Fuck Yeah! Jean Baudrillard!

It’s fall, and America is once again infatuated with pumpkin spice everything. What started as a simple fascination with pumpkin spice lattes has now spread - pumpkin spice is now a culinary cancer on otherwise fine food. Pumpkin spice also offers the perfect opportunity to understand Jean Baudrillard, the thinker of simulation and inventor of the Matrix. But first, some history. Pumpkin spice lattes are the demon spawn of Starbucks, who concocted the beverage about 11 years ago.  As of last year, the company had sold more than 200 million. Now, pumpkin and pumped-spiced themed items grace our shelves in the form of beers, cookies and other delectables. Starbucks even began peddling pumpkin sauce and US pumpkin-flavored sales amounted to $308 million in 2013, up from $290 million in 2012,  Vox.com writes. We live in a world where our globalized and industrialized agricultural system has erased seasons. Back in the day you were stuck with what was seasonal - you ate tomatoes and

-Erlich Bachmann on the HBO series Silicon Valley

"Ségalan says that once the Earth has become a sphere, every movement distancing us from a point by the same token also begins to bring us closer to that point.  This is true of time as well.  Each apparent movement of history brings us imperceptibly closer to its anti-podal point, if not indeed to its starting point.  This is the end of linearity.  In this perspective, the future no longer exists.  But if there is no longer a future, there is no longer an end either.  So this is not even the end of history.  We are faced with a paradoxical process of reversal, a reversive effect of modernity which, having reached its speculative limit, and extrapolated all its virtual developments, is disintegrating into its simple elements in a catastrophic process of recurrence and turbulence." -Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End

Disaster Porn courtesy of the Onion

I'm assuming this is a debaters sight, and today we hit a team who ran this or should I say  sang this.