AdamSmith

We live to serve.

Well... Several self-consuming jokes present themselves. Of course. But judge for yourself. Here's the book: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm For the record, most of the Academie Frogcaise leaves me cold. This one is different.

David Miranda Is Nobody’s Errand Boy When Glenn Greenwald’s 28-year-old Brazilian partner was detained in London this summer while transporting documents related to the bombshell Edward Snowden story, many assumed he was unfairly roped into a situation he didn’t understand. That couldn’t be further from the truth. posted on November 14, 2013 at 10:40pm EST Natasha Vargas-Cooper BuzzFeed Contributor Photograph by Jimmy Chalk for BuzzFeed David Miranda and I are debating whether or not to take off our shirts in the middle of a throbbing dance floor inside the heart of gay Rio de Janeiro. Silvery blue lights and men the size of sparrows swirl around us as we gauge the euphoria of the crowd. “It’s not that kind of party, honey!” Miranda shouts hoarsely over the Brazilian dance mix of Ke$ha’s “Die Young.” We opt instead to gulp the night air. We pound our cocktails and bound out of the split-level nightclub to chat and smoke on the cracked Portuguese-style pavement. A thin white man in his mid-thirties with birdy lips, piss-water blonde hair, and uncool jeans follows us out the door. Miranda and I bullshit with some fellow revelers on the patio: a pudgy art dealer, a redhead, and a bespectacled line cook who has a “thing” for Rhoda Morgenstern. The man with the bird lips lingers close by. Miranda, 28, dusky, pillow mouthed, chiseled, with dark wine eyes, is too fine a specimen not to be cruised tonight, but Bird Lips is standing a little too close and appears, by the jutting of his chin and the self-conscious tilt of his head, to be eavesdropping on our conversation. Miranda and I shoot each other a wary glance and move back inside. Just as we are about to lose ourselves in a Cher dubstep-banger, Bird Lips perches behind us, unmoving, and begins to stare. We traverse the dance floor; he follows. What do you call someone who believes they are being spied on? Paranoid? What if that person’s not only been spied on, but also already detained by an intelligence agency? When they hush their voice in a crowd or hold a waiter, cabbie, or a stranger at a dance club in a prolonged gaze of suspicion, do you chalk it up to being traumatized or just overcautious? If you are David Miranda, then on Nov. 3, the British government classified you in legal brief as a terrorist and a conduit for espionage. You’ve been detained in a Heathrow Airport bunker under the Terrorism Act of 2000 and interrogated for nine hours without a lawyer by unnamed U.K. officials for transporting classified documents between Berlin and Brazil. If you are David Miranda, there’s reason to believe the CIA has broken into your house and stolen your laptop. You’ve been called a spy, a hero, a lawn boy, and a drug mule. Your husband is Glenn Greenwald, MI5 agents have the passwords to your smartphone, and British border agents have probably logged on to your Skype account, so you have every reason in the world to worry why this guy is standing so fucking close to you. Miranda whips around, squares his shoulders, thrusts his face to Bird Lips’ ear, and demands to know: “What are you doing? Are you following us?” Bird Lips gets ruffled and bolts out of the club not to be seen again. “That wasn’t just me, right? He was following us!” Miranda insists over the pounding techno, “I’m not crazy, right?” Photograph by Jimmy Chalk for BuzzFeed When news of Miranda’s nine-hour detention at Heathrow broke on Aug. 19 and turned him into a household name overnight, cable news pundits and thousands of tweets percolated with speculation and far-flung theories about how willing a player Miranda was in the Glenn Greenwald–Edward Snowden surveillance scandal that had been making headlines for months. One of those theories posited that the gaping social chasm between Miranda’s and Greenwald’s backgrounds suggested that the highly educated American lawyer turned whistle-blowing journalist with a background in the ruthless world of New York corporate law had cynically manipulated his younger, slum-raised, hunky, ostensibly ignorant boyfriend into being an unwitting human courier dispatched on a highly dangerous mission. “I don’t mean to be unkind, but he was a mule,” Jeffrey Toobin, chief legal analyst for CNN, told Anderson Cooper in the days following Miranda’s detention. “He was given something — he didn’t know what it was — from one person to another at the other end of an airport.” Toobin said he believed the U.K. government was totally justified in detaining Miranda and that the Brazilian native “was lucky that they used the terrorism law” because he was ultimately not arrested. After I spent several weeks with Miranda and Greenwald in and around their home in the upscale, artist-friendly Rio neighborhood of Gavea over the last month, one thing has become very clear: David Miranda knew exactly what he was doing. To believe he was played as some type of dupe or mule by Greenwald not only ignores the real nature of their relationship but also assumes that there’s some safer way to transport sensitive documents across the globe. Is there any device more fail-safe and secure than the person you love the most? Does Apple make that sort of product? Miranda knew very well that he was traveling from Rio to Berlin to see Greenwald’s reporting partner, documentarian Laura Poitras, and that he would be returning through the U.K., all the time carrying a heavily encrypted flash drive directly related to the trove of documents that former and now notorious CIA employee Edward Snowden had vacuumed from the National Security Agency and had given to Greenwald earlier in the year. As to the relative risk of this adventure, Greenwald and Miranda knew that others who made the same trek were, in the eyes of the authorities, much “hotter” and more conspicuous than Miranda. “Numerous Guardian employees who have worked heavily on this story flew in and out of Heathrow multiple times without incident,” Greenwald says, “including when they were carrying materials.” Three weeks before Miranda’s detention, Poitras herself — who met with Snowden in Hong Kong and wrote numerous articles about the documents — flew to London, entering the U.K., and had no problems. Why would they stop someone much more peripheral like Miranda? the couple reasoned. “I have been involved in every aspect of Glenn’s life, why wouldn’t I be a part of this?” Miranda asserts over lunch at a fashion mall in Rio’s São Conrado neighborhood the next afternoon. “I think what Snowden did was heroic. Glenn and Laura’s reporting is so important. It caused a serious debate about privacy and internet freedom in my country and around the world. I’m so proud to be able to play any role at all in that. I’d go to jail for that.” His already throaty voice is a little huskier from singing along to Justin Timberlake the night before. Miranda has the day off from a cramped school week that includes a major group project on branding and marketing for a local café. Miranda is in his final year at university, where he is majoring in communications. He would ideally like to become a marketing and communications specialist for a major media company, particularly one with a thriving video game department. “Glenn and I have talked all the time about what doing these stories would do to our lives. Since we met, I’ve pushed him and supported him,” Miranda says. He starts counting on his fingers: “I’ve helped him negotiate contracts; I make sure he gets paid what he deserves — Glenn just wants to work and sometimes will do it for cheap.” Miranda’s list continues with ascending urgency. “When Glenn publishes NSA stories in foreign countries, I help reach out to press so the stories get the most exposure. For a while we considered starting our own website to publish the NSA documents; when Glenn thought The Guardian was taking too long to publish the first NSA story, I told him he had to make them know he would go somewhere else to publish if they delayed too much.” “I was in Hong Kong,” Greenwald says, referring to his first meeting with Snowden in early June. “We were eager to have the world learn about this spying as soon as possible. And we didn’t want any fear-driven institutional constraints getting in the way.” Greenwald credits Miranda with pushing him to hold The Guardian’s feet to the fire and not delay on this bombshell publication. “I had my chat box open on my laptop while talking to Guardian editors, and I had David on the phone in my ear, and he’s dictating what to write to them word by word. It was something like, ‘Please consider this my resignation if the article is not published by 5 p.m. today,’ and I was like, ‘Oh my god, David, I cannot say that!’” But Miranda kept pushing. Greenwald sent a more compromising, though still firm message. Before 5 p.m. that day, the first NSA story was published on The Guardian’s website. “David is a grown, 28-year-old man,” Greenwald says, visibly bristling at the accusation that Miranda was an exploited errand boy. “He is the most insanely willful person I have ever met; it makes me crazy sometimes. He was an orphan and had to take care of himself very early on in a way few people do. So it’s absurd to think that I could manipulate him into anything he didn’t want to do. A lot of this is pure racism, classism, and ethnocentricity: Some white Americans see a nonwhite Brazilian who grew up poor and doesn’t speak perfect English, and so disgustingly assume that he’s dumb, naïve, and easily manipulated.” Miranda’s life has been totally transformed and taken a radically different course since he laid his beach towel down next to Greenwald’s on a Rio de Janeiro beach eight years ago. “We knew we were fucking with power,” Miranda says. But what has shocked both men is that somebody engaged in a journalistic endeavor like Miranda could be labeled a terrorist by the U.K. “I guess we should have known,” says Greenwald. “This is a country with a history of repressing press freedoms, that has no constitutional guarantee of a free press. I mean, they still have a queen. Is there anything more primitive and authoritarian than a fucking monarchy?” Just how much bad blood simmers between these two men and the British government comes to the fore as Miranda recounts here, for the first time, the granular details of his Kafkaesque detention in Heathrow Airport. The news of this detention flashed globally on Aug. 19, but the chain of events that led to this incident began in an unkempt Hong Kong hotel room months earlier. Photograph by Jimmy Chalk for BuzzFeed It was June when Snowden, Greenwald, and Poitras were working out of Snowden’s cramped, littered Hong Kong hotel room with Guardian reporter Ewan MacAskill, pushing out the most explosive stories about government overreach since the Pentagon Papers. Snowden offered Greenwald some advice before he headed back Brazil with a cache of NSA documents: Make a copy and give them to someone Greenwald trusts with his life. There needed to be contingencies, Snowden told Greenwald — a backup plan should Greenwald’s archive be damaged, confiscated, or if the exiled NSA contractor should ever be captured or disappeared. “There’s only one person who fits that description, of course,” Greenwald says, reaching across the outdoor dinner table to Miranda. The floppy tropical fronds of the restaurant veranda hang motionless in the dank Brazilian dusk as Greenwald lightly brushes Miranda’s fingertips with his own. Miranda, sitting in front of a roiling fondue bowl, scrunches his lips sideways and nods with a cocksure smirk to Greenwald. “That’s right!” declares Miranda. From Hong Kong, Greenwald told Miranda by Skype — they had not yet had reason to suspect their conversations would be monitored — he would be taking Snowden’s advice and in a few days would email Miranda a heavily encrypted copy of the NSA archive to be stored on a thumb drive or a cloud, in a place that nobody but Miranda would know. Miranda would not be able to access the documents — he would not have the encryption key — but there would always be an available copy should something happen to Greenwald’s. “And that’s when it all started,” Miranda says in a once-upon-a-time tone. It was with this Skype conversation, the couple believe, that Miranda became a target not only of government surveillance but intimidation to suppress Greenwald’s journalism. “The whole thing is disgusting,” Miranda snorts. Miranda started making arrangements to fly to Berlin and stay with Poitras. The simplest reason, Miranda explains: “Laura doesn’t like to talk on the phone.” And there was plenty to talk about — primarily movie rights. Studios started courting Miranda, Greenwald, and Poitras for rights to their story since Poitras’ first images of an unshaven Snowden began to saturate the news cycle. (All signs point to a Sony-helmed production with Ed Norton perhaps playing Greenwald; Greenwald says he doesn’t care much which actor is chosen, but half-jokingly adds that only David Miranda could play David Miranda — “Who else could be so smoldering and broody?”) He planned to go Berlin to meet with Poitras and her editors to strategize on getting the best and “most serious” version of their story made into a movie, Miranda says. “Plus,” Miranda adds playfully, “I needed a vacation!” Miranda originally planned to accompany Greenwald to Hong Kong in June but stayed in Rio to complete his finals. And there was some other business related to Greenwald and Poitras’ journalism that Miranda could help out with on this trip. Originally, The Guardian was going to fly a staffer to Berlin in July to courier documents between Poitras and Greenwald for stories they were working on together. On the day scheduled for the staffer’s flight to Germany, he instead asked Poitras to just FedEx the documents to Greenwald. “The Guardian had just destroyed their hard drives under orders from the [Government Communication Headquarters], and the U.K. government was becoming increasingly threatening,” Greenwald says, a mild sympathy in his voice. “I think this employee’s supervisor was just totally freaked out.” The sympathy quickly gives way to a more incredulous agitation: “But FedEx-ing classified documents? That was obviously not something Laura or I were willing to do.” (When asked about this series of events, a spokesperson for The Guardian said over email that the paper does not comment on its “process.”) Poitras was also angered and disturbed by the suggestion. Guardian higher-ups eventually recanted and said they would be willing to have their employee fly to Berlin, but Poitras was unwilling to deal further with The Guardian over the issue. That left the question of how Greenwald would get the materials he needed. “David was going to Berlin to talk to Laura anyways,” Greenwald says, “and so he suggested that he just take the documents. Laura trusts David completely, so that became the new plan.” Because Miranda was performing a service to support articles that were to be written for The Guardian, the newspaper paid for his trip and made his travel arrangements through London. Miranda flew to Berlin on Aug. 18 and did the typical club and upscale restaurant scene with Poitras and some of her friends in and around Alexanderplatz. Poitras and Miranda hashed out some details about movie rights — she was skeptical of signing anything that gives big studios access to her film archive or work. Miranda decided toward the end of the trip to catch a later flight into London, where there was a short layover in Heathrow before continuing onto Rio. “I called the airline to change flights,” Miranda recalls, “and they wouldn’t let me. They didn’t give me any details, they just kept telling me they couldn’t do it. I knew the morning of my flight something bad was going to happen; I could feel it.” Miranda and Greenwald now suspect the U.K. government was lying in wait to grab Miranda at Heathrow, knowing that he could be carrying documents or data from Poitras. Indeed, even the Obama White House was given an advance warning of Miranda’s detention but it isn’t clear with how much lead time. “There was a heads-up that was provided by the British government,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said shortly after Miranda was grabbed. “We didn’t tell anyone about my travel plans,” Miranda says. “Only me, Glenn, and Laura and a couple of people at The Guardian knew, so obviously the only way they could know what I was doing on this trip is if they were going through our emails and Skype logs.” Miranda’s suspicions that his detention was predetermined were confirmed last week at the initial hearing on his lawsuit against the British government. The government told the court it distributed a red-flag Port Circulation Sheet to its border agents in anticipation of Miranda’s arrival: “Intelligence indicates that Miranda is likely to be involved in espionage activity which has the potential to act against the interests of U.K. national security … We assess that Miranda is knowingly carrying material the release of which would endanger people’s lives … Additionally the disclosure, or threat of disclosure, is designed to influence a government and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism…” When Miranda’s plane landed, he says, the flight staff announced that everyone would have to show their passports as they exited the plane and crossed onto the tarmac at Heathrow. Miranda queued up, showed his passport, and was immediately taken by two border agents to a sterile, white, windowless room several floors below the departure gates, isolated from the airport’s hustle and bustle. “I thought I knew exactly what was happening,” Miranda says flatly. “I knew because Laura had talked about being detained before on other assignments and I just thought to myself, I will try to be as vague as possible.” Inside the neon-washed holding room furnished only with a table and four chairs, the agents confiscated Miranda’s bags, including a laptop, cell phone, and encrypted flash drive. Under Section 7 of the U.K.’s anti-terrorism law, officials have the right to examine property and search anything the detained person is carrying. Once Miranda was seated across from the two agents, he told them he knew why they had detained him. “It’s because of the work my partner is doing,” Miranda recalls, voicing the same braggadocio and confidence he showed at the nightclub. “So what do you want from me?” “What sort of work is your partner doing?” one agent, who identified himself as Two-Oh-Five-Oh-Six, inquired with a seemingly benign curiosity. “Come on,” Miranda responded, agitated. “We don’t know who your partner is,” the agent replied flatly. Miranda asked if he could have a lawyer; the agents told him he could speak to a lawyer who would be limited to explaining the Terrorism Act to him. What was his lawyer’s name? They would ring him straight away. “Glenn Greenwald,” Miranda snapped. “Does he practice law in the U.K.?” Miranda bluffed and said Greenwald did practice in the U.K., but after one of the agents consulted a registry over the phone they found that Greenwald was not, in fact, a solicitor in Her Majesty’s kingdom. The agents told Miranda he could have an attorney from their own approved list, but that they could only speak by phone and would not be present for the rest of the interrogation. Miranda refused: “I told them no, because I did not trust their chosen lawyers or their phones. I also thought when a lawyer Glenn hired or someone from The Guardian did finally come to meet me, the agents would tell me I already had a lawyer and not allow me to talk to anyone else.” One of the agents asked Miranda for the passwords to his cell phone, laptop, and flash drive. When Miranda did not respond, agents grew sterner and told him again that under the Terrorism Act he could be sent to prison for not cooperating with their requests. Miranda relented. “I became scared at that moment because I know that people get disappeared by the U.S. and U.K. governments if they claim you’re a terrorist,” he says. “I didn’t have the encryption keys to allow access to the documents, but I did tell them my passwords to my personal phone and laptop.” Miranda’s laptop browser was open to his email. His cell phone contained everything one’s cell phone typically does: contacts, emails, texts, pictures — the type of pictures you take with your romantic partner. The agents also took from Miranda’s backpack a piece of paper that had one of the passwords for the outer shell of the flash drive, not to core data, say Miranda and Greenwald. That flash drive is the focus of Scotland Yard’s ongoing criminal investigation against Miranda, British officials say. In a statement given after Miranda’s release, Oliver Robbins, deputy national security adviser for the U.K.’s Cabinet Office, said the flash drive contained “approximately 58,000 highly classified U.K. intelligence documents” that were “entirely of misappropriated” materials. Robbins chastised Miranda for exercising “very poor judgment.” Miranda and Greenwald both claim the U.K. government is lying about what that one seized password enables. “It is impossible that they could have access to the documents,” Greenwald insists. “David did have a piece of paper, and it did have a password on it, but it did not allow access to the actual documents because there were multiple encryption walls around it. All the password allows access to is a list of the documents and, in some cases, a summary of them. They are lying when they claim it allowed access to the documents themselves, trying, as usual, to scare their public into submitting to their assertions of radical authority.” When the agents got the passwords from Miranda, all pretenses collapsed and the interrogation began in earnest. We can only rely on Miranda’s retelling of the subsequent hours spent in the Heathrow interrogation room, since U.K. officials have never released audio or visual from the detention. Indeed, Miranda says when he asked if agents were recording, they said there was no recording allowed during the initial interrogation under the Terrorism Act — though the words “terrorism,” “bomb,” “weapon,” “murder,” and “destruction” were not mentioned by the agents, nor were any of the typical nouns often associated with endangering the lives of others. “They never once asked me a single question about terrorism,” Miranda says. A rotating tag team of seven agents asked Miranda questions ranging from his personal life with Greenwald to his family background to his own politics. Miranda’s request for a translator was brushed aside, and all nine hours were spent being interrogated in English. “First they tried to pit me against Glenn,” Miranda recalls. The agents asked Miranda whom he went to the nightclubs with in Berlin. “Boyfriends,” Miranda replied, meaning male friends. Did Glenn know about these boyfriends? “No.” How would Glenn feel if he knew Miranda was out with the other men? “Fine.” They asked if Miranda had been in contact with Edward Snowden. “No.” Were his family members political? “No.” They asked about Miranda’s political views. Did he support the street protests in Brazil? “Yes.” Did he participate in the protests? “No.” “They offered me water, but they didn’t pour it front of me,” Miranda says with a note of pride. “So I said no. I didn’t trust them for a second, I never had a drink of water while I was there, and I never got up to go the bathroom.” Back in Brazil, Greenwald was asleep at home. “I get a phone call at 6:30 in the morning, which you know is bad news,” Greenwald says. A man who gave no name identified himself as a “security official at Heathrow Airport” and said Miranda was in detention under the Terrorism Act. He told Greenwald that Miranda had been held at that point for three hours and that they could hold him up to nine hours, at which point they could arrest him, release him, or ask a judge for additional time to interrogate. “I look it up, and it’s, like, less than 3% of people are held for more than an hour under that law, and less than .3% are held for more than three hours, and if you are held for more than an hour you often end up arrested,” Greenwald adds. “I definitely thought they were going to arrest him or haul him before a judge to seek more detention time, which would not go in our favor.” The interrogation reached its fifth hour when an agent came to tell Miranda that they had contacted Greenwald. Greenwald spent the next several hours maniacally stress-eating Doritos, emailing everyone he knew at The Guardian, and chatting with Edward Snowden and Laura Poitras online. Between 2006 and 2010, Poitras herself was detained and interrogated more than 40 times after producing an Oscar-nominated documentary called The Oath about the U.S. occupation of Iraq and while working on a film about extremists in Yemen called My Country, My Country. “Ironically,” Poitras tells me via email, “the detentions stopped following an article Glenn wrote about an incident at Newark airport where agents threatened to handcuff me for taking notes because they said my ‘pen was a weapon.’” Poitras says that the most invasive border crossing she experienced occurred in 2010 at John F. Kennedy Airport: “They seized my laptop, phone, and camera and held them for 41 days,” Poitras recalls. “When I got my equipment back, the photos on one device had been viewed and a slide show had been created.” After eight hours and 20 minutes, Miranda recalls, he was allowed to meet lawyers from The Guardian. After exactly nine hours, Miranda was released and told he would not be immediately charged. Miranda was told to wait in the customs inspection lounge while the agents tried to find a direct flight back for him to Rio. Miranda asked that his personal electronic devices be returned but was told they were now evidence in a pending criminal investigation and he could not have them back until the investigation was closed. “They’re trying to make an act of journalism into an act of terrorism.” Greenwald and Miranda at Rio de Janeiro’s International Airport August 19, 2013. Ricardo Moraes / Reuters Another two hours passed with the British agents still holding his passport. The agent arranging Miranda’s travel then told him there were no more flights back to Rio that evening and that he would have to go through customs, stay the night in London, make his own arrangements with his own funds, and return to the airport to fly out the next day. “That’s when I went crazy, because I was sure that if I walked out of the airport, they would find some reason to arrest me and disappear me in some prison,” Miranda says. “Also, they had just spent nine hours holding me as a possible terrorist, and now they wanted to force me to enter their country and walk free inside of it?” He then did what H.L. Mencken once referred to as “hoist[ing] the black flag.” Miranda began to scream: “I am a Brazilian citizen!” The few dazed travelers coming in from their evening flights, waiting to have their passports stamped began to turn their heads. “I’m being held here against my will!” The customs agents froze. “I want to go home! They will not let me go home! They took my passport!” Within 20 minutes of Miranda’s screaming episode, the agents miraculously booked a direct flight back to Rio that night and returned his passport at the last moment as he entered the business class cabin. “The day after I got home, Glenn yelled for me to come into the living room,” Miranda recalls. Greenwald had logged into his own Skype account. “Look,” Greenwald said, pointing to his contact list. A little green dot appeared and announced “David Miranda is online” but David Miranda was not online — he was standing next to Greenwald as he got dressed, getting ready to go to school. Miranda had not signed into his Skype account since his laptop was confiscated at Heathrow. “Those assholes in London were going through my Skype account,” Miranda says. Photograph by Jimmy Chalk for BuzzFeed Now Miranda and Greenwald are fighting back, challenging the legality of Miranda’s detention, and they had their first hearing in front of a three-panel judge in London on Nov. 6. Miranda’s lawyer, Matthew Ryder, argued that he was carrying source materials for journalism, which was in the “global public interest.” For the U.K. government to invoke the Terrorism Act in order to search and seize his materials was using the law for an “improper purpose” and created a “disproportionate interference with Miranda’s right to freedom of expression.” Ryder argued if the U.K. wanted to stop Miranda at Heathrow, they could have done so under normal law, which would have given him some protections as a journalist. The legal proceedings could drag on for months, especially as Greenwald’s latest revelations involve the British government. Greenwald’s recent departure from The Guardian has freed him from the draconian British press laws that could have hampered the U.K.-based daily from breaking this new round of stories. “There’s a good chance that, at the lowest level, David won’t win his court case in the U.K.,” Greenwald says, plunking a skewer of raw shrimp into his fondue bowl. “Don’t say that,” Miranda says, clicking his cheek in disapproval. “I hate it when you talk like that. It’s so negative.” “It’s just that it’s a post-9/11 era,” Greenwald says gently. “I’ve just seen all these judges who are so subservient, who will get down on their knees in deference every time the state utters the words ‘terrorism’ or ‘national security.’” He adds, to get back in Miranda’s good favor, “They’re trying to make an act of journalism into terrorism.” If you ask Miranda about the dynamics between him and Greenwald (and the 10 stray dogs the couple have adopted), Miranda describes himself as the alpha. “I’m the pack leader,” Miranda tells me, grinning. “A son of Apollo.” Miranda tends to dominate through his moods; he’s quick to show his disdain, annoyance, or disappointment. “I’m a very emotional person,” Miranda says, putting both tan hands to his Armani-clad chest. “Like, you will always know how I’m feeling and when I’m feeling it.” Greenwald, a former champion high school debater, city council candidate, and courtroom litigator, tries to counter Miranda’s occasional brooding or temper with point-by-point arguments to the contrary. “We yell when we fight,” Miranda admits, “but we never break up. There’s something in the universe that says we have to be together. I never met anyone like Glenn — he’s my husband and I don’t know where either of us would be without each other.” Miranda says early on in their relationship, when he was “young and more bull-headed,” he would devolve into fits of jealousy and despair when Greenwald would have to travel to New York to wrap up his law practice. “I have attachment and abandonment issues because of how I grew up,” Miranda says with the self-awareness and diagnostic certainty that comes with long hours in a shrink’s office. Miranda grew up in Jacarezinho, a favela town of 60,000 inhabitants, built along the railroad tracks of northern Rio. Miranda’s mother worked in Jacarezinho as a prostitute. He has four other brothers from unknown fathers whose whereabouts he’s unfamiliar with. When he was 5 years old, his mother died of ovarian cancer derived from a sexually contracted disease, and he was sent to live with one of his mother’s friends, who also worked as a prostitute. “She slapped me the day of my mother’s funeral because I wasn’t crying,” Miranda recalls. “I didn’t really know my mom, so I didn’t know what I was losing.” Miranda doesn’t have many memories of his mother — the few he does are of passing kindness: extra treats when she would come home in the mornings, singing songs, letting him play with a bunny rabbit while she attended to men. The woman Miranda lived with had several sons and daughters who became Miranda’s surrogate siblings. Miranda formed the closest bond to one of his adopted teenager sisters, a moody, defiant young girl who used to bring home books about witchcraft and love spells. The two would pore over the occult, Greek myths, and listen to early ’90s rock together. When she began to pull away from the family, Miranda, at age 13, dropped out of school, and moved into a run-down apartment with some of his older cousins to claim his own independence. “I kept reading books and magazines on the bus when I’d go to work.” Miranda worked through his teenage years at a car wash, handing out sidewalk flyers for a local dentist, then working for the dentist directly. Eventually he moved into a sales position for the Brazilian lottery. “I was actually very happy at that time because I was free and totally in charge of my life.” But to this day Miranda refuses to set foot on a Rio bus, thanks to too many days spent riding in cramped buses with too little money. The winter Miranda would turn 20, he met a Jewish-American lawyer on an Ipanema beach. Their courtship was intense and speedy, with the couple moving in together by week’s end. After two years of living together, they became common-law husbands. Eventually Greenwald insisted that Miranda go back to school. “I just thought it was a tragic waste of intelligence for David not to continue his education,” Greenwald says. “He didn’t want to be reliant on me, and I didn’t want that either.” It took several years, but Miranda completed high school and is now in his final year of university. At dinner, Greenwald and Miranda talk more about Heathrow and the detention; they rehash a few of Miranda’s zingers on a recent interview with Anderson Cooper. Whatever squabbles the couple has had in their eight years together — there have been some — they are still as bonded and protective over each other as ever. “Heathrow was no big deal compared to the 12 hours I thought I was going to be murdered in my house when Glenn disappeared,” Miranda says with a flustered laugh. Greenwald begins to blush a bit. Ueslei Marcelino / Reuters Miranda spent a Sunday evening in early June partying until daylight: partly to celebrate Greenwald’s triumph for publishing the first NSA story, partly to avoid being alone in the house while Greenwald was in Hong Kong. This is the same weekend Greenwald told Miranda over Skype he was giving him his own copy of the NSA archives for safekeeping. Miranda went out for the evening and returned home at 6 a.m. He fed the 10 dogs, which bark, growl, and snarl at the slightest noise emitting from inside or around the couple’s large two-story house. Miranda plopped down at the kitchen table, checked his email on his laptop, and then dragged himself upstairs for a power nap. Four hours later, Miranda groggily walked downstairs and his laptop was gone. “I looked everywhere, for over an hour, and I couldn’t find it,” Miranda says. “Then I thought, OK, someone broke in while I was asleep.” Miranda assumed that perhaps it was someone he was friendly with. “Maybe it was someone who knew I was married to Glenn and wanted to make money by breaking into our house and getting one of our laptops.” But how did they get past his dogs? That’s when Miranda started to get scared, but he didn’t want to throw Greenwald’s focus with talk of black-op home invasions. Miranda went to bed early that evening and awoke the next morning to banging on his front door. Two men who said they were from the electric company came to shut the power off. “They said we were late on our bill, which is impossible because we’re never late.” He showed the men bills to no avail. The power went off. When Miranda called the electric company from his cell phone, the representative said their account was up to date but had some hold on it she could not undo. Greenwald was still in the air, unreachable on his flight between Dubai and Rio. Adding to Miranda’s anxiety was Snowden’s unknown whereabouts at the time — he had gone into hiding 48 hours prior. “I spent the next 10 hours at home, with my dogs, with no electricity, waiting for Glenn to come home,” Miranda says. “But maybe he wasn’t going to come home! I started going crazy. I thought anything could happen to me, like bad things, and it could look like an accident or whatever. I stayed up all night in the dark.” Greenwald arrived the following morning to a frantic Miranda. “I thought they got Snowden,” Miranda said, near tears. “I thought they got you.” Greenwald thought it was a strange series of events but nothing like the sort of paranoid nightmare Miranda imagined. He dismissed Miranda’s consternation with a hug and some soothing words. “Looking back,” Greenwald says, tilting his wine, a bit repentant and conciliatory, “I realize that David’s assumptions were more rational than mine. I didn’t want us to become those paranoid, creepy people who attribute every inexplicable event in their lives to the CIA.” This change of perspective came after he mentioned the events to one of The Guardian’s lawyers, who told him that “he had talked to all these people in the intelligence community and he had heard that the CIA has one of the most robust presences in Rio and that the CIA station chief in Rio is ‘notoriously aggressive.’” With Greenwald’s admission, Miranda looks pleased and vindicated and orders the check. “Ultimately, as harrowing and unjust as it was, the U.K. actually did us a favor,” Greenwald says as we head toward the car. “They revealed how abusive the U.S. and U.K. can be with power, which is a major point of the reporting I’m doing; they humanized the story, and they gave a platform for my charming and admirable husband to speak out.” While Scotland Yard has been threatening a criminal charge to be brought against Miranda for months now, it’s unlikely any formal charges will be made, stemming in part from the fact that the British government has not been able to hack inside the encrypted flash drive. If the U.K. government was able to break into the flash drive and attempted to charge Miranda with espionage, it’s highly unlikely the Brazilian government would extradite him. In the meantime, Miranda is not changing his plans. “I’m going to finish university next year and then I might take some post-graduate classes in journalism,” Miranda says. Then he plans to enter to enter the job market as a branding and communications specialist. “We know we are probably under constant surveillance,” Miranda says, as we pile into the couple’s cherry red Jeep, “but we don’t give a fuck. We’re not going to be stupid.” “But we’re not going to live our lives in fear,” he adds as the car pulls away. “Now everyone in the world is watching, bitches!” Ricardo Moraes / Reuters http://www.buzzfeed.com/natashavc/david-miranda-is-nobodys-errand-boy

"Debated internally." LOL Dialog among the stomachs. A+

Just about every time it is not convenient to take one, seems like.

That is to say, stomachs.

One of my favorite books. Guy Debord's The Society of the SpectacleWill Self takes a walk through the banlieues of Paris and is astonished by the prescience of Debord's 1967 masterpiece, which so accurately describes 'the shit we're in'inS Will Self The Guardian, Thursday 14 November 2013 10.01 EST 'What other text from the 60s so accurately describes the shit we’re in?' – Will Self on Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. Photograph: Situationist International A small green tent was pitched on the small daisy-spotted patch of greenish grass. It looked tidily enough done; suitable perhaps for a summer rock festival. But this was just outside the Saint-Gratien RER station, north of the rundown riverine port of Gennevilliers, on the outer whorl of the Parisian fingerprint; and the tent – which had the limp-wristed bough of an evergreen touching its flysheet in benediction – was quite clearly being lived in. The mental picture the non-Parisian has of the city's banlieues is framed by the fictive: gangster movies such as La Haine, or TV cop shows such as Spiral that do battle with similar Danish, Swedish, British and, of course, American vehicles, in a race to see which can sandblast its respective society with the greatest quantity of grit. But within this framing, content and dimensionality are provided by recent history, and in particular by the widespread rioting of 2005 that thrust these under-imagined locales on to TV screens worldwide. Not since the événements of 1968 had Parisian street fighting commanded such attention, but whereas the soixante-huitards could be characterised as the vanguard of a stillborn revolution, the young second-, third- and probably fourth-generation immigrants who chucked molotov cocktails at the flics and the CRS during the émeutes neither donned, nor were measured up for, any such ideological camouflage. Instead, the violent eruption of the Parisian banlieues was anatomised by reference to a body politic sickening with pathological metaphors. Implicitly, explicitly … ineluctably, the rioters were the Muslim Other, which, having been almost accidentally ingurgitated as part of the colonialist couscous, was now playing havoc with Gallic digestion. The French state had found itself – willingly or not – as a fellow-traveller on the neocons' coach trip to the rapturous intersection of medieval chiliasm and Fukuyama's neoliberal end-point. Walking from the RER station towards the Seine, I passed not through what the fictive might lead you to expect, but rather low and hummocky hills, the swoop of a B-class road, outcroppings of commerce, small apartment blocks, car parks, duff public sculpture, off-cuts of quasi-open space – over it all an ambiguous miasma of street furniture and signage: this was France, certainly, but a France at once decoupled from any sense of pays, and divorced from the least suggestion of the urbane. In a comparable district of London – picture, if you are able to, Ruislip or Hounslow, Abbey Wood or Enfield – there would be myriad subliminally registered cues, all of which would combine to force on the spectator the unavoidability of her metropolitan condition. In London, the interwar spread of municipal socialism through the arteries of the tube system was accompanied by the soft-modernism of the suburban stations and Harry Beck's matching diagram, which completes their connectivity. In London, the map really is the territory, because the territory really is the map. Not here. The vexed relationship between the map and the territory suffuses The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord's 1967 masterpiece, which argues that not only authentic social relations, but even the bricks and mortar that frame them, and the tarmac that connects one to another, have all been replaced with their representation; a 1:1 scale model. Moreover, for Debord, as a sequel to the paralysis of "historical development", the contrast between town and country has become submerged in a sclerotic suburbia. He is at pains to point out that this annulling is no cod-utopian "supersession" but rather an "erosion … visible in the eclectic mélange of … decayed elements". From the beige depths of a heavily shuttered house beside a hillock from which I could spy the Eiffel Tower, a deep, dark voice spoke: "Qu'est-ce que vous cherchez?" I suppose, had I been the ghost of Jane Jacobs I would have experienced this as reassurance: the eyes, even if unseen themselves, remained on the street. But, instead, I muttered pacifications: "Nothing … just having a look … about", then walked on down and around the hill through a scree of crushed fag packets, centrifugally impelled aluminium trim and the petrified tears shed by long dead cars. Dragon's teeth were sewn across the scabrous roadway – I queased between them and found myself within 100 metres of the riverbank. The A15 soared overhead: two pilotis planted this side of the river, the next pair on the far bank, its two carriageways separated by curved air. Up there was the city, conceived of however you so pleased. Down here, however, was this un-place, an inter-zone, under-imagined and thus free to be itself. Sprays of cherry blossom mimicked by tangles of wire and a shaggy pelt of weedy grass. Two small brown kids sat beside an oblong concrete depression filled with dank water, one had her hair tied in pigtails. They were playing with tin cans, cups and a bucket. Beyond them, right on the river's edge was their Paris: a bidonville of shacks built from bits of scavenged packing cases, plastic tarpaulin, car tyres and all sorts of other stuff. Many of its most sympathetic readers experience The Society of the Spectacle as a concerted howl of disgust. I cannot agree – for me it is the Spectacle that, far from being the creation of some malevolent or false god, emerges instead as the hero of the piece, inasmuch as any hero can be conceived of as the unconscious product of insensate historical processes. The Spectacle, Debord writes, "is the heart of the unrealism of the real society". We are all jammed up against the plate glass of the Spectacle, our faces crushed as we "lèche-vitrine" in search of the same old commodified poison. The entirely manmade nature of the world from which the individual subject experiences alienation is not, for Debord, a factual programme to be passively viewed on the TV screens of the global village, but a belief that is actively entered into. It is the genius of Debord to have characterised the totalising capability of late capitalism so early in its post-industrial manifestation. The Society of the Spectacle reads – if you will savour a cliche – as fresh as paint. Debord's analysis of time itself as a series of epochs is dizzying: such "pseudo-festivals" as sporting events (the Olympics springs immediately to mind), act to convince the denizens of the Spectacle that they are still living in a cyclical and eternal go-round, while only the anointed few, the celebrities, are imbued with the attributes of money and power that signify the ability to make choices – to progress into a better future. "Being a star," Debord writes, "means specialising in the seemingly lived." Sound familiar, "Sir" Peter Bazalgette? But it is most of all in its analysis of the ideology of the Spectacle that Debord's text repays close reading. It is the Spectacle's genius to have "turned need against life" and thus effected "the separation and estrangement between man and man". Hence the Spectacle's embrace of economics as the only form of instrumental – indeed "scientific" – knowledge worth possessing; hence ritual obeisance made before the gods who will confer growth, and hence the fact that more or less any contemporary western politician – from Hollande, to Merkel, to Cameron, to Obama, and back again – who had eyes to see, could find their own Caliban image raging back at them from the pages of The Society of the Spectacle. At Argenteuil centre-ville, I found echoic pedestrian underpasses, faux-19th century streetlamps of twirled iron and postmodern apartment blocks built of scaled-up children's construction toys. I walked on across the oxbow of Gennevilliers, still feeling that I was nowhere at all in particular – standing beside a grocery store or an office block, then crossing between parked cars. The bridge across the re-encountered Seine that led to Clichy was lined with cheerful window boxes, planted with a gaily patriotic tricolour of blooms pinker, pinker and pinkest. Where there are window boxes there must, of course, be a window – this one framed the mirrored cuboids of La Défense to the west, structures that might have been designed expressly to conform to the Debordian paradigm. And then, some way past the Porte de Clichy, I was quite suddenly – if at an indefinable point – in Paris, a city to this day that defines itself by the micro-associations of its smaller parts: the awning of an alimentation, a drain cover, the angle of a pissing dog's leg, the furl of paper around a stick of bread, the white apron around a smoking waiter – quite as much as the high extravaganza of its grand boulevards and gold-leafed public buildings. Rereading The Society of the Spectacle, I was struck yet again not only by Debord's astonishing prescience – for what other text from the late 1960s so accurately describes the shit we're still in? – but also wondered how it was that his dérives across the Paris of the time could have so attuned him to the way in which the urban environment of the near future would become quite so decoupled from any element of the felt or experienced life. After all, Paris was by no means the most Spectacular city of the late 1950s and early 60s; indeed, it's still not on an equal footing to London. Unplanned London, which has just arrived at its square miles of parametrically designed junk space, its CCTV-overseen gated business cantonments and Chinese party cadre-owned luxury encampments, its logo skyscrapers and purpose-built "iconic" tourist destinations. It occurs to me that Haussmann's attempt to impose civic order and authority on the medieval jumble of mid-19th century Paris had not only paved the way for the Spectacle, but it had also afforded its – and his – enemies with the material to rip up for their barricades. There seems a nice congruence between the go-rounds of the Grands Boulevards and centrifugal/centripetal current of French theorising, whereby notions given form in the cafes of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the classrooms of the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure swirl out in widening circles from the metropolis, only to then gurgle back in again, before eventually disappearing up the arses of their originators. Seen like this, The Society of the Spectacle is at once the bastard progeny of the French Enlightenment – out of Diderot, by means of the Napoleonic Code – and a salutary reminder of how the pursuit of some millenarian ideological purity only ever results – if successful – in the rumbling of tumbrels; or, if a failure, in its wholesale co-option by its stated enemies. That we no longer hear quite so much about "the spectacle" as shorthand for any of the following: the ludic element of consumer society, the post-ideological character of western "democracy", the web-cum-matrix woven by the internet, the glocal character of late capitalism, may be because Debord's concept has now been so thoroughly appropriated – one might fairly say détourned – that there's nothing left of it but its coldly numerical bones. Had Debord not shot himself in 1994 in his rural fastness of Bellevue-la-Montagne, he probably would have turned his gun on the likes of Tony Wilson and Malcolm McLaren (and no doubt me as well); pop music impresarios whose much-trumpeted situationist influence – such as it was – consisted only in a series of pranks, that, while they may have given succour to the culturally anomic nonetheless only resulted in the profitable sale of records, posters and other memorabilia. I doubt, somehow, that either Wilson – chiefly known for managing Joy Division and the Happy Mondays, and setting up Factory Records – or McLaren, rather more famous for his role as the Sex Pistols' svengali, can have subjected The Society of the Spectacle to a sustained critical reading. Had they done so, they would've realised that their antics were anathema to Debord; that the playful elements of situationist practice – the bowdlerising of cartoons, the daubing on walls of whacky slogans, the exaltation of drunkenness – were only ever to be sanctioned if constitutive of a genuine insurrection, such as the few short weeks of 68, and as precursors of that revolution of everyday life (to adapt the title of the competing situationist theoretical work, written by Debord's greatest rival, Raoul Vaneigem), which was to follow the final and complete dissolution of the Spectacle. The relative success of the Situationist International during les évènements also sowed the seeds for the détournement of The Society of the Spectacle itself. I say relative success because it can be doubted – and will always be disputed – the extent to which Debord and his loose confraternity of freelance bully-boys and wannabe revolutionists actually succeeded in either manning the barricades themselves, or screwing the courage of the mob to CRS's sticking post. But the important thing was that the situationists were perceived as having been in the thick of things – as instigators and ideological choreographers of the distinctively ludic elements of this particular civil disorder. The sneering, de haut en bas reception of The Society of the Spectacle on its publication the year before in French, was followed the year after by its rhapsodic one when it appeared in translation. By then, of course, the game was effectively up – something Debord, a man obsessed by war games and strategising, undoubtedly grasped. The Society of the Spectacle so far as being an animator of events, had in a matter of months become simply another text to be subjected to scores, hundreds, thousands of exhaustive academic analyses. The best that could be said for the thing – from its author's point of view – was that the royalties paid his wine bills, and helped to supplement a lifetime of unabashed – and indeed, self-righteous – sponging. Of course, The Society of the Spectacle still animates serious protest to this day – or, rather, since to admit to having been one of the Invisible Committee that authored the highly Debordian The Coming Insurrection (2007) is to court arrest on those grounds alone, the very style of the earlier work remains inflammatory. As to its content, The Coming Insurrection has nothing much to add – how can it, when, as I say, never before has Debord's work seemed quite as relevant as it does now, in the permanent present that he so accurately foretold? Open his book, read it, be amazed, pour yourself a glass of supermarket wine – as he would wish – and then forget all about it, which is what the Spectacle wants. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/14/guy-debord-society-spectacle-will-self

Or, rather, do.

The image is too perfect.

By contrast, Harry teases Wills for "piling on the pounds" since getting hitched... http://zeenews.india.com/entertainment/wellness/harry-teases-william-for-piling-on-pounds_94424.html

I learned eating baked potato skins from a high school sweetheart whose family had emigrated South from Yankeedom, so brought all manner of strange habits. I then found that made the rock-salt-rubbed baked potatoes served by Red Lobster into the most palatable thing on their menu. Back to apples, David Souter's clerks noted it as one more sign of his frugal ways that lunch was always a cup of yogurt and an apple eaten core, seeds and all.

Good lord. Although I've long noticed most grotesquerie store "wheat breads" have cellulose as the main fiber. A wonder we're not evolving into ruminants.

Cartoon tag line: "TV was so lousy last night, I nearly switched it off!"

This seemed too good to bury way down in the Nutrition, Health & Fitness forum. Not that it has anything to do with those things in any event. The McRib: Enjoy Your Symptom How McDonald’s strange, seasonal sandwich explains the rest of its menu Ian Bogost Nov 13 2013, 3:13 PM ET The Atlantic Wire Wikimedia Commons Each year, the McRib makes a brief visit to Earth. Its arrival elicits reactions ranging from horror to awe. And for good reason: this would-be rib sandwich is really a restructured pork patty pressed into the rough shape of a slab of ribs, its slathering of barbecue sauce acting as camouflage as much as coating. “Pork” is a generous term, since the McRib has traditionally been fashioned from otherwise unmarketable pig parts like tripe, heart, and stomach, material that is not only cheap but also easier to mold and bind into a coherent, predetermined shape. McDonald’s accurately lists the patty’s primary ingredient as “boneless pork,” although even that’s a fairly strong euphemism. Presumably few of the restaurant’s patrons would line up for a Pressed McTripe. Despite its abhorrence, the McRib bears remarkable similarity to another, more widely accepted McDonald’s product, the Chicken McNugget. In fact, the McRib was first introduced in 1982, shortly after the company had designed the McNugget. Chicken McNuggets are fashioned by the same method as is the McRib, namely by grinding factory-farmed chicken meat into a mash and then reconstituting them into a preservative-stabilized solid, aka a “nugget.” And both products are bound and preserved by a petrochemical preservative called tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ. According to the Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, one gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.” In a 2003 lawsuit accusing McDonald’s of consumer deception, federal district court judge Robert W. Sweet called Chicken McNuggets a “McFrankenstein creation.” But despite rejoinders like that of Judge Sweet, the Chicken McNugget flies under the radar, hiding its falseness, while the McRib flaunts it. In part, this is because the concept of a Chicken McNugget corresponds with a possible natural configuration of ordinary poultry, whose meat could be cut into chunks, battered, and fried. By contrast, there is no world in which pork spare ribs could be eaten straight through, even after having been slow cooked such that some of the cartilage breaks down. It’s a partial explanation for the horror and the delight wrought by McRib, but not a sufficient one. * * * Sometimes the things we believe aren’t out there in plain view, but hidden away inside. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan gives the name objet a to the thing that elicits desire. In French the phrase means “object other” (the a stands for autre). For Lacan, our behaviors themselves may be knowable, but the causes of those behaviors aren’t always so. Objet a is not the object of desire (the thing we desire), but the thing that causes the desire to come into being (the cause of a desire for that thing). The philosopher Slavoj Žižek sometimes calls objet a the stain or defect in the world that motivates a belief or action. Psychoanalysis focuses on the operation of the unconscious, the motivations that make us think, believe, and act without us being aware of them. As such, we can’t see those causes directly, we can’t unearth them and hold them in our hands. This is one of the main differences between psychoanalysis and modern psychiatry and neuroscience. The psychoanalyst contends that our rationales are not reducible to their symptoms (for matching to pharmaceuticals) or their measurements (for matching to known neurological patterns). The causes of our desires can’t be seen directly, but must be looked at from a distorted perspective. Žižek calls it a “parallax gap,” a break in perspective separating two things that cannot be synthesized. Here’s how he puts it: “the object-cause of desire is something that, when viewed frontally, is nothing at all, just a void—it acquires the contours of something only when viewed sideways.” Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors (1553) In the history of art, the most famous example of “looking awry” at an image to see what only appears as a void from the front is Hans Holbein’s 1553 painting The Ambassadors. When viewed straight-on, its clear that something is amiss in the foreground near the ambassadors’ feet. But only when the picture is viewed askew, from a different perspective, does the “stain” reveal itself: a skull, symbolizing death, thus betraying the vanity of the vestments and ornaments of the painting’s aristocrats. Even though we see skull in the painting, we don’t really see it for what it is until we look at it differently, until we view it sideways. The McRib is like Holbein’s skull: we experience it as (quasi-)foodstuff, as marketing campaign, as cult object, as Internet meme, but those experiences don’t sufficiently explain it. To understand McRib fully, we have to look at the sandwich askew. When McDonald’s first “retired” the McRib in 2005, it marketed the event as the “McRib Farewell Tour.” The promotion included websites with a mock-petition to save the sandwich, sponsored by the fictitious “Boneless Pig Farmers Association of America.” The same farewell tour appeared again in 2006, and yet again in 2007. Since then, the sandwich has reappeared for a few weeks in the autumn, a predictable part of the holiday season. Together, the eternal return of the McRib, along with the blatant celebration of a sandwich that is obviously and unabashedly fake comprise the cause of desire the public bears for McDonald’s. Not just for the McRib, mind you, but for all of the restaurant’s offerings—most of which rely on the same cheap ingredients, machined pre-preparation, and chemical additives that the McRib embodies to the point of caricature. We know that we do not know the composition of the McNugget or McRib or McWhatever, but we do not know precisely what it is that we do not know. Nevertheless, we desire such products not in spite of the fact that we do not know it, but because we don’t. This apparent paradox rests at the very heart of McDonald’s cookery: the secret components and methods that make it possible to create cheap and predictable, sweet and fat fast food. We normally don’t talk about it, but the chemical composition, mass-manufacture, and freezer-to-tray reconstitution of fast food isn’t just a convenient means to produce a result people enjoy. Instead, that very manufactured falseness is itself what we desire, in food as much as in smartphones—what is high-tech if not designed fakery? In fact, manufactured, technological falseness has become a feature of haute cuisine as much as fast food. As Jeb Boniakowski has argued, apart from context, cost, and class markers, there’s really not much difference between McDonald’s “super-processed” food and molecular gastronomy, the application of food science to haute cuisine. And just as fine dining derives some of its desirability from its infrequence, so the McRib’s regular death and reanimation might be a necessary condition for its viability. Some have argued that if marketplace demand for pork trimmings were to rise consistently, then their prices would rise too, destroying the very conditions that make the sandwich possible. Much like waterways can be overfished, the pork parts market can be over-McRibbed. At least, that seems to have been true of the sandwich’s mythic origins. These days, McDonald’s claims that the McRib is made from ground pork, not from offal. Nevertheless, its scarcity makes the sandwich as much a financial instrument as it does an entrée. In 2012, McDonald’s shrewdly shifted the McRib’s return to December from October, relocating its revenues and thus producing slightly higher fourth quarter profits. If you put a Cheeto on a big white plate in a formal restaurant and serve it with chopsticks and say something like “It is a cornmeal quenelle, extruded at a high speed, and so the extrusion heats the cornmeal ‘polenta’ and flash-cooks it, trapping air and giving it a crispy texture with a striking lightness. It is then dusted with an ‘umami powder’ glutamate and evaporated-dairy-solids blend.” People would go just nuts for that. This year, the McRib’s fate remains elusive; no official announcement has emerged from the proverbial pressed pig plantation. Still, dutiful citizens in scattered locations across the U.S. have already reported sightings of the sandwich, indicating the porcine stampede has begun. * * * The McRib’s stochastic return makes visible the relationship between the eater and the McDonald’s menu. It produces a stain, a tear in the order of things that reveals the object-cause of desire for McDonald’s, but only briefly before it evaporates like faux-cartilage. The fragile conditions that make the McRib possible also insure that desire for McDonald’s food more generally speaking is maintained. Desire is a delicate system. For Lacan, the lover “gives what he does not possess,” namely the objet a that incites desire rather than sustaining it. Likewise, McDonald’s sells what it does not sell: the conditions of predictability, affordability, and chemico-machinic automated cookery that make its very business viable. When we eat at McDonald’s we don’t eat its food—Quarter Pounders or Big Macs or what have you—so much as we consume the mechanical predictability of its overall offering. Chicken McNuggets are the same everywhere. The same shape, the same taste, the same packaging, the same menu, the same uniforms, the same roofline, the same signage. Industrialism is also a kind of magic, the magic of the perfect facsimile. Eating at McDonald’s—eating anything whatsoever at McDonald’s—connects us to that magic, allows us to marinate inside it and take on its power. We might be conditioned to feel ashamed of this desire, to regret or lament wanting to eat at McDonald’s because its shapes and smells and packages are so familiar. But why? We dine at temples of molecular gastronomy like El Bulli or Alinea partly (perhaps largely) for the experience of being shown an experience, of partaking in the concepts, in the presentation of aromas disperses with dry ice vapor or oils flavored with steelhead roe. Eating isn’t an afterthought, but it isn’t the whole story either. McDonald’s knows itself and its customers well enough to realize that it must peel back the curtain occasionally, to show the real cause of desire for its products rather than to coat them in duplicitous marketing about freshness and wholesomeness. It’s necessary to insure that the indirect expression of the desire for its wares take the form of a surprise that clashes with our expectations of what to expect from McDonald’s food. One doesn’t even have to eat a McRib to be subject to it, since mass- and now social media perform the work for us. One can unironically post a Facebook update asking “Where’s my McRib?” or drive a little out of the way to pass the McDonald’s in the hopes of glimpsing the distinctive “McRib is Back” signage. Even if you’d never eat a McRib, it’s important to know when it returns, to remind yourself that industrialized, preserved foods are both a miracle and a calamity. Lacan gave the name “symptom” to the process by which psychoanalytic subjects take part in their unconscious desires. Couldn’t one of Žižek’s famous refrains about the concept, “Enjoy your Symptom,” easily pass as a McDonald’s slogan? The strange, even upsetting relationship between McDonald’s and its customers is not so different from the analyst’s talking cure, which helps the patient see the symptom in order to allow it to be recognized and thereby to disappear. The McRib’s existence injects a measure of otherwise unrealizable gratification into the social fabric of food culture, like the McRib’s sauce covers reconstituted pork to make it palatable. Normally, psychoanalysis is meant to reveal a desire in order to satisfy it. But in the case of McRib, that satisfaction must be temporary, occasional, such that it can return again the next year. A good thing, too because who could bear it every day? Yet, the McRib’s perversity is not a defect, but a feature. The purpose of the McRib is to make the McNugget seem normal. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/the-mcrib-enjoy-your-symptom/281413/

Apple Cores Are a Myth You can eat the whole apple. Americans could be throwing away $13.2 billion. James Hamblin The Atlantic Nov 15 2013, 12:14 PM ET What do you think an apple core is? What's the thing we throw away? It is a ghost. If you eat your apples whole, you are a hero to this ghost. If you do not, you are barely alive. Come experience vitality. Earlier this year, in "How to Eat Apples Like a Boss," a video by Foodbeast, the Internet was promised the gift of confidence in apple-eating. Elie Ayrouth ate an apple starting at the bottom, proceeding to up to the top, and finishing with a wink to the camera, as bosses do. Eating as such, Foodbeast said, the core "disappears." I do them one better and say that it never existed. The core is a product of society, man. There is a thin fibrous band, smaller in diameter than a pencil and not bad to the taste. If you eat your apple vertically, it is not noticeable. There are usually a couple seeds toward the top, which are easy to swallow, though it's probably a better idea to spit them because they contain a substance called amygdalin. That can release a small amount of hydrogen cyanide when digested. God/nature wants those seeds on the ground, not in our colons. You would have to eat a ton of apple seeds for it to kill you, but I'm not here to coax you guys into testing your bodies' limits in metabolizing cyanide. I also don't advocate doing anything "like a boss," much less professing it, much less actively aspiring to it by watching YouTube infotorials, but this is an imperative behavioral modification. If you want to feel like a hero by doing essentially nothing, think of it in terms of the national deficit and world hunger. By eating your apples in their entirety, you are a boss in the most endearing sense—not in that the practice confers swagger or panache, but because you are actively part of a meaningful solution. Google image: apple core; see: waste. Don't google apple core myth. They will come for you. If each of us eats an apple a day, as we all do, and we are all wasting 30 percent of our apples at $1.30 per pound, that's about $42 wasted per person per year—which is $13.2 billion annually, thrown in the trash or fed to pigs. With that kind of money, we could rebuild the Gulf Coast after a hurricane the size of Rita or buy an entirely new Mark Zuckerberg. As a health writer I make a point of not trying to tell people how to live their lives. Today I make an exception. This is the cause I will champion to my grave. I was a guest on MSNBC recently to talk about "chicken" nuggets, ostensibly how disturbing they are as a concept, and I endured criticism for being too ambivalent. Eat what you like, in moderation. Chicken nuggets are not my war. On this point I abandon moderation. Bring me on your television programs, and I will eat an apple in its entirety, and I will disparage anyone who does not do the same. As a nation we must redefine apple consumption, lest it define us. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/apple-cores-are-a-myth/281531/

Excellent graphic of how fast the frustrations of trying to figure out Internet X$FK&S?@ age us!

11 terrifying kids from vintage adverts who will freeze the very marrow in your bones 1. Aww look at that - she’s thrilled that dinner is a succulent blood-clot on toast 2. This girl doesn’t need cereal - she hungers for your soul 3. Not so much a child, more a 40-year-old Tory/transgenic pig hybrid 4. This murderous moppet should not be allowed a sharpened knife 5. Not appropriate, mister ad-man. Not. Appropriate. 6. “It’s easy to DIE DIE DIE…” 7. Slogan: Pears Soap will turn your baby’s bath time into an unimaginable horror 8. “Dear Mom, I hope you die soon” 9. The first rule of parent club is that you don’t let the baby shave itself 10. There is no reason for this kid to be naked but for a fedora 11. You know what other meat tastes exactly like pork? This kid knows He knows Oh God, he KNOWS http://usvsth3m.com/post/66372953934/11-terrifying-kids-from-vintage-adverts-who-will-freeze

Could be worse -- he could use your shirt!

No, they are Kenyan. I mean, has anyone ever seen their birth certificates?

And, for myself at least, not something I can ever remember happening!

Old Dog, New Origin: First Pooches Were European By Stephanie Pappas, Senior Writer 19 hours ago Man's best friend gained that title in Europe, according to a new study that pinpoints the origin of dog domestication to between 18,800 and 32,100 years ago. The study places the origin of dogs before the rise of agriculture, suggesting that human hunter-gatherers tamed the wolf. Whereas previous genetic studies had placed the origin of dogs in the Middle East or Asia, this research is the first to focus on the genetics of ancient dogs, rather than looking at modern dogs and trying to extrapolate back. "All modern dogs analyzed in our study were closely related to either ancient dogs and wolves from Europe or modern wolves from there," study scientist Olaf Thalmann, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turku in Finland, told LiveScience in an email. The beginning of dogs Dogs are the only large carnivores that humans have ever domesticated, but when and where dangerous wolves became lovable pups has been hard to pin down. That's because, genetically speaking, dogs are a mess. They've been moved around the world for centuries, mixing their genomes indiscriminately at far-flung ports of call, and even — early in their evolution — mating with their wild counterpart, the wolf. Adding to the confusion is the intensive period of selective dog breeding that started in the late 1880s and gave humans the wide variety of dog breeds known today. Archaeologists have found definite evidence of domestication in the form of dogs and humans buried together at least 14,000 years ago. Some have suggested domestication occurred earlier than that, perhaps as long as 33,000 years ago, based on some doglike skulls found in Belgium and in Siberia. Original genetic analyses put dog domestication much earlier, with researchers writing in a 1997 paper in the journal Science suggesting that dogs diverged from wolves more than 100,000 years ago. Those studies compared modern dogs with modern wolves, however, the analysis was muddied by dogs' weird breeding history. In the new study, published Friday (Nov. 15) in the journal Science, scientists analyzed ancient DNA from prehistoric dog fossils found in Europe and the New World. Genetic ties The researchers sequenced mitochondrial DNA from these fossils. Mitochondria are tiny organs inside cells that generate the energy that cells need to run. The genes that control the mitochondria are passed down the maternal line. Comparing the ancient mitochondrial DNA with the mitochondrial DNA of modern dog breeds and wolves revealed a common link to Europe, the researchers found. "Dogs seem to have been domesticated or first evolved from a population of ancient wolves living in Europe," said study researcher Robert Wayne, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. "That ancient wolf population is now extinct." "We've kind of made mistakes [in previous studies] assuming that ancient wolves and modern wolves are direct ancestors and descendants," Wayne told LiveScience. The finding suggests that wolves first started hanging around humans during a time when people hunted large animals like mammoth. The remains of mammoth and other megafauna carcasses would have been good eating, and friendlier wolves may have gradually started interacting with the human hunter-gatherers. The study researchers also examined some of the most controversial prehistoric canid fossils, including one found in a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia and others discovered in Belgium. These remains date as far back as 36,000 years ago. The new study finds that the Siberian and Belgian pooches were not direct ancestors to modern dogs. It seems they may have been an unknown species of doglike wolf, or they may have been an "aborted domestication event," Wayne said. A European story Genetics is a tricky way to try to establish the timing of dogs' emergence, said Clive Wynne, a dog cognition researcher at Arizona State University who was not involved in the study. Many of the genetic techniques used were developed to trace the divergence of species over millions of years. Dog domestication happened much more quickly, and a few thousand years makes a big difference in whether dogs were originally the pets of hunter-gatherers or more sedentary farmers, Wynne told LiveScience. Most researchers already agreed that the rise of dogs occurred before the rise of agriculture, said Greger Larson, an archaeologist and geneticist at Durham University in the U.K. who was not involved in the study. But the new geographical information linking dogs to prehistoric Europe is "a really big step in the right direction," Larson told LiveScience. "What it absolutely establishes is that there are canids in Europe that are contributing DNA to modern dogs and that Europe is, without question, part of the story," Larson said. "Zooarchaeologists and archaeologists have known that for a long time, but the genetic data has not backed that up." The next step is to delve into the nuclear DNA of ancient dogs, Wayne and Thalmann said. The DNA in a cell's nucleus is passed down from both parents, and thus holds information the maternal mitochondrial DNA doesn't. It was nuclear DNA studies that revealed Neanderthals and modern humans interbred, for example. New genetic techniques should make similar studies possible in dogs, Larson said. "That'll be a game-changer," he said. Genetic research is also revealing the changes necessary to turn a dog into a wolf. A study published in January in the journal Nature found that, unlike wolves, dogs have evolved the ability to eat starchy food — a talent that may have given them a paw up in surviving off human trash. http://news.yahoo.com/old-dog-origin-first-pooches-were-european-191015214.html

That thing.

Mr. Zip recommends...

"Don't Wipe Your Face on Your Shirt" http://youtube.com/watch?v=Jq1b3eSpeLw