

This putters through my Inbox:

The Critical Engineer considers Engineering to be the most transformative language of our time, shaping the way we move, communicate and think. It is the work of the Critical Engineer to study and exploit this language, exposing its influence.

The Critical Engineer considers any technology depended upon to be both a challenge and a threat. The greater the dependence on a technology the greater the need to study and expose its inner workings, regardless of ownership or legal provision.
…

more at http://criticalengineering.org/

Yes, engineering is a package of protocols which guide much of the social energies of the present and recent (long!) past. Raising the topic is quite important as a precursor to altering the influence that it imposes (or that we submit to). The nature of the threat includes death as an outcome, the nature of the seduction is life. The challenge is first to bring such ideas as this to the surface for dialogue, and then comes the task of mapping the connections between ‘everyday life’ and the dependencies on (the) engineering (mentality).

I spent an uncomfortable evening with Kittler and a handful of Austrians at a restaurant in Linz back in 1998. It was uncomfortable because of the language gap. My German was worse than his English. He states elsewhere in the interview by John Armitage (excerpted below) how shy he is, and that goes a long way to explaining the dis-comfort. I ended up talking mostly with his American-born assistant before cashing in early to get some sleep — I had to catch a sunrise train from Linz on to Copenhagen.

JA: Virilio argues that war is his ‘laboratory’ and for you too war, it seems, is the ‘mother of all technologies’. Yet, unlike Virilio, you are deeply concerned with war as an international mechanism of technology transfer. What, for you, is the significance of, for example, the transfer of technologies such as Nazi Germany’s V2 rocket programme to America after the Second World War?

FK: What I can tell you is that I believe that war is at least the mother of all high-speed information and communications technologies. Like Pynchon, I am very interested in the topic of technology transfer. The key question for me is, what technologies or which kinds of technology transfer gave rise to the contemporary American Empire? Obviously, the first source of the American Empire is the British Empire which was originally driven by a coal-based fleet system but which has, since the Second World War, been transformed into an oil-based system founded on air power. Naturally, the second source is Nazi Germany, which made great strides in the technological development not merely of the V2 rocket but also of the tank. For instance, by 1939, Nazi Germany was the only country in the world that had a radio in every one of its army’s tanks. Otherwise the Blitzkrieg simply would not have been possible. Of course, it did not take long for the Americans to adopt this idea and by the end of 1942 there were radios in US tanks. But, as we have discussed before, war also has a way of transferring its language too, as when today’s high-technology businesses in particular speak of ‘logistics’, ‘strategy’ and even of ‘duty officers’, terms which all arise from the military-industrial complex. It is for these and other reasons that I think that US President Dwight Eisenhower spoke brilliantly when he coined the term military-industrial complex, for he saw immediately the connections between war, technology and commerce. However, it is difficult for us Europeans to investigate American military and techno-scientific history, a subject that has been well researched by the Americans themselves, as acquiring even declassified documents on the Second World War, and so on is still very hard, as I know from long experience. Yet I must confess that I cannot stand on American soil with much pleasure. In fact, my antipathy to America is one of the main reasons why I often avoid talking about the military-industrial complex since for me to talk about the devil is to talk with the devil. As a good friend of mine said to me lately, we in Germany should not say a word about America’s war on Iraq or speak any longer of the seemingly endless necessity of reforming Germany. We should not so much forget all this as not talk about it. Instead, we should focus on changing ourselves and speak about other things. So I asked him what we should discuss as an alternative and he answered that we should talk about love in Europe.

from Theory Culture Society 2006 23:17

and another piece on Kittler by Tom McCarthy . . . good for the personality profile.

and a long reverie by former student Eugen Leitl . . .

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group . . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. — Edward Sapir, ‘The Status of Linguistics as a Science,’ Language, Vol. V, pp. 209-210 (1929).