Due to increasing competition for scarce natural resources, a barbarism haunts the planet. In the drive for expansion and profits, the endgame of the capitalist system promises imperialism, domination of impoverished peoples and an ecological nightmare. The capitalist path is a death trap, but there is a just, people-based alternative: Socialism. In this wide-ranging interview, Prof. Michael Lebowitz discusses his latest book, The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development.

Marcocoeloma trispinosum decorator crab with Zoanthus sp. polyps
 
Here’s some absolutely stunning and hypnotic HD videos from a marine art collective called MORPHOLOGIC. It’s true color-pallet-bliss.

MORPHOLOGIC is a scientific art endeavor led by marine biologist Colin Foord and musician Jared McKay. With the aquarium as our primary medium, we explore the artistic possibilities of living coral reef organisms via HD vi and site-specific artworks.

Our laboratory/studio is a state certified aquaculture facility perpetuating marine life within the confines of downtown Miami. Working in conjunction with biologists from the Université de Provence in Marseille, France, we are developing a living genetic database, aquaculture techniques, and biological assays of coral species.

Sit back, relax and let the beauty sooth ya.

 
More marine gorgeousness after the jump…

 
Incredible and utterly frightening video of three men driving through a wildfire in Tamboles, Russia. What were they thinking?! 

 
(via Doobybrain)

 
PETA’s ‘Meat Tray Demonstration’ yesterday in Times Square featured bloodied human beings wrapped in meat trays like slabs of beef. The point is a good one. Flesh is flesh, no matter the source. And seeing humans depicted as steaks and pork chops puts the whole concept of eating creatures with faces into grisly perspective. Meat is murder.
 
Read about the demonstration at the Peta Files.

 
François Vautier says, “I installed an ant colony inside my scanner five years ago. I scanned the nest each week.”
 
Wow! This is pretty amazing stuff!
 
(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)

Smog makes it hard to see the Los Angeles Civic Center on Jan. 5, 1948. Photo: Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive/UCLA Library
 
In this age of climate-change consciousness, we’ve been thinking of pollution in epic-scale terms for so many decades that it’s become difficult to perceive it locally or episodically. On Wired.com’s This Day in Tech blog, Jess McNally notes  that on this day 67 years ago, residents of Los Angeles initially suspected that the unseasonable eye-stinging haze descending on their city was a Japanese chemical attack:

As residents would later find out, the fog was not from an outside attacker, but from their own vehicles and factories. Massive wartime immigration to a city built for cars had made L.A. the largest car market the industry had ever seen. But the influx of cars and industry, combined with a geography that traps fumes like a big bowl, had caught up with Angelenos.

 

Susan Morrow (left) and Linda Hawkins wipe tears from their eyes on a downtown street during a smoggy day in October 1964. Photo: Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive/UCLA Library
 
It took Arie Jan Haagen-Smit, a Dutch scientist working at the California Institute of Technology, to point that out, but that wasn’t until the early ‘50s. Although the term smog—a portmanteau of smoke and fog—was coined in the early 20th century, L.A. made it truly famous.

Check out Wired’s fascinating selection of photos from the UCLA Library depicting the Southland’s struggle against smog from the 1940s through the 1960s.

 
Stunning video of a timestamp lightning storm slowed down 300x. This definitely gives a new meaning to “don’t mess with Mother Nature.” Don’t.
 
Update: Video was removed. Please enjoy this crappy lightning storm instead.

 
(via Interweb3000)

 
Marshall McLuhan would have turned 99 years old today, and his status as the god-daddy of media studies still seems pretty rock-solid. I wasn’t previously aware of how often the Canadian theorist appeared on TV, and was especially unaware of his November 1967 duet with New York novelist Norman Mailer on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show The Summer Way, bravely moderated by Ken Lefolii.

Recovered from recent treatment for a benign brain tumor he suffered while teaching in New York, McLuhan gamely tugs at a few of Mailer’s pretensions. Mailer is recently back from levitating the Pentagon with the Yippies, with the siege of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention in his future.

McLuhan pops off a bunch of gems, including:

The planet is no longer nature, it’s now the content of an artwork.
…
Nature has ceased to exist…it needs to be programmed.
…
The environment is not visible, it’s information—it’s electronic.
…
The present is only faced by any generation by the artist.

Communications maven Michael Hinton goes speculative on his hero’s televised meeting with the Jersey-raised boxer-novelist, but of course it’s best to just check the thing out yourself.
 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
As the art of urban projection has grown, its scope has started blasting out into contexts beyond simply pretty pictures on building. Yekpare is one of the most amazing pieces in the format that I’ve seen yet. Art-directed by Deniz Kader and Candaş Şişman of the firm Nerdworking and soundtracked by Görkem Şen, Yekpare is a project that douses Istanbul’s Haydarpaşa Train Station in the symbological 8,500 year history of the city. From the writeup:

The story embraces symbols from Pagans to Roman Empire, from Byzantine Empire to Latin Empire, and finally from Ottoman Empire to Istanbul at the present day…
Haydarpaşa Train Station, with its brilliant architectural forms, is the building on which the story is projected. The connection between middle east to west has been provided by Istanbul and Haydarpaşa since 1906..
The project’s conceptual, political and geographical positioning, the location’s depth of field and the fact that the entire show can be watched from Kadıköy coast; make “Yekpare” a dramatic presentation.

‘YEKPARE’ (monolithic) from nerdworking on Vimeo.

 
Talk about timeless. Journalist Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us came out in 2007 just as the implications of the mortgage crisis started coming into focus. This video speculating on how the earth swallows a house over 500 years was produced in conjunction with the publication, and in view of so many foreclosed American houses trashed out by their owners and the oily cancer temporarily zombifying the Gulf of Mexico, it seems rather tranquil.
 
Get: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman [Paperback]

 
For most of us, our jobs are shitty only in the figurative, but not literal sense. That’s not true for Julio Cou Cámara, who literally spends his workday swimming in excrement, urine and other waste products in the sewers of Mexico City. Because of a odd way the city’s sewage system was constructed, if a blockage occurs, it can cause flooding immediately—or worse—so the government employs two full time divers who jump into the stinky muck and then grope—blindly, of course—to find the obstuctions and remove them before any damage is done. Yucky, yes, but fascinating!

From a long and interesting article on Edible Geography:

People often ask me what I see down there. Do I find money or jewellery?  No, you can’t really see any of those things. Montezuma’s treasure may be down there, but I will most likely never find it, because you can’t see anything—all you can do is feel blockages.

In terms of things we come across: we find lots of cigarette butts. I’ve had blockages caused by pieces of carpets, pieces of cars, or even body parts. Removing these kinds of things from the sewage is part of our work. People who work nearby or are walking past think, “Look at that crazy guy, he’s getting into the sewage.” But yeah, of course—that’s just what we do.

A normal day for me… well, what can I tell you? I go into the office, and if there are no emergencies then we work on maintaining the equipment. This equipment has to be in one hundred percent perfect condition—it mustn’t fail. My other colleague and I have our gear ready at all times. We work during the night as well as during the day. It’s not as though day or night makes a difference for us, because we can’t see anything down there anyway.

Julio the Sewer Diver (Edible Geography)

Deep-Slime Divers Keep Vast and Smelly Sewers Flowing (Washington Post)

Thank you Paul Gallagher!

 
The global metropolis is seeing a golden age of street art nowadays, as seen in the evolution from spraycan through stencil/wheatpaste and on to other outdoor installations. The Luzinterruptus crew from Madrid has been doing some amazing light-work lately with some compelling underlying themes.
Their latest, Ejército de platillos volantes desechables (above), saw them land an army of disposable flying saucers in Parque del Oeste, the home of the rebuilt ancient Egyptian Temple of Debod.
 

 
Before that, the Luz’ers’ Publicidad herida de muerte (Mortally Wounded Advertising) commented on the thick layer of posters that cover the city’s walls by making them bleed fire.
 

 
Some months ago, curator Sebastian Buck in Good Magazine surfaced Luz’s Tanta Policía, para tan Poca Gente… (Lots of Cops for So Few People), in which the crew protested the increased police presence in their East Villagesque Malasana neighborhood by decorating 50 random cars with homemade replicas of the city’s official blue siren.

 
Today, writing on Esquire’s Politics blog, Esquire’s executive editor Mark Warren posted this rather succinct piece about what GOP Rep. Joe Barton (TX)—a man who has received over $1.5 million in campaign donations from oil and gas interests—had to say about the BP oil spill catastrophe in his “apology” to BP and what it says—LOUDLY AND CLEARLY—about the Republican Party and whose side they are on. Hint: It’s not the people of the Gulf coast and it sure as hell ain’t mother nature’s side either. This is an ASTONISHING admission and something everyone in this country—even the Tea partiers—should read. The ones who can read, I mean…

Just when you thought nothing could improve upon the statement released yesterday evening by the Republican Study Committee’s chairman Tom Price of Georgia — which attacked the deal struck at the White House yesterday providing for the $20 billion escrow account to compensate the people of the Gulf Coast for damages as “Chicago-style shakedown politics” — came the unthinkable: This morning, Texas Republican Joe Barton apologized to Tony Hayward — twice — and said that he was ashamed that such a thing could occur in America.

He apologized.

Now, it was puzzling enough that the Republicans would think it wise to attack a deal that seeks to make American citizens whole from damages caused by a foreign corporation. But it is incomprehensible that even a lobby puppet such as Barton would place the Republican Party squarely on the side of the corporation and against the people of the Gulf Coast.

In so doing, in one five-minute opening statement in a hearing that otherwise seemed to be yielding nothing meaningful, Joe Barton may have changed the calculus of this fall’s elections.

His party will protest and say otherwise, but Barton has revealed something quite extreme and very ugly about what he and his colleagues truly believe.

—snip—

So today, in Washington D.C., Joe Barton has placed himself and his party so far outside the bounds of decency that he has even Tony Hayward shaking his head.

It is important to note that Joe Barton is not popularly regarded in his caucus as a whackjob. Rather, as the ranking Republican on Energy and Commerce, he is well-respected. He cannot be marginalized as an outlier. This moment cannot simply be allowed to pass. And its importance cannot be overstated.

George W. Bush once famously said: “You’re either with us or against us.”

Indeed.

 
THERE SHOULD BE A MOVE TO IMPEACH THIS SON OF A BITCH TOMORROW. WHAT ARE THE PEOPLE OF TEXAS WAITING FOR AFTER THIS?!?!?! NEED ANY MORE EVIDENCE THAT JOE BARTON IS A FUCK? I DON’T THINK SO!
 
The Joe Barton Apology Tour Is About to Bring Down the GOP (Esquire)
 
(Via Esquire’s newly minted News and Features editor at Esquire.com, Dangerous Minds pal Marty Beckerman! Congrats are in order for both Mr. Beckerman and for one of the most venerated magazines in American, Esquire, for making such an inspired hire as Marty. Salut!)

Photo by Lily E. via Wonkette
 
This pretty much sums it up.
 
All of America Captured In Single Photograph