this is not a blog entry, just a way to bookmark posts i'd like to have accessible
the list will be expanded

Coming compounds ban in Japan

new compounds added to the Japanese restricted chemical list, after 22nd November '09

list of common RC's used in legal highs and a historical note on the evolution leading to RC's in headshops

http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/sho...92&postcount=2

for a change in headshop / legal high vendor practices after the ivory wave incident

http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/sho...7&postcount=14

secret ingredients in legal highs
...

If the evidence allows for several explanations to a given problem then the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions is most probably correct. This principle is called Occam’s Razor, after the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar, William of Ockham. There is not the slightest need to postulate pre-placed explosive charges to explain why the towers collapsed at near free-fall speeds. Practical aspects of explosive demolitions make the explosive charge hypothesis improbable to the point of absurdity (see “Conspiracy disproved”).

There are plenty of real conspiracies in the US. Why make up fake ones? Every few years, property tsars and the city government in New York conspire...

from http://mondediplo.com/2006/12/02conspiracy

Distractions from awful reality
US: the conspiracy that wasn’t

The left in the United States remains distracted by fantastic stories about conpiracies hatched by the Bush administration: in many of these, even the 9/11 attacks are believed to have been an inside job. Yet the chief, and most fearful, characteristic of the Bush administration has been its low level of practical management abroad and at home.

By Alexander Cockburn

Where was the American left in the recent campaign that ended in the recapture of both houses of Congress by the Democrats on 7 November? Was it in the streets fomenting...

This study is not concerned with the counterculture as a historical phenomenon as much as it is concerned with the genesis of counterculture as an enduring commercial myth, the titanic symbolic clash of hip and square that recurs throughout post-sixties culture. On occasion, the myth is phrased in the overt language of the historical counterculture (Woodstock II, for example); but for the most part the subject here is the rise of a general corporate style, phrased in terms of whatever the youth culture of the day happens to be, that celebrates both a kind of less-structured, faster-moving corporation and that also promotes consumer resistance to the by-now well-known horrors of conformist consumerism....

The counterculture may be more accurately understood as a stage in the development of the values of the American middle class.


Placing the culture of the 1960s in this corporate context does little to support any of the standard countercultural myths, nor does it affirm the consensual notion of the 1960s as a time of fundamental cultural confrontation. It suggests instead that the counterculture may be more accurately understood as a stage in the development of the values of the American middle class, a colorful installment in the twentieth century drama of consumer subjectivity. This is not, of course, a novel interpretation: in the 1960s and 1970s it was a frequent plaint...

This is a study of business thought, but in its consequences it is necessarily a study of cultural dissent as well: its promise, its meaning, its possibilities, and, most important, its limitations. And it is, above all, the story of the bohemian cultural style's trajectory from adversarial to hegemonic; the story of hip's mutation from native language of the alienated to that of advertising.

It is more than a little odd that, in this age of nuance and negotiated readings, we lack a serious history of co-optation, one that understands corporate thought as something other than a cartoon. Co-optation remains something we vilify almost automatically; the historical particulars which...

However the conservatives may froth, this second myth comes much closer to what academics and responsible writers accept as the standard account of the decade. Mainstream culture was tepid, mechanical, and uniform; the revolt of the young against it was a joyous and even a glorious cultural flowering, though it quickly became mainstream itself. Rick Perlstein has summarized this standard version of what went on in the sixties as the "declension hypothesis," a tale in which, "as the Fifties grayly droned on, springs of contrarian sentiment began bubbling into the best minds of a generation raised in unprecedented prosperity but well versed in the existential subversions of the...

Despite its shortcomings, the conservatives' vision of sixties-as-catastrophe has achieved a certain popular success. Both Bloom's and Bork's books were best-sellers. And a mere mention of hippies or "the sixties" is capable of arousing in some quarters an astonishing amount of rage against what many still imagine to have been an era of cultural treason. In the white suburban Midwest, one happens so frequently across declarations of sixties- and hippie-hatred that the posture begins to seem a sort of historiographical prerequisite to being middle class and of a certain age; in the nation's politics, sixties- and hippie-bashing remains a trump card only slightly less effective than...

An excerpt from “The Conquest of Cool”
Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism
by Thomas Frank

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/259919.html

Why do this kind of advertising if not to incite people to riot?—Nike copywriter, 1996

of commerce and counterculture

For as long as America is torn by culture wars, the 1960s will remain the historical terrain of conflict. Although popular memories of that era are increasingly vague and generalized—the stuff of classic rock radio and commemorative television replayings of the 1968 Chicago riot footage—we understand “the sixties” almost instinctively as the...

The new businessman quite naturally gravitates to the slogans and sensibility of the rebel sixties to express his understanding of the new Information World. He is led in what one magazine calls “the business revolution” by the office-park subversives it hails as “business activists,” “change agents,” and “corporate radicals.” He speaks to his comrades through commercials like the one for “Warp,” a type of IBM computer operating system, in which an electric guitar soundtrack and psychedelic video effects surround hip executives with earrings and hairdos who are visibly stunned by the product’s gnarly ‘tude (It’s a “totally cool way to run your computer,” read the product’s print ads). He understands...

Other legendary exponents of the countercultural idea have been more fortunate—William S. Burroughs, for example, who appears in a television spot for the Nike corporation. But so openly does the commercial flaunt the confluence of capital and counterculture that it has brought considerable criticism down on the head of the aging beat. Writing in the Village Voice, Leslie Savan marvels at the contradiction between Burroughs’ writings and the faceless corporate entity for which he is now pushing product. “Now the realization that nothing threatens the system has freed advertising to exploit even the most marginal elements of society,” Savan observes. “In fact, being hip is no longer quite enough—better...

Why Johnny Can’t Dissent
from http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/f/frank-dissent.html

The public be damned! I work for my stockholders.
--William H. Vanderbilt, 1879

Break the rules. Stand apart. Keep your head. Go with your heart.
--TV commercial for Vanderbilt perfume, 1994

Capitalism is changing, obviously and drastically. From the moneyed pages of the Wall Street Journal to TV commercials for airlines and photocopiers we hear every day about the new order’s globe-spanning, cyber-accumulating ways. But our notion about what’s wrong with American life and how the figures responsible are to be confronted haven’t changed much in thirty...

That the communications giants would find “freedom of the press” to be such an obliging concept does not disturb Reporters sans frontières (RSF, Reporters without borders). RSF’s secretary general, Robert Ménard, offers this concession: “In order to defend journalists throughout the world, we require the consent and support of the profession, whereas discussions concerning the journalistic profession are by definition contentious. For instance, how can we organise a discussion on the increasing concentration of the media and then ask Havas or Hachette to sponsor an event?” (10). Since defending journalists in China or Chechnya also means dealing with Hachette and Havas (not to mention Silvio...

MEDIA OWNERSHIP AND BIAS
France: his master’s voice

http://mondediplo.com/2001/08/04press

The media may now be free of governmental censorship, but this has been replaced by self-censorship serving the interests of individual and corporate media owners - and the self-promotion of intellectuals.

By Serge Halimi

Is it just coincidence or are Western journalists obsessed with the word morality? Moral demands are made on our political leaders, and morality now figures in international law, and there are endless media debates by omnipresent intellectuals of little worth, professors of morality and those who like to theorise about evil. More...