Liu Bolin Camoflague
Fred Lebain A Spring in New York
Felice Varini
Gillian Brown, constructed photographs
Georges Rousse
Active camouflage & Perspective
To serve or be served.
Republican activists in Iowa are decrying the Iowa Family Policy Center’s efforts to raise $100,000 to hire Sarah Palin for a speaking engagement, “recoiling at the thought of paying to land a politician’s speaking appearance.”
The conflict may hint at the divide between those who want to submit to a leader and those who don’t. For those who don’t, liberty is paramount and submitting to authority is always a humiliation – whether it be the will of a king or that of a traffic cop. Skeptical, they view leaders as functionaries – as civil servants.
Then there are those who submit to authority with pleasure, who take pride in royalty, who extol the qualities of strongmen, who defer to clergy and seek out gurus. Romantic, they view leaders as gifted and extraordinary, worthy of admiration if not worship.
Sarah Palin was elected by the former to the most powerful government post in Alaska, an office she recently quit in order to better serve – or be served by – the latter.
Pomp and circumstance are especially meaningful to those who want to submit. Otherwise, how would they know they are bowing down in front of the right idol?
“Phones unfortunately more widespread than food.”
Matthew Cordell writes:
The WFP has announced a new twist in its successful program using mobile phones to alert Iraqi refugees in Syria about available food aid… [Quoting Reuters] “Iraqi refugees in Syria will this week start receive U.N. text messages they can redeem for fresh food in local shops. “…
FP’s Joshua Keating notes the strangeness of a world in which people don’t have access to food but own mobile phones. I hear what he’s saying, and the situation may even be more shocking than he knows. According to the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, worldwide at the end of 2008 there were 4.1 billion mobile phone subscriptions, buoyed by developing countries, where two-thirds of those subscriptions were used. The WFP’s work in Syria is just one of the many projects taking advantage of the ubiquity of mobile device to affect change in the developing world. A report last year from the UN Foundation and the Vodafone Group Foundation details a series of case studies that are fascinating.
On a related note, Barbara Demick’s profile of a North Korean refugee and famine in North Korea is horrifying. It is, indeed, very possible to live in a society with all sorts of modern amenities but no food.
Moreover, hunger worldwide is growing as food prices continue to rise, despite the recession and advances in technology.
On unsubscribing to BoingBoing, thanks to Google Reader, curiosity and time.
There was a time, before I always read MetaFilter and Andy Baio’s waxy.org/links, before I checked Jon Gruber’s Daring Fireball and Bruce Schneier’s blog daily, before I ran through every update on art sites ranging from Designboom to VVork, that I was often delighted by the posts in BoingBoing, one of the first successful instances of crowd-sourced content on the web. And when, on occasion, the curators walked out from behind the curtains to make a petulant political tirade or to repeatedly share an unexamined personal obsession, it struck me as a fair price to pay for so many surprising stories about the web as culture and/or the impact of the web on culture. stories that were once hard to find, all aggregated in one place. a place that is now, for me, a piece of software: Google Reader.
And so that time has passed, the need satisfied otherwise and the curators’ political digressions strike me as more ill-informed than ever, their predilections that much more predictable and flat. Certainly, very few writers can touch upon a wide variety of topics with consistent results. But the best know how to tread into the unknown or the uncertain with humility or, at least, curiosity. The ones worth following know how to get lost in themselves without becoming solipsistic.
Caramel, the movie, is excellent.
Tilting the scales, again.
This shark story from Australia (an estimated 20 ft long predator takes two big bites out of a 10 ft great white) is sad, to me. The prey was caught by a human trap: “The great white was savaged after it got snared on a drum line – a baited hook attached to a buoy – near North Stradbroke Island, east of Brisbane.”
Is that the alarm?
The marching band down the street had been teasing out the riff for about 10 minutes before they hit the recognizable phrase. They’re playing the Steve Miller Band’s Fly Like an Eagle (“Time keeps on slippin'”) at 7 am.
It’s a spectacular wake-up alarm. Well played, Eagle Rock High School Senior Jazz Band.
Hiding in plain sight and plethora.
And here I thought Google was already doing this for the U.S. government:
In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using “open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.
Original story at Wired.
Chinese Barbizon
Peter Hessler‘s essay “Chinese Barbizon” in the The New Yorker is fantastic: gentle characterizations, arresting ideas, fascinating details. It dovetails the particular with the metaphysical; a great surprise. (PDF)
Blind spots.
The AP quotes one of the pilots of the NWA flight that overshot its destination by 150 miles: “We were not asleep; we were not having an argument; we were not having a fight.”
Has anyone asked them if they were making out?
Update: sadly, it was a Dilbert moment. (Or Tufte.)
on scientific knowledge, mental health and politics
A study of male testosterone levels during election night 2008 suggests male supporters of McCain-Palin were “amped up” on testosterone.
As technology advances, we’ll have many more insights into the ways that biology reflects and, perhaps, impacts culture. But the temptation to “medicalize” our political differences must be rejected.
If, someday, it turns out that manic depressive men are five times more likely to become political extremists, or that women who suffer from anxiety attacks are four times more likely to support authoritarian policies, that does not mean that either political inclination is, simply, symptomatic of a treatable illness.
When we address each other politically, when we exhort each other to accept an argument, we agree to respect one another as rational, autonomous beings, no matter our motives or capabilities. There is no difference, really, between accusing your political adversary of having a “false consciousness” and accusing them of being “driven by biology.” We either extend the franchise to every human being or to none, based not on any scientific criteria but on faith: “that all men are created equal.”
Politics is how we humans transcend the human condition – we have always been animals, nature-bound, striving for the ideal of a more perfect union. We may come to understand our natural selves – our genes and neural pathways – better than ever imagined. But that won’t get us any closer to understanding our political selves. Political knowledge is produced solely by participating in politics. If anything, advances in the political sciences are those that mitigate the influence of our irrational motivations – rather than attempt to rout them out altogether.
We can and should promote the solace of being at peace with our bodies – of understanding and controlling paranoia, aggression, mania, psychosis, depression, etc. It is even a political value to advocate mental health as a right rather than a privilege. But “treatment” will never be an appropriate political response.
The Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, the Soviet Psikhushkas, Nazi eugenics – in each of these cases the scientific methods of the powerful were used to justify oppression. It’s not that their sciences were wrong – though they certainly were – it’s that their politics were wrong.
Hawk breakfast.
Yesterday morning I looked out our bedroom window and saw what looked like a pile of gray debris.
“Concrete?” I wondered, “how did that get there?”
And then I saw some motion just a few feet away from the pile. “Oh,” I realized, “that’s a hawk. Eating its breakfast.”
It had begun its meal above the first pile of feathers and then taken its prey to the more removed location uphill.
The NYT on Fox News vs. the White House; a curious claim.
Would love to know what basis the NYT and Brian Shelter have for making the following claim: “But shots are still being fired, which animates the idea that both sides see benefits in the feud.”
“[A]nimates the idea.” That’s some fancy language.
The rest of the article lays out the case for why Fox News is going after President Obama. It makes no reference to what would motivate the Obama administration to fan those flames.
Update: There may be many reasons why the Obama administration would want to stimulate a public discussion of Fox News, but this article avoids them.
Fame as a mania.
Does reality TV leave viewers confused as to what is reality and what is fantasy? The BBC:
Parents are being asked for up to £40,000 ($80,000) to fund the courses. But some in the industry claim they are a waste of money.
The demand for music and drama courses has soared, following the popularity of TV talent shows such as X Factor.
There are now several thousand in the UK, but only 35 are accredited by the National Council for Drama Training.
According to the council, casting agents do not have the time to visit non-accredited courses, so students stand little chance of getting a job after completing such course.
Craigslist.
About 14 years ago, I wrote a friend back east the kind of letter only a 22 year-old can write. In it, I asked why it had to be that there were no national magazines of the stature of The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books based in – and named after – San Francisco. At 22, I did not fully appreciate the force of history. Its weight.
But the irony may be that while I was arguing for a counterfactual history, the future was being altered with basic HTML. It’s no accident that Craigslist came from San Francisco and not New York City. Has any other publication of the last 20 years had a greater impact on printed media?
The witness project, all the time, everywhere, on automatic.
In the shadows of horrible crimes, a glimmer of hope, provided by cell phones:
But even more than the shootings, the attacks on women — horrific anywhere, but viewed with particular revulsion in Muslim countries like this one — appear to have traumatized the citizenry and hardened the opposition’s determination to force out the leader of the military junta, Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara.
Buy stock in ink jet printing.
On NPR’s Marketplace this morning, a media business expert chimed in on Conde Nast discontinuing the print edition of Gourmet magazine with: “They’ll still keep a zombie version around with a web site.”
The web version is a zombie version.
I guess that would make an iPhone version, paired up with instant printing services, a ghoul version.
How insightful.
postscript: We had a subscription to Gourmet. I was set to buy one as a gift to my parents. I’d recommended the magazine to friends. We will miss having copies to store alongside our cookbooks. But, one day, we’ll also have an easy to clean digital tablet in our kitchen. And, while it won’t be the same, it should serve its purpose well.
The new Americas.
Why the U.S. is and is not at war in Latin America:
What has happened in Rio applies, in varying degrees, throughout Latin America–most notably in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Colombia. Two decades after the collapse of Communism, the region’s Marxist guerrillas have disappeared, only to be replaced by violent drug mafias.
And what Mexico has come to represent:
I asked [the new chief of Rio’s civil police] if the security situation in Rio was calamitous. “Calamitous?” he said. “No. If it was, there would be no way to turn it back…This isn’t Baghdad yet, or Mexico.”
From Jon Lee Anderson’s report on Rio de Janeiro.