When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, but before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture often takes place. All of a sudden, people know the game is up: they simply cease to be afraid. It isn’t just that the regime loses its legitimacy: its exercise of power is now perceived as a panic reaction, a gesture of impotence. Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski, in Shah of Shahs, his account of the Khomeini revolution, located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew. Within a couple of hours, all Tehran had heard about the incident, and although the streetfighting carried on for weeks, everyone somehow knew it was all over. Is something similar happening now? —“Berlusconi in Tehran,” Slavoj Žižek, London Review of Books
Other animals that bark;
crab rights;
arctic mystery goo; the acerbic art of L’Assiette au Beurre; media requests to Sanford’s office (via)
Calorie counts on food labels around the world are based on a system developed in the late 19th century by American chemist Wilbur Olin Atwater. Atwater calculated the energy content of various foods by burning small samples in controlled conditions and measuring the amount of energy released in the form of heat. To estimate the proportion of this raw energy that was used by the body, Atwater calculated the amount of energy lost as undigested food in faeces, and as chemical energy in the form of urea, ammonia and organic acids found in urine, and then he subtracted these figures from the total. Using this method, Atwater estimated that carbohydrates and protein provide an average of 4 kcal per gram, while fat provides 9 kcal per gram. With a few modifications, these measurements of what is known as metabolisable energy have been the currency of food ever since. —“The Calorie Delusion: Why food labels are wrong,” Bijal Trivedi, New Scientist
Pyongyang, July 14 (KCNA) — General Secretary Kim Jong Il visited the Hamhung Disabled Soldiers’ Essential Plastic Goods Factory on April 15, Juche 92 (2003). After a while he went back in a hurry saying that since it was the Day of the Sun the disabled soldiers of the factory might enjoy the holiday at ease only after he and his suite left it. —“Meticulous Benevolent Affection,” Korean News Service