The Cherry Picker

Walking Gun

Auto-destruction: the sandpaper cover

The book is most famous for its cover, a dust jacket made of heavy-grade sandpaper. Usually credited to Debord, the sleeve was actually conceived in a conversation between Jorn and the printer, V.O. Permild:

The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists, prominent in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution in 1972.

The intellectual foundations of the Situationist International were derived primarily from anti-authoritarian Marxism and the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, particularly Dada and Surrealism.[1] Overall, situationist theory represented an attempt to synthesize this diverse field of theoretical disciplines into a modern and comprehensive critique of mid-20th century advanced capitalism.[1] The situationists recognized that capitalism had changed since Marx's formative writings, but maintained that his analysis of the capitalist mode of production remained fundamentally correct; they rearticulated and expanded upon several classical Marxist concepts, such as his theory of alienation.[1] In their expanded interpretation of Marxist theory, the situationists asserted that the misery of social alienation and commodity fetishism were no longer limited to the fundamental components of capitalist society, but had now in advanced capitalism spread themselves to every aspect of life and culture.[1] They rejected the idea that advanced capitalism's apparent successes—such as technological advancement, increased income, and increased leisure—could ever outweigh the social dysfunction and degradation of everyday life that it simultaneously inflicted.[1]

Essential to situationist theory was the concept of the spectacle, a unified critique of advanced capitalism of which a primary concern was the progressively increasing tendency towards the expression and mediation of social relationsthrough objects.[1] The situationists believed that the shift from individual expression through directly lived experiences, or the first-hand fulfillment of authentic desires, to individual expression by proxy through the exchange or consumption of commodities, or passive second-hand alienation, inflicted significant and far-reaching damage to the quality of human life for both individuals and society.[1] Another important concept of situationist theory was the primary means of counteracting the spectacle; the construction of situations, moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing the feeling of life and adventure, and the liberation of everyday life.[1][2]

The Friends of Abe, Inc. (FOA) is a support and networking group for politically conservative members of the Hollywood elite. The organization was formed in 2004 by actor Gary Sinise. Screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd helped organize the group. "Friends of Abe" is a reference to "Friends of Bill", which is how members of Alcoholics Anonymous sometimes identify themselves, while "Abe" refers to Abraham Lincoln. As of January 2012, the organization had more than 1800 members. In addition to Sinise, Pat Boone, Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer, Kevin Sorbo, and have stated that they are members of the The organization fiercely protects its list of members for whom it maintains a secure private website, abespal.com. Sinise later withdrew from the leadership and Hollywood producer Jeremy Boreing became executive director.

The group meets monthly to hear guest speakers.It has hosted a number of Republican politicians at its events, including Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Paul Ryan, Rick Santorum, John Boehner, and Thaddeus McCotter. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia received reimbursement for giving a speech at a FOA fundraiser in .Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Michael Steele and Mark Levin have also met with Friends of Abe, as have political operatives Frank Luntz and Karl Rove.

Friends of Abe spent three years trying to get tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status for their organization. The tax status is reserved for organizations that do not engage in any partisan activity. IRS officials have questioned whether the organization's promotion of presidential candidates during its events constituted political campaign support, an activity forbidden for tax-exempt organizations. During the application process, FOA refused IRS demands to provide it with access to the part of its website that includes its list of members since such access is not required by federal law.The tax-exempt status was granted in March 2014.

ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between man and machine, Eliza simulated conversation by using a 'pattern matching' and substitution methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the program, but had no built in framework for contextualizing events. Directives on how to interact were provided by 'scripts', written originally in MAD-Slip, which allowed ELIZA to process user inputs and engage in discourse following the rules and directions of the script. The most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist and used rules, dictated in the script, to respond with non-directional questions to user inputs. As such, ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots, but was also regarded as one of the first programs capable of passing the Turing Test.