technologanda: activism, art & technology

What the Right Gets Right - NYTimes.com

2012-01-19T02:05:00.000-08:00

What the Right Gets Right - NYTimes.com

a curious article asking liberals / leftists "what the right gets right," such as the fact that conservatives:

- acknowledge “the superiority of market systems for encouraging efficient use of resources.”

- “appreciate more instinctively the need for fiscal balance.”

- "are more suspicious from a philosophical point of view of big government as an answer to many issues and are suspicious of Wall Street institutionally and not just their high salaries, and bad practices.”

- are skeptical of “the application of social science theories to real world problems” and cognizant of “human fallibility/corruptibility.”

the article also limns a few "liabilities of conservatism" such as:

“Conservatives are too prone to engage in zero-sum thinking (either I keep my money or the government takes it). They fail to appreciate the possibility of positive sum solutions to social conflicts.”

Conservatives hold “the laissez-faire ‘minimal-state’ view that, although we have a moral obligation to refrain from hurting others, we have no obligation to help others. Conservatives cling to the comforting moral illusion that there is a sharp distinction between allowing people to suffer and making people suffer.”

“Conservatives fail to recognize that even if each transaction in a free market meets their standards of fairness (exchanges between competent adults who have not been coerced or tricked into contracts), the cumulative results could be colossally unfair.”

“Conservatives do not understand how prevalent situational constraints on achievement are and thus commit the fundamental attribution error when they hold the poor responsible for poverty.”

“Conservatives overgeneralize: From a few cases of poor persons who exploit the system, they draw sweeping conclusions about all poor persons.”

“Chance happenings play a much greater role in success or failure than conservatives realize. People often do not control their own destinies.”

For God So Loved the 1 Percent ... - NYTimes.com

2012-01-19T00:27:00.000-08:00

For God So Loved the 1 Percent ... - NYTimes.com

...Realizing that they needed to rely on others, these businessmen took a new tack: using generous financing to enlist sympathetic clergymen as their champions. After all, according to one tycoon, polls showed that, “of all the groups in America, ministers had more to do with molding public opinion” than any other.

The Rev. James W. Fifield, pastor of the elite First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, led the way in championing a new union of faith and free enterprise. “The blessings of capitalism come from God,” he wrote. “A system that provides so much for the common good and happiness must flourish under the favor of the Almighty.”

Christianity, in Mr. Fifield’s interpretation, closely resembled capitalism, as both were systems in which individuals rose or fell on their own. The welfare state, meanwhile, violated most of the Ten Commandments. It made a “false idol” of the federal government, encouraged Americans to covet their neighbors’ possessions, stole from the wealthy and, ultimately, bore false witness by promising what it could never deliver.

...In an extensive public relations campaign, they encouraged communities to commemorate Independence Day with “freedom under God” ceremonies, using full-page newspaper ads trumpeting the connection between faith and free enterprise. They also held a nationwide sermon contest on the theme, with clergymen competing for cash. Countless local events were promoted by a national “Freedom Under God” radio program, produced with the help of the filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille, hosted by Jimmy Stewart and broadcast on CBS.

...In the end, Mr. Romney is correct to claim that complaints about economic inequality are inconsistent with the concept of “one nation under God.” But that’s only because the “1 percent” of an earlier era intended it that way.

The Experience Economy - NYTimes.com

2011-02-17T06:37:00.000-08:00

The Experience Economy - NYTimes.com:

an intriguing editorial by David Brooks...

"the past few decades, Americans have devoted more of their energies to postmaterial arenas and less and less, for better and worse, to the sheer production of wealth.

During these years, commencement speakers have urged students to seek meaning and not money. Many people, it turns out, were listening."

Amy Chua Is a Wimp - NYTimes.com

2011-01-18T06:44:00.000-08:00

Amy Chua Is a Wimp - NYTimes.com

I have the opposite problem with Chua. I believe she’s coddling her children. She’s protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn’t understand what’s cognitively difficult and what isn’t.

Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.

...Chua would do better to see the classroom as a cognitive break from the truly arduous tests of childhood. Where do they learn how to manage people? Where do they learn to construct and manipulate metaphors? Where do they learn to perceive details of a scene the way a hunter reads a landscape? Where do they learn how to detect their own shortcomings? Where do they learn how to put themselves in others’ minds and anticipate others’ reactions?

The Highlights Interview with Daniel Bozhkov

2010-12-24T18:24:00.001-08:00

The Highlights Interview with Daniel Bozhkov

JD: I think of your seasonal role as Skowhegan’s fresco master in terms of a liminal being or hybrid. There you are artist and instructor, interloper and community member, facilitator and, to a certain extent, participant. How does this particular circumstance influence the work you’ve made there, or the work you’ve made elsewhere?

DB: I think it has influenced a great deal. I’m very interested in this category of the “migrant” that Julia Kristeva talks about: a person who moves from one language to another, from one culture to another, and becomes multilingual and this necessitates translation of the whole individual experience into the second language. One is learning everything anew, and through that process reinventing oneself. Most of the words between two languages can be vaguely of proximity to each other, but ultimately there is a contextual experience that you cannot reach, or translate, unless you know both languages and you’ve learned them in both cultures. This brings me back to the question of the hybrid. You acquire a kind of hybrid mind, or hybrid relation to maybe everything. Simultaneous roles are the ones in which you experience reality. That whole notion between who is the instructor and who is the learner, who is the author and who is the reader become interchangeable within the activity.

...

JD: Your work has been described as “sublimely silly,” “squirrelly,” “funny,” “absurdly earnest,” and “spontaneous.” Can you talk a bit about the levity behind the buoyancy?

DB: “Levity behind the buoyancy.” This is a congregation of two terms that are oxymoronic next to each other. In some of my work there is that initial, not drive, but outcome that has to do with deflation of power. There are power structures and particular power conglomerates around us. I don’t necessarily mean power of the state but, for instance, the power of meaning to crystallize and not allow any other interpretation. It seems to me that I have an impetus to deflate that. Sometimes, in a very profound situation of deep sadness, there’s even more room, something really ridiculous seems to be part of it too. This extra space, this possibility for another turn, has something to do with the power of oxymoron.

There is an absurd side of the ‘necessity for existence.’ On one level, everything that exists justifies its own existence — it exists because it does. The fact that it’s there proves that it needs to be there. On another level, the whole system of trying to understanding this is completely absurd. In the most serious questions of life and death there is not only dark, but an absurd and ridiculous side as well. And I just can’t avoid it. It just comes out. In Bulgaria, for instance, there’s been an early medieval heresy, the Bogomils. They were Christian dualists who were told that the world was created by the God and the Devil at the same time. So there are negative things created by the negative, and positive by the positive. They have this apocryphal saying, “I believe in God, but I don’t trust Him.” The first part of that sentence is like a credo, the second part completely deflates that. Maybe they’re saying, “I don’t trust the human mind that speculates about God.” On one hand I have moments when I experience the profound level of interconnectedness of everything. On another I don’t trust my drive to completely comprehend it, because I appreciate that it’s enormous, it’s inexhaustible. My attempt to know it is ridiculous because I’m ill-equipped. In some of my works you see me experiencing this limitation.

JD: Unlike other artists who may use humor as an entryway into explorations of more ambiguous space, you see this absurdity or this silliness as being integral to the weightiness?

DB: Oh, absolutely — no, definitely. It’s part of the attempts to know, really. The absurd humor is not simply playing the part of the comic relief. I mean, Dostoyevsky is one of the darkest writers I’ve read, or Kafka, and there is a lot of deeply absurd humor there. You know how sometimes Monty Python reaches this very profound moment of “we don’t know what’s happening here,” it’s just so out there, it’s painfully silly, and, at the same time, you experience certain exhilaration that cuts through the limits of reason. Or Andy Kaufman with his ‘have-beens’ talk show, and his “inter-gender wrestling matches.” He introduces a freshly minted incoherence into the most banal situations, which we think that we know all too well.

Museums Special Section - Haiti’s Visionaries, Rising From the Rubble - NYTimes.com

2010-12-19T04:16:00.000-08:00

Museums Special Section - Haiti’s Visionaries, Rising From the Rubble - NYTimes.com:

a reminder that art is something fundamentally human, a way of making sense when nothing does, necessary even in times of catastrophe...

"A funky downtown section of Port-au-Prince called the Grand Rue was the scene, in December, of a first-time art event called the “Ghetto Biennial.” Based on international models but operating on a tiny budget, it brought in a few artists from abroad but was basically a showcase for a collective of Haitian sculptors who call themselves Atis Rezistans. The group’s three senior members — Andr�Eug�ne, Jean H�rard Celeur and Frantz Jacques, known as Guyodo — work together in the Grand Rue, in a warren of cinderblock car-repair shops that supply the material for their art: rusted chassis, steering wheels, hubcaps, broken crankshafts, cast-off oil filters. With the help of young assistants, they turn this industrial junk into demonic doomsday figures with giant phalluses and gargoylish bodies topped by plastic doll heads or human skulls."

Ai Weiwei, Artist and Activist, Confined in Beijing - NYTimes.com

2010-12-19T03:57:00.000-08:00

Ai Weiwei, Artist and Activist, Confined in Beijing - NYTimes.com:

"A phalanx of Beijing police officers confined the prominent artist and activist Ai Weiwei to his north Beijing home on Friday, a move he suggested came at the behest of unnamed but powerful political figures in Shanghai who feared that he was about to embarrass them.

If so, they were correct."

A Conversation With Aniruddh D. Patel - Exploring Music’s Hold on the Mind - Question - NYTimes.com

2010-06-01T06:38:00.000-07:00

A Conversation With Aniruddh D. Patel - Exploring Music’s Hold on the Mind - Question - NYTimes.com

What do humans have in common with parrots? Both species are vocal learners, with the ability to imitate sounds. We share that rare skill with parrots. In that one respect, our brains are more like those of parrots than chimpanzees. Since vocal learning creates links between the hearing and movement centers of the brain, I hypothesized that this is what you need to be able to move to beat of music.

Charles Bowden on "Murder City: Ciudad Ju�rez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields"

2010-04-15T12:11:00.000-07:00

Charles Bowden on "Murder City: Ciudad Ju�rez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields":

oh man this is dark.

"And I think the war on drugs is ending, because, frankly, it’s no longer the darkness at the edge of town. I do stories all over this country. I don’t care where you go, the drugs are everywhere. I don’t care where you go, people are being arrested. I did a story in western North Dakota, county of—you know, got more people in this room maybe than the county. They busted eighty meth labs in a year. What are you going to say, that these are, you know, the lesser breed or something? I mean, these are a bunch of people that look like potatoes that plow fields. That’s what our war on drugs has come to. We’re killing ourselves with our war. We’re not helping anyone."

Op-Ed Columnist - The Humble Hound - NYTimes.com

2010-04-12T14:45:00.000-07:00

Op-Ed Columnist - The Humble Hound - NYTimes.com

from a lovely column by David Brooks...

Alongside the boardroom lion model of leadership, you can imagine a humble hound model. The humble hound leader thinks less about her mental strengths than about her weaknesses. She knows her performance slips when she has to handle more than one problem at a time, so she turns off her phone and e-mail while making decisions. She knows she has a bias for caution, so she writes a memo advocating the more daring option before writing another advocating the most safe. She knows she is bad at prediction, so she follows Peter Drucker’s old advice: After each decision, she writes a memo about what she expects to happen. Nine months later, she’ll read it to discover how far off she was.

In short, she spends a lot of time on metacognition — thinking about her thinking — and then building external scaffolding devices to compensate for her weaknesses.

She believes we only progress through a series of regulated errors. Every move is a partial failure, to be corrected by the next one. Even walking involves shifting your weight off-balance and then compensating with the next step.

She knows the world is too complex and irregular to be known, so life is about navigating uncertainty. She understands she is too quick to grasp at pseudo-objective models and confident projections that give the illusion of control. She has to remember George Eliot’s image — that life is like playing chess with chessmen who each have thoughts and feelings and motives of their own. It is complex beyond reckoning.

She spends more time seeing than analyzing. Analytic skills differ modestly from person to person, but perceptual skills vary enormously. Anybody can analyze, but the valuable people can pick out the impermanent but crucial elements of a moment or effectively grasp a context. This sort of perception takes modesty; strong personalities distort the information field around them. This sort of understanding also takes patience. As the Japanese say, don’t just study a topic. Get used to it. Live in it for a while.

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2010-04-04T22:41:00.003-07:00

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Mind - New Research Focuses on the Power of Physical Contact - NYTimes.com

2010-03-01T07:08:00.000-08:00

Mind - New Research Focuses on the Power of Physical Contact - NYTimes.com

If a high five or an equivalent can in fact enhance performance, on the field or in the office, that may be because it reduces stress. A warm touch seems to set off the release of oxytocin, a hormone that helps create a sensation of trust, and to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

Interview with YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES

2010-02-17T15:05:00.000-08:00

Interview with YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES

YHCHI: It's pretty obvious that the "tone" or "voice" of Internet literature is more distant and difficult to "locate" than traditional writing. Mere book packaging tells a lot about the book and the author; browser packaging is generic. Internet writers can either see this as a problem or welcome it as a relief from the critical fashion of reading biography into every aspect of literature.

As for the look of our work, we do what we can. We've never been interested in graphic design (a lot of Web artists--and even writers-- start out or double as graphic artists). There are hundreds of fonts, millions of colors, and we don't know what to do about that.

So to answer your question, no, we can't and won't help readers to "locate" us. Distance, homelessness, anonymity, and insignificance are all part of the Internet literary voice, and we welcome them.

TS: Can you say a few things about your process of collaboration?

YHCHI: We sit in front of our computers side by side on the floor of our tiny pre-World War II Japanese house in Seoul and try to ignore each other. Something inevitably comes up, and the laughs--sorry -- the collaboration process begins.

TS: What do you make of the critical writing out there thus far on Web-based art and Web-based writing?

YHCHI: There isn't much critical writing yet on Web writing. One reason is that it's a young medium. Another is that it's not taken very seriously (i.e., there's no money in it). Still another is that it's more satisfying to create than to criticize.

There's a tendency to read quickly on the Internet. Speed is everything, and densely written texts, be they creative or critical, seem to make the reader anxious -- maybe because of the phone bill. Then again, maybe another reason for the dearth of critical Web writing is that there's nothing to criticize -- Web writing might not be very good.

the Encyclopaedia Britannica on film

2009-12-25T20:39:00.000-08:00

The editors of Encyclopædia Britannica first commissioned an article on the subject of motion pictures for the Thirteenth Edition (1926), which, like the Twelfth Edition (1922), constituted a three-volume supplement to the famous Eleventh Edition (1910–11). The Fourteenth Edition was launched in 1929, only a few scant years from the advent of “talkies,” and was published yearly (with three exceptions) from 1929 to 1973. The 1929 printing included a discussion of many aspects of motion pictures, including some notable advice on methods of makeup--"False beards should be made with crêpe hair a little lighter than the natural hair. Comb out well, press in a book, cut off a straight edge, and after applying spirit gum on the face attach the straight edge to the face, and trim with scissors to the required shape."

Lillian Gish’s contribution, which ran under the heading "A Universal Language" was in print from 1929 to 1939. By the time it was replaced, Hollywood was in full swing and exposition of this sort probably sounded somewhat quaint.

The motion picture, by virtue of its intrinsic nature, is a species of amusing and informational Esperanto, and, potentially at least, a species of aesthetic Esperanto. Of all the arts, if it may be classified as one, the motion picture has in it, perhaps more than any other, the resources of universality. Even a simple waltz by Johann Strauss may remain alien and unassimilable to the musical ear of the Chinese; a Michelangelo fresco may fail to impress its significant beauty upon a Japanese or Hindu; a drama by Ibsen may remain completely unintelligible, even in competent translation, to a maharaja of India, just as Chinese music must ever remain strange, peculiar and incomprehensible to the Anglo-Saxon ear. But the motion picture art of Charlie Chaplin will inevitably make a Japanese laugh as heartily as a Dane.

The reason is simple. Pantomine is the aboriginal means of human communication and intercourse, and pictures bring to a child his first acquaintance with and understanding of the world about him. The motion picture, combining the two, is thus addressed to a common human understanding. It begins with the elementals of human perception and comprehension; it starts at the outset with the advantage of the fundamentals of human intercommunication and explicitness. It is for this reason that the moving picture has spread through the world and has been accepted far and wide in what has seemed an unbelievably short space of time.

The motion picture tells its stories directly, simply, quickly and elementally, not in words but in pictorial pantomine. To see is not only to believe; it is also in a measure to understand. In theatrical drama, seeing is closely allied with hearing, and hearing, in turn, with mental effort. In the motion picture, seeing is all--or at least nine-tenths of all.

This, of course, is the screen in its fundamental aspect. This is the motion picture simple and unsophisticated. This is the universal engine that is the cinema. The motion picture, plainly enough, in certain of its manifestations may remain largely vague and ambiguous to a people alien to the source of its imagination, preparation and making. But the motion picture in itself and in the aggregate is based upon materials of easy, common appreciation. Love, hate, desolation, despair, joy, ecstasy, defeat, triumph--these are universal emotions. Conveyed by words, as drama conveys them, they may offer difficulties to remote and various peoples. But conveyed by the movements of the human face and body, by smiles and tears, troubled brows and dejected shoulders, sparkling eyes and fluttering hands, they are immediately recognizable. A laugh or a sob is the same the world over. They need no words to explain them.

In another phase of the cinema, the so-called news-reel has already proved itself to be a form of journalistic Esperanto, just as the so-called educational moving picture has shown itself to be a form of informational Esperanto. The news-reel has brought to the far corners of the earth the life and daily activities of all nations and people. The educationals, as they are known, have acquainted the audiences of the world with various phenomena associated with invention, manufacture, discovery, ingenuity and enterprise peculiar to a certain country. The news-reel has informed every country of its neighbour, his leaders, his achievements, his troubles, his pleasures, his problems. It has spread a direct acquaintanceship with alien lands, peoples and customs to other lands. It has provided an international newspaper self-adapted to the understanding of all peoples, and a running commentary on contemporaneous history.

The motion picture is at once the common story-book, newspaper and text-book of the 20th century. In its loftier aspects, it may conceivably elude the comprehension of audiences remote from its birthplace. That is, when it abandons its more elemental nature and strives for isolation as an art form. But that is the fate of art, all art, wherever it be found. Art is for the few, unfortunately; the generality of people have difficulty in taking it into their understanding. Shakespeare and the Orient may remain strangers; Leonardo and Dostoievsky may find no sympathy and hospitality in the consciousness of half a dozen lands. But there is probably no land where the spectacle of soldiers marching off to war or a fat man being struck with a custard pie is not instantaneously hailed with understanding. It is in elementary excitements and humours such as these, together with the thousand and one others that they connote, that the motion picture, reaching constantly after higher things, finds the mainspring of its wide and comprehensive appeal. It deals for the most part with primitive instincts, primitive impulses, primitive human peace and alarm, happiness and ache, ambition and dream. These may be dressed in strange costumes and may be shown through strange peoples, but underneath they are the emotions and inspirations and trials of all the human race. The backgrounds may be unfamiliar, but the hearts that beat and struggle, triumph or fall, are the hearts of all mankind. And so the world laughs with Chaplin and Lloyd, cries with Seastrom and Murnau and Griffith, startles at the revelations of Eisenstein, gasps pleasurably at Fairbanks and Valentino, feels tenderness with Mary Pickford and warms to the homely lovableness of Wolheim and Beery.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Patronizing the Arts.

2009-12-20T13:18:00.000-08:00

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Patronizing the Arts.

Oh heyyyy Ballet, wow, you're reeeeal fun to watch—all those pliés and jetés—good for you!

- - - -

Hey, Painting. What are you, like, oils on a canvas? Boy, that's a priceless way to capture the human condition.

- - - -

Whoa, nice beat you got there, Music. Yeah, that'll never get old. Why don't you repeat that chorus again? It's soooo catchy.

- - - -

Hey, Literature. What 'cha got there, some words on paper? That'll sure come in handy... when I'm in the can!

Fordlandia

2009-09-21T21:41:00.001-07:00

AMY GOODMAN: The documentary The Amazon Awakens, an excerpt, that was made by Walt Disney but commissioned by the US Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. Greg Grandin, author of Fordlandia, Walt Disney—he visited?

GREG GRANDIN: Yes, he visited prior to making this documentary. They were friends, Henry Ford and Walt Disney. And there was even evidence that some of the attractions in Disneyland in California were actually based on experience in Fordlandia, the Tropical Belle steamship ride or riverboat ride.

...GREG GRANDIN: Well, you know, let me say that, you know, Ford spent about a billion dollars, in inflation-adjusted dollars, on this project, and not one drop of latex made it into a Ford car. It was an absolute failure. And the more it failed, the more—this is also a resonance with recent history—the more it failed, the more he justified it in idealistic terms, not unlike, in some ways, the Iraq war. The more you fail to find weapons of mass destruction, the more it becomes a civilizational mission to bring democracy to the Middle East. The same thing with Fordlandia.

There were riots, and there were—workers rebelled against this attempt to impose Ford-style regimentation. One worker called it resisting being turned into 365-day machines.

And then, of course, the environmental aspect of it. Ford basically—by planting rubber trees so close together in the Amazon, Ford basically created a large incubator. Caterpillars and pests and blight just devastated the plantation. The more it failed, the more money that was poured into it.

AMY GOODMAN: And the people who were in the Amazon, the response there, the natives of the Brazilian Amazon?

GREG GRANDIN: Well, they did resist that heavy attempt to regulate every aspect of their lives, not just the industrial regime, but also their diet, their sanitation and medical regulation. And during one riot in particular, they smashed all the time clocks. This was a particularly symbolic rebellion against Midwestern industrialization.

...And Fordlandia, in some ways, is very resonant with this. Just, you know—you go to Fordlandia, and there’s almost a yearning for this kind of holistic capitalism, a kind of paternal capitalism or developmentalism, where capital—where industries cared about what happened to workers, in terms of education, in terms of healthcare. But you go 300 miles east of Fordlandia, and there’s this city of Manaus, which is the fastest-growing city in Brazil. It’s a free trade port in the middle of the Amazon. It kind of sprawls out like some kind of perverse Oz eating away at the jungle. And nearly every major electronics corporation—Nokia, Sony, Sanyo, Harley-Davidson and other—Honda—have assembly plants there, where they make—where they assemble brand-name products for sale elsewhere in Latin America. So it’s a perfect example of how Fordism has been extended globally. So you have this nice two contrasts, Fordlandia and Manaus, side by side.

A Paradise Built in Hell: Rebecca Solnit on "The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster"

2009-08-31T13:18:00.000-07:00

A Paradise Built in Hell: Rebecca Solnit on "The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster"

REBECCA SOLNIT: You know, a lot of my work has been based on the field of disaster sociology, which emerged after the World War II, when the US government decided it wanted to know how human beings would behave in the aftermath of an all-out nuclear war. The assumption, as it often is, is that we would become childlike and sheepish and panic and be helpless, or that we’d become sort of venal and savage and barbaric. And the disaster scholars started to look at this and eventually dismantled almost every stereotype we have and found that people are actually, as I’ve been saying, resourceful, altruistic, brave, innovative and often oddly joyful, because a lot of the alienation and isolation of everyday life is removed. And, you know, you saw that in the 1906 earthquake, which I studied a lot for the centennial a few years ago, that people created these community kitchens, that they were extremely resourceful and helpful. And you see that all through. You see that in Mexico City. You saw that in 9/11.

What you also see is that because the authorities think that we’re monsters, they themselves panic and become the monsters in disaster. Some of the sociologists I worked with—Lee Clarke and Caron Chess—call this “elite panic,” and that’s the panic that matters in disasters, the sense that things are out of control; we have to get them back in control, whether that means shooting civilians suspected of stealing things, whether that means focusing on control and weapons as a response, rather than on help and support or just letting people do what they already are doing magnificently. And so, it really upends not only the sense of what happens in disaster, in these extreme moments, but I think it upends our sense of human nature, who most of us are and who we want to be. There’s enormous possibility in disaster to see how much people want to be members of a stronger society, to be better connected, to have meaningful work, how much everyday life prevents that.

Send In the Skinny, Juggling, German Clown, Hilby - NYTimes.com

2009-08-23T10:15:00.000-07:00

Send In the Skinny, Juggling, German Clown, Hilby - NYTimes.com

and now something completely different...

He calls himself Hilby, “the skinny German juggle boy,” and that is the first big wink at his audience, a signal that he will be poking fun at himself as well as at the conventions of his trade. In his act he juggles both words and objects, including, at one rivetingly absurd point, a bowling ball, a toilet plunger and a cordless hedge trimmer.

He maintains a fast-paced comic banter, gently mocking himself and his audience, especially its desire to see him fall or get hurt. (“Americans love accidents.”) He is highly skilled technically but does not mind dropping things because comedy, he believes, is more entertaining than precision (a view, he said, that his occasional all-German audiences do not share).

Offstage Mr. Hilbig is an earnest, mellow, yoga-practicing father of two who lives in Ithaca, N.Y., with his girlfriend, a photographer who has two children. On official forms he lists his occupation as clown, and from Memorial Day to Labor Day every year he is one of hundreds of variety entertainers — jugglers, magicians, hypnotists, mentalists, impressionists, Dadaists — who travel the fair circuit, bringing, to borrow a German term, echt performance art to the land.

The heart of Mr. Hilbig’s approach is to mount a charm offensive: “If you’re charming, you can knit a sweater onstage. You have to make the audience feel there’s no other place you’d rather be than right here right now with you people.”

In truth, that is not what Mr. Hilbig felt when he first arrived at the Fayette County Fair, a new booking secured by his agent. (Yes, clowns have agents too.) He found the setting dispiriting. His stage was strewn with litter and the small sign advertising his presence, “The Herald-Standard presents Hilby the Skinny German Juggle Boy,” hung above a trash can.

Further, Mr. Hilbig worried that Fayette County was “not exactly my demographic.” His show works best, he said, in areas where Priuses outnumber pickup trucks. He likes to bait his audiences when they do not laugh by saying that his humor requires at least a high school education, but in Fayette County, where a quarter of the population over 25 does not have one, that would not be terribly funny.

Gradually, however, the place grew on him. He found the livestock auction fascinating, the monster trucks impressive and the large Army recruiting station, in an area where unemployment is especially high, “depressing but real.” He admired the majesty of the lions and tigers and befriended their handler, Clayton Rosaire, a 10th-generation wild-animal trainer from Sarasota, Fla.

“I’m intrigued by his family history,” Mr. Hilbig said. “I’m a first-generation skinny German juggle boy.”

During the five days he worked the fair Mr. Hilbig drove his minivan from his motel to the fairgrounds each afternoon and changed into his lederhosen in the back of the fiddlers’ hall. When the “Pigs Gone Wild!” race started blasting “Sweet Home Alabama,” he readied his own sound system and loosened up by chatting with early audience members.

Before one show the fair’s queen and princess, in matching tie-dyed T-shirts, settled into the front row. “By the way, girls, the next time you do laundry, you should really separate the colors from the whites,” Mr. Hilbig called out to them. The girls laughed, adjusting their purple pageant sashes; they were itching to be selected as volunteers.

But alas for them, Mr. Hilbig chose instead a dimply young girl named Madison (“Is that your mom there, Madison, taking pictures for the insurance claim?”), a corrections officer from the town of Fairchance (“Wow, that must really stink being a prisoner in Fairchance”) and a burly, tattooed electrician (“Can I call you Papa Smurf?”).

As he balances swords atop knives in his teeth and mounts six-foot-tall unicycles, Mr. Hilbig especially likes to tease men. He prances around the stage and (during fire juggling) refers to himself as “a flaming German.” He squeezes men’s muscles, blows them kisses and urges them to hug to the song “Feelings” — although in Fayette County he never coaxed more than a handshake from his male volunteers.

“People used to ask me all the time if I’m gay,” Mr. Hilbig said. “What a weird question. So I try to blur the boundaries. The more uptight the guys are, the funnier it is.”

Sometimes Mr. Hilbig’s friends tell him he is “so good he should be famous.” But Mr. Hilbig, shrugging, said, “Famous doesn’t really exist in terms of juggling.” He is content, he said, to be his own boss, to earn a decent living (“I do fine; I can buy organic vegetables”) and to savor the sweet moments when he electrifies an audience. Over the years he has developed a loyal following, and in Fayette County he added at least one particularly ardent fan: Mr. Galbraith, the retired steelworker, who attended 11 of his 15 performances, crying out “Wow!” and “Ha ha ha!” and “Hot pants!” (when Mr. Hilbig crouched over a flame).

Episodically, Mr. Hilbig persuaded his audiences to sing a song from “The Sound of Music,” sending ragged choruses of “doe a deer” out over the midway. And in the end, despite his initial anxieties, he seemed to have won them over. Summing up an apparent consensus, Ms. Scully, the fair princess, said, “The pigs are very popular, but I liked him better.”

Op-Ed Contributor - Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think - NYTimes.com

2009-08-19T09:19:00.000-07:00

Op-Ed Contributor - Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think - NYTimes.com

In fact, our mature brain seems to be programmed by our childhood experiences — we plan based on what we’ve learned as children. Very young children imagine and explore a vast array of possibilities. As they grow older and absorb more evidence, certain possibilities become much more likely and more useful. They then make decisions based on this selective information and become increasingly reluctant to give those ideas up and try something new. Computer scientists talk about the difference between exploring and exploiting — a system will learn more if it explores many possibilities, but it will be more effective if it simply acts on the most likely one. Babies explore; adults exploit.

Each kind of intelligence has benefits and drawbacks. Focus and planning get you to your goal more quickly but may also lock in what you already know, closing you off to alternative possibilities. We need both blue-sky speculation and hard-nosed planning. Babies and young children are designed to explore, and they should be encouraged to do so.

The learning that babies and young children do on their own, when they carefully watch an unexpected outcome and draw new conclusions from it, ceaselessly manipulate a new toy or imagine different ways that the world might be, is very different from schoolwork. Babies and young children can learn about the world around them through all sorts of real-world objects and safe replicas, from dolls to cardboard boxes to mixing bowls, and even toy cellphones and computers. Babies can learn a great deal just by exploring the ways bowls fit together or by imitating a parent talking on the phone. (Imagine how much money we can save on “enriching” toys and DVDs!)

But what children observe most closely, explore most obsessively and imagine most vividly are the people around them. There are no perfect toys; there is no magic formula. Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play.

Democracy Now! | Headlines for August 03, 2009

2009-08-04T10:50:00.000-07:00

Democracy Now! | Headlines for August 03, 2009

Washington Lobbying Firm Caught Sending Fake NAACP Letters

A prominent Washington lobbying firm has acknowledged sending forged letters to a Virginia lawmaker urging him to vote against the House climate change bill. The lobbying firm Bonner & Associates sent letters to the office of Democratic Congressman Tom Perriello of Virginia that appeared to be from members of the NAACP and the Latino organization Creciendo Juntos. The letters urged Perriello to vote against the climate bill in order to protect minorities from higher energy bills. The fake letters appeared on letterhead from the NAACP and Creciendo Juntos and were signed by made-up individuals. The lobbying firm claimed that the letters were sent out in error by a temporary employee, but the firm has a history of what’s called “astroturfing,” misrepresenting corporate-backed policy as a real grassroots movement. The company has refused to say who was paying for the campaign to derail the climate change bill. Clients of Bonner & Associates have included Citicorp, Aetna, PhRMA, Dow Chemical, AT&T, and General Motors. In the end, the effort failed. Congressman Tom Perriello voted for the legislation.

Democracy Now! | Headlines for June 17, 2009

2009-07-01T14:07:00.000-07:00

Democracy Now! | Headlines for June 17, 2009

A canny placement of consecutive stories -- on the new war bill passed by (US) congress, and the number of displaced persons worldwide -- from DemocracyNOW!

"Dennis Kucinich also criticized the increased funding for the International Monetary Fund.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich: “There’s money, too, for the IMF, presumably to bail out European banks, billions for the IMF, so they can force low- and middle-income nations to cut jobs, wages, healthcare and retirement security, just like corporate America does to our constituents. And there’s money to incentivize the purchase of more cars, but not necessarily from the US, because a Buy America mandate was not allowed. Another $106 billion, and all we get is a lousy war. Pretty soon that’s going to be about the only thing made in America: war."

UN: Record Number of Internally Displaced Persons

The United Nations is reporting a record number of internally displaced persons received UN assistance in 2008. 14.4 million people were registered as living under UN care. Another 11.6 million internally displaced persons were left to fend for themselves or receive assistance from other agencies. The total number of internally displaced persons has increased even more since the end of 2008 due to fighting in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Somalia."

American Album - Finding Purpose in Serving the Needy, Not Just Haute Cuisine - NYTimes.com

2009-06-14T15:40:00.000-07:00

American Album - Finding Purpose in Serving the Needy, Not Just Haute Cuisine - NYTimes.com:

"In an era in which food politics are increasingly part of the national conversation and organic chefs are lauded in glossy magazines, Mr. Hammack and a growing number of talented colleagues are applying their creativity and commitment to serving the lost and needy. They are working at food banks and shelters in places like Winston-Salem, N.C., and Richmond’s so-called Iron Triangle, a neighborhood synonymous with poverty, bounded by railroad tracks.

About 40 trained chefs now work at 28 food banks affiliated with Feeding America, a nonprofit network based in Chicago, double the number a decade ago, said Ross Fraser, a spokesman.

At the D.C. Central Kitchen in Washington, the estimated 11,000 volunteers include acclaimed chefs like Ris Lacoste.

“Food is really the base level of our humanity, our culture, our spirituality,” said Michael F. Curtin Jr., the chief executive of the kitchen and a former restaurateur.

Mr. Hammack’s own story begins with his grandmother Nola Lilly Hammack, who was born in Oklahoma and bequeathed her grandson her Dust Bowl know-how for making memorable meals from humble ingredients. Among them were dandelion greens braised in apple cider vinegar, spaghetti sauce from tomatoes sun-dried on window screens, and po’ boy pudding — water, flour, bacon fat and spices.

A dedicated churchgoer, Mr. Hammack realized after two years that an entire career spent cooking for the affluent would not fulfill him. Today, he leads a double life, spending weekdays at the mission and weekends catering in San Francisco with a company he founded, Bohemian Elegance.

In 2002, the mission teamed up with the local community college, where those who have graduated from the recovery program can go on to a full-fledged cooking school...

To be of use...

2009-06-12T12:56:00.000-07:00

The Case For Working With Your Hands
from NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html

Survival (of middle-managers) depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. Nothing is set in concrete the way it is when you are, for example, pouring concrete.

...
There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

An economy that is more entrepreneurial, less managerial, would be less subject to the kind of distortions that occur when corporate managers’ compensation is tied to the short-term profit of distant shareholders. For most entrepreneurs, profit is at once a more capacious and a more concrete thing than this. It is a calculation in which the intrinsic satisfactions of work count — not least, the exercise of your own powers of reason.

Ultimately it is enlightened self-interest, then, not a harangue about humility or public-spiritedness, that will compel us to take a fresh look at the trades. The good life comes in a variety of forms. This variety has become difficult to see; our field of aspiration has narrowed into certain channels. But the current perplexity in the economy seems to be softening our gaze. Our peripheral vision is perhaps recovering, allowing us to consider the full range of lives worth choosing. For anyone who feels ill suited by disposition to spend his days sitting in an office, the question of what a good job looks like is now wide open.

Next Test - Value of $125,000-a-Year Teachers - NYTimes.com

2009-06-08T07:45:00.000-07:00

Next Test - Value of $125,000-a-Year Teachers - NYTimes.com

They are members of an eight-teacher dream team, lured to an innovative charter school that will open in Washington Heights in September with salaries that would make most teachers drop their chalk and swoon; $125,000 is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher earns, and about two and a half times as much as the national average for teacher salaries. They also will be eligible for bonuses, based on schoolwide performance, of up to $25,000 in the second year.

The school, called the Equity Project, is premised on the theory that excellent teachers — and not revolutionary technology, talented principals or small class size — are the critical ingredient for success. Experts hope it could offer a window into some of the most pressing and elusive questions in education: Is a collection of superb teachers enough to make a great school? Are six-figure salaries the way to get them? And just what makes a teacher great?

...a golden résumé and a well-run classroom are two different things. “There are people who it’s like, wow, they look great on paper, but the kids don’t respect them,” Mr. Vanderhoek said.

The eight winning candidates, he said, have some common traits, like a high “engagement factor,” as measured by the portion of a given time frame during which students seem so focused that they almost forget they are in class. They were expert at redirecting potential troublemakers, a crucial skill for middle school teachers. And they possessed a contagious enthusiasm — which Rhena Jasey, 30, Harvard Class of 2001, who has been teaching at a school in Maplewood, N.J., conveyed by introducing a math lesson with, “Oh, this is the fun part because I looooooove math!” Says Mr. Vanderhoek: “You couldn’t help but get excited.” Hired.

Framing a New Generation in Shows at the Met and the New Museum - NYTimes.com

2009-06-03T09:34:00.000-07:00

Framing a New Generation in Shows at the Met and the New Museum - NYTimes.com

Is same generation a useful basis for writing history? Obviously the answer is yes and no. For years now scholars have questioned the validity of viewing the cultural past and the present through the old apparatus of renaissances, dynasties and “periods.” They see these categories for what they are: packaging designed to sell an account of events that will go down smoothly and leave no spaces blank or questions unanswered. Generations could be added to the list.

Isn’t the point of art, though, to acknowledge that some questions can never be answered, but to ask them anyway? Isn’t part of the job of artists to refuse smoothness and to keep opening up space, formal, temporal, psychic, emotional, whatever you want to call it? In the end the generational model may be most useful for showing us the artists who don’t fit, who aren’t interested, who think old when they’re young and young when they’re old, to whom it may or may not occur as they walk past the hall of fame, “not me, not here, not yet.”

EXCLUSIVE...Pentagon Pundits: New York Times Reporter David Barstow Wins Pulitzer Prize for Exposing Military's Pro-War Propaganda Media Campaign

2009-06-02T21:11:00.001-07:00

EXCLUSIVE...Pentagon Pundits: New York Times Reporter David Barstow Wins Pulitzer Prize for Exposing Military's Pro-War Propaganda Media Campaign

AMY GOODMAN: We begin our show today with New York Times reporter David Barstow. He recently won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for exposing how dozens of retired generals working as radio and television analysts had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to military contractors that benefited from policies they defended.

Barstow uncovered Pentagon documents that repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration themes and messages to millions of Americans in the form of their own opinions.

The so-called analysts were given hundreds of classified Pentagon briefings, provided with Pentagon-approved talking points and given free trips to Iraq and other sites paid for by the Pentagon.

David Bartow wrote, quote, “Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse—an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.”

The officials appeared on all the main cable news channels—Fox News, CNN and MSNBC—as well as the three nightly network news broadcasts.

The Pentagon program started during the build-up to the Iraq war.

BILL O’REILLY: You met with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

MAJ. GEN. PAUL VALLELY: Special briefing on Thursday. Very interesting. A lot of good information, especially about post-Saddam, post-regime time, what are we going to do then? And it’s a very well laid-out plan.

AMY GOODMAN: The Pentagon continued to use retired generals to counter criticism on various issues, ranging from Guantanamo to the surge in Iraq. In some cases, analysts would appear on cable news programs live from the Pentagon just minutes after receiving a special briefing.

WOLF BLITZER: This is just coming into CNN right now. The Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has just wrapped up his meeting with retired US generals. Our own military analyst, retired US Air Force Major General Don Shepperd, is fresh of that meeting. He’s joining us now live from the Pentagon.

MAJ. GEN. DONALD SHEPPERD: The message needs to be, imagine an Iraq—imagine Iraq under the control of Zarqawi with another conveyor belt for terrorists, combined with oil and water and land and resources. Imagine the effect of that. That’s the message that has to get out to the American people.

AMY GOODMAN: Since the New York Times first report appeared thirteen months ago, the major cable news programs and television networks have responded with what has been described as a, quote, “deafening silence.” Even after David Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize last week, the story—and even Barstow’s prize—went unnoticed on cable news and television networks.

...DAVID BARSTOW: You know, to be honest with you, I haven’t received many invitations—in fact, any invitations—to appear on any of the main network or cable programs. I can’t say I’m hugely shocked by that.

On the other hand, while there’s been kind of deafening silence, as you put it, on the network side of this, the stories have had—sparked an enormous debate in the blogosphere. And to this day, I continue to get regular phone calls from not just in this country but around the world, where other democracies are confronting similar kinds of issues about the control of their media and the influence of their media by the government.

So it’s been an interesting experience to see the sort of two reactions, one being silence from the networks and the cable programs, and the other being this really lively debate in the blogosphere.

...As Glenn Greenwald put it, “The New York Times’ David Barstow won a richly deserved Pulitzer Prize […] for two articles that, despite being featured as major news stories on the front page of [the New York Times], were completely suppressed by virtually every network and cable news show, which to this day have never informed their viewers about what Barstow uncovered. [And yet] here is how the Pulitzer Committee described Barstow’s exposés:

‘Awarded to David Barstow of The New York Times for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended.’”

EXCLUSIVE...Pentagon Pundits: New York Times Reporter David Barstow Wins Pulitzer Prize for Exposing Military's Pro-War Propaganda Media Campaign

2009-06-02T21:11:00.000-07:00

EDUARDO GALEANO: The Open Veins of Latin America

2009-06-02T19:32:00.000-07:00

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/28/eduardo

EDUARDO GALEANO: There is a new energy, which is not new at all. I think that history never ends. Some histories inside history have no happy ends, unhappy ends. But history doesn’t end. She’s a stubborn lady, and she goes on walking, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing. But it never ends. When histories say goodbye, history is really saying, “See you. See you later. See you soon.” So this is like a subterranean river, who went on flowing and nowadays is reappearing with a very important energy coming from people, from the [inaudible] river—how is it? From—

JUAN GONZALEZ: Below to above.

EDUARDO GALEANO: —below to above, yes, and not on the other side, on the other way.

AMY GOODMAN: Trickle up, not trickle down.

EDUARDO GALEANO: I have an engineer friend of mine who said, “Lo único que se hace desde arriba son los pozos,” “The only thing that you can make from up to down are holes.” And it’s true. All the other things are made are created from the bottom. And that’s the way it’s going to be done, and it’s already going on doing in several Latin American countries, which is good news, indeed, for the world.

what you would like him to learn from this book, President Obama?

EDUARDO GALEANO: No, I don’t want to teach anybody anything. Never. I even insisted last evening, when I was talking in that theater—

AMY GOODMAN: At the Ethical Culture Society.

EDUARDO GALEANO: Yes—the fact that I would be glad if Obama and all the USA progressive governors or people here begin to change the word—the word “leadership” by the word “friendship,” because leadership implies the resistance in someone over, above the other ones. And in the real human relationships, the real ones are horizontal, horizontal, not vertical; solidarity instead of charity; and no borders and no classes to receive from anyone, because the Northern world acts as if God would made them the teachers of the South, and they are taking examination all the time. To Venezuela, for instance, is it really democratic country? We’ll decide, because we are the teachers on democracy.

And paradoxically, the teachers on democracy are the factories of military dictatorships. I mean, the United States, and not only the United States, also some European countries, have spread military dictatorships all over the world. And they feel as if they are able to teach democracy.

So I don’t want to teach anything to anybody. I just want to tell stories deserve to be told. That’s all.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

EDUARDO GALEANO: Yeah, I was working for several magazines and newspapers, and this Crisis was a very nice experience. It was a cultural magazine, consecrated to cultural subjects and items.

AMY GOODMAN: In Argentina?

EDUARDO GALEANO: In Argentina, when I was in exile. Once a month, a very, very beautiful magazine who sold about 35,000, 40,000 copies, which is a record in the Spanish language, because we could diffuse a new conception of culture. Instead of repeating the old story about culture being the specialized work of artists and perhaps scientists, we tried to recover culture as a collective expression of identity.

And so, we were talking to people, but also hearing what people had to say, in the walls with the graffitis, in the factories. We went with recorders trying to ask what they thought, for instance, the worker thought about the sun, because we were speaking to workers that never saw the sun, except on Sundays. They were working the whole day. Or to the drivers, the bus drivers, who sometimes were working in Argentina that years, fifteen, twenty hours per day. It was unbelievable. So, with our records—registers, no? Grabadoras?

AMY GOODMAN: Tape recorders.

EDUARDO GALEANO: Tape recorder, tape recorders. We went there, asking them, “When you can sleep, what do you dream? What are your dreams? Do you have dreams? Nightmares?” And this was culture for us also. So it was a quite an original experience, really strange. And it was very, very successful, ’til first the economy and later the dictatorship finished it. And when words cannot be better than silence, it’s better to shut up.

opening minds

2009-05-28T10:32:00.000-07:00

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/opinion/28kristof.html?em

The larger point is that liberals and conservatives often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren’t a result of a deliberative process. The crucial part of the brain for these judgments is the medial prefrontal cortex, which has more to do with moralizing than with rationality. If you damage your prefrontal cortex, your I.Q. may be unaffected, but you’ll have trouble harrumphing.

One of the main divides between left and right is the dependence on different moral values. For liberals, morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm. For conservatives, morality also involves upholding authority and loyalty — and revulsion at disgust.

So how do we discipline our brains to be more open-minded, more honest, more empirical? A start is to reach out to moderates on the other side — ideally eating meals with them, for that breaks down “us vs. them” battle lines that seem embedded in us. (In ancient times we divided into tribes; today, into political parties.) The Web site www.civilpolitics.org is an attempt to build this intuitive appreciation for the other side’s morality, even if it’s not our morality.

“Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart,” Professor Haidt says. “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”

Augusto Boal, Founder of the Theater of the Oppressed, Dies at 78

2009-05-14T08:00:00.000-07:00

Augusto Boal, Founder of the Theater of the Oppressed, Dies at 78

In Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, in the working quarters of Rio. And then, every morning that I went to work with my father, when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, and then I saw all those workers, and I saw how they were oppressed. And always, I was preoccupied with them. I was fascinated by how could they not rebel if they were so oppressed.

And then, my beginning, it was at fifteen years old; I started writing plays about them. And I was in a moment in which I thought that as I was not oppressed as their oppression, I was not in the same circumstance, and I was pretending to be an artist, I was superior in some way. And then I said, “I’m going to teach them what they have to do to fight.” So I entered in the line of the political theater of the ’50s, of the ’60s, in which they had messages to give.

And one day I learned that I did not know more than they did, unless in the theater. In the theater, yes, I knew more. But their lives, they knew more than I. And it happened on a day when I was working for peasants in the northeast of Brazil, and I was doing a play in which the protagonist said, at the end said, “We have to spill our blood to save our land.” And then we were all singing, dressed like peasants. We were not peasants; looking like peasants, but we were not peasants, and saying, “You have to spill your blood, our blood, to save our lands, to reconquer.”

And then a peasant came to us and says, “Well, you think exactly like we do. So why don’t you take your rifles,” because we had rifles on stage, very beautiful, colorful rifles, and he said, “Why don’t you come with your rifles, and let’s go to fight against some landowners that occupied our land. We have to spill our blood.” And then we said, “Forgive us, but our rifles, they are not true. They are fake. They are setting rifles.” And he said, “OK, the rifles are not true. They are not real rifles. But you are sincere, so you come, because we have rifles for everybody. Let’s fight against them.” And then we said, “No, we are truly artists, not truly peasants.” And he said, “When truly artists say, ‘Let’s spill our blood,’ you are talking about our true blood of truly peasants and not about yours.”

So I understood that we could not give a message to women, because we are men; to blacks, because we are white; to peasants, because we live in the city. But we can help them to find their own ways of fighting.

...
AMY GOODMAN: How did [being imprisoned for your theatre work] change your view also of theater?

In some way, it had been changed before we did this episode, in which I found that I was telling—giving advice to someone, but I was not able to take the same risks. Che Guevara used to say something very beautiful. He said, “To be solidarity is to take the same risks.” And I was not taking any risk. I went there, I did the play, and then “Go and fight,” and I take the plane back home. So my—had already changed.

But at the same time, to be in a solitary cell, to be alone there, not talking to anybody anytime, and most of the time not seeing anybody, made me, for the first time in my life, to listen to silence. I had never listened to silence. I listened to sounds. But I listened to sounds. And then, in that moment, I learned. I learned that in this moment of the silence, your thoughts, they become more concrete, almost objects.

And then, when I was moved from this cell to a cell with many other prisoners, political prisoners, I learned something very important also, that when we are free in space, we are arrested in time. We have to go look at the watch. It’s what time? And we have to go here, we have to go there. We are arrested in time. And when we are arrested in space, we have the free time. We have the liberty of using our time.

...There is a poet, a Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, who says, “The path does not exist. The path, you make by treading on it. By walking, you make the path.” So we don’t know where the path leads, but we know the direction of the path that we want to take. That’s what I want, and not to accomplish, but to follow, until I can’t.

Findings - Ear Plugs to Lasers - The Science of Concentration - NYTimes.com

2009-05-12T15:58:00.000-07:00

Findings - Ear Plugs to Lasers - The Science of Concentration - NYTimes.com

Ultimately, Dr. Desimone said, it may be possible to improve your attention by using pulses of light to directly synchronize your neurons, a form of direct therapy that could help people with schizophrenia and attention-deficit problems (and might have fewer side effects than drugs). If it could be done with low-wavelength light that penetrates the skull, you could simply put on (or take off) a tiny wirelessly controlled device that would be a bit like a hearing aid.

...Researchers have already observed higher levels of synchrony in the brains of people who regularly meditate.

---
...She recommends starting your work day concentrating on your most important task for 90 minutes. At that point your prefrontal cortex probably needs a rest, and you can answer e-mail, return phone calls and sip caffeine (which does help attention) before focusing again. But until that first break, don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption. (For more advice, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

"You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”

During her cancer treatment several years ago, Ms. Gallagher said, she managed to remain relatively cheerful by keeping in mind James’s mantra as well as a line from Milton: “The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.”

Oakland, Calif. - NYTimes.com

2009-05-08T03:21:00.000-07:00

Oakland, Calif. - NYTimes.com

The Black Panther Legacy Tours (707-644-2730; www.blackpanthertours.com) aren’t for your typical tour group types. Led by David Hilliard, a former Panthers chief of staff and childhood friend of Huey P. Newton, the three-hour tours ($25 a person, reservations only) start at the West Oakland Library, 18th and Adeline Streets. They trace the history of the Oakland-born movement at 18 sites, from the boxy building where Newton and Bobby Seale drew up the party’s Ten Point Program in 1966 to the sidewalk where Newton was killed by a drug dealer in 1989.

Op-Contributor - End the University as We Know It - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

2009-04-26T22:40:00.000-07:00

Op-Contributor - End the University as We Know It - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
...

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I have already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.

4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising. Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.

Op-Ed Columnist - The End of Philosophy - NYTimes.com

2009-04-07T09:14:00.000-07:00

Op-Ed Columnist - The End of Philosophy - NYTimes.com

As Steven Quartz of the California Institute of Technology said during a recent discussion of ethics sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, “Our brain is computing value at every fraction of a second. Everything that we look at, we form an implicit preference. Some of those make it into our awareness; some of them remain at the level of our unconscious, but ... what our brain is for, what our brain has evolved for, is to find what is of value in our environment.”

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.

Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.

In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, “The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and ... moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.”

The question then becomes: What shapes moral emotions in the first place? The answer has long been evolution, but in recent years there’s an increasing appreciation that evolution isn’t just about competition. It’s also about cooperation within groups. Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other and stand together in the face of common threats. Many of our moral emotions and intuitions reflect that history. We don’t just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals. We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions. We are all the descendents of successful cooperators.

The first nice thing about this evolutionary approach to morality is that it emphasizes the social nature of moral intuition. People are not discrete units coolly formulating moral arguments. They link themselves together into communities and networks of mutual influence.

The second nice thing is that it entails a warmer view of human nature. Evolution is always about competition, but for humans, as Darwin speculated, competition among groups has turned us into pretty cooperative, empathetic and altruistic creatures — at least within our families, groups and sometimes nations.

The third nice thing is that it explains the haphazard way most of us lead our lives without destroying dignity and choice. Moral intuitions have primacy, Haidt argues, but they are not dictators. There are times, often the most important moments in our lives, when in fact we do use reason to override moral intuitions, and often those reasons — along with new intuitions — come from our friends.

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.

Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central. The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself.

Op-Ed Columnist - The First Shrink - NYTimes.com

2009-04-05T07:32:00.000-07:00

Op-Ed Columnist - The First Shrink - NYTimes.com

As Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a Harvard law professor who mentored the young Obama, put it, “He can enter your space and organize your thoughts without necessarily revealing his own concerns and conflicts.” He can leave you thinking he agrees, when often he’s only agreeing to leave you thinking he agrees.

...Having an Iowa-style town hall in Strasbourg with enthusiastic French and German students was a clever ploy to underscore his popularity on the world stage, and put European leaders on notice that many of their constituents are also his.

Like a good shrink, the president listens; it’s a way of flattering his subjects and sussing them out without having to fathom what’s in their soul. “It is easy to talk to him,” Dmitri Medvedev said after their meeting. “He can listen.” The Russian president called the American one “my new comrade.”

Mr. Obama, the least silly of men, was even willing to mug for a silly Facebook-ready picture, grinning and giving a thumbs-up with Medvedev and a goofy-looking Silvio Berlusconi.

Now that America can’t put everyone under its thumb, a thumbs-up and a killer smile can go a long way.

the sparks (in response to the previous)

2009-02-24T00:16:00.000-08:00

in response to my last post:

You can be smart as hell
Know how to add
Know how to figure things
On yellow pads
Answer so no one knows
What you just said
But when you're all alone
You and your head
What's the computer say, it's mumbling now
It says "hey Joe"
It's spelled it out and
"You've got angst in your pants"
"You've got angst in your pants"

http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw090212sparks_the_art_of_th

memes and much better ways of describing

2009-02-24T00:03:00.000-08:00

somehow i came across this... which seemed interesting but also like a science-centric, hopeless and not so fun or compelling way of saying just about the same thing as Tom Wolfe says here:
http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/wolfe/lecture.html

http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Chapters/awaken.html

Understanding the fantastic process of natural selection we can see how our human bodies came to be the way they are. But what about our minds? Evolutionary psychology does not easily answer my questions.

For example, why do we think all the time? From a genetic point of view this seems extremely wasteful - and animals that waste energy don't survive. The brain uses about 20% of the body’s energy while weighing only 2%. If we were thinking useful thoughts, or solving relevant problems there might be some point, but mostly we don't seem to be. So why can’t we just sit down and not think?

...Thus we all become unwitting hosts to an enormous baggage of useless and even harmful meme-complexes.

One of those is myself.

Why do I say that the self is a meme-complex? Because it works the same way as other meme-complexes. As with astrology, the idea of "self" has a good reason for getting installed in the first place. Then once it is in place, memes inside the complex are mutually supportive, can go on being added to almost infinitely, and the whole complex is resistant to evidence that it is false.

First the idea of self has to get in there. Imagine a highly intelligent and social creature without language. She will need a sense of self to predict others’ behaviour (Humphrey, 1986) and to deal with ownership, deception, friendships and alliances (Crook, 1980). With this straightforward sense of self she may know that her daughter is afraid of a high ranking female and take steps to protect her, but she does not have the language with which to think "I believe that my daughter is afraid ... etc.". It is with language that the memes really get going - and with language that "I" appears. Lots of simple memes can then become united as "my" beliefs, desires and opinions.

...Zen does this too, though the methods are completely different. In Zen training every concept is held up to scrutiny, nothing is left uninvestigated, even the self who is doing the investigation is to be held up to the light and questioned. "Who are you?".

After about 15 years of Zen practice, and when reading The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau, I began working with the koan "Who...?". The experience was most interesting and I can best liken it to watching a meme unzipping other memes. Every thought that came up in meditation was met with "Who is thinking that?" or "Who is seeing this?" or "Who is feeling that?" or just "Who...?". Seeing the false self as a vast meme-complex seemed to help - for it is much easier to let go of passing memes than of a real, solid and permanent self. It is much easier to let the meme-unzipper do its stuff if you know that all it’s doing is unzipping memes.

Another koan of mine fell to the memes. Q. "Who drives you?" A. "The memes of course." This isn’t just an intellectual answer, but a way into seeing yourself as a temporary passing construction. The question dissolves when both self and driver are seen as memes.

Current Fellows, Rackham Graduate School, University of Michigan

2009-02-02T05:29:00.000-08:00

Current Fellows, Rackham Graduate School, University of Michigan

someone i'd like to talk to...

"My core intellectual interest is in imagination and mediation – how ideas emerge, circulate and generate other ideas, narratives and forms. Representations – both textual and visual – are central to my work as products that are formed by and reflect particular cultural and historical environments and yet, as fixed entities, can travel and have influence far from their points of origin. In one form or another, all my projects explore cultures of knowledge production: how the circulation of representations, as well as the organization of information and technology shapes the imagination and how, in turn, innovations in narrative form, including communication technologies, come about.

Trained in literature, anthropology and film studies, the question that guided my dissertation fieldwork was highly interdisciplinary by necessity: What ways of seeing are global news audiences offered and how do the structures that shape these ways of seeing, also shape ways of imagining the world and political practices possible within it?

Specifically, international news photographs play a critical role in how the world is imagined today – they mediate and manage diverse imaginations. Against the backdrop of Gulf War II, commonly referred to as “the most photographed war in history,” my fieldwork centered on key nodal points of production, distribution, and circulation of the international photojournalism industry in its centers of power in New York and Paris. My informants were various “brokers of images,” such as photo editors and agencies, who act as mediators for views of the world, and in so doing also become mediators of our imagination. Currently I am completing the resulting manuscript, Images and their Brokers: The Work of International News Photographs in the Age of Digital Reproduction, an ethnography of a very loose community of people collectively engaged in visual knowledge production at a time when the core technologies of their craft, their status amidst a growing pool of amateurs, and the very relationship between representations and acts of violence was changing rapidly.

My next projects involve: the novelty introduced to visuality with photographic representations of the human body, the use of photography as a tool of governmentality, the expansive photo albums of Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamit II, the confluence of changes in transportation, communication, distribution of capital, industrialization, and perceptions of time and space that coincide with several innovations in the history of media, and Turkish coffee grinds.

Research interests: Visual anthropology, media anthropology, ethnographic and documentary film, cultures of knowledge production, photography, anthropology of news and journalism, anthropology of the imagination, moving image studies, theories of representation, narrative forms. France, Turkey, USA."

Democracy Now! | Headlines for January 06, 2009

2009-01-16T01:11:00.000-08:00

Democracy Now! | Headlines for January 06, 2009
US Opens Massive New Embassy in Iraq

In Iraq, the US has opened its massive new embassy in Baghdad. The $700 million building is the most expensive and largest embassy in the world. The 104-acre compound includes twenty-one buildings, a commissary, cinema, retail and shopping areas, restaurants, schools, a fire station, power and water treatment plants, as well as telecommunications and wastewater treatment facilities. The compound is six times larger than the United Nations in New York.

BOMB Magazine: Roman Signer by Armin Senser

2008-12-27T09:19:00.000-08:00

BOMB Magazine: Roman Signer by Armin Senser

Roman Signer has always lived and worked in St. Gallen, in eastern Switzerland. I visited him at his studio recently, where he showed me how sand trickles down from the ceiling onto a violin suspended below and makes music in the process. One could say that while sand is the performer of the piece, Signer is the producer of the musical performance. Signer is known as an explosion artist and a maker of ephemeral sculptures. He is neither an intellectual, nor a craftsman nor a blaster. He is not an action artist, a clown, or a shaman either. Signer has no use for theory: his art is not conceptual, and nor is it minimalist or a land art. To put it simply, Signer just thinks a lot. He thinks for himself and for those beyond; so that the world may lose its ordinariness and reveal itself to us in its splendor.

Signer makes objects very close to our lives, like tables or chairs, relate to earth, wind, fire, and water in unexpected ways. What is true for chemistry—from the combination of basic elements something completely new emerges—is also true for Signer’s artworks. Having turned 70 last May, Signer is thought by many to be Switzerland’s most important artist. In his Swiss-German accent, his answer to that would be a laconic yes, a brief monosyllabic answer that consecrates the transient as the most fertile ground for art.

BOMB Magazine: Everyone Gets Lighter by John Giorno

2008-12-27T09:18:00.000-08:00

BOMB Magazine: Everyone Gets Lighter by John Giorno

Marcus Boon Some people are confused by your attitude toward the self. There is this battle that’s been going on for decades between experimental and lyric poets: the lyric poets are supposedly interested in a direct expression of the self, and the experimental poets reject that notion, arguing that poetry is about process and language as a self-constituting entity. Your work doesn’t seem to fit into either of those categories. People ask: Is he talking about himself? Is this actually self-expression? Or is it an experiment, in the sense that something formal is going on?

John Giorno Everything is an expression of my mind: it’s arising in my mind and there’s a self there. I have an ego, and it’s all coming out of that. Modernism and lyric poetry are now both historical eras. T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is a miraculous poem, though it has all kinds of modernist principles. The idea that poetry has to be without feeling and self and anything personal in it is enough to kill you. When concepts such as these first arose—going back to the tradition of experiments from the Russians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Italian Futurists to Duchamp—they were filled with enormous feelings. For Duchamp, to make that transition from painting naked women in 1912, to doing what he did took enormous feeling and energy. To now have that be devoid of personal emotions is a trap that people who become bad artists hold onto.

BOMB Magazine: Mike Davis by Lucy Raven

2008-12-26T00:25:00.000-08:00

BOMB Magazine: Mike Davis by Lucy Raven:

"MD The border is both a growth industry in its own right and a sector of a vastly larger complex of automated oppression. Together with the D.C. Beltway, San Diego is the principal world center for the development of new technologies of surveillance, identification, data mining, cyber-warfare, and remote-controlled murder. The Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD provides a publically financed research hub for scores of secretive private firms, mostly in the University City area, including Science Applications International Corporation, the largest purveyors of software to the CIA and the DIA, and General Atomics, which manufactures the notorious Predator. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement/Border Patrol’s technology development branch is headquartered in downtown San Diego to take advantage of this cornucopia of Orwellian R&D."

The Border Patrol, of course, has long used the San Diego sector to experiment with stealth technology, beginning with the motion detectors and heat sensors that were first developed by the Pentagon in its futile crusade to seal off the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War. The fantasy now is a transcontinental “virtual border” of advanced sensors and video surveillance integrated in real time with a new communications system for the Border Patrol, patterned after Pentagon paradigms of “network-centric warfare” and “virtual battlespaces.” As proposed expenditures soar into the billions of dollars, the giant military-industrial carnivores have become hungry for shares in this border boom.

...Since most tourists and non-military residents—I suppose beguiled by pandas and wet t-shirts—don’t even register the monumentality of these mega-bases and naval installations, they are unlikely to read the surrealistic fine print. For example, about 50 miles east of San Diego along the border is an obscure naval facility called La Posta Naval Reserve Base. In fact, it is “virtual Afghanistan” where Navy SEALs and probably the elite Marine recon guys train before they go to Afghanistan, because it so strikingly resembles that landscape. Forty or fifty miles northeast of La Posta, still in San Diego County, is the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) facility at Warner Springs where SEALs try to survive in the mountains but are inevitably captured and brutally interrogated. You might have seen the SERE (Florida) sequence in G.I. Jane where Viggo Mortensen beats the shit out of Demi Moore. SERE training has been invoked in the defense of waterboarding and torture, since our commandos and pilots themselves undergo what the Spanish Inquisition used to call “The Question.”

Live here for a while (I grew up in the San Diego backcountry in the ’50s and early ’60s) and you will inevitably have eerie, unexpected encounters with the brave new world that a trillion dollars of recent military expenditures is summoning into being. On hot days I like to run at the harbor with a sea breeze in my face. Frequently, in the mornings, there are dolphins doing Sea World–like stunts in the water; after an encore, they hop aboard the flat back of a Navy fast-boat which roars back to the “marine-mammal weapons facility”—or whatever it is actually called—at Ballast Point. The dolphins, of course, are the advanced descendants of pioneering ancestors domesticated and weaponized in the ’70s. Together with some killer whales and a few sea lions, they are now a routine part of the naval arsenal and were used to penetrate Sadaam’s harbor defenses during both Iraq wars. They are also rumored (most recently by the London Independent) to be efficient underwater assassins with a gunlike device attached to their friendly faces.

The military also operates its own versions of Disneyland. San Clemente Island, just over the horizon, west of the Encinitas surf shops and pickup bars, is one of the Pentagon’s most valuable assets. It’s about 25 miles long and has been bombarded, strafed, and invaded almost daily since the early Second World War. Recently they opened a 21-million-dollar American embassy on San Clemente: smaller than Madonna’s house, but still useful for practice by Marines and SEALs.

More well known perhaps are the stage-set versions of Fallujah and Sadr City. These “urban warfare simulators” include “Yodaville” at the Yuma Marine Corps Air Station just across the Arizona border, and the MGM-quality complexes at 29 Palms and Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, where Arab immigrants impersonate unruly natives and give young Marines and soldiers an extra jolt of Baudrillardian hyper-reality.

...MD “Peace, prosperity, internationalism.” In Duncan Hunter’s own congressional district. And here are the founders, over here. Ruth Norman. Doesn’t she look adorable?

LR She looks amazing. Is it a painting or a photograph?

MD I think they added a little William Blake to Tesla here.

Unarian 1 Do you want me to light up the star map?

LR Why not?

Unarian 2 Another good photo you could take is of the Voice of Venus, the first Unares book—that’s the one that started the revolution.

MD (to Unarian) Do you live here in El Cajon? I grew up here, 50 years ago.

Unarian 1 I do. I’d read the books for about two and a half years and I came down and met Ruth Norman.

LR Is this space the physical center of Unarius?

Unarian 2 It’s the physical manifestation of the celestial world of Unarius.

Unarian 1 There are seven spiritual planets, teaching centers where scientists, artists, philosophers, and everybody else goes through time periods as they start to progress into a higher awareness of themselves. Nikola Tesla is the head of the scientific plane of Eros. It’s where all of the scientists who have left their mark in the world come from.

Unarian 2 Like many of the famous people of the past. Maybe they don’t consciously remember, but in their sleep or their out-of-body experiences, they gain knowledge. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he got his inspiration when he was taking night classes in one of the…

...

This is the thing about living in southern California or New York City. Whatever happens in world history, whatever invasion or war, a new stratum of refugees ends up on our shores opening restaurants. Somalis have come to San Diego in large numbers, too. Whatever the tragedy of history, of other people’s defeat or dispossession, we always eat better….

...MD This is Bostonia, or what remains of it: when I was in elementary school it was still a separate hamlet from the rest of El Cajon, with irrigation ditches on the side of Second Street, an 1880s general store, a noxious chicken factory, and a legendary Country-Western honky-tonk. (Indeed, I still recall childhood wonderment at the incredible quantities of puke and blood in front of the Bostonia Ballroom on a Monday morning.) I have some wonderful memories of early friends and especially my first love, but I am also haunted by the dark side of my childhood. As weird as it may sound from an old socialist and long-professed atheist, I actually believe that I have seen the devil or his moral equivalent in El Cajon.

No, I am serious. Like Terrell County in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, El Cajon seems episodically visited by inexplicable violence. Over the years I have led a charmed, unharmed life in various domiciles in West Belfast, the East End of London, and the Bowery. Likewise, I lived for two extended periods in South Central L.A., presumably the only white guy for miles, with only civility and warmth from my neighbors. In my hometown, by contrast, I’ve been shot at, kicked to pieces in the street, and even had someone try to set me afire. Why? Because my residual redneck self tends to stare back at the other bastard. Yesterday and today, that’s sufficient cause for absolute mayhem in El Cajon.

...

MD Despite my yarning to you, I am more allergic to memoir (especially those that betray family honor or the confidences of old friends and lovers) than poison oak, but I have scouted the idea of a surreal scrapbook, something enigmatic, along the lines of literary flotsam from the Atlantis of the ’50s.

But now let’s look at something that will rate five stars in any Baedeker for born-again Christians: the fundamentalist temple built by the world’s best-selling author.

...But neither my wife nor I are good spies. We blurt out the goods at the first opportunity. We were once at the Alamo and one of the tour guides, a daughter of the Texas revolution, came up to us and said, “Welcome to the birthplace of Texas independence. Do you all have any personal connection?” And my wife says, “Oh, I do. My great-great-grandfather, General Juan Amador, helped execute the survivors.” I thought we’d have to get an ambulance for this poor lady.

LR What’s the story there?

MD I am married to Alessandra Moctezuma and she has a very colorful genealogy, like a magical-realist novel, starting with a daughter of the ill-fated Aztec emperor. One of her great uncles was Carlos López Moctezuma, the Jack Palance, all-purpose bad guy of classical Mexican cinema. Another was known as “El Tigre,” and helped suppress (in ways I am reluctant to discuss in detail) the Cristero Rebellion in Jalisco in the late 1920s.

Her dad, who for years broadcast the pioneering modern jazz program on Mexican radio, was fascinated by Edgar Allan Poe and the gothic genre; he directed several now-cult horror films and produced Jodorowsky’s El Topo.

Tom Wolfe's 2006 Jefferson Lecture

2008-12-23T16:07:00.000-08:00

Tom Wolfe's 2006 Jefferson Lecture

I take that term, the human beast, from my idol, Emile Zola, who published a novel entitled The Human Beast in 1888, just 29 years after Darwin's The Origin of Species broke the stunning news that Homo sapiens--or Homo loquax, as I call him--was not created by God in his own image but was precisely that, a beast, not different in any essential way from snakes with fangs or orangutangs . . . or kangaroos. . . or the fang-proof mongoose. Darwin's doctrine, Evolution, leapt from the pages of a scientific monograph into every level of society in Europe and America with sensational suddenness. It created a sheerly dividing line between the God-fearing bourgeoisie who were appalled, and those people of sweetness and light whose business it was to look down at the bourgeosie from a great height. Today, of course, we call these superior people intellectuals, but intellectual didn't exist as a noun until Clemenceau applied it to Zola and Anatole France in 1896 during the Dreyfus Case. Zola's intellect was as sweetly enlightened as they made them. He was in with the in-crowd. Evenings he spent where the in-crowd went, namely, the Café Guerbois, along with Manet, Cezanne, Whistler, Nadar, and le tout Paris boheme. He took his cues from the in-crowd's views, namely, Academic art was bad, Impressionism was good, and Homo sapiens had descended from the monkeys in the trees. Human beasts? I'll give you human beasts! Zola's aforementioned novel of that name, La Bete Humaine in French, is a story of four murderers, a woman and three men, who work down at track level on the Paris-Le Havre railroad line, each closing in on a different victim, each with a different motive, including the case of a handsome young passenger train engineer with a compulsion . . . to make love to women and then kill them. With that, Zola crowned himself as the first scientific novelist, a "naturalist," to use his term, studying the human fauna.

I love my man Zola. He's my idol. But the whole business exudes irony so rich, you can taste it. It tastes like marzipan. Here we have Darwin and his doctrine that in 1859 rocks Western man's very conception of himself . . . We have the most popular writer in the world in 1888, Zola, who can't wait to bring the doctrine alive on the page . . . We have the next five generations of educated people who have believed and believe to this day that, at bottom, evolution's primal animal urges rule our lives . . . to the point where the fourth greatest pop music hit of 2001, "You and Me, Baby" by the Bloodhound Gang, proclaims, "You and me, baby, we ain't nothing but mammals. / So let's do it like they do on the Dis-cov-ery Channel"--it's rich! rich! rich beyond belief!

...No evolutionist has come up with even an interesting guess as to when speech began, but it was at least 11,000 years ago, which is to say, 9000 B.C. It seems to be the consensus . . . in the notoriously capricious field of evolutionary chronology . . . that 9000 B.C. was about when the human beast began farming, and the beast couldn't have farmed without speech, without being able to say to his son, "Son, this here's seeds. You best be putting 'em in the ground in rows ov'ere like I tell you if you wanna git any ears a corn this summer."

Do forgive me, Emile, but here is the tastiest of all ironies. One of Homo loquax's first creations after he learned to talk was religion. Since The Origin of Species in 1859 the doctrine of Evolution has done more than anything else to put an end to religious faith among educated people in Europe and America; for God is dead. But it was religion, more than any other weapon in Homo loquax's nuclear arsenal, that killed evolution itself 11,000 years ago. To say that evolution explains the nature of modern man is like saying that the Bessemer process of adding carbons to pig iron to make steel explains the nature of the modern skyscraper.

...Weber was well known in academia for his essay "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," written after he toured the United Sates in 1904. It was the origin of the unfortunately non-Protestant cliché, "the work ethic." He introduced the terms "charisma" and "charismatic" in their current usage; also "bureaucracy," which he characterized as "the routinization of charisma." He coined the term "style of life," which was converted into the compound noun "lifestyle" and put to work as the title of a thousand sections of newspapers across the United States. But what caught my imagination was the single word "status." In a very short, very dense essay called "Class, Status, and Party" he introduced an entirely new concept.

...Within the ranks of the rich, including the "owners of the means of production," there inevitably developed an inner circle known as Society. Such groups always believed themselves to be graced with "status honor," as Weber called it. Status honor existed quite apart from such gross matters as raw wealth and power. Family background, education, manners, dress, cultivation, style of life--these, the ineffable things, were what granted you your exalted place in Society.

Military officer corps are rife with inner circles aloof from the official and all-too-political hierarchy of generals, admirals, and the rest. I went to work on a book called The Right Stuff thinking it would be a story of space exploration. In no time at all, I happened upon something far more fascinating. The astronauts were but part of an invisible, and deadly, competitive pyramid within an inner circle of American military fighter pilots and test pilots, and they were by no means at the apex. I characterized this pyramid as a ziggurat, because it consisted of innumerable and ever more deadly steps a fighter pilot had to climb to reach the top. The competition demanded an uncritical willingness to face danger, to face death, not once but daily, if required, not only in combat but also in the routine performance of his duties--without ever showing fear--in behalf of a noble cause, the protection of his nation. There were more ways to die in a routine takeoff of a supersonic jet fighter of the F-series than most mortals could possibly imagine. At the time, a Navy pilot flying for twenty years, an average career span, stood a 23 percent chance of dying in an accident and a 56 percent chance of having to eject at some point, which meant being shot out of the plane like a human rocket by a charge of dynamite under his seat, smashing into what was known as the "wall" of air outside, which could tear the flesh off your face, and descending by parachute. The figures did not include death or ejection in combat, since they were not considered accidental. According to Korean War lore, a Navy fighter pilot began shouting out over the combat radio network, "I've got a Mig at zero! A Mig at zero! I've got a Mig at zero!" A Mig at zero meant a Soviet supersonic fighter plane was squarely on his tail and could blow him out of the sky at any moment. Another voice, according to legend, broke in and said, "Shut up and die like an aviator." Such "chatter," such useless talk on the radio during combat, was forbidden. The term "aviator" was the final, exquisite touch of status sensitivity. Navy pilots always called themselves aviators. Marine and Air Force fliers were merely pilots. The reward for reaching the top of the ziggurat was not money, not power, not even military rank. The reward was status honor, the reputation of being a warrior with ultimate skill and courage--a word, by the way, strictly taboo among the pilots themselves. The same notion of status honor motivates virtually every police and fire fighting force in the world.

Status groups, Weber contended, are the creators of all new styles of life. In his heyday, the turn of the 19th century, the most stylish new status sphere, no more than 30 years old, was known as la vie boheme, the bohemian life. The bohemians were artists plus the intellectuals and layabouts in their orbit. They did their best to stand bourgeois propriety on its head through rakish dishabille, louder music, more wine, great gouts of it, ostentatious cohabitation, and by flaunting their poverty as a virtue. And why? Because they all came from the bourgeoisie themselves originally and wanted nothing more desperately than to distinguish themselves from it. They seldom mentioned the upper class, Marx's owners of "the means of production." They seldom mentioned Marx's working class, except in sentimental appreciation of the workers' occasional show of rebelliousness. No, as the late Jean-Francois Revel said of mid-20th century French intellectuals, the bohemians' sole object was to separate themselves from the mob, the rabble, which today is known as the middle class.

I thought bohemia had been brought to its apogee in the 1960s, before my very eyes, by the hippies, originally known as acid heads, in reference to the drug LSD, with their Rapunzel hair down to the shoulder blades among the males and great tangled thickets of hair in the armpits of the women, all living in communes. The communes inevitably turned religious thanks to the hallucinations hippies experienced while on LSD and a whole array of other hallucinogens whose names no one can remember. Some head--short for acid head--would end up in the middle of Broadway, one of San Francisco's main drags, sitting cross-legged in the Lotus position, looking about, wide eyes glistening with beatification, shouting, "I'm in the pudding and I've met the manager! I'm in the pudding and I've met the manager!" Seldom had so many gone so far to feel aloof from the middle class.

But I was wrong. They were not the ones who raised rejection of the middle class to its final, Olympian level. For what were the hippies and their communes compared to the great bohemians of our time in the status sphere known as Hip Hop, with its black rappers and "posses" and groupies, its hordes of hangers-on--and its millions of followers and believers among the youth of America, white and black? The Hip Hop style of life turns bourgeois propriety inside out. It celebrates the status system of the Street, which is to say, the standards of juvenile male street gangs, so-called gangbangers. What matters is masculinity to burn and a disdain of authority. The rappers themselves always put on looks of sullen hostility for photographs. The hippies' clothes of yore look like no more than clown costumes next to the voluminous Hip Hop jeans with the crotch at knee level and the pants legs cascading into great puddles of fabric at the ankles, the T-shirts hanging outside the pants and just short of knee level and as much as a foot below their leather jackets or windbreakers, and the black bandannas known as do-rags around their heads. What were the hippies' LSD routs known as acid tests . . . compared to the Hip Hop stars' status tests that require shooting and assassinating one another periodically? How cool is that? One of my favorite sights in New York is that of a 14- or-15-year-old boy who has just descended from his family's $10 or $12 million apartment and is emerging onto the sidewalks of Park Avenue dressed Hip-Hop head to crotch, walking through a brass-filigreed door held open by a doorman in a uniform that looks like an Austrian army colonel's from 1870.

Not all status groups are either as competitive as capital-S Society's and the military's or as hostile as the bohemians'. Some are comprised of much broader populations from much larger geographic areas. My special favorites are the Good Ol' Boys, as I eventually called them. I happened upon them while working on an article about stock car racing. Good ol' boys are rural Southerners and Midwesterners seldom educated beyond high school or community college, sometimes owners of small farms but more likely working for wages in factories, warehouses, and service companies. They are mainly but by no means exclusively Scots-Irish Protestants in background and are Born Fighting, to use the title of a brilliant recent work of ethnography by James Webb. They have been the backbone of American combat forces ever since the Revolution, including, as it turns out, both armies during the Civil War. They love hunting, they love their guns, and they believe, probably correctly, that the only way to train a boy to kill Homines loquaces in battle someday is to take him hunting to learn to kill animals, starting with rabbits and squirrels and graduating to beasts as big or bigger than Homo loquax, such as the deer and the bear. Good ol' boys look down on social pretension of any sort. They place a premium on common sense and are skeptical of people with theories they don't put to the test themselves.

I offer an illustration provided to me by a gentleman who is in this audience tonight and who witnessed the following: It was the mid-1940s, during the second World War, and a bunch of good ol' boys too old for military service were sitting around in a general store in Scotland County, North Carolina, waiting for a representative of a cattleman's association. They fell to discussing the war.

One of them said, "Seems to me this whole war's on account of one man, Adolph Hitler. 'Stead a sending all these supply ships to England and whatnot and getting'm sunk out in the Atlantic Ocean by U-boats, why don't we just go ov'ere and shoot him?"

"Whatcha mean, 'just go ov'ere and shoot him'?"

"Just go to where he lives and shoot the sonofabitch."

"I 'speck it ain't that easy. He's probably got a wall around his house."

"Maybe he does. But you git me a boat to git me ov'ere and I'll do it myself."

"How?"

"I'll wait'il it's night time . . . see . . . and then I'll go around to the back of the house and climb the wall and hide behind a tree. I'll stay there all night, and then in the morning, when he comes out in the yard to pee, I'll shoot him."

Quite in addition to the Good Ol' Boy's level of sophistication, that story reveals four things: a disdain for the futility of government and its cumbersome ways of approaching problems, a faith in common sense, reliance on the inner discipline of the individual--and guns.

Even before I left graduate school I had come to the conclusion that virtually all people live by what I think of as a "fiction-absolute." Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world--so ordained by some almighty force--would make not that individual but his group . . . the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles. Politicians, the rich, the celebrated, become mere types. Does this apply to "the intellectuals" also? Oh, yes. . . perfectly, all too perfectly.

...More recently, I returned to Washington and Lee for a conference on the subject of Latin American writing in the United States. The conference soon became a general and much hotter discussion of the current immigration dispute. I had arrived believing that, for example, Mexicans who had gone to the trouble of coming to the United States legally, going through all the prescribed steps, would resent the fact that millions of Mexicans were now coming into the United States illegally across the desert border. I couldn't have been more mistaken. I discovered that everyone who thought of himself as Latin, even people who had been in this country for two and three generations, were wholeheartedly in favor of immediate amnesty and immediate citizenship for all Mexicans who happened now to be in the United States. And this feeling had nothing to do with immigration policy itself, nothing to do with law, nothing to do with politics, for that matter. To them, this was not a debate about immigration. The very existence of the debate itself was to them a besmirching of their fiction-absolute, of their conception of themselves as Latins. Somehow the debate, simply as a debate, cast an aspersion upon all Latins, implying doubt about their fitness to be within the border of such a superior nation.

The same phenomenon, championism, I believe, solves the mystery of something I had been unable to figure out for a very long time, namely, what is it that accounts for the extraordinary emotion of sports fans? What earthly connection do the citizens of New York City think they have to, say, the New York Yankees, whose team includes not one person from the city of New York, which is, in fact, 40 percent Latin American, and an assortment of mercenaries who will play anywhere for the top dollar? How can such a team get such a strong grip on local emotions? Here we see championism in its most elemental form. As far back as the story of David and Goliath in the Bible, the human beast has become excited by those who represent them in what at that stage of history was known as single combat. Before a battle was fought each side would send forth its fighting champion. Goliath, a giant, protected by the most elaborate armor, was so awesome, that at first no one among the Israelites dared confront him. Finally, a young unknown named David volunteered. He turned down King Saul's offer of his own armor as protection and said he preferred to travel light and fast. He proceeded to slay Goliath with a slingshot. At this point, The Philistine army panicked. The defeat of its great champion was seen as a sign from the gods. They fled, the Israelites pursued and slaughtered them. This notion of a surrogate, a champion, who can represent an entire people and give them the exultation of victory when it triumphs and plunge them into depression of defeat when he loses, has persisted for millennia.

Single combat was never pursued as a substitute for actual battle; these contests were always held as an indication of which way the gods were leaning. Nevertheless, both the exultation and the depression were real emotions, curious emotions, on the face of it, entirely aroused by status concerns. The surprising insinuations of status concerns into every area of life must be understood if one is to understand the nature of the human beast. Consider the toxic power of humiliation. Humiliation is a wound inflicted upon the beast's status picture of himself, upon the validity of his standing within the boundaries of his own fiction absolute. Not long ago, in New York, a drug dealer named Pappy Mason was out of prison on parole standing on the sidewalk in front of a bar with a group of his buddies, drinking a beer. A police detective happened to be driving by in an unmarked car and recognized him. He stopped, got out, and said "Mason, you know what stupid is? Stupid is what you're doing right now, drinking in public. You get your ass back in that building--or I'm taking your ass in." Now here was Mason, in front of his buddies. He had a terrible decision to make. Taking his ass in meant taking him to the precinct station and booking him. Drinking on the sidewalk was--a--Mickey Mouse--misdemeanor but it was enough to violate his parole and put him right back in prison. On the other hand, just caving in to some pig of a cop in front of his posse and slinking back into the bar was unthinkable . . .On the other hand, maybe it was thinkable . . .To go back to jail--so he did think . . .slinked back into the bar . . .You did what you had to do, Pappy--but the humiliation! the humiliation! A day passed, two days passed--the humiliation! Day after day it festered . . . festered . . . Eventually he found himself back in prison for an unrelated offense . . .and the same old humiliation . . .slinking back into the bar that night . . .festered . . . Finally, it became too much. He got a message out to one of his boys on the outside: "Go kill a cop." And the guy said, "What cop?" And Mason said, "Any cop." And so three members of his posse drove about . . . looking for a cop, any cop They came upon a young patrolman alone in a police car in front of the house of an immigrant from Guinea who, as it tuned out had been threatened by drug dealers. They had already tried to burn down his house because he had reported their activities to the police. The young cop, named Eddie Byrne, had been assigned to protect him. It was now late at night, quiet, and the three assailants came up behind the car and assassinated the young policeman. It became a cause of public outrage. It had taken the life of a young man, Eddie Byrne. Yes, but the cops . . .they had trashed Pappy Mason's status picture of himself.

That a wound to one's status, not to one's body, not to one's bank account, not to one's general fortunes in life, that such a wound to one's status could have such a severe effect upon the psyche of the human beast, is no minor matter. It means that we have come upon a form of anguish that is somehow primal. Even the most trivial and the most unlikely circumstances can be colored by the beast's constant and unrelenting concern for his own status. Which is to stay, his own standing, his own rank, in the eyes of others and in his own eyes.

It could be anything as minor and trivial as a man in New York in a taxi five, perhaps even ten blocks from his destination, agonizing over what tip he should give the driver. His status verdict would be in the hands of only one person, the driver, someone he would most likely never see again. And yet, the human beast is perfectly capable of devoting the most excrutiating mental energy to such a trifling decision. When I was working on a novel about college life entitled I Am Charlotte Simmons, I kept coming upon situations in which I thought surely other emotions would rule, love, if not love, passion, or if not passion, at least lust. Instead, as elsewhere, status ruled. Undergraduate life today, involves a status system in which sexual activity can be summed up as "Our eyes met, our lips met, our bodies met, and then we were introduced." The attitude young women have toward their own sexual activity, as well as the impression others have of it, has turned 180 degrees in one generation. There was a time when the worst . . . slut . . . for want of a better term . . . maintained a virginal and chaste façade. Today, the most virginal and chaste undergraduate wants to create a façade of sexual experience. One night I was in a college lounge sitting on a sofa that was backed up against a narrow table. Another sofa was backed up likewise on the other side. All at once a voice from the sofa behind me, a boy's voice was saying, "What are you talking about? How could I? We've known each other since before Choate! It would be like incest!" And then I heard the girl say, "Please. Come on. I can't stand the thought of having to do it with somebody I hardly know and can't trust." It turned out that she was beseeching him, her old Platonic friend of years' standing, to please relieve her of her virginity, deflower her. That way she could honestly maintain the proper social stance as an experienced young woman in college.

Even before I had left graduate school I had begun to wonder if somewhere in the brain there might be a center that interpreted incoming data and gave the human beast the feeling he was improving its status, merely maintaining its status, or suffering the grave wound of humiliation.

I turned to the literature of the physiology of the brain for the answer, only to discover that Sigmund Freud had stopped the physical study of the brain cold for 40 years. Freud had been so persuasive, had so convinced the scientific community and the academic community in general that he had found the final answers to mental disturbance in his theories of the id, the ego, the superego, and the Oedipal drama within the family, that it was rather pointless to go through the tedious, laborious business of determining what synapses, what dendrites, what circuits in the brain accounted for what one already knew anyway. The physical study of the brain didn't resume until 1969, thanks to the work of a Spanish physician and brain physiologist named Jose Delgado. Delgado was somewhat well-known already because of a striking and very public experiment he had conducted in a bull ring in Madrid. Delgado was experimenting with stereotaxic needle implants and other painless ways to reach regions of the brains of animals and eventually, as it turned out, humans. He was so sure that he had found specific regions of the brain that created specific reactions within animals that he had come into the bull ring possessing only a small radio transmitter and had allowed himself to be charged by a one and a half ton bull tormented into a state of rage by picadors. The bull charged. Delgado stood there, motionless. The bull finally reached the critical point where it would be useless for anyone, even a toreador, to flee. Delgado pressed a button on the radio transmitter--and the bull came to a shuddering halt within feet of the scientist, and then turned and trotted off in the other direction. Delgado had also run tests of sensory deprivation on healthy young college students. He put them in sensory deprivation chambers that were absolutely soundless. The temperature was set so that the human body would detect neither heat nor cold. The room was well-lit, but the subject wore translucent goggles and could perceive light but he could make out no details. The subject wore special gloves that reduced the tactile sense to a minimum. Within hours, not days, the subjects, these healthy young people, would begin hallucinating, losing their minds. To Delgado, this was proof of his proposition that the human mind is in fact not the possession of the individual but more of a town square into which anyone can come, into which any animal can come, into which even vegetation can come. And what the human beast thinks is his mind is in fact--and these were Delgado's words--a "transitory combination of elements borrowed from the environment."

...Delgado stressed the role of culture. Culture referred to those things in human life that could not exist without speech, whether culture in the sense of the arts or culture in the sense of the manners and mores of a society. Delgado insisted that the brain and its genetic history and evolution was simply the substratum upon which culture wrought its effects. He did not know the precise neural path. After all, he was re-opening a field that had been dormant for 40 years. But just last year, barely 6 months ago, three neurobiologists may very well have discovered the answer, in a study of African cichlid fish published in an article entitled, "Rapid behavioral and genomic responses to social opportunity" in the journal PLoS Biology. Russell Fernald of Stanford, his former associate Sabrina Burmeister, now at the University of North Carolina, and Erich Jarvis of Duke studied the behavior of the fish in a laboratory tank. In the tank was an obviously dominant male and his subjects, male and female. The others were gray in color but the dominant male had swelled up within a skin of lurid stripes and was the only male who had access to the females. They then removed the dominant male in the dark of night. When light returned, another male, just as gray as before, noticed the absence of the ruler, whereupon he swelled up with a skin of lurid colors, and his gonads immediately grew to eight times their previous size, and now he had exclusive access to the females. The three neurobiologists determined that a purely social situation, a status situation, had caused changes in the brain of the newly-dominant male at the cellular and molecular level, set off by a gene, known as egr-1, located in the anterior preoptic area. They had established that a change in social status had caused a change in the brain. It was the opposite of the situation envisioned by Neo-Darwinists neuroscientists who assume is that the genetic inheritance triggers changes in status.

As recently as the year 1000, Neo-Darwinists might argue, the entire world was divided into warriors and slaves or virtual slaves, aside from a few highly skilled artisans organized into guilds. Not only that, when the warriors couldn't find a real war to fight, they fought each other with blunted swords and spears in tournaments. At the conclusion of a tournament, ordinary religious restrictions on sexual behavior were suspended long enough for the winners to help themselves to as many young women as they cared to. The young women were there expressly for that purpose. This reward, which is so similar to that of dominant males among the non-human beasts, endures symbolically to this day in the form of pretty little cheerleaders with short skirts and their underpants showing.

But such comparisons collapse when the human beasts' third class is taken into account. This is the clergy, the priests and the prophets. Here in the 21st century, it is impossible to comprehend the power that the clergy had 1000 years ago. In the year 1082, Pope Urban II gave a speech on a platform in a field in France in which he exhorted all the knights of Europe--of Christendom--to go to the Middle East and take back Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Saracens, referring to the ruling Arabic Muslims. Immediately the Crusades began. Later, cynics would maintain that the Crusaders had gone to the Middle East only to bring back the booty that was eventually theirs. In fact, the warriors hadn't the faintest idea of what they would find. They were obeying the command of their Holy Father, the Pope. Until well into the Middle Ages the German Empire continued to call itself the Holy Roman Empire.

Book One, first verse, of the Book of John in the New Testament says cryptically: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." This has baffled Biblical scholars, but I interpret it as follows: Until there was speech, the human beast could have no religion, and consequently no God. In the beginning was the Word. Speech gave the beast its first ability to ask questions, and undoubtedly one of the first expressed his sudden but insatiable anxiety as to how he got here and what this agonizing struggle called life is all about. To this day, the beast needs, can't live without, some explanation as the basis of whatever status he may think he possesses. For that reason, extraordinary individuals have been able to change history with their words alone, without the assistance of followers, money, or politicians. Their names are Jesus, John Calvin, Mohammed, Marx, Freud--and Darwin. And this, rather than any theory, is what makes Darwin the monumental figure that he is. The human beast does not require that the explanation offer hope. He will believe whatever is convincing. Jesus offered great hope: The last shall be first and the meek shall inherit the earth. Calvin offered less. Mohammed, more and less. Marx, even more than Jesus: The meek will take over the earth now! Freud offered more sex. Darwin offered nothing at all. Each, however, has left an enduring influence. Jesus is the underpinning of both Marxism and political correctness in American universities. There was a 72-year field experiment in Marxism, which failed badly. But Marx's idea of one class dominating another may remain with us forever. In medical terms, Freud is now considered a quack. But his notion of sex as an energy like the steam in a boiler, which must be released in an orderly fashion or the boiler will blow up, remains with us, too. At this very moment, as we gather here in the Warner Theatre, you can be sure that there are literally millions of loin spasms and hip-joint convulsions that are taking place at this very instant throughout the world that would not be occurring were it not for the power of the words of Sigmund Freud. Today, Charles Darwin still reigns, but his most fervent followers, American neuroscientists, are deeply concerned about this irritating matter of culture, the product of speech. Led by the British neuroscientist Richard Dawkins, they currently propose that culture is the product of "memes" or "culturegens", which operate like genes and produce culture. There is a problem, however. Genes exist, but memes don't. The concept of memes is like the concept of Jack Frost ten centuries ago. Jack Frost was believed to be an actual, living, albeit invisible, creature who went about in the winter freezing fingertips and making the ground too hard to plow. Noam Chomsky has presented another problem. He maintains that there is no sign that speech evolved from any form of life lower than man. It's not that there is a missing link, he says. It's that there is absolutely nothing in any other animal to link up with. It becomes difficult for Neo-Darwinists to continue to say that structures consisting only of words are not real and durable. What accounts for the fact, to choose but one example, that Islam has directed the lives and behavior of literally billions of people since the eighth century?

Princeton anthropologist Clifford Geertz has written, "There is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture. Men without culture would not even be the clever savages of Lord of the Flies."

Now, at last, may we begin the proper study of homo loquax?

Democracy Now! | Republican IT Specialist Dies in Plane Crash

2008-12-23T04:59:00.000-08:00

Democracy Now! | Republican IT Specialist Dies in Plane Crash

AMY GOODMAN: Alright, well, we had you on right before the election, because that’s when Mike Connell was being deposed. This news that came out of his death in a plane crash on Friday night, talk about what you understand has happened.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, I cannot assert with perfect confidence that this was no accident, but I will say that the circumstances are so suspicious and so convenient for Rove and the White House that I think we’re obliged to investigate this thing very, very thoroughly. And that means, first of all, taking a close look at some of the stories that were immediately circulated to account for what happened, that it was bad weather. That was the line they used when Wellstone’s plane went down. There had been bad weather, but it had passed two hours before. And this comes from a woman at the airport information desk in Akron. We’re told that his plane was running out of gas, which is a little bit odd for a highly experienced pilot like Connell, but apparently, when the plane went down, there was an explosion, a fireball that actually charred and pocked some of the house fronts in the neighborhood. People can go online and see the footage that news crews took. But beyond the, you know, dubiousness of the official story, we have to take a close look at—and a serious look at all the charges that Connell was set to make.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, he had asked the Attorney General Mukasey for protective custody, because of threats to him and his wife?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: He reported threats to his lawyer, Cliff Arnebeck, and Arnebeck—also, Velvet Revolution heard from tipsters, as well, tipsters who also claimed that Connell’s life was at risk. Stephen Spoonamore, the whistleblower who was the first—who was the one to name Connell in the first place, also had an ear to the inside. He’s also very connected. And all these people were saying Rove is making threats, the White House is very worried about this case.

Having heard all this, Arnebeck contacted Mukasey, he contacted Nancy Rogers, who is the Ohio Attorney General, and he wrote a letter to the court, telling all of them that “This man should be in protective custody. He is an important witness in a RICO case. Please do something to look after him.” And they didn’t respond to this.

AMY GOODMAN: So, explain what this case is all about and exactly what Mike Connell has been doing over these last years. What does it mean to be Karl Rove’s IT guru?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, the lawyers in the case refer to him as a high-IQ Forrest Gump, by which they mean that he seems to have been present at the scene of every dubious election of the last eight years. We’re talking about Florida in 2000. We’re talking about Ohio in 2004. We’re talking about Alabama in 2002. He seems to have been involved in the theft of Don Siegelman’s re-election for governor. There’s some evidence that links him with the Saxby Chambliss-Max Cleland Senate race in Georgia in 2002. To be Karl Rove’s IT guru seems to have meant basically setting it up so that votes could be electronically shaved to the disadvantage of the Democrats and the advantage of Republicans.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “electronically shaved”? I mean, you’ve got all these precincts all over Ohio. They’re counting up their votes. What does he have to do with this?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, specifically, there’s a computer architecture setup called “Man in the Middle," which involves shunting the election returns from, you know, the state in question—in this case, Ohio—shunting them to a separate computer elsewhere. All of the election returns in Ohio in 2004 went from the Secretary of State’s website—this is Ken Blackwell—to a separate computer in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which was under the control of another private company called SMARTech.

So we have now two private companies: GovTech Solutions, which is Connell’s company, SMARTech, which is run by a guy named [Jeff] Averbeck. And the company—the third private company that managed the voting tabulators in Ohio was called Triad. All three of these companies worked closely together on election night in Ohio in 2004. It turns out that the state’s own IT person was sent home at 9:00 p.m. They said, “Go ahead. Go home. We’ll take care of this.” So that this trio of highly partisan and, let me add, Christianist companies basically took over the whole—

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “Christianist”?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, they’re radical theocratic activists, particularly—particularly Triad and SMARTech. You know, they are fervently anti-choice.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Mike Connell was, in fact—many said that’s what motivated him through all of this, his fierce anti-abortion stance.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: He told—Connell told Spoonamore that one of the primary reasons why he helped Bush-Cheney steal elections was to save the babies. I do think, though, that we have to draw a distinction between Connell, on the one hand, and the Averbeck and the Rapp family, on the other hand, because Connell was far less ferocious in his political views. He was an ardent anti-abortionist, it’s true, but he wasn’t quite as hardcore as the others. And in fact, you know, he was a little bit alienated from the others, and that’s one of the reasons why he was inclined to talk, and so on.

But the fact is, to answer your question, that on election night in 2004, it had been Connell, with these other two companies working with him, who had managed the computer setup, enabling Ken Blackwell to study the maps of precincts and voter turnout very carefully and figure out how many votes they need. By shunting the data to Chattanooga, they kind of slowed down the data stream.

AMY GOODMAN: Wasn’t Karl Rove’s email also there in Chattanooga on some of these servers?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yes, yes. The same servers were used to host a whole bunch of highly partisan websites. And also, indeed, Karl Rove’s emails were on that server, too.

AMY GOODMAN: That have gone missing.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: That have gone missing. Incidentally, Stephen Spoonamore, again, the whistleblower who’s the one who named Connell, has told us—and I’ve seen his own contemporary notes—

AMY GOODMAN: And explain again who he was. Why was he in a position to whistleblow?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Stephen Spoonamore is a conservative Republican, a former McCain supporter and a very prominent expert at the detection of computer fraud. He’s the star witness in the Ohio lawsuit, right, in which Connell was involved. He has done extensive work of this kind, involving computer security, and had therefore worked with Connell, knew Connell personally and knew a lot of the people who were involved in the sort of cyber-security end of the Bush operation.

Despite his conservatism—or I suppose some would say because of it—he’s a man of principle—I mean, believes in the Constitution. He believes elections should be honest. He’s the one who came forward and named Connell.

And I have seen his notes of a conversation in which Connell asked Spoonamore how one would go about destroying White House emails. To this, Spoonamore said, “This conversation is over. You’re asking me to do something illegal.” But clearly, clearly—this is the important point—Mike Connell was up past his eyeballs in the most sensitive and explosive aspects of this crime family that, you know, has been masquerading as a political party.

...But the point is—I can’t stress this strongly enough—we’re dealing not just with a shocking accident, if that’s what it was, and a convenient one. We’re dealing not even just with a particular lawsuit that, you know, really requires vigorous promotion. The important point here is that this is all about our elections. That’s what this is about. This is about democratic self-government.

The fact that Obama won so handily has caused a lot of us to sit back and relax. There’s been a lot of popping of champagne corks and people drawing the conclusion that the system must work, because our guy won. Well, this is not a sports event. This is self-government.

In fact, the evidence strongly suggests—and we haven’t had a chance to talk about this since Election Day—that Obama probably won by twice as many votes as we think. Probably a good seven million votes for Obama were undone through vote suppression and fraud, because the stuff was extensive and pervasive, in places where you wouldn’t expect it.

The Illinois Ballot Integrity Project was monitoring the vote in DuPage County, right next door to Obama’s, you know, backyard, Cook County. And two of them, in only two precincts on Election Day, saw with their own eyes 350 voters show up, only to be turned away, told, “You’re not registered,” people who were registered, who voted in the primary. All but one of these people was black. That’s in Illinois.

People at the Election Defense Alliance have discovered, from sifting through the numbers, an eleven-point red shift in New Hampshire. That means that there’s a discrepancy in Obama’s disfavor, primarily through use of the optical scan machines, an eleven-point discrepancy in the Republicans’ favor, OK?

You start to combine this with all the vote suppression, all the disenfranchisement, all the vote machine flipping that went on in this election, you realize, OK, Obama won, but millions of Americans, most of them African American and students, you know, were not able to participate in any civic sense, ironically, a lot of the same people, you know, who would have been disenfranchised and were disenfranchised before the civil rights movement. So the fact that a black president was elected, while cause for jubilation, see, ought not to take place at the expense of a whole lot of our fellow citizens who seem to have been disenfranchised on racial grounds. My point is very simply this: We’ve got to get past the victory of Obama and look seriously at what our election system is like, or else, I promise you, see, the setup that was put in place in this last election, in 2004 and in 2000, OK, will still be there in 2010, still be there in 2012. So we’ve got to take steps to do something about it now.

Take Back the Land

2008-12-22T02:00:00.000-08:00

Take Back the Land:

interesting...
from the Take Back the Land website:

"GENTRIFICATION IS DEAD

Many organizations across the US have taken on the good fight against gentrification. Considering the current housing market collapse, however, is gentrification still the same force it was a few years ago?

Due to the drastic change in the economic outlook, the fact is that the economic cycle of gentrification is over and, therefore, organizations and individuals geared to fight it must re-examine material conditions and re-tool their efforts.

Take Back the Land, a project of the Center for Pan-African Development, propositions that Gentrification is Dead. We urge you to read this piece and discuss it with your organizations.

Read Gentrification is Dead. READ THE ON-LINE VERSION. DOWNLOAD THE PDF PRINT VERSION."

Democracy Now! | Take Back the Land: Miami Grassroots Group Moves Struggling Families into Vacant Homes

2008-12-22T01:58:00.000-08:00

Democracy Now! | Take Back the Land: Miami Grassroots Group Moves Struggling Families into Vacant Homes: "One grassroots group in Miami called Take Back the Land has launched a campaign to help some of the victims of the foreclosure crisis. The group, led by activist Max Rameau, has been helping homeless families illegally move into vacant homes that have been foreclosed. Two years ago, Rameau helped build the Umoja Village Shantytown that housed hundreds of homeless men and women. He is the author of the book Take Back the Land: Land Gentrification and the Umoja Village Shantytown."

MAX RAMEAU: Well, we haven’t had a whole lot of reaction. Up until last week, there was really no reaction at all. And, of course, people were aware of what we were doing when we started this in October of 2007. We did so very openly and very publicly, and we had a big feature in the local newspaper about it, so that it wasn’t like we were keeping this secret or anything, and our activities were very well known.

However, last weekend, one of the homes that we moved a family in, this family identified themselves publicly and has done media and did not conceal their identity at all. The police chief of the city of Miami did send over two officers last week to check on the house and to look around in order to advance his own investigation of what was happening, and we had to respond to questions about what was going on.

But I will say that I think the crisis is at such a level right now that I don’t think there’s going to be a whole lot of public appetite for the police doing a widespread crackdown on this kind of thing, given the fact that there are a whole lot of people who need homes, there’s a whole lot of empty homes, and there’s a whole lot of money that’s being shoveled over to the banks. So the banks have all this money, and they don’t even have to give up the homes. They get both the money and the homes. So I think that the police are being used as a tool for the banks so that the banks can keep these places vacant and cash in on them a little bit later. I don’t think there’s going to be a whole lot of public sympathy for that position.

AMY GOODMAN: What has been the response overall? The press? The authorities? And how many people have you found homes for?

MAX RAMEAU: Well, the authorities, we haven’t had much response from at all, except for that one incident last week, which, you know, didn’t amount to anything but a fact-finding mission.

The general public has been very responsive to it. Obviously, we go and we talk to the neighbors before we move people into these homes, because we’re not only trying to improve the lives of these individuals, we also want to improve our communities, the communities that, you know, I live in and that we live in. So we feel that having the neighbors a part of the process is a very important part of this campaign. And the general public, I think, supports it, because they recognize that there is a real crisis here, and these houses are not doing anything good.

I think what’s happening is we’re having a—approaching a real clash between two rights, or at least perceived rights. One is the right of human beings to have housing, and the other is the right of corporations to make a profit. And there’s a clash going on between these two rights, or perceived rights, and the society is starting to work out which one it thinks is the most important right. And we are asserting that the right of human beings to housing supersedes the right of corporations to make a profit. And I think people are starting to come to that same conclusion.

The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon

2008-12-19T02:38:00.000-08:00

The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon

Following Watson, a book (Keyes 1982), a newsletter article (Brain/Mind Bulletin 1982), and a film (Hartley 1983) have each been created with the title "The Hundredth Monkey." In addition we find a journal article entitled "The 'Hundredth Monkey' and Humanity's Quest for Survival" (Stein 1983) and an article called "The Quantum Monkey" in a popular magazine (Science Digest 1981. Each relies on Watson as the sole source of information on the remarkable and supernatural behavior of primates.
The monkeys referred to are indeed remarkable. They are Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata), which line in wild troops on several islands in Japan. They have been under observation for years. During 1952 and 1953 the primatologists began "provisioning" the troops - providing them with such foods as sweet potatoes and wheat. The food was left in open areas, often on beaches. As a result of this new economy, the monkeys developed several innovative forms of behavior. One of these was invented in 1953 by an 18-month-old female that the observers named "Imo." Imo was a member of the troop on Koshima island. She discovered that sand and grit could be removed from the sweet potatoes by washing them in a stream or in the ocean. Imo's playmates and her mother learned this trick from Imo, and it soon spread to other members of the troop. Unlike most food customs, this innovation was learned by older monkeys from younger ones. In most other matters the children learn from their parents. The potato-washing habit spread gradually, according to Watson, up until 1958. but in the fall on 1958 a remarkable event occurred on Koshima. This event formed the basis of the "Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon."

9 Is Not 11 : outlookindia.com

2008-12-19T02:13:00.000-08:00

9 Is Not 11 : outlookindia.com

a compelling response to the Mumbai attacks by Arundhati Roy...

There is a fierce, unforgiving fault line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let's call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially 'Islamist' terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try and place it in a political context, or even try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself.

Side B believes that though nothing can ever excuse or justify terrorism, it exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm's way. Which is a crime in itself.

U B U W E B - Film & Video: Orson Welles - The One Man Band

2008-12-17T10:35:00.000-08:00

U B U W E B - Film & Video: Orson Welles - The One Man Band: "ORSON WELLES: THE ONE-MAN BAND"

wow -- this little film has the best intro i've seen, anywhere, in a while.

from Wikipedia and Tom Wolfe: fiction-absolute

2008-12-17T02:05:00.001-08:00

The concept of fiction-absolute exists firstly within the context of anthropology, secondarily within the study of group psychology also known as tribalism.

It is a term invented and defined by Tom Wolfe as being the propaganda that each tribe (i.e. social group) defines and uses to explain why that group is the best of all groups and its people the best people. The term itself indicates that it is absolutist in that it defines in stark terms why members should prefer that tribe, and necessarily fictional because it is propaganda. The fiction-absolute is essentially a tribe's core propaganda, and most intolerant.

The fiction-absolute not only necessitates a harsh view of other groups, but also unaffiliated people and, of course, individualists.

The fiction-absolute is the system of lies and truths from which can spring other intolerance, but also collective action.

Examples of collective action that supposedly derive from the fiction-absolute:

* Manifest Destiny
* British Colonialism
* Secession and formation of the Confederate States of America
* the Nazi concept of Lebensraum

The founding principle of a fiction-absolute need not, however, be a falsehood.

from Wikipedia and Tom Wolfe: fiction-absolute

2008-12-17T02:05:00.000-08:00

Fiction-absolute - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2008-12-17T02:03:00.000-08:00

Fiction-absolute - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

hmmm...

"The concept of fiction-absolute exists firstly within the context of anthropology, secondarily within the study of group psychology also known as tribalism.

It is a term invented and defined by Tom Wolfe as being the propaganda that each tribe (i.e. social group) defines and uses to explain why that group is the best of all groups and its people the best people. The term itself indicates that it is absolutist in that it defines in stark terms why members should prefer that tribe, and necessarily fictional because it is propaganda. The fiction-absolute is essentially a tribe's core propaganda, and most intolerant.

The fiction-absolute not only necessitates a harsh view of other groups, but also unaffiliated people and, of course, individualists.

The fiction-absolute is the system of lies and truths from which can spring other intolerance, but also collective action.

Examples of collective action that supposedly derive from the fiction-absolute:

* Manifest Destiny
* British Colonialism
* Secession and formation of the Confederate States of America
* the Nazi concept of Lebensraum

The founding principle of a fiction-absolute need not, however, be a falsehood."

Op-Ed Columnist - Lost in the Crowd - NYTimes.com

2008-12-16T07:39:00.000-08:00

Op-Ed Columnist - Lost in the Crowd - NYTimes.com

I don't understand exactly how David Brooks went, in my mind, from being a repulsive conservative apologist to an intriguingly moderate centrist. I'm less sure how any moderate centrist can be remotely intriguing. Nonetheless, this is interesting.
--CF

-----------------------------------------
Gladwell’s noncontroversial claim is that some people have more opportunities than other people. Bill Gates was lucky to go to a great private school with its own computer at the dawn of the information revolution. Gladwell’s more interesting claim is that social forces largely explain why some people work harder when presented with those opportunities.

Chinese people work hard because they grew up in a culture built around rice farming. Tending a rice paddy required working up to 3,000 hours a year, and it left a cultural legacy that prizes industriousness. Many upper-middle-class American kids are raised in an atmosphere of “concerted cultivation,” which inculcates a fanatical devotion to meritocratic striving.

...As usual, Gladwell intelligently captures a larger tendency of thought — the growing appreciation of the power of cultural patterns, social contagions, memes. His book is being received by reviewers as a call to action for the Obama age. It could lead policy makers to finally reject policies built on the assumption that people are coldly rational utility-maximizing individuals. It could cause them to focus more on policies that foster relationships, social bonds and cultures of achievement.

Yet, I can’t help but feel that Gladwell and others who share his emphasis are getting swept away by the coolness of the new discoveries. They’ve lost sight of the point at which the influence of social forces ends and the influence of the self-initiating individual begins.

Most successful people begin with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so. They were often showered by good fortune, but relied at crucial moments upon achievements of individual will.

Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention. We know from experiments with subjects as diverse as obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers and Buddhist monks that people who can self-consciously focus attention have the power to rewire their brains.

Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons. This individual power leads to others. It leads to self-control, the ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses. If forced to choose, we would all rather our children be poor with self-control than rich without it.

It leads to resilience, the ability to persevere with an idea even when all the influences in the world say it can’t be done. A common story among entrepreneurs is that people told them they were too stupid to do something, and they set out to prove the jerks wrong.

It leads to creativity. Individuals who can focus attention have the ability to hold a subject or problem in their mind long enough to see it anew.

Gladwell’s social determinism is a useful corrective to the Homo economicus view of human nature. It’s also pleasantly egalitarian. The less successful are not less worthy, they’re just less lucky. But it slights the centrality of individual character and individual creativity. And it doesn’t fully explain the genuine greatness of humanity’s outliers. As the classical philosophers understood, examples of individual greatness inspire achievement more reliably than any other form of education. If Gladwell can reduce William Shakespeare to a mere product of social forces, I’ll buy 25 more copies of “Outliers” and give them away in Times Square.

Findings - Tips From the Potlatch, Where Giving Knows No Slump - NYTimes.com

2008-12-16T07:27:00.000-08:00

Findings - Tips From the Potlatch, Where Giving Knows No Slump - NYTimes.com

“Furthermore such is my pride that I will kill on this fire my copper Dandalayu, which is groaning in my house. You all know how much I paid for it. I bought it for 4,000 blankets. Now I will break it in order to vanquish my rival. I will make my house a fighting place for you, my tribe.” Today, though, potlatch scholars say that those extravagant copper fights were a historical anomaly caused by the arrival of white fur traders, which upended the Indians’ social structure and created a class of nouveau riche leaders vying for prestige.

...Turnabout is fair play. There’s no reason to spend precious time and money shopping for the aunt who surprised you last year with the programmable breadmaker. It’s still in the box. Rewrap it and give it back to her.

Returning a gift was done routinely in the old potlatches; the donors didn’t object as long as it was accompanied by an interest payment that might be 100 percent per year.

“In the old days, if a chief gave away 200 blankets to another chief, the next year or when the other chief next held his potlatch it was likely he’d get back 400 blankets or more,” says Andrea Sanborn, the director of the U’mista Cultural Center in Alert Bay, which houses the collection of potlatch regalia seized in the 1921 raid. “But today it is not expected that it be double anymore.”

So there’s certainly no need to buy Auntie a second breadmaker. A book of Amish bread recipes would do fine.

Don’t forget your enemies. “A lot of attention has been paid to the competitive side of the old potlatches, but they also helped people avoid conflicts,” says Aldona Jonaitis, an anthropologist at the University of Alaska. “Besides strengthening the bonds within a family, potlatching enabled people to establish bonds and obligations with potential enemies outside the family.” Today, with families becoming smaller and more dispersed, giving gifts to outsiders — even ones you don’t like — is a better self-preservation strategy than ever.

Share the wealth. The missionaries who railed against the potlatch didn’t understand its larger social function. In return for recognizing the greatness of the host chief, the low-status guests were given food and gifts without any expectation of repayment. It might be seen as a successful example of “trickle-down economics,” says Aaron Glass, a potlatch scholar at the American Museum of Natural History.

“Even though the elite chiefs controlled the fishing grounds and the trade networks,” Dr. Glass says, “the potlatch functioned to make sure everyone had enough fish and that the excess trading wealth was redistributed to the entire community.” In hard times that function is especially important, so remember the neediest this year.

Ignore the Scrooges. For more than a century, the potlatchers in Chief Cranmer’s family have been rebuffing their critics with a simple explanation. “Outsiders may think we’re dumb for giving away our money when everyone else is trying to save, but we do it because we feel good,” Chief Cranmer says. “After you give away everything and are pretty broke, you’re supposed to be happy.” And he swears that’s just how he felt after his last potlatch.

A Prior: Renzo Martens

2008-12-12T19:31:00.000-08:00

A Prior

W]hat art does is help you reformulate concepts, ideas and beliefs and to become conscious of things, not in a visceral way alone, but in a cognitive way….[7] Perhaps Martens’ objective could be to formulate a mediation, to create a means through which to see reality, to understand and interpret it.

...

Emerging from the first of our two lengthy conversations was an artist with a decisive point of departure: making use of the same strategy as his ‘fellow’ photographers and journalists, Martens refers to his film as a tautology. “As the producer of the film, you are always implicated. You are always involved. Many filmmakers and photographers try to cover this up.” According to Martens, declaring your own position is the ultimate prerequisite for opening up an external reality. Moreover, on the part of the filmmaker, exposing or not exposing one’s own position is often tied up with an economic implication. As a result, the position of the photographer or filmmaker in this context can only be recognized when it is lucrative. For example, in presenting help by a relief worker, the latter (usually a white man or woman) is put in the image, but where exploitation is being presented as the subject matter, you never see a white person in the image. Martens refers to Tillim, the white South African whose photographs were shown at Documenta, and how Tillim ensures that there is never a white journalist to be seen in any of his photographs, even if, at the events he photographed, he was surrounded not only by hordes of black protesters, but also by hordes of white photographers. According to Martens, this is only because Tillim wants to sketch the situation as an external reality, with which the future buyer of the work has or wants no real relationship. The person who purchases or sees the work will see the African situation as an outsider, certainly not as someone who is in fact involved with it, let alone contributing to its perpetuation.

Martens moreover has clear doubts about the potential of showing the suffering and pain of others in images, and to support his thinking, he refers, among others, to Susan Sontag. As Martens puts it, Susan Sontag described it well in her book, Regarding the Pain of Others. It is, in fact, impossible to visualize suffering. “It seems too simple to elect sympathy (as a feeling generated by photographs). The imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the faraway sufferers – seen close-up on the television screen – and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet once more a mystification of our real relations to power. So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent it can be (for all good intentions) an impertinent – if not inappropriate – response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same maps as their suffering, and may – in ways we might prefer not to imagine –be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.”[8] In other words, Martens agrees with Sontag that the pain and suffering of others is in fact impossible to depict.

...The segment on the art gallery is interesting. In it, the gallery is exhibiting ‘artistic’ photographs of workers in appalling conditions. They seem virtual slaves. Taken by the wife of the manager of the plantation where the workers were being exploited like slaves, the photographs are being sold for $600 apiece at an opening at a local gallery, to buyers who include the plantation owner himself. In this scene, Martens’ investigation reaches a climax. Concurrently, it is here that cynicism also reaches its apex – not Martens’ cynicism, but that of the exploiter and the Westerner with the clear conscience, aware of no wrongdoing whatsoever. Almost equally repulsive, or in any case hard to digest – on Christmas Eve – is a scene in which a few local men, on Martens’ own instructions, take photographs of malnourished and literally dying toddlers. They emphatically tell their fellow villagers how they will pay nothing for their photographs, cannot give them anything at all, cannot be of any possible use to them and will themselves only earn a penny from the commercialization of their poverty. These are horrible situations, and it is at moments like these that I suddenly look at what I am seeing with different eyes. I feel very involved and responsible for what is happening, and I understand that Martens here reaches his goal.

Martens compares his tactics with those of a satirical tradition, as he tells me about A Modest Proposal,[9] the satirical pamphlet published by Jonathan Swift in 1729, describing how parents should best serve their children to be eaten at fancy London dinner tables, rather than let them be a burden to themselves or to the state. At the time, the pamphlet was dismissed as satanic and immoral, but its intention was to open people’s eyes to the misery prevailing in Ireland in the eighteenth century. With this comparison, Martens sees his position as a filmmaker as deviating from that of ordinary reporters because he brings himself into the image while showing what is happening. By making a film about its own broader parameters, elements that are normally obscured become obvious and visible. In this way, one’s sense of involvement also becomes far greater.

H. M., an Unforgettable Amnesiac, Dies at 82 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

2008-12-07T07:50:00.000-08:00

H. M., an Unforgettable Amnesiac, Dies at 82 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

On Tuesday evening at 5:05, Henry Gustav Molaison — known worldwide only as H. M., to protect his privacy — died of respiratory failure at a nursing home in Windsor Locks, Conn. His death was confirmed by Suzanne Corkin, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who had worked closely with him for decades. Henry Molaison was 82.

...

H. M. could recount childhood scenes: Hiking the Mohawk Trail. A road trip with his parents. Target shooting in the woods near his house.

“Gist memories, we call them,” Dr. Corkin said. “He had the memories, but he couldn’t place them in time exactly; he couldn’t give you a narrative.”

He was nonetheless a self-conscious presence, as open to a good joke and as sensitive as anyone in the room. Once, a researcher visiting with Dr. Milner and H. M. turned to her and remarked how interesting a case this patient was.

“H. M. was standing right there,” Dr. Milner said, “and he kind of colored — blushed, you know — and mumbled how he didn’t think he was that interesting, and moved away.”

...

In the last years of his life, Mr. Molaison was, as always, open to visits from researchers, and Dr. Corkin said she checked on his health weekly. She also arranged for one last research program. On Tuesday, hours after Mr. Molaison’s death, scientists worked through the night taking exhaustive M.R.I. scans of his brain, data that will help tease apart precisely which areas of his temporal lobes were still intact and which were damaged, and how this pattern related to his memory.

Dr. Corkin arranged, too, to have his brain preserved for future study, in the same spirit that Einstein’s was, as an irreplaceable artifact of scientific history.

“He was like a family member,” said Dr. Corkin, who is at work on a book on H. M., titled “A Lifetime Without Memory.” “You’d think it would be impossible to have a relationship with someone who didn’t recognize you, but I did.”

In his way, Mr. Molaison did know his frequent visitor, she added: “He thought he knew me from high school.”

Henry Gustav Molaison, born on Feb. 26, 1926, left no survivors. He left a legacy in science that cannot be erased.

Strangers May Cheer You Up, Study Says - NYTimes.com

2008-12-06T01:06:00.000-08:00

Strangers May Cheer You Up, Study Says - NYTimes.com

How happy you are may depend on how happy your friends’ friends’ friends are, even if you don’t know them at all.

And a cheery next-door neighbor has more effect on your happiness than your spouse’s mood.

So says a new study that followed a large group of people for 20 years — happiness is more contagious than previously thought.

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”

In fact, said his co-author, James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, their research found that “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”

The researchers analyzed information on the happiness of 4,739 people and their connections with several thousand others — spouses, relatives, close friends, neighbors and co-workers — from 1983 to 2003.

“It’s extremely important and interesting work,” said Daniel Kahneman, an emeritus psychologist and Nobel laureate at Princeton, who was not involved in the study.

mom and Wagner

2008-12-03T02:10:00.000-08:00

from my mom:

imogen cunningham, the photographer says, "being devoted to one's work is much like hearing a great wagnerian opera with one's soul open." i so very agree.

Senegal's Traditional Wrestling Evolves

2008-12-02T23:48:00.000-08:00

Senegal's Traditional Wrestling Evolves:

In New Senegal, No Holds Barred
Migration Changes Face of Ancient Sport:

By Emily Wax

"DAKAR, Senegal -- In his dark, concrete room in a congested Dakar neighborhood, Lamine Mane, a professional wrestler, and several friends huddled over a bundle of faded photographs.

The frayed stack of old pictures showed some of the traditional wrestlers who generations ago performed on the soft green grass in villages across West Africa. On those family-filled evenings, peasant children would drop their mundane chores to watch their fathers achieve glory in a five-minute match.

There were no headlocks. No hitting. No biting. At the end of the match, a team of wise elders announced the winner. Women sang praises to the loser to heal his disappointment, then everyone feasted on succulent goat and rice.

In the village where Mane grew up, 500 miles south of Dakar, only single men were allowed to wrestle, as a ritual of courtship. Girls with neatly braided hair sashayed around the ring, flirting with potential suitors. The wrestlers were believed to have mystic powers, and they served as the community's private military.

But today, any man who trains and finds a manager can wrestle. Competitors punch and bite, and some end up in the hospital. They want to win cash and contracts for fast-food endorsements, not roasted goat. No one sings to the loser. Romance happens at dance clubs, not at the ring.
...
The movement of people from rural areas to cities is changing elements of culture from birth to burial rites, dating to divorce, and even one of West Africa's oldest traditions and most popular sports.

"In the village, the wrestlers were representing the community. Now we've left the soil, found the city, and it's all about the individual," said Abdoul Wahid Kane, a professor of sports sociology at the National Higher Institute for Popular Education and Sport at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. "The changes in wrestling represent the changes in African society. Yet sometimes I wonder: How modern, how individualistic, do we really want to become?"
...
Mane stood out for his determination. But he continued hanging out with a crowd of wild, jobless boys who drank at discos and roared around the city on mopeds. One day, Mane crashed and ended up with a sprained shoulder and a missing tooth. The next day, in the hospital, he dreamed he was dying alone in a ditch, with only his moped at his side.

"In the dream, my ancestors said to me, 'What is your destiny? You are just 18, and you are spoiling your opportunities,' " he recalled.

His older brother, a mid-level boxer with bulging arms, had found meaning in his life through training for the sport. "There is something so good in my brother," said Boubaccar Mane, 34. "I thought L.A. could really make it as a wrestler, so I led him that way."
...
In a sandy lot at a school in the neighborhood, Mane and 30 other hard-bodied wrestlers work out with 90 minutes of sprints, leg bends, squats and sit-ups. Their dark faces become covered with dust as they lock bodies and try to pin each other to the ground.

Boys from the neighborhood watch practice from the concrete veranda around the school, sometimes imitating the wrestlers' movements.

"Living in the city, you can't just rest and live on the ancestors' land like before," said Mane, panting after practice. "Where you start out shouldn't be where you end. I know that. But the pressure is there. It's not just fun and romance. This is survival in the big city. This means something."
...
Before the match, the wrestlers and their inner circle strutted around outside the ring, performing a four-row line dance. Each man lifted a foot and stomped it down, then shimmied forward in time with the drumming. Fans whooped and danced in the stands, holding up signs for their favorites.

...
Senegalese are avid sports fans in general. A strong fitness culture makes joggers a common site on the streets of Dakar. In the homeland of international star El Hadji Diouf, soccer matches draw crowds to every television.

But wrestling is 'more interesting than soccer, because it's ours,' said Ousseynou Diakhate, a 22-year-old wrestler in the northern Senegalese town of Louga, who has been fighting professionally for three years.

Even in the provinces, wrestlers make up to $400 per match, but Diakhate insists they don't do it for profit. 'It's the traditions that nourish us,' he said. 'But if we make some money from it, all the better.'

The origins of this national sport lie in the rhythms of village life.

'If the harvest is good, young men come together to measure their strength, and girls watch to see who they want to marry,' said Youssou Mbargane Mbaye, wrestling historian and head of an association of traditional praise singers."

The pomp and pageantry of traditional wrestling is nearly as important as the fight itself. Wrestlers and their entourages dance wildly around the ring to the beat of drums and traditional flutes, while women chant songs of heroism and strength. The beginning of the fight is signaled when one wrestler places a drum in the middle of the ring, and the challenger overturns it.
...
Each fight is preceded by days of spiritual preparation. Marabouts, leaders of mystical Muslim brotherhoods, fashion amulets and talismans for the fighters. These tokens can include Quranic verses, plant derivatives or goat bones for fighters to bite as they step into the ring.

Mbaye said that in Dakar, however, the focus is increasingly on money. Cash prizes began to be offered in the 1960s, replacing the traditional offering of a sack of rice or a cow. Since then the purses have grown.

The dynamics of wrestling in Dakar also changed with the introduction of a new set of rules that allow wrestlers to punch each other.

"It's a foreign element. It comes from boxing," said Mbaye, who said that the more violent the game is, the more paying spectators it draws. "Now the only thing the young men care about is the amount of money they make."

Yakhya Diop Ndoye, a 14-year-old spectator at a Dakar match, says he wrestles at home with his friends in the traditional style without hitting but that he dreams of becoming a professional athlete who can bloody his opponent with impunity.

"When they hit each other, they get more money," he said.

He and his friends hoot excitedly as two fighters exchange blows in the ring.
...
However, even in Dakar, where promoters spend up to $400,000 to organize big fights, Sunday evening wrestling still reflects its rural roots. Praise singers are always on hand to spin oral histories around fighters and invited guests, and as celebrity athletes grow wealthier, the spiritualism surrounding the match becomes more pronounced.

Mbaye explained that fighters now buy much more powerful magic than they ever could in the village.

Senegal elevates traditional wrestling beyond indigenous culture

2008-12-02T23:25:00.000-08:00

Senegal elevates traditional wrestling beyond indigenous culture

Like other sports, Senegal's traditional wrestling has undergone a drastic revolution, such that the Gueyes, feared fighters in their days in the 1970s, are drowned in nostalgia today as the new generation of wrestlers smile all the way to the bank with mega bucks, from a sport that was previously played for leisure but provided little or no financial returns to the combatants.

The sport has seen a massive infusion of modernity in Senegal, especially in officiating, with a complete group of uniformed umpires, a panel of judges and the introduction of body punching to enliven the drab grab/hold techniques.

The wrestlers are still attired in the old tradition of loincloth, fully exposing their muscles with the waist and arms bedecked with an assortment of "gris-gris" charms.

But despite all the efforts at modernisation, traditional wrestling a la Senegal, still retains its mystic, with a massive dose of razzmatazz, while the marabouts still occupy a privileged position in the magical preparations to ensure victory for their wards.

Since the average fight lasts less than 10 minutes, the wrestlers and their griots (praise singers), bodyguards and supporters often over-dramatise the pre-match up, which in some cases lasts up to two hours, including the time for opening supporting bouts, to ensure that the paying crowd has value for money.

The typical preparation for a bout ranges from the enchanting to the bizarre, involving various rituals, including digging up the ground and "bathing" the wrestlers with liquid concoctions.

...
The 35,000-strong crowd at the Leopold Senghor Stadium in Dakar included Senegalese First Lady Viviene Wade.

The importance of the wrestling bout was not lost on her husband President Abdoulaye Wade, who made it a point to extend his best wishes to the two wrestlers in his New Year message to the nation.

To also underscore the gripping passion of the sport, national media reports on the fight displaced the president's annual goodwill message to the nation, occupying the front pages of all the private journals the following day.

If the fight was spectacular, the build-up was emotive with corporate Senegal led by the mobile phone company Alize, deploying every arsenal to maximise advertisement revenue.

The fight organisers, Action 2000, said the contest cost a whopping 240 million CFA francs (about 680,000 dollars) to stage, and the national frenzy was such that half way into the bout, the stadium's gates were swung open to allow in thousands of fans massed outside the venue.

The actual bout was over in under seven minutes but extended pre-fight dramas were a sight to behold and more than compensated for the short duration of the main bill.

Tyson, who had once lost his title to another tough fighter, Serigne Dia, alias "Bombardier," was floored by the hard-punching Yekini.

The city of Dakar, with three million inhabitants, came to a virtual standstill during the electrifying moments of the fight, with citizens who were unable to go to the stadium, glued to their television sets either at home or around shops and open spaces with mounted TV sets to watch live broadcast of the match.

The gate fee ranged between 1,000 CFA and 15,000 CFA francs (from two to 7.5 dollars), but despite allowing thousands in free, Petit Mbaye, the chief executive officer of Action 2000, said his organisation raked in a net profit of 28 million CFA Francs (about 56,000 dollars).

A victorious Yekini pocketed 65 million CFA francs or 130,000 dollars, while Tyson got 60 million CFA francs (about 125,000 dollars).

Even by African standards and for a country with a national minimum wage of 40,000 CFA francs (about 80 dollars) a month, the Yekini-Tyson thriller was not only a national record, but has taken traditional wrestling to new heights.

Op-Ed Columnist - Talia for President - Editorial - NYTimes.com

2008-11-16T22:23:00.000-08:00

Op-Ed Columnist - Talia for President - Editorial - NYTimes.com

If your image of a philanthropist is a stout, gray geezer, then meet Talia Leman, an eighth grader in Iowa who loves soccer and swimming, and whose favorite subject is science. I’m supporting her for president in 2044.

When Talia was 10 years old, she saw television clips of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and decided to help. She galvanized other kids and started a movement to trick-or-treat at Halloween for coins for hurricane victims.

The movement caught the public imagination, Talia made it on the “Today” show, and the campaign raised more than $10 million. With that success behind her, Talia organized a program called RandomKid to help other young social entrepreneurs organize and raise money.

At randomkid.org, young people can link up with others to participate in various philanthropic ventures. On the Web site, Talia has organized a campaign to build a school in rural Cambodia, backed by children in 48 states and 19 countries.

Likewise, she’s working with schools in seven states to provide clean water for rural African villages. She is a frequent guest speaker at other schools, although she acknowledges she’s just a bit intimidated when she visits a high school.

“I’m only in middle school, so I see high schoolers as the big kids,” she said. “When I go to high school to pass out Unicef boxes, I see them as the big, scary ones.”

In Modeling Risk, the Human Factor Was Left Out - NYTimes.com

2008-11-10T13:18:00.000-08:00

In Modeling Risk, the Human Factor Was Left Out - NYTimes.com

“The price of an asset, like a house or a stock, reflects not only your beliefs about the future, but you’re also betting on other people’s beliefs,” he observed. “It’s these hierarchies of beliefs — these behavioral factors — that are so hard to model.”

Indeed, the behavioral uncertainty added to the escalating complexity of financial markets help explain the failure in risk management. The quantitative models typically have their origins in academia and often the physical sciences. In academia, the focus is on problems that can be solved, proved and published — not messy, intractable challenges. In science, the models derive from particle flows in a liquid or a gas, which conform to the neat, crisp laws of physics.

Not so in financial modeling. Emanuel Derman is a physicist who became a managing director at Goldman Sachs, a quant whose name is on a few financial models and author of “My Life as a Quant — Reflections on Physics and Finance” (Wiley, 2004). In a paper that will be published next year in a professional journal, Mr. Derman writes, “To confuse the model with the world is to embrace a future disaster driven by the belief that humans obey mathematical rules.”

Yet blaming the models for their shortcomings, he said in an interview, seems misguided. “The models were more a tool of enthusiasm than a cause of the crisis,” said Mr. Derman, who is a professor at Columbia University.

In boom times, new markets tend to outpace the human and technical systems to support them, said Richard R. Lindsey, president of the Callcott Group, a quantitative consulting group. Those support systems, he said, include pricing and risk models, back-office clearing and management’s understanding of the financial instruments. That is what happened in the mortgage-backed securities and credit derivatives markets.

Better modeling, more wisely applied, would have helped, Mr. Lindsey said, but so would have common sense in senior management. The mortgage securities markets, he noted, grew rapidly and generated high profits for a decade. “If you are making a high return, I guarantee you there is a high risk there, even if you can’t see it,”...

Financial regulation, Mr. Lo said, should be seen as similar to fire safety rules in building codes. The chances of any building burning down are slight, but ceiling sprinklers, fire extinguishers and fire escapes are mandated by law.

“We’ve learned the hard way that the consequences can be catastrophic, even if statistically improbable,” he said.

Circadian clock may be critical to learning and memory

2008-10-31T10:11:00.000-07:00

Circadian clock may be critical to learning and memory

Working with Siberian hamsters, biologist Norman Ruby has shown that having a functioning circadian system is critical to the hamsters' ability to remember what they have learned. Without it, he said, "They can't remember anything." ...

The change in learning retention appears to hinge on the amount of a neurochemical called GABA, which acts to inhibit brain activity. All mammal brains function according to the balance between neurochemicals that excite the brain and those that calm it. The circadian clock controls the daily cycle of sleep and wakefulness by inhibiting different parts of the brain by releasing GABA.

But if the hippocampus—the part of the brain where memories are stored—is overly inhibited, then the circuits responsible for memory storage don't function properly. "Those circuits need to be excited to strengthen and encode the memories at a molecular level," Ruby said.

"What I thought was happening was that our animals were having chronically high levels of GABA because they had lost their circadian rhythm," Ruby said. "So instead of rhythmic GABA, it is just constant GABA output."

To test that idea, Ruby and his colleagues gave the circadian-deficient hamsters a GABA antagonist called pentylenetetrazole, or PTZ, which blocks GABA from binding to synapses, thereby allowing the synapses to continue firing and keeping the brain in a more excited state. It worked. The learning-impaired hamsters caught up with their intact peers to exhibit the same level of learning retention.

...
The finding is even more striking when you consider that when a hamster loses its circadian system, it gets even more sleep than usual.

"What our data are showing is that these animals still performed terribly on a simple learning task, even though they're getting loads of sleep," Ruby said. "What this says is that the circadian system really is necessary for something that is deeply important: learning."

Op-Ed Columnist - American Stories - NYTimes.com

2008-10-31T03:46:00.000-07:00

Op-Ed Columnist - American Stories - NYTimes.com

Americans are decent people. They’re not interested in where you came from. They’re interested in who you are. That has not changed.

But much has in the last eight years. This is a moment of anguish. The Bush presidency has engineered the unlikely double whammy of undermining free-market capitalism and essential freedoms, the nation’s twin badges.

American luster is gone. The American idea has, in Joyce Carol Oates’s words, become a “cruel joke.” Americans are worrying and hurting.

So it is important to step back, from the last machinations of this endless campaign, and think again about what America is.

It is renewal, the place where impossible stories get written.

It is the overcoming of history, the leaving behind of war and barriers, in the name of a future freed from the cruel gyre of memory.

It is reinvention, the absorption of one identity in something larger — the notion that “out of many, we are truly one.”

It is a place better than Bush’s land of shadows where a leader entrusted with the hopes of the earth cannot find within himself a solitary phrase to uplift the soul.

Democracy Now! | Kambale Musavuli on the "Forgotten War" in the Congo

2008-10-28T07:45:00.000-07:00

Democracy Now! | Kambale Musavuli on the "Forgotten War" in the Congo

AMY GOODMAN: Kambale, we only have about thirty seconds, but you also organized a cell phone protest yesterday. Explain.

KAMBALE MUSAVULI: Yes. What we have asked people to do to show the connection with coltan is to turn off their cell phone last week on Wednesday, October 22nd, and change their voice mail, because we believe that people will call their phones still, and explaining why their phone is off during that day. Our aim, really, during the cell phone boycott, is to raise awareness about what’s happening in the Congo, and using the cell phone as a messaging tool was very, very successful. We had students in New Zealand, a high school in Avonside, that actually did that perfectly, getting the whole high school to participate in that. So, our aim into the cell out, as well as Congo Week, is basically to end the conflict and provide support to the Congolese people in their quest to regain sovereignty of their land.

Democracy Now! | The Fruit Hunters: Author Adam Leith Gollner on the Politics of Fruit and the Secret History of the "Miracle Berry"

2008-10-24T01:06:00.000-07:00

Democracy Now! | The Fruit Hunters: Author Adam Leith Gollner on the Politics of Fruit and the Secret History of the "Miracle Berry"

ADAM LEITH GOLLNER: This miracle berry was banned by the FDA in the early 1970s. Some—

AMY GOODMAN: I’m eating something that was banned by the FDA?

ADAM LEITH GOLLNER: Well, you’re about to find out—you’re about to hear the story. In the ’60s and the ’70s, an entrepreneur named Robert Harvey managed to raise tens of millions of dollars to create an all-natural alternative to sugar using the miracle fruit, and he managed to synthesize the active ingredient in this berry, which is a protein called “miraculin.” So, what’s happening to you right now is you have miraculin on your taste buds, and that means that when sour foods come into contact with the sweetness receptors on your taste buds, it sends this very powerful sweetness signal to your brain, even though there’s only sour coming into your mouth. And so—

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it’s just unbelievable.

ADAM LEITH GOLLNER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s sweeter than an orange.

ADAM LEITH GOLLNER: It’s amazing. And this entrepreneur—

AMY GOODMAN: Did you bring more limes? Because I like it.

ADAM LEITH GOLLNER: Keep on eating them. I know, I know. It’s really delicious.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, I love limes, too, when they’re sour, but these are very sweet. So, why was it banned?

ADAM LEITH GOLLNER: OK, so here is what happened. He started making miracle fruit tablets, because these fruits don’t have a very long shelf life, and that’s another reason that many of these fruits from the tropics don’t make it here, is that they just have no shelf life whatsoever. But he put them in tablet form. Diabetics were going crazy for them. Kids were choosing miracle fruit popsicles over regular popsicles by this enormous margin. And companies, other corporations started getting interested. And Harvey was turning down offers in the billions for control—billions of dollars were being offered to him for this, because it looked like it was poised to become an all-natural alternative to sugar. And even the artificial sweetening industry was very concerned about this threat of this small red berry.

But what happened was, that just as it was about to launch, Harvey’s company, his office was raided by industrial spies. His files were stolen. He got into high-speed car chases in the middle of the night. People were following him.

AMY GOODMAN: Who is this guy?

ADAM LEITH GOLLNER: He was the entrepreneur that brought miraculin to the market in 1960s and ’70s. And then it got banned just as it was about to launch. And he got a letter in 1974 from the FDA saying the miracle berry—miracle berry products are not allowed into the market in any form whatsoever. And so, he had to shut down the entire operation.

...

AMY GOODMAN: Is it metabolized as glucose?

ADAM LEITH GOLLNER: No, not at all. Not at all.

AMY GOODMAN: So, for diabetics, it’s fine.

ADAM LEITH GOLLNER: It’s totally good. It’s good for people who are undergoing chemotherapy treatment, because for them, all food tastes metallic and rubbery. But when you take a miracle berry, it actually allows you to taste the foods again. It’s just a wonderful thing.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about how, OK, this miracle berry has not been approved, but aspartame has? Explain the story of aspartame and our former secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld.

ADAM LEITH GOLLNER: Yes, Donald Rumsfeld was the head of a corporation called Searle, and he spent many years approving the—or working on the legalization process for aspartame. And the head of the FDA that came in briefly, just for a moment, just long enough to approve aspartame, immediately left subsequently. He came under fire for accepting corporate donations and corporate gifts. Nobody was surprised, seeing as he immediately went to Searle’s public relations firm as soon as he left the FDA.

The Food Issue - New Food Ideas - NYTimes.com

2008-10-21T08:17:00.000-07:00

The Food Issue - New Food Ideas - NYTimes.com

In the last five years, 532 patent requests — two-thirds of them from Monsanto, BASF and Syngenta — have been filed on the genes intended for use in crops designed to withstand environmental stresses. “We're talking about a grab on strategic genes in the world's most important food crops,” says Hope Shand, the research director for the watchdog organization ETC Group. “This simply shouldn't be allowed.” Jonathan Bryant, the director of North American business for BASF, which in 2007 signed a $1.5 billion deal to collaborate with Monsanto on the development of drought-tolerant crops, calls the patents “a very small protection amongst a sea of opportunity.” The continued consolidation of intellectual property combined with the sort of corporate cooperation currently being enjoyed by BASF and Monsanto is considered a recipe for disaster by some. The anti-genetic-modification activist Vandana Shiva, whose New Delhi-based Navdanya group builds seed banks for the sharing of climate-resilient crops,says consolidation isn't just bad economics and bad social policy; it's bad science. “As a physicist,” she says, “I can tell you that it is crazy in times of unpredictability to have centralized uniformity. If you are going to have climate chaos, what you need is lots of diversity, and you want that diversity in lots of places, in a very decentralized way.” — JOCELYN CRAUGH ZUCKERMAN

CULANTHROPY:

Two years ago, the New York City chef Christine Carroll was painting a New Orleans high school with a post-Katrina volunteer group when she realized that she was no painter. But she could cook; so could everyone she knew. And New Orleans needed nourishment. Once home, she started organizing CulinaryCorps, a charity that recruits squads of chefs and culinary students for weeklong trips to New Orleans, where they might be asked to cook dinner for a Habitat for Humanity crew one night and the still-stoveless residents of the Lower Ninth Ward the next. Mornings are spent volunteering: teaching elementary-school kids about growing vegetables or helping to recover flood-damaged cookbooks from venerated restaurants. The focus is not just on feeding the hungry but also on keeping the city's food traditions alive. “We give them our version of shrimp and grits, and then when they come back for seconds, they share their secret family recipes,” says Carroll. Of the 75 chefs who have gone through the program, two have moved to New Orleans to make culinary philanthropy — or “culanthropy” — a full-time project. Next year, Carroll says, she hopes to take her Sauciers Sans FrontiËres idea to places like Appalachia and Puerto Rico. — ADAM FISHER

SKY VEGETABLES:

Last April, after winning a competition at the University of Wisconsin School of Business, Keith Agoada, who was then still a student, decided to turn his sustainable-urban-farming plan into a business and created Sky Vegetables. The concept takes advantage of the “fields” of flat rooftops found atop supermarkets by using that space to grow crops. Agoada says Sky Vegetables will have benefits beyond sustainable local produce. The plants and greenhouses will absorb sunlight, making it easier for supermarkets to cool their buildings; in the winter they will add insulation. And an heirloom tomato grown a few feet up from the aisle in which it's sold won't come with any guilt-inducing air miles. The farms will use rainwater for irrigation and solar panels for some of their energy needs. No greenhouses have been installed yet, but Agoada and his partner say they hope to begin construction on a prototype next year; they are currently talking to supermarkets in the Bay Area. — LIA MILLER

The Food Issue - New Food Ideas - NYTimes.com

2008-10-21T08:08:00.000-07:00

The Food Issue - New Food Ideas - NYTimes.com

An initiative in Chad and Darfur is taking the low-tech concept of solar cooking to a higher level. Run by Jewish World Watch, a coalition of Los Angeles-area synagogues founded in 2004 to address modern genocide, the Solar Cooker Project provides refugee-camp residents with the materials — aluminum foil, cardboard and glue — to build cookers.Thirty dollars covers the cost of two cookers, cloth potholders — and training. Harnessing the sun's energy doesn't just mean fewer girls searching for firewood (often putting them at risk of being raped along the way) and fewer people suffering from the injuries associated with live-fire cooking; it also provides relief for the denuded Chadian and Sudanese countryside. The nearly-three-year-old project has supplied and trained more than 10,000 women and girls in the Iridimi and Touloum camps and recently began work with 28,000 residents of the Oure Cassoni camp. In Iridimi, trips to collect firewood have decreased by 86 percent. The program director, Rachel Andres, who was recently awarded the Charles Bronfman Prize for her work, says it's been successful “because it's so simple,” she said. “You realize that, yes, all the other pieces of fighting this genocide are important — it's important to write letters to the head of the U.N. and to President Bush and to members of Congress and to anyone who will listen — but this is one area in which you can do something concrete.” — JOCELYN CRAUGH ZUCKERMAN

Among Rock-Ribbed Fans of Palin, Dudes Rule - NYTimes.com

2008-10-19T04:30:00.000-07:00

Among Rock-Ribbed Fans of Palin, Dudes Rule - NYTimes.com:

sometimes the nyt makes me smile...

She has been widely attacked, even by a growing number of conservatives, as being essentially unserious and uncurious. “She doesn’t think aloud. She just ...says things,” the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote Friday. “She does not speak seriously but attempts to excite sensation.”

All the while, Ms. Palin’s stoutest defenders are often the Joe Sixpacks in her crowds, who shrug off her critics, ridiculers and perceived adversaries in the news media. They say they appreciate Ms. Palin for, above all else, how “real” and “like us” she is.

The Believer - Interview with David Foster Wallace

2008-10-01T22:15:00.000-07:00

The Believer - Interview with David Foster Wallace

DFW: The reason why doing political writing is so hard right now is probably also the reason why more young (am I included in the range of this predicate anymore?) fiction writers ought to be doing it. As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil. Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude: Limbaugh, Hannity, that horrific O’Reilly person. Coulter, Kristol, etc. But the Left’s been infected, too. Have you read this new Al Franken book? Parts of it are funny, but it’s totally venomous (like, what possible response can rightist pundits have to Franken’s broadsides but further rage and return-venom?). Or see also e.g. Lapham’s latest Harper’s columns, or most of the stuff in the Nation, or even Rolling Stone. It’s all become like Zinn and Chomsky but without the immense bodies of hard data these older guys use to back up their screeds. There’s no more complex, messy, community-wide argument (or “dialogue”); political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying. Watching O’Reilly v. Franken is watching bloodsport. How can any of this possibly help me, the average citizen, deliberate about whom to choose to decide my country’s macroeconomic policy, or how even to conceive for myself what that policy’s outlines should be, or how to minimize the chances of North Korea nuking the DMZ and pulling us into a ghastly foreign war, or how to balance domestic security concerns with civil liberties? Questions like these are all massively complicated, and much of the complication is not sexy, and well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way—as is the belief that every last person you’re in conflict with is an asshole—but it’s childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community.

...

DFW: Probably the quickest, most efficient way to respond is to say that this question leads nicely into the whole reason why pop-tech books might have some kind of special utility in today’s culture. The big difference is that things are vastly more compartmentalized now than they were up through, say, the Renaissance. And more specialized, and more freighted with all kinds of special context. There’s no way we’d expect a world-class, cutting-edge mathematician now also to be doing world-class, cutting-edge philosophy, theology, etc. Not so for the Greeks—if only because math, philosophy, and theology weren’t coherently distinguishable for them. Same for the Neoplatonists and Scholastics, and etc. etc. (This is a very, very simple answer, of course, maybe right on the edge of simplistic.) By the time Cantor weighed in on ∞ in the 1870s, it was part of an extremely specialized technical discipline that took decades to master and be able to do advanced work in. For Cantor and R. Dedekind (and now this is all just condensed way down from the book (sort of the same way the question is)), the math of ∞ is derived as a way to solve certain thorny problems in post-calc analysis (viz., the expansions of trig functions and the rigorous definition of irrational numbers, respectively), which problems themselves derive from K. Weierstrass’s solutions to certain earlier problems, and so on. It’s all so abstract and specialized that large parts of E&M end up getting devoted to unpacking the problems clearly enough so that a general reader can get a halfway realistic idea of where set theory and the topology of the Real Line even come from, mathematically speaking. The real point, I think, has to do with something else that ends up mentioned only quickly in the book’s final draft. We live today in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract and technically complex and context-dependent that it’s next to impossible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments) have much relevance to her actual life. Where even people in two closely related sub-sub-specialties have a hard time communicating with each other because their respective s-s-s’s require so much special training and knowledge. And so on. Which is one reason why pop-technical writing might have value (beyond just a regular book-market $-value), as part of the larger frontier of clear, lucid, unpatronizing technical communication. It might be that one of the really significant problems of today’s culture involves finding ways for educated people to talk meaningfully with one another across the divides of radical specialization. That sounds a bit gooey, but I think there’s some truth to it. And it’s not just the polymer chemist talking to the semiotician, but people with special expertise acquiring the ability to talk meaningfully to us, meaning ordinary schmoes. Practical examples: Think of the thrill of finding a smart, competent IT technician who can also explain what she’s doing in such a way that you feel like you understand what went wrong with your computer and how you might even fix the problem yourself if it comes up again. Or an oncologist who can communicate clearly and humanly with you and your wife about what the available treatments for her stage-two neoplasm are, and about how the different treatments actually work, and exactly what the plusses and minuses of each one are. If you’re like me, you practically drop and hug the ankles of technical specialists like this, when you find them. As of now, of course, they’re rare. What they have is a particular kind of genius that’s not really part of their specific area of expertise as such areas are usually defined and taught. There’s not really even a good univocal word for this kind of genius—which might be significant. Maybe there should be a word; maybe being able to communicate with people outside one’s area of expertise should be taught, and talked about, and considered as a requirement for genuine expertise.… Anyway, that’s the sort of stuff I think your question is nibbling at the edges of, and it’s interesting as hell.

Ideas and Trends - The Best Mind of His Generation - David Foster Wallace - NYTimes.com

2008-09-22T09:32:00.000-07:00

Ideas and Trends - The Best Mind of His Generation - David Foster Wallace - NYTimes.com

All this shone through Mr. Wallace’s fiction. ... He was smarter than anyone else, but also poignantly aware that being smart didn’t necessarily get you very far, and that the most visible manifestations of smartness — wide erudition, mastery of trivia, rhetorical facility, love of argument for its own sake — could leave you feeling empty, baffled and dumb.

Dammam Journal - Saudi Women Find an Unlikely Role Model - Oprah - NYTimes.com

2008-09-22T09:17:00.000-07:00

Just one more reason I love Oprah.

Dammam Journal - Saudi Women Find an Unlikely Role Model - Oprah - NYTimes.com

When “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was first broadcast in Saudi Arabia in November 2004 on a Dubai-based satellite channel, it became an immediate sensation among young Saudi women. Within months, it had become the highest-rated English-language program among women 25 and younger, an age group that makes up about a third of Saudi Arabia’s population.

In a country where the sexes are rigorously separated, where topics like sex and race are rarely discussed openly and where a strict code of public morality is enforced by religious police called hai’a, Ms. Winfrey provides many young Saudi women with new ways of thinking about the way local taboos affect their lives — as well as about a variety of issues including childhood sexual abuse and coping with marital strife — without striking them, or Saudi Arabia’s ruling authorities, as subversive.

Some women here say Ms. Winfrey’s assurances to her viewers — that no matter how restricted or even abusive their circumstances may be, they can take control in small ways and create lives of value — help them find meaning in their cramped, veiled existence.
...
“We have a very male-dominated society, and it’s very hard sometimes,” Ms. Muhammad said. “But for now I have my coffee, and sit, and I watch Oprah.

It’s my favorite time of day.”

Democracy Now! | Headlines for September 22, 2008

2008-09-22T09:06:00.000-07:00

Democracy Now! | Headlines for September 22, 2008

Study: Ethnic Cleansing Was Primary Factor in Reducing Iraq Violence

A new study out of UCLA has concluded that ethnic violence—not the Bush administration’s surge—was the primary factor in reducing violence in Iraq. UCLA geographers studied how much light was being generated at night in different neighborhoods of Baghdad. Night light in neighborhoods populated primarily by embattled Sunni residents declined dramatically just before the February 2007 surge and never returned. Meanwhile, the use of lights at night remained constant or increased during the surge in largely Shiite neighborhoods. Co-author Thomas Gillespie said, “If the surge had truly ‘worked,’ we would expect to see a steady increase in night-light output over time. Instead, we found that the night-light signature diminished in only certain neighborhoods, and the pattern appears to be associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing.”

Op-Ed Contributors - Real Heroes, Fake Stories - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

2008-09-20T01:38:00.000-07:00

Op-Ed Contributors - Real Heroes, Fake Stories - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

IT is one of the most stirring accounts of heroism to emerge from 9/11: a fighter pilot from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington returns from a training mission, finds out that a plane, United Airlines Flight 93, has been hijacked and is heading for Washington, then takes off without refueling and low on ammunition in pursuit.

...It is hard to imagine a more thrilling, inspiring — and detailed — tale of fighter-jock heroism. There is only one problem with it: it isn’t true. It is about as close to truth as the myth of the Trojan Horse or the dime-store novels about Billy the Kid.

...No one is telling that tale anymore, but the damage was done. Because the story couldn’t withstand scrutiny, the public was left free to believe anything, and to doubt everything. Many still believe that a cruise missile hit the Pentagon; that 9/11 was an “inside job” by American and Israeli intelligence; that the military actually did shoot down United 93.

Worse still, by overstating the effectiveness of national command and control by the time United 93 was heading for Washington, the government obscured the central reality of that morning: that the Washington establishment talked mainly to itself, disconnected from the reality on the ground and in the air. Because bureaucrats obscured that disconnect, they didn’t fix it, in terms of national security or any other complicated federal emergency response. Thus the whole world got to see a very similar reaction in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit, and residents of New Orleans struggled to survive on their rooftops while officials in Washington issued reassuring statements.

The afterword to “Touching History” was written by General Arnold, despite his having been forced to retract his testimony to the 9/11 commission. (“I was wrong,” he told the panel at its final hearing. “I was wrong.”) He praises the book’s “corrections to the record” because they recognize the heroism of people like Major Hutchison and expose the “political agenda” of the commission.

Democracy Now! | Slavery by Another Name: Author Douglas Blackmon on the Re-Enslavement of Black People in America

2008-08-27T08:28:00.000-07:00

Democracy Now! | Slavery by Another Name: Author Douglas Blackmon on the Re-Enslavement of Black People in America

JUAN GONZALEZ: And how was it—for instance, if someone was arrested on a vagrancy charge, you would assume that this would only be a very short sentence. How were they able to be then impressed into service for these companies for longer periods of time?

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, take, for instance, the example of a man named Green Cottenham, around whom I built much of the narrative of the book. Green Cottenham was a child of former slaves who was born in the 1880s in the center of Alabama. And by the time he had reached adulthood, just after the turn-of-the-century, this whole new system of intimidation, really terror in many respects, had come into place against African Americans across the South.

And he was arrested in the spring of 1908, when a deputy sheriff in Columbiana, Alabama went out on a sweep, effectively, to round up a number of African American men, because a few days later, the man from the US Steel mine, who came by periodically to pick up laborers and take them back to the mines, would be arriving in a few days. And so, Green Cottenham was swept up. He was standing around with a number of other African Americans behind the train station in the town. And this group of men were arrested for no particular reason.

By the time they were brought before a judge two days later, the deputy couldn’t remember exactly what the charge had been, and so the original charge that’s written down on the day he’s arrested is different from the one that the judge finally decides to convict him of, which was simply vagrancy. And almost any farm worker, and certainly any indigent African American man, in 1908 could be charged with vagrancy, unless he had some powerful white man willing to step forward and say, “No, he works for me. He’s under my control.” Well, that didn’t happen for Green Cottenham, and so he is convicted of vagrancy.

He was sentenced to a fine of $10 or thereabouts, but on top of the fines, there would be imposed on these men—in those days, sheriffs and court clerks and many other government officials received their compensation not in salaries from the government, but from fees that were charged to the people they arrested and convicted. And so, in addition to his fine, there was almost $200 of additional fees tacked onto what he would have to pay to become free. Well, that’s two or three years’ wages in that era. And that was something that would be impossible for a young man like him to have produced.

And so, to pay off those fines, he was effectively sold into the control of US Steel Corporation, who would pay back his fines a month at a time. And this happened to thousands of people, many of whom, even after their fines had been paid off, were still not released, or the people who were holding them would invent another offense and make another claim of a spurious crime, have them convicted again and hold them for an even longer period of time.

AMY GOODMAN: You say the system’s final demise came with World War II. Explain why that was so significant.

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, at the beginning of World War II, just days after Pearl Harbor, as President Roosevelt was mobilizing the national war effort, one of the issues that was being discussed at the Cabinet level in Washington were the propaganda vulnerabilities of the United States: what would be the issues that the enemies of America would raise to try to undercut morale in the United States? And immediately, one of President Roosevelt’s aides points out that particularly the Japanese would argue that America was not the country fighting for freedom and that the proof of that was the treatment of African Americans in the Deep South. Roosevelt realized what a vulnerability that was. He ordered that there be legislation against lynchings, making it a federal crime, that that be introduced in Congress, which it was.

And then, shortly after that, the attorney general was having a similar conversation with his deputies, one of whom said, “By the way, there are also many places in the South where slaves are still being held, and it’s been the policy of the federal government, of the Department of Justice, not to investigate.” And this was the case for many decades, that the Department of Justice had a policy not to investigate allegations of slavery in the South and not to bring prosecutions against those who were holding slaves. But because of the propaganda concerns at the beginning of World War II, the attorney general issued a new policy, which said, from this day forward, investigate these cases. And within a few months, there was an investigation and a prosecution underway against a family in Texas which had been holding a man named Alfred Irving as a slave for many, many years under terrible circumstances.

Democracy Now! | Plan Mexico and the US-Funded Militarization of Mexico

2008-08-02T16:20:00.000-07:00

Democracy Now! | Plan Mexico and the US-Funded Militarization of Mexico

In the case of Plan Mexico, it’s a perfect example of the result of those policies. Essentially, it’s very important what Avi says, that it’s not just a counter-narcotics program, it’s a regional cooperation security initiative that includes counter-narcotics, counterterrorism and border security. So it lumps these together and basically gets a greater military presence for the United States within Mexico, not actual troops, but in terms of its intervention in the Mexican national security apparatus, and imposes the agenda of the United States government on that country.

AVI LEWIS: A senior State Department official named Thomas Shannon, who’s deeply involved in the Security and Prosperity Partnership, I think kind of let the cat out of the bag in a speech this past spring, when he was talking about the SPP and North America as a shared economic space, which is the current lingo for this worldview. And he said explicitly, “What we’re doing, in some way, in a certain respect, is armoring NAFTA.” And I think when you look at the intersection of the economic agenda, the cover of the war on drugs, the immigration and border hysteria underneath it, Plan Mexico represents exactly that, the armoring of NAFTA. And, of course, it’s not talked about in those ways when it’s approved by Congress, when Democrats and Republicans reach across the aisle to support it.

LAURA CARLSEN: It’s no coincidence that this is coming up right at the time in which Mexico’s involved in another very important debate, which relates to the privatization of the oil company. By having a militarized society, you are assuring a certain amount of social control. We know in Mexico that there will be mass opposition to the privatization of oil. And yet, access to Mexico’s oil resources have been another major objective of the SPP, the Security and Prosperity Partnership under NAFTA. So, by having the army in the streets, you’re in a position to quell social uprisings that may be coming up that have to do with control over natural resources, as well.

Editorial - Man-Made Hunger - Editorial - NYTimes.com

2008-07-17T18:46:00.000-07:00

Editorial - Man-Made Hunger - Editorial - NYTimes.com

Of those, perhaps the most wrongheaded are the tangle of subsidies, mandates and tariffs to encourage the production of biofuels from crops in the United States and the European Union. According to the World Bank, almost all of the growth in global corn production from 2004 to 2007 was devoted to American ethanol production — pushing up corn and animal feed prices and prompting farmers to switch from other crops to corn.

Long-standing farm subsidies in the rich world have also contributed to the crisis, ruining farmers in poor countries and depressing agricultural investment.

Rich countries are not the only culprits. At least 30 developing countries have imposed restrictions or bans on the export of foodstuffs. Importing countries are now stockpiling supplies, which takes more food from global markets. Export barriers also reduce farmers’ profits and discourage them from investing in more production.

Television - Ed Burns, Now Wired Enough to Move On to Battles Beyond the Streets - NYTimes.com

2008-07-15T15:07:00.000-07:00

a (sort of) hopeful argument for art, and for life...

Television - Ed Burns, Now Wired Enough to Move On to Battles Beyond the Streets - NYTimes.com

Mr. Burns said he was surprised by all the attention “The Wire” received from policymakers who were piqued by the show’s gritty civics lessons — the very sort of people, he said, who more or less ignored him when he worked in the public sector.

“The irony is that you have to be somebody before anybody listens to you,” he said. “I wasn’t an expert when I was an expert, and now that I’m not an expert, I’m an expert. It’s kind of curious.”
...

He considered the often bleak worldview of “The Wire,” with its overarching theme that no matter what a person does, it will never be enough to stop the city from grinding over him. “I’m not a fatalist,” he said. “I’m very optimistic. In America, before we notice things, things have to become bad.”

Police Impersonator’s Arrest Stuns Missouri Town - NYTimes.com

2008-07-01T06:42:00.000-07:00

Police Impersonator’s Arrest Stuns Missouri Town - NYTimes.com

"In addition to having a badge and a car that seemed to scream law enforcement, Mr. Jakob offered federal drug enforcement help, Mr. Schulte said. (Local officials thought the offer must have somehow grown out of their recent application for a federal grant for radio equipment.) Mr. Jakob even asked Chief McCrary to call what he said was his supervisor’s telephone number to confirm Gerald’s need for his help, the mayor said.

When the call was placed, a woman — whose identity is unknown — answered with the words “multijurisdictional task force,” and said that the city’s request for federal services was under review, the mayor said. Mr. Schulte said he now suspects that Mr. Jakob adapted the nonexistent task force name from the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies starring Eddie Murphy.

“Not only were these officers taken in, but so was everybody else,” said Chet Pleban, a lawyer for Mr. McCrary and the other two members of the police force who lost their jobs after Mr. Jakob’s real identity came to light.

Of the firings, Mayor Schulte said, “Nobody wanted to, but the city’s lawyer recommended it.”

When residents first began noticing Mr. Jakob, he certainly looked the part. His hair was chopped short, residents recalled, and his stocky chest filled a black T-shirt he sometimes wore that read “Police.” They said he wore military-style boots, pants with pockets running down the legs and carried a badge (his lawyer said it was from a former job as a security guard in St. Louis). And his off-white Ford Crown Victoria was decked out with police radios and internal flashing lights, residents said.

In speech, Rev. Peter Gomes exhorts ‘virtue of failure’

2008-06-29T16:38:00.000-07:00

In speech, Rev. Peter Gomes exhorts ‘virtue of failure’

a good summary and follow up:

Gomes, whose preaching style was described in a 1996 New Yorker profile as "a mix of black 'tornado' preaching and traditional English sermons," got a lot of laughs from the crowd with a speech that offered, in his words, "unconventional wisdom" and that poked good-natured fun at professors, students and their parents.

"Now, one of the great bits of conventional wisdom that commencement and baccalaureate preachers tend to offer is the notion that you're ready, you're prepared, you can do it," Gomes said. "So, go for it. Your training and experience prepare you for all that there is to do. We can't wait. That is one bit of conventional wisdom.

"The other bit of conventional wisdom is that the world is waiting for you. Somewhere out there millions and millions of people are waiting for graduates of the Class of '08 to lead them into the future. Yesterday was chaos and confusion. Tomorrow will be sweetness and light, thanks to you."

Gomes said both assertions are wrong. Rather, graduates will find that they cannot do everything they set out to do. They will see their most ambitious plans thwarted. They also will discover that they are mostly invisible. "The world will little note nor long remember what you say or do here," he added. "It's a shame, but that is the case."

Gomes instead pointed to the "virtue of failure," saying that, if education has any value at all, "it will help us to understand the constructive uses of failure." The object of an education is to "make a life that is worth living," not lots of money, he said.

"Think of the things that haven't gone right, the things that don't go well, because there will be many more of them in your lives," he said. "And how will you sort out those failures? What will you learn from them? What will you make of them?"

Gomes also encouraged graduates "to entertain the value of impossible things."

"I want to invite you into the world of the fantastic, the world of the impossible, the world of the things that don't necessarily make sense or scan," he said. "It's an invitation to do something most college graduates are unwilling to do, and that is to take risks."

He said his favorite intellectual on the subject of "impossible things" is the Red Queen, from Alice in Wonderland, because the queen describes how, when she was the young protagonist's age, she would sometimes believe "as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

"When you combine the joys of instructive failure with the persistent pursuit of the impossible, it seems to me you have a recipe, my dear young friends, for a good life, one in which the rest of us will be as interested as you are—a good life, a life worth living," Gomes said. "And literally, at the end of the day, that is what it is all about."
Changing the world

Barry W. Fischer, who graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics and a master's degree in civil and environmental engineering, delivered the "student reflection" following Gomes' address. Fischer said that when he was accepted to Stanford, he felt as though he had been given the opportunity to change the world.

Now, he said, he realized his "original vision of individually changing the world was naïve."

"I've come to realize that I cannot change the world. But we can," he said. "I've come to be imbued with Stanford spirit—a spirit recognizing that changing the world requires a community."

He compared his experience at Stanford to being part of a jigsaw puzzle and said that, as graduates of the university, "we should be passionate puzzle solvers who constantly seek out diverse puzzle pieces and put them together—creatively uniting individuals from different backgrounds, cultures, religions and opinions."

SR

Oprah talks to graduates about feelings, failure and finding happiness

2008-06-29T16:34:00.000-07:00

Oprah talks to graduates about feelings, failure and finding happiness

So, I was juggling these messages of expectation and obligation and feeling really miserable with myself. I'd go home at night and fill up my journals, 'cause I've kept a journal since I was 15—so I now have volumes of journals. So, I'd go home at night and fill up my journals about how miserable I was and frustrated. Then I'd eat my anxiety. That's where I learned that habit.

And after eight months, I lost that job. They said I was too emotional. I was too much. But since they didn't want to pay out the contract, they put me on a talk show in Baltimore. And the moment I sat down on that show, the moment I did, I felt like I'd come home. I realized that TV could be more than just a playground, but a platform for service, for helping other people lift their lives. And the moment I sat down, doing that talk show, it felt like breathing. It felt right. And that's where everything that followed for me began.

And I got that lesson. When you're doing the work you're meant to do, it feels right and every day is a bonus, regardless of what you're getting paid.

It's true. And how do you know when you're doing something right? How do you know that? It feels so. What I know now is that feelings are really your GPS system for life. When you're supposed to do something or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know. The trick is to learn to check your ego at the door and start checking your gut instead. Every right decision I've made—every right decision I've ever made—has come from my gut. And every wrong decision I've ever made was a result of me not listening to the greater voice of myself.

If it doesn't feel right, don't do it. That's the lesson. And that lesson alone will save you, my friends, a lot of grief. Even doubt means don't. This is what I've learned. There are many times when you don't know what to do. When you don't know what to do, get still, get very still, until you do know what to do.

And when you do get still and let your internal motivation be the driver, not only will your personal life improve, but you will gain a competitive edge in the working world as well. Because, as Daniel Pink writes in his best-seller, A Whole New Mind, we're entering a whole new age. And he calls it the Conceptual Age, where traits that set people apart today are going to come from our hearts—right brain—as well as our heads. It's no longer just the logical, linear, rules-based thinking that matters, he says. It's also empathy and joyfulness and purpose, inner traits that have transcendent worth.

These qualities bloom when we're doing what we love, when we're involving the wholeness of ourselves in our work, both our expertise and our emotion.

So, I say to you, forget about the fast lane. If you really want to fly, just harness your power to your passion. Honor your calling. Everybody has one. Trust your heart and success will come to you.

So, how do I define success? Let me tell you, money's pretty nice. I'm not going to stand up here and tell you that it's not about money, 'cause money is very nice. I like money. It's good for buying things.

But having a lot of money does not automatically make you a successful person. What you want is money and meaning. You want your work to be meaningful. Because meaning is what brings the real richness to your life. What you really want is to be surrounded by people you trust and treasure and by people who cherish you. That's when you're really rich.

So, lesson one, follow your feelings. If it feels right, move forward. If it doesn't feel right, don't do it.

Now I want to talk a little bit about failings, because nobody's journey is seamless or smooth. We all stumble. We all have setbacks. If things go wrong, you hit a dead end—as you will—it's just life's way of saying time to change course. So, ask every failure—this is what I do with every failure, every crisis, every difficult time—I say, what is this here to teach me? And as soon as you get the lesson, you get to move on. If you really get the lesson, you pass and you don't have to repeat the class. If you don't get the lesson, it shows up wearing another pair of pants—or skirt—to give you some remedial work.

And what I've found is that difficulties come when you don't pay attention to life's whisper, because life always whispers to you first. And if you ignore the whisper, sooner or later you'll get a scream. Whatever you resist persists. But, if you ask the right question—not why is this happening, but what is this here to teach me?—it puts you in the place and space to get the lesson you need.

My friend Eckhart Tolle, who's written this wonderful book called A New Earth that's all about letting the awareness of who you are stimulate everything that you do, he puts it like this: He says, don't react against a bad situation; merge with that situation instead. And the solution will arise from the challenge. Because surrendering yourself doesn't mean giving up; it means acting with responsibility.

Many of you know that, as President Hennessy said, I started this school in Africa. And I founded the school, where I'm trying to give South African girls a shot at a future like yours—Stanford. And I spent five years making sure that school would be as beautiful as the students. I wanted every girl to feel her worth reflected in her surroundings. So, I checked every blueprint, I picked every pillow. I was looking at the grout in between the bricks. I knew every thread count of the sheets. I chose every girl from the villages, from nine provinces. And yet, last fall, I was faced with a crisis I had never anticipated. I was told that one of the dorm matrons was suspected of sexual abuse.

That was, as you can imagine, devastating news. First, I cried—actually, I sobbed—for about half an hour. And then I said, let's get to it; that's all you get, a half an hour. You need to focus on the now, what you need to do now. So, I contacted a child trauma specialist. I put together a team of investigators. I made sure the girls had counseling and support. And Gayle and I got on a plane and flew to South Africa.

And the whole time I kept asking that question: What is this here to teach me? And, as difficult as that experience has been, I got a lot of lessons. I understand now the mistakes I made, because I had been paying attention to all of the wrong things. I'd built that school from the outside in, when what really mattered was the inside out.

So, it's a lesson that applies to all of our lives as a whole. What matters most is what's inside. What matters most is the sense of integrity, of quality and beauty. I got that lesson. And what I know is that the girls came away with something, too. They have emerged from this more resilient and knowing that their voices have power.

And their resilience and spirit have given me more than I could ever give to them, which leads me to my final lesson—the one about finding happiness—which we could talk about all day, but I know you have other wacky things to do.

Not a small topic this is, finding happiness. But in some ways I think it's the simplest of all. Gwendolyn Brooks wrote a poem for her children. It's called "Speech to the Young : Speech to the Progress-Toward." And she says at the end, "Live not for battles won. / Live not for the-end-of-the-song. / Live in the along." She's saying, like Eckhart Tolle, that you have to live for the present. You have to be in the moment. Whatever has happened to you in your past has no power over this present moment, because life is now.

But I think she's also saying, be a part of something. Don't live for yourself alone. This is what I know for sure: In order to be truly happy, you must live along with and you have to stand for something larger than yourself. Because life is a reciprocal exchange. To move forward you have to give back. And to me, that is the greatest lesson of life. To be happy, you have to give something back.

I know you know that, because that's a lesson that's woven into the very fabric of this university. It's a lesson that Jane and Leland Stanford got and one they've bequeathed to you. Because all of you know the story of how this great school came to be, how the Stanfords lost their only child to typhoid at the age of 15. They had every right and they had every reason to turn their backs against the world at that time, but instead, they channeled their grief and their pain into an act of grace. Within a year of their son's death, they had made the founding grant for this great school, pledging to do for other people's children what they were not able to do for their own boy.

The lesson here is clear, and that is, if you're hurting, you need to help somebody ease their hurt. If you're in pain, help somebody else's pain. And when you're in a mess, you get yourself out of the mess helping somebody out of theirs. And in the process, you get to become a member of what I call the greatest fellowship of all, the sorority of compassion and the fraternity of service.

The Stanfords had suffered the worst thing any mom and dad can ever endure, yet they understood that helping others is the way we help ourselves. And this wisdom is increasingly supported by scientific and sociological research. It's no longer just woo-woo soft-skills talk. There's actually a helper's high, a spiritual surge you gain from serving others. So, if you want to feel good, you have to go out and do some good.

But when you do good, I hope you strive for more than just the good feeling that service provides, because I know this for sure, that doing good actually makes you better. So, whatever field you choose, if you operate from the paradigm of service, I know your life will have more value and you will be happy.

I was always happy doing my talk show, but that happiness reached a depth of fulfillment, of joy, that I really can't describe to you or measure when I stopped just being on TV and looking at TV as a job and decided to use television, to use it and not have it use me, to use it as a platform to serve my viewers. That alone changed the trajectory of my success.

So, I know this—that whether you're an actor, you offer your talent in the way that most inspires art. If you're an anatomist, you look at your gift as knowledge and service to healing. Whether you've been called, as so many of you here today getting doctorates and other degrees, to the professions of business, law, engineering, humanities, science, medicine, if you choose to offer your skills and talent in service, when you choose the paradigm of service, looking at life through that paradigm, it turns everything you do from a job into a gift. And I know you haven't spent all this time at Stanford just to go out and get a job.

You've been enriched in countless ways. There's no better way to make your mark on the world and to share that abundance with others. My constant prayer for myself is to be used in service for the greater good.

So, let me end with one of my favorite quotes from Martin Luther King. Dr. King said, "Not everybody can be famous." And I don't know, but everybody today seems to want to be famous.

But fame is a trip. People follow you to the bathroom, listen to you pee. It's just—try to pee quietly. It doesn't matter, they come out and say, "Ohmigod, it's you. You peed."

That's the fame trip, so I don't know if you want that.

So, Dr. King said, "Not everybody can be famous. But everybody can be great, because greatness is determined by service." Those of you who are history scholars may know the rest of that passage. He said, "You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato or Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's theory of relativity to serve. You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love."

In a few moments, you'll all be officially Stanford's '08.

You have the heart and the smarts to go with it. And it's up to you to decide, really, where will you now use those gifts? You've got the diploma, so go out and get the lessons, 'cause I know great things are sure to come.

Gomes cites Dr. Seuss, Aristotle, Red Queen in Baccalaureate speech

2008-06-29T15:37:00.000-07:00

Gomes cites Dr. Seuss, Aristotle, Red Queen in Baccalaureate speech

The second bit of unconventional wisdom I want to offer to you is to entertain the value of impossible things. As I look out at you, you all look very sensible. Few of you have taken many great risks. You've all done the right thing. You've all gone to the right place and here you all are at the right moment, ready to be spat out of Stanford's mouth like a watermelon seed. So, most of you are not particularly interested in the fantastical or the impossible. You will plot your lives carefully and cautiously, as you have been taught to do here. We take some responsibility for that, but remember we don't have to live with our responsibilities. You do. And so, I want to invite you into the world of the fantastic, the world of the impossible, the world of the things that don't necessarily make sense, or scan. It's an invitation to do something most college graduates are unwilling to do, and that is to take risks.

People think that your undergraduate experience should be practical and useful. I hope it has been impractical and will prove un-useful to many of you, because that means that you will have to start learning, perhaps for the first time and on your own, and that's not a bad thing to do because you have the talent, most of which has not been called upon during your undergraduate days. Most of you have got by here on 20 percent of your skills. Heaven only knows what you did with the other 80 percent. Time will tell. But when you're out there, wherever out there is, that other 80 percent will need to be summoned into active service; and my guess is it will be a surprise that you will be capable of doing what would right now appear to be impossible things.

If we are to profit from failure, to learn from it, then we are free to imagine, take on impossible things that we would otherwise avoid for fear of failure. In taking no risks, so as to avoid failure, we also fail to take the risk of success, achievement and—dare I even say it to you very solemn looking people?—joy. It is a joyful thing to have a life to live. You are meant to enjoy it. You are meant, strangely enough, to be happy.

Now, you don't look very happy right now, I suppose. Who would? Hearing an important speaker talking about failure and imagination. But you are meant to be happy; to say, I am using my time, my talent, my place, even my treasure, in such a way as to give me happiness. Now, it's the smarter of you who are saying, all very well and good, reverend sir—define happiness. Well, I'm ready for you, and I have a dead white male to support what I have to say, so it must be true.

It is Aristotle—remember him, Aristotle? He defined happiness as "The exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope." That describes you. "Vital powers"—you have those vital powers. Now, you're not quite as vital as you were when you were freshmen. You are in a state of perpetual decline, I'm sorry to say, and it will only get worse. There's no way to recover that élan vital that you once had, but there's still enough of it in you to make a difference. 'Along lines of excellence'—the very best use you can possibly make of your powers and your life, even the most miserable of you, your life is an exercise in "scope." You will have opportunities none of you deserve, but all of you will have to exercise those vital powers, and it is in doing all of that that happiness comes. Happiness is not what our Constitution provides. You don't pursue it but you discover it, when you are doing something useful and good. And when you do that, you will wake up and say, "I'm a happy person. I'm not a frivolous person. I'm not a person filled at every minute with pleasure. But I am happy. I have a sense of place and purpose." And that, when all is said and done, is the very best that we can hope for you. And so we do. And we invite you into that world of impossible things of which happiness may be one, the chief.

I like to quote here my favorite intellectual on the subject, and that is the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. Remember, the Red Queen boasted that she believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast? How many impossible things have you believed before breakfast this morning? Most of you haven't had breakfast, I can tell, so, there are no impossible things to believe in or to think about. Most of you drank your breakfasts last night. I understand that, too, but there is something about those wonderful, impossible things that makes the world a place for you. And poor old Alice, such a little prig; I can't stand Alice. She doesn't get it. She doesn't understand it but perhaps you do, and so the great question for you will be, what wild and impossible, irrational thing will you aim for in your life? What strange unpredictable enterprise will take you from this place? How will you do it? Somebody said it is like teaching a rabbit to play a drum. You do it over and over and over again.

I cite another dead white male, probably two more than you've had here, that old cynic Voltaire, who said, "How infinitesimal is the importance of anything I do, but how infinitely important it is that I should do it." Is that just another 18th-century dude mouthing off, or could there be something in it for you?

When you combine the joys of instructive failure with the persistent pursuit of the impossible, it seems to me you have a recipe, my dear young friends, for a good life. One in which the rest of us will be as interested as you are. A good life, a life worth living, and, literally at the end of the day, that is what it is all about.

Imagine No Possessions - The MIT Press

2008-03-19T05:02:00.000-07:00

Imagine No Possessions - The MIT Press

These artists, heeding the call of Constructivist manifestos to abandon the nonobjective painting and sculpture of the early Russian avant-garde and enter into Soviet industrial production, aimed to work as "artist-engineers" to produce useful objects for everyday life in the new socialist collective.

Kiaer shows how these artists elaborated on the theory of the socialist object-as-comrade in the practice of their art. They broke with the traditional model of the autonomous avant-garde, Kiaer argues, in order to participate more fully in the political project of the Soviet state. She analyzes Constructivism's attempt to develop modernist forms to forge a new comradely relationship between human subjects and the mass-produced objects of modernity; Constructivists could "imagine no possessions" (as John Lennon's song puts it) not by eliminating material objects but by eliminating the possessive relation to them. Considering such Constructivist objects as flapper dresses and cookie advertisements, Kiaer creates a dialogue between the more famous avant-garde works of these artists and their quirkier, less appreciated utilitarian objects. Working in the still semicapitalist Russia of the New Economic Policy, these artists were imagining, by creating their comradely objects, a socialist culture that had not yet arrived.

Democracy Now! | Headlines for February 29, 2008

2008-03-06T05:18:00.000-08:00

Democracy Now! | Headlines for February 29, 2008

Comcast Admits to Planting Attendees at FCC Hearing

The media giant Comcast has admitted to paying people to fill the seats at a government hearing on net neutrality. The gathering at Harvard University Monday was one of several organized by the Federal Communications Commission to gather public input. Critics say Comcast was trying to take space away from critics of media consolidation. Harvard says dozens of genuine participants were forced to stand outside the hearing unable to participate.

Puerto Rico Teachers Continue National Strike

In Puerto Rico, teachers have entered the second week of a national strike. The union representing Puerto Rico’s 42,000 public school teachers declared the strike after thirty months of negotiations. The US government is refusing to negotiate with the union until teachers end the walkout.

Women’s Health Activist Barbara Seaman Dies at 72

And the longtime women’s health activist Barbara Seaman has died at the age of seventy-two. Seaman authored many books, including The Doctor’s Case Against the Pill, one of the first indictments of the birth control pill, published in 1969. She was the co-founder of the National Women’s Health Network.

Democracy Now! | On Tenth Anniversary of V-Day, Vagina Monologues Playwright Eve Ensler Focuses on Violence Against Women in New Orleans and Gulf Sout

2008-02-16T07:50:00.000-08:00

Democracy Now! | On Tenth Anniversary of V-Day, Vagina Monologues Playwright Eve Ensler Focuses on Violence Against Women in New Orleans and Gulf South

AMY GOODMAN: You said something interesting last night, Eve, about how perhaps your most radical act in starting The Vagina Monologues, something you thought was so outside the mainstream, became the most mainstream.

EVE ENSLER: Well, I think there’s that great irony, I think, when people tell you not to do things or not to say that something, usually when you say that thing, that’s the thing that changes your life and moves the world in some specific way. And, you know, I had written a lot of plays before The Vagina Monologues that were—well, they were all political plays, but they, on some level, were far less radical. But it was that play, ironically, that was invited into the mainstream, you know, and I think it’s telling, hopefully, to women, particularly, to find the thing they need to say, whatever it is, and to go and say it, because you never know who’s just there waiting for that shift of consciousness.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And your emphasis this year on New Orleans and the women of New Orleans, why precisely did you take that as the focus this year, and what are you planning to do?

EVE ENSLER: Well, we went down to New Orleans right after the flood. We were invited down there by women on the ground who were, you know, at shelters and hotlines, and the whole infrastructure, of course, was gone. So we went to see what we can do, which is what we do. We don’t kind of have an interventionist politics. People invite us, or they do what they do and we support it. And we did this amazing evening of storytelling, and we kind of launched this idea of this Katrina warrior network of women, and about 900 women showed up. And it launched this community and network of women.

And we were down there at the same time trying to determine where our tenth anniversary was going to be, and we thought maybe Nairobi, maybe Paris, and then it was like, no, this needs to be at the Superdome. You know, we need to take back the Superdome. We need to reclaim and turn it into Superlove. And what was fabulous about it is, at the same time, we were launching a spotlight on conflict zones last year, and New Orleans is clearly a conflict zone. It has all the ingredients of a conflict zone, a failed state, you know, the desecration of one section of the population, loss of control in the central government. We can go on and on. And so, we began to look at it like that and began to see the impact of what happens when there is a failed state, when in this country people don’t show up and there’s that kind of profound neglect and abandonment, particularly looking at women, because women have carried New Orleans and the Gulf South since the storm.

And I know you all have spent a lot of time there and covered it in an incredible way since the flood, but, you know, I’m there almost every month in some way, and people don’t know what’s going on there. We don’t—people don’t know that we have tent cities there. People don’t know that the mental health rates and the suicide rates are out of control. People don’t know that people who lived in houses that were once $400 are now $1,200. People don’t know that people are being charged for fuel adjustment, this new term, and they don’t even have a meter, you know, the gas meter in their house. I mean, it’s a bizarre, I think really immoral and profound statement about where the US is.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, the reports recently of all the formaldehyde problems with the trailers—

EVE ENSLER: Oh, absolutely.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —and the poisoning of—

EVE ENSLER: And the poisoning and everybody becoming sick. You know, there’s a piece I just wrote for Oprah, where I call it “FEMAldehyde,” you know, which is kind of this new creation made by our own, very own failed government. But I think what we’re saying is that we need to bring women from this country and all over the world to show up for our sisters in the South.

AMY GOODMAN: And what is the special burden you feel the women of New Orleans bear?

EVE ENSLER: Well, I think if we can look at all the pieces of it, we kind of look at the whole story of what needs to change for women everywhere. But there’s the burden of racism. There’s the economic inequalities. There’s the burden of a failed education system there, so where are children going to school? And where are they—it has just been designated the murder capital of America. So we’re talking about one of the highest—the highest violence rate in America. We’re talking about communities where taxi drivers wouldn’t even bring me to go—I don’t have a car—because they were too scared to go into the community, and people are living there.

You know, we’re talking about—I think women particularly are on the frontlines, because they are dealing with children, they’re dealing with husbands who have no work, they are dealing with how to put food on the table, they are dealing with all the kind of nurturing, moving-the-community-forward aspects. And everybody’s traumatized. We’re talking about a seriously traumatized population. So you’ve got trauma.

You know, we did a brunch there recently for the women in the Gulf South, Mississippi, Alabama, grassroots activists, fabulous women who have just been working twenty-four hours a day, and we just gave them a brunch. Women were standing up and weeping, you know, talking about the fact that no one had ever given them a brunch. I thought, a brunch? This is what we’re grateful for? A brunch? And I think, so, part of it is, how do we bring people from all over the US and say we care about the women in New Orleans? We’re going to be giving free massages, free medical exams, free yoga and meditation, all free for the women. And women from all over the country are volunteering. And then we’re going to do a performance of The Vagina Monologues with performers from New Orleans. You know, Charmaine Neville is performing, and there will be gospel choirs. And it’s going to be the biggest mega-event we’ve ever done, at the New Orleans Superdome, at the arena.

Democracy Now! | Headlines for February 04, 2008

2008-02-04T08:15:00.000-08:00

Democracy Now! | Headlines for February 04, 2008: "Bush Proposes Highest Military Budget Since World War II

President Bush is expected to unveil a budget today that includes military spending of more than $515 billion. The New York Times reports that if approved, military spending will reach its highest level since World War II. The figure does not include supplemental funding for nuclear weapons or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has already topped $600 billion. The Pentagon budget proposal marks a seven-percent increase over last year and the 11th consecutive year its gone up. It comes just days after the Bush administration announced plans to seek deep cuts to Medicare and a freeze on new Medicaid spending. Overall the White House is trying to slash $208 billion from federal health programs over the next five years. The Bush administration has increased military spending by 30% since taking office."

This Republic of Suffering - Drew Gilpin Faust - Book Review - New York Times

2008-01-27T08:28:00.000-08:00

A fascinating take on the spiritual reconstruction of America, and its cultural repercussions:

This Republic of Suffering - Drew Gilpin Faust - Book Review - New York Times: "“The war’s staggering human cost demanded a new sense of national destiny,” Faust, now the president of Harvard University, writes, “one designed to ensure that lives had been sacrificed for appropriately lofty ends.” Frederick Douglass thought freeing the slaves should have provided the “sacred significance” of all that loss. But, Faust continues, “the Dead became what their survivors chose to make them,” and as the decades passed and memories blurred, “assumptions of racial hierarchy would unite whites North and South in a century-long abandonment of the emancipationist legacy.” In the end most Americans of my great-great-grandfather’s generation — and their successors — allowed their shared memories of suffering to “establish sacrifice and its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately reunite.” We might wish, with Frederick Douglass, that they had decided otherwise, but Drew Gilpin Faust’s profoundly moving book helps us understand why they did not."

Virginia Heffernan - The Medium - Television - Internet Video - Media - New York Times

2008-01-27T08:22:00.000-08:00

As smart, rational, and powerful as the laptop-per-child initiative is, it could stand some more sensual and spiritual development (design-wise, that is) to overcome (or to enact!) its apparently universalizing cultural assumptions.

Virginia Heffernan - The Medium - Television - Internet Video - Media - New York Times:

"I thought of the Global Recordings Network, an evangelical organization in Los Angeles with 70 years of experience introducing technology to underserved populations. In the process of recording Bible stories in every known language, Global Recordings has created a variety of hand-cranked machines, which it delivers to remote places, where Christian parables can be played without a power source.

In “Tailenders,” a 2005 documentary about the organization, the alien-looking contraptions can be seen making converts. But not necessarily to Christianity. Rather, people who hear the recordings come to desire, somehow, simply to share in the supernaturalism of disembodied audio. Whoever controls these animistic effects, it seems, must be worth listening to. When missionaries approach, these people are vulnerable, having just witnessed a small miracle.

If Negroponte wants to convert kids to the global information economy, he might consider the chief virtue of the XO laptop: its lights and sounds. Even Western kids, whose toys flash and squeal, are drawn with primitive wonderment to the peculiar phenomena of this computer — the distinctive hums and blinks that seem like evidence of its soul.

I love the One Laptop Per Child project. But I’m already a believer. If Negroponte wants to keep evangelizing, speaking at the Vatican and trying to save the world, he should take a page from the real missionaries’ playbook. For XO 2.0, he ought to consider more volume and dazzle, as well as an electrical storm, a booming voice and the light and heat of a burning bush."

The Age of Ambition - New York Times

2008-01-27T06:38:00.000-08:00

The Age of Ambition - New York Times: "Another young person on a mission is Ariel Zylbersztejn, a 27-year-old Mexican who founded and runs a company called Cinepop, which projects movies onto inflatable screens and shows them free in public parks. Mr. Zylbersztejn realized that 90 percent of Mexicans can’t afford to go to movies, so he started his own business model: He sells sponsorships to companies to advertise to the thousands of viewers who come to watch the free entertainment.

Mr. Zylbersztejn works with microcredit agencies and social welfare groups to engage the families that come to his movies and help them start businesses or try other strategies to overcome poverty. Cinepop is only three years old, but already 250,000 people a year watch movies on his screens — and his goal is to take the model to Brazil, India, China and other countries."

designedobjects wiki / PostOptimal

2008-01-07T18:38:00.000-08:00

designedobjects wiki / PostOptimal: "300.015 Post-Optimal Objects (P.O.O.)

John Marshall

This course focuses on designed objects and their cultural contexts. Students explore the territory between fine art and design and address approaches for developing the aesthetic and critical possibilities of objects outside a commercial context. Students also investigate various ways of creatively communicating ideas about objects, such as making appearance models, mock-ups and storyboards. The creative works made in Post-Optimal Objects may be shown as prototypes or communicated via publication (online or print). Participants think conceptually about what they want to achieve, translate these ideas into visualizations, and develop some of these into fully executed and documented works. Digital 3D modeling, scanning, laser cutting, and rapid prototyping are used together with traditional media such as wood, metal, and plastics.

Prerequisite: Junior or senior A&D major or permission of instructor.

TTh 8:30-11:30am

http://hehe.org.free.fr/

http://snibbe.com/

http://www.aether.hu/

http://www.artlebedev.com/

http://www.ateliervanlieshout.com/

http://www.auger-loizeau.com/

http://www.oboiler.com/

http://www.bootleg-objects.com/

http://www.boym.com/

http://www.brokenoff.com/

http://www.christian-moeller.com/

http://www.coin-operated.com/

http://www.damianosullivan.com/

http://w"

Will the Humanities Save Us? - Stanley Fish - Think Again - Opinion - New York Times Blog

2008-01-07T18:37:00.000-08:00

Will the Humanities Save Us? - Stanley Fish - Think Again - Opinion - New York Times Blog

It’s a pretty idea, but there is no evidence to support it and a lot of evidence against it. If it were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so. Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge. The texts Kronman recommends are, as he says, concerned with the meaning of life; those who study them, however, come away not with a life made newly meaningful, but with a disciplinary knowledge newly enlarged.

And that, I believe, is how it should be. Teachers of literature and philosophy are competent in a subject, not in a ministry. It is not the business of the humanities to save us, no more than it is their business to bring revenue to a state or a university. What then do they do? They don’t do anything, if by “do” is meant bring about effects in the world. And if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.

To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise.

Democracy Now! | Headlines for January 02, 2008

2008-01-02T13:06:00.000-08:00

Democracy Now! | Headlines for January 02, 2008: "ABC & Fox Bar Six Presidential Candidates From NH Debate

In other campaign news, ABC and Fox have decided to bar six Democratic and Republican candidates from debates this weekend in New Hampshire. Democrats Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel won't be allowed to participate in ABC’s Democratic debate on Saturday. Republicans Ron Paul and Duncan Hunter are being excluded from a debate hosted by Fox on Sunday.

Report: U.S. Has Become “Endemic Surveillance Society”

A new report by Privacy International and the Electronic Privacy Information Center has ranked the United States in the worst possible category for privacy protections. The United States is listed along with nations including China, Russia, Singapore and Malaysia as having an “endemic surveillance society.” According to the authors of the report, the United States is the worst ranking country in the democratic world."

Predictions for 2008 - Climate Change - Global Warming - John Tierney - New York Times

2008-01-02T05:25:00.000-08:00

Predictions for 2008 - Climate Change - Global Warming - John Tierney - New York Times: "When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what’s called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we’ve seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don’t have so many vivid images readily available.

Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago."

Democracy Now! | Headlines for December 26, 2007

2008-01-01T21:11:00.000-08:00

Democracy Now! | Headlines for December 26, 2007

Lakota Indians Declare Sovereignty From U.S.

The Lakota Sioux Indians have withdrawn from all treaties with the United States and declared their independence. A delegation from the tribe delivered the news to the State Department last week. Longtime Indian rights activist Russell Means said: “We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us.” Lakota country comprises portions of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. The Lakota said the decision was necessary in the face of what they described as colonial apartheid conditions. The life expectancy for Lakota men is less than 44 years; 97 percent of the Lakota people live below the poverty line. The Lakota also said the United States never honored many treaties signed dating back to the mid 19th century.

FBI Builds Database of People’s Physical Characteristics

The Washington Post reports the FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world’s largest computer database of peoples" physical characteristics including digital images of faces, fingerprints, palm patterns, iris patterns and other biometric information. The project will give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of workers who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law. The plan is drawing criticism from those who worry that people’s bodies will become de facto national identification cards. Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union said: “It’s going to be an essential component of tracking. It’s enabling the Always On Surveillance Society.”

Israel Rules It Was OK To Use Cluster Bombs in Lebanon

In other news from the region, an Israeli military prosecutor has concluded that Israel’s use of cluster bombs during the 2006 Lebanon war was justified and did not violate any standards of international law. Lebanese officials accused the Israeli army of covering up war crimes. The United Nations and human rights groups say Israel dropped about 4 million cluster bomblets during the 34-day war.
More than 30 people have been killed by cluster bomb and land mine explosions in Lebanon since the 2006 summer war.

FBI’s Hoover Drafted Plan to Imprison 12,000 Americans

And a newly declassified document from 1950 shows that former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover drafted a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty. Hoover sent his plan to the White House in July, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. Hoover wanted the FBI to be able to permanently detain all individuals potentially dangerous to national security and jail them at military bases and in federal prisons. According to the New York Times, no known evidence suggests President Truman or any other president approved any part of Hoover’s proposal.

The Believer - Interview with Richard Powers

2007-12-29T07:26:00.000-08:00

The Believer - Interview with Richard Powers: "It takes one hundred billion interconnected cells to conjure up a coherent story of the world. But if neuroscience concludes anything, it’s that sensing and feeling and thinking and perceiving and hundreds of other seemingly separate processes are all conjoined in a huge, dynamic, and continuously revised narrative network. The brain is the ultimate storytelling machine, and consciousness is the ultimate story. Our neurons tell our selves into being."

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Prometheus Keeps a Diary.

2007-12-16T08:05:00.000-08:00

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Prometheus Keeps a Diary.

PROMETHEUS
KEEPS A DIARY.
BY MIKE RICHARDSON-BRYAN

- - - -

Day 1

What an awful day. Chained to a rock, my liver ripped out and eaten by an eagle, and I just bit my tongue! That's gonna be a canker sore for sure. But I know I did the right thing. Those poor people needed fire in the worst way. Besides, how long can Zeus hold a grudge?

pulse-berlin : Thinking Aloud

2007-12-15T20:49:00.000-08:00

pulse-berlin : Thinking Aloud

Moving to another historical stage: as part of Stalinist imperialism in the early 1920s, one newly created culture collided with an older one. At that time, the Russian psychologist Alexander Luria traveled from Moscow to the Uzbek Ferghana Valley to interview the Muslim population living there. He wanted to investigate the influence of new literacy programs ordered by Moscow on their logical thinking processes. Luria published the transcripts much later in his book “Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations” (1976). Using these interviews, Goss created her piece “How to Fix the World” (2004). The interview subjects in the video appear clever and crafty in the way they interpret and evade the tasks they are given. In the video sequence “Studying the Writing of Lenin,” a lecture hall is shown in which students are gathered, bending over Stalin’s writings. An animated circle moves over the scene like a magnifying glass, changing the Roman letters into Cyrillic characters. Goss scans documentary pictures and translates their messages. In the middle of the video, an encomium to Stalin is recited called “Be immortal, great Stalin.” In contrast to oral relativism, this constructed text is an extreme example of literalness. Political indoctrination also becomes apparent in a concrete question and answer situation. As to whether all people are equal, an old man replies as though quoting from party literature that he only sees a difference between land owners and workers.

In “How to Fix the World,” Goss reminds us of the role that language plays in the attempt by governments to influence the future of their own country as well as that of other countries. Even the laconically formulated title of this piece is a reference to the intention, as crass as it is absurd, to change cultural prejudices. Using a nonsense phrase to illuminate the sinister use of propaganda to twist the truth, the video ends with a chorus intoning, “Precious metals do not rust. Gold is a precious metal. Do precious metals rust? Precious metal rusts.“

Goss’s work tends to question the creation and sustainability of the facts and rules that surround us. Currently, she is working on a video piece about the meter, the European standard of measurement. For this piece she traveled through France, as France is the country where, at the end of the 18th century, the meter was first derived from a piece of brass of that same length, and which can still be seen today in Paris.

Collaborative Arts » Essays » John Wood and Paul Harrison- The Odd Couple

2007-12-15T20:39:00.000-08:00

Collaborative Arts » Essays » John Wood and Paul Harrison- The Odd Couple

The immediate impact of watching a Wood and Harrison video work (no single sequence lasts longer than three minutes – Jo to confirm!) is without doubt the physical nature of their endeavours – the ways in which their individual (or joint) uniform presence addresses each given obstacle. Gravity is the constant against which their bodies and/or objects are variously hurled, pulled, squashed and dropped. One could apply to their work a recent comparison of artist Bruce Nauman and Samuel Beckett, “(their work) is held or called by the ground. In both artists’ work, gravity exerts its pull everywhere, though not always visibly. As with all human beings, the ground-ward tug effects or exerts (as an accidental by-product) shapeliness, grace and balance, even as it deforms those things, pulling them into disorganisation, flatness or comic indistinction[4].”

Democracy Now! | Anthropologists Up in Arms Over Pentagon's "Human Terrain System" to Recruit Graduate Students to Serve in Iraq, Afghanistan

2007-12-15T20:31:00.000-08:00

Democracy Now! | Anthropologists Up in Arms Over Pentagon's "Human Terrain System" to Recruit Graduate Students to Serve in Iraq, Afghanistan

JUAN GONZALEZ: What specifically is the Human Terrain program? How did it start, and how does it typically operate now in places like Afghanistan and Iraq?

DAVID PRICE: The Human Terrain program is run through BAE, which is a contracting agency. You know, in some ways it’s very similar to Blackwater in the way that it works. What they do is they take ethnographers, they take anthropologists, who may or may not have cultural expertise in the areas where they’re working, and they take these ethnographers, embed them with the troops, they travel with them, and then they try and advise commanders about taking culturally appropriate action.
...
DAVID PRICE: Yeah. I know basically the facts that you stated there. I was on a panel with her in a session organized by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists at the anthropology meetings, and her critique was very interesting. Her critique of Human Terrain is not my own. Part of it is. She had serious complaints, from the inside, about basically the intellectual incompetence of the people who are involved in the program. The ethnographers really don’t have linguistic or cultural competence for the regions that they’re working in. And so, her critique was that it’s being run very poorly.

But this is where I differ with her. She believed that if, you know, better anthropologists or people with higher degrees of competence were involved, then the program would be a good one. I disagree with that entirely, because that would not resolve the ethical issues, you know, as well as the moral issues of being involved in a very corrupt war being fought in Iraq today.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how this debate is being played out in the Anthropological Association and what this oath is all about.

DAVID PRICE: Well, the oath is very simple. You know, it’s a pledge that’s modeled after actions taken by physicists during the Reagan era, during Star Wars, where physicists said that they just wanted to be clear, individuals wanted to be clear, they did not want their research and they were not willing to be involved in the Star Wars program. Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist who studies nuclear weapons production, came up with the idea of modeling a very similar pledge. So, you know, a small group of us, eleven of us, got together and hammered out some language—it’s very simple—saying that we’re not—you know, all of us are not even necessarily opposed to some work with the military, but anything involving counterinsurgency, such as this, or anything that violates ethical standards of research, we’re opposed to, and we’re simply asking our colleagues to stand up and be counted with us, saying that they’re not willing to use anthropology to these ends.
...