Cult of the Dead Cow

Cult of the Dead Cow PDF Author: Joseph Menn
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 9781541762367
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The shocking untold story of the elite secret society of hackers fighting to protect our privacy, our freedom -- even democracy itself Cult of the Dead Cow is the tale of the oldest, most respected, and most famous American hacking group of all time. Though until now it has remained mostly anonymous, its members invented the concept of hacktivism, released the top tool for testing password security, and created what was for years the best technique for controlling computers from afar, forcing giant companies to work harder to protect customers. They contributed to the development of Tor, the most important privacy tool on the net, and helped build cyberweapons that advanced US security without injuring anyone. With its origins in the earliest days of the Internet, the cDc is full of oddball characters -- activists, artists, even future politicians. Many of these hackers have become top executives and advisors walking the corridors of power in Washington and Silicon Valley. The most famous is former Texas Congressman and current presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke, whose time in the cDc set him up to found a tech business, launch an alternative publication in El Paso, and make long-shot bets on unconventional campaigns. Today, the group and its followers are battling electoral misinformation, making personal data safer, and battling to keep technology a force for good instead of for surveillance and oppression. Cult of the Dead Cow shows how governments, corporations, and criminals came to hold immense power over individuals and how we can fight back against them.

Cult of the Dead Cow

Cult of the Dead Cow PDF Author: Joseph Menn
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 9781541762367
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
The shocking untold story of the elite secret society of hackers fighting to protect our privacy, our freedom -- even democracy itself Cult of the Dead Cow is the tale of the oldest, most respected, and most famous American hacking group of all time. Though until now it has remained mostly anonymous, its members invented the concept of hacktivism, released the top tool for testing password security, and created what was for years the best technique for controlling computers from afar, forcing giant companies to work harder to protect customers. They contributed to the development of Tor, the most important privacy tool on the net, and helped build cyberweapons that advanced US security without injuring anyone. With its origins in the earliest days of the Internet, the cDc is full of oddball characters -- activists, artists, even future politicians. Many of these hackers have become top executives and advisors walking the corridors of power in Washington and Silicon Valley. The most famous is former Texas Congressman and current presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke, whose time in the cDc set him up to found a tech business, launch an alternative publication in El Paso, and make long-shot bets on unconventional campaigns. Today, the group and its followers are battling electoral misinformation, making personal data safer, and battling to keep technology a force for good instead of for surveillance and oppression. Cult of the Dead Cow shows how governments, corporations, and criminals came to hold immense power over individuals and how we can fight back against them.

Cult of the Dead

Cult of the Dead PDF Author: Kyle Smith
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520975715
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
A cultural history of how Christianity was born from its martyrs. Though it promises eternal life, Christianity was forged in death. Christianity is built upon the legacies of the apostles and martyrs who chose to die rather than renounce the name of their lord. In this innovative cultural history, Kyle Smith shows how a devotion to death has shaped Christianity for two thousand years. For centuries, Christians have cared for their saints, curating their deaths as examples of holiness. Martyrs’ stories, lurid legends of torture, have been told and retold, translated and rewritten. Martyrs’ bones are alive in the world, relics pulsing with wonder. Martyrs’ shrines are still visited by pilgrims, many in search of a miracle. Martyrs have even shaped the Christian conception of time, with each day of the year celebrating the death of a saint. From Roman antiquity to the present, by way of medieval England and the Protestant Reformation, Cult of the Dead tells the fascinating story of how the world’s most widespread religion is steeped in the memory of its martyrs.

The Ancient Roman Afterlife

The Ancient Roman Afterlife PDF Author: Charles King
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477320202
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
In ancient Rome, it was believed some humans were transformed into special, empowered beings after death. These deified dead, known as the manes, watched over and protected their surviving family members, possibly even extending those relatives’ lives. But unlike the Greek hero-cult, the worship of dead emperors, or the Christian saints, the manes were incredibly inclusive—enrolling even those without social clout, such as women and the poor, among Rome's deities. The Roman afterlife promised posthumous power in the world of the living. While the manes have often been glossed over in studies of Roman religion, this book brings their compelling story to the forefront, exploring their myriad forms and how their worship played out in the context of Roman religion’s daily practice. Exploring the place of the manes in Roman society, Charles King delves into Roman beliefs about their powers to sustain life and bring death to individuals or armies, examines the rituals the Romans performed to honor them, and reclaims the vital role the manes played in the ancient Roman afterlife.

The Living And The Dead

The Living And The Dead PDF Author: Nina Tumarkin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book shows how Communist state and party authorities stage-managed the Soviets' memory of World War II, transforming a national trauma into a heroic exploit that glorified the party while systematically concealing the disastrous mistakes and criminal cruelties committed by the Stalinist tyranny.

Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?

Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? PDF Author: Robert Bartlett
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691169683
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 806

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Book Description
A sweeping, authoritative, and entertaining history of the Christian cult of the saints from its origin to the Reformation From its earliest centuries, one of the most notable features of Christianity has been the veneration of the saints—the holy dead. This ambitious history tells the fascinating story of the cult of the saints from its origins in the second-century days of the Christian martyrs to the Protestant Reformation. Robert Bartlett examines all of the most important aspects of the saints—including miracles, relics, pilgrimages, shrines, and the saints' role in the calendar, literature, and art. The book explores the central role played by the bodies and body parts of saints, and the special treatment these relics received. From the routes, dangers, and rewards of pilgrimage, to the saints' impact on everyday life, Bartlett's account is an unmatched examination of an important and intriguing part of the religious life of the past—as well as the present.

The Political Cult of the Dead in Ukraine

The Political Cult of the Dead in Ukraine PDF Author: Guido Hausmann
Publisher: V&R Unipress
ISBN: 3847013831
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The Ukrainian Euromaidan in 2013–14 and the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war in the Eastern part of the country have posed new questions to historians. The volume investigates the relevance of the cults of the fallen soldiers to Ukraine's national history and state. It places the dead of the Euromaidan and the forms and functions of the emerging new cult of the dead in the context of older cults from pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet times from various Ukrainian regions until the end of the presidency of Petro Poroshenko in 2019. The contributions emphasize the importance of the grassroot level, of local and regional actors or memory entrepreneurs, myths of state origin and national defense demanding unity, and the dynamics of commemorative practices in the last thirty years in relation to pluralist and fragmented processes of nationand state-building. They contribute to new conceptualizations of the political cult of the dead.

Israel's Beneficent Dead

Israel's Beneficent Dead PDF Author: Brian B. Schmidt
Publisher: Eisenbrauns
ISBN: 9781575060088
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Did the ancient Israelites perform rituals expressive of the belief in the supernaturalbeneficent power of the dead? Contrary to long held notions of primitive society and the euhemeristic origin of the divine, various factors indicate that the ancestor cult, that is, ancestor veneration or worship, was not observed in the Iron Age Levant. The Israelites did not adopt an ancient Canaanite ancestor cult that became the object of biblical scorn. Yet, a variety of mortuary rituals and cults were performed in Levantine society; mourning and funerary rites and longer-term rituals such as the care for the dead and commemoration. Rituals and monuments in or at burial sites, and especially the recitation of the deceased's name, recounted the dead's lived lives for familial survivors. They served broader social functions as well; e.g., to legitimate primogeniture and to reinforce a community's social collectivity. Another ritual complex from the domain of divination, namely necromancy, might have expressed the Israelite dead's beneficent powers. Yet, was this power to reveal knowledge that of the dead or was it a power conveyed through the dead, but that remained attributable to another supranatural being of non-human origin? Contemporary Assyrian necromancers utilized the ghost as a conduit through which divine knowledge was revealed to ascertain the future and so Judah's king Manasseh, a loyal Assyrian vassal, emulated these new Assyrian imperial forms of prognostication. As a de-legitimating rhetorical strategy, necromancy was then integrated into biblical traditions about the more distant past and attributed fictive Canaanite origins (Deut 18). In its final literary setting, necromancy was depicted as the Achille's heel of the nation's first royal dynasty, that of the Saulides (1 Sam 28), and more tellingly, its second, that of the Davidides (2 Kgs 21:6; 23:24).

The Cult of the Saints

The Cult of the Saints PDF Author: Peter Brown
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022617543X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
A new edition of the “brilliantly original and highly sophisticated” study of saint worship after the fall of the Roman Empire (Library Journal). In this groundbreaking work, Peter Brown explores how the worship of saints and their corporeal remains became central to religious life in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. During this period, earthly remnants served as a heavenly connection, and their veneration is a fascinating window into the cultural mood of a region in transition. Brown challenges the long-held two-tier idea of religion that separated the religious practices of the sophisticated elites from those of the superstitious masses, instead arguing that the cult of the saints crossed boundaries and played a dynamic part in both the Christian faith and the larger world of late antiquity. He shows how men and women living in harsh and sometimes barbaric times relied upon the holy dead to obtain justice, forgiveness, and power, and how a single sainted hair could inspire great thinkers and great artists. An essential text by one of the foremost scholars of European history, this expanded edition includes a new preface from Brown, which presents new ideas based on subsequent scholarship. “Informative…demonstrates once again Brown’s genius for sharing with his readers the fruits of not only his own painstaking and meticulous scholarship but also his penetrating understanding of the evolution of Western culture as a whole.”—Religious Studies

Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult

Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult PDF Author: Suzanne G. Lindsay
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9781409422617
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This book sheds new light on the interplay of the funerary arts, tomb cult and the mentalities that shaped them in France, over a period famous for profound and often violent change. Using previously untouched archival sources and period published material, this study proposes new and vital contexts for nineteenth-century France's celebrated funerary projects, often profoundly reinterpreting them, and brings to light significant enterprises that are little known today.

The Sinister Way

The Sinister Way PDF Author: Richard von Glahn
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520928776
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
The most striking feature of Wutong, the preeminent God of Wealth in late imperial China, was the deity's diabolical character. Wutong was perceived not as a heroic figure or paragon of noble qualities but rather as an embodiment of humanity's basest vices, greed and lust, a maleficent demon who preyed on the weak and vulnerable. In The Sinister Way, Richard von Glahn examines the emergence and evolution of the Wutong cult within the larger framework of the historical development of Chinese popular or vernacular religion—as opposed to institutional religions such as Buddhism or Daoism. Von Glahn's study, spanning three millennia, gives due recognition to the morally ambivalent and demonic aspects of divine power within the common Chinese religious culture.