learning to read

crowdcensure for victory

i took one copy of that book upsetting the senator off the internet.

dear reader, every little bit helps.

if every conscientious american did that every day we'd eradicate the menace in no time.

before causing my copy to be destroyed, i thought i'd see if it was the same as the serially xeroxed and cheaply bound copy i'd seen all those years ago. that copy did not have any ASCII illustrations, which do appear in the copy i took off the internet.

much of the bad writing, the malapropisms, and casual tone sound a lot more contemporary than a) i recall or b) the dated material itself (for example, and perhaps conceding the senator's concern to a degree, the vexing question of the provenance of the recyclable plastic bottle molotov cocktail comes clear while reading a recipe written in 1971 - that lost golden age when "a coke bottle" was sure to be made of glass). oh, and it is a pdf'd web page, not the anticipated scan of aforementioned "'zine"-style, serially-copied publication, though it is quite widely available on the open internet, likely in various formats; haven't checked, but expect a copy more like what i remember resides at the internet archive.

anyway, scary representations of household chemistry and edifying explanations of long-gone telephone switching --

illustrative paraphrase: the best computer to make [color]box device is an atari because you can do it in basic with only 5 statements--ha: old-timey! 

 -- systems and scams abound among some gleeful contemplation of seriously horrifying pranks and mayhem. a fellow around the water cooler recalled the book as the source of his recipe for gunpowder; another colleague attributes a friend's son's dementia onset to a recipe from the book. i would be very reticent about attempting almost anything i read there.

"anarchist" in the title seems to signify one inclined to mayhem or taboo chemical knowledge rather than one inclined to implementing a political philosophy of absolute freedom.

amusing paraphrase: cutting enough match heads can be tedious, but will make a fun evening for the whole family if you can pry them away from the tv.

i guess, if i were allegedly a part of a conspiracy, downloading and reading that book and discussing said downloading and reading with alleged co-conspirators could be construed as an act or acts in furtherance of whatever alleged goal of said alleged conspiracy; it is not clear where the threshold of criminality is for the individual not conspiring (i don't say "lone-wolf" because that term presupposes a planned class of activities the contemplated reader may, for any of an infinitude of reasons, never be inclined to undertake).

an alleged conspirator might avoid legal sanction by acting specifically to frustrate the object of the conspiracy, viz. confessing to the man in time for the man to harmlessly foil the plot(s) . . . maybe; it is not clear what an individual not conspiring might do.

a nice, quiet, fellow who mostly keeps to himself, i caused the copy i had taken off the internet (which seemed to continue, beyond the cookbook, proper, to include one or more additional volumes with "terrorist" and "handbook" in their titles -- not that i waive my fundamental right to read anything i find on the internet or elsewhere containing those words) to be destroyed, although a novice forensicist could surely reconstitute enough of it to demonstrate its arrival, review and "destruction". i didn't really want it floating around in the recent memory at the same time i'm reading abu bakr naji's "the management of savagery," which is, frankly, fascinating, far more erudite than "jolly roger", and far less disturbing to read than the latest news of any of any number of parties' depredations; so far, it is broad strategy and exegesis not so different from clausewitz, nkrumah, guevara et al.

triage, collage and other progeny of shams

the time has come again to drop bombs on people (& infrastructure, homes and resources) in the interest of saving lives. dear reader, who am i kidding: that time is perpetual, the celebrated new american century! which, is neither so new as it used to be, nor so celebrated as its erstwhile proponents might have hoped (although: the shock doctrine).

you may have heard it said that, to a man with a hammer every problem resembles a nail.

yes; to a signatory of international humanitarian instruments with a terrifically expensive advanced arsenal of remote-controlled munitions and delivery systems at hand, it appears that every problem resembles the undefended industrial base of a belligerent nation, or, at least, a hospital behind which some jihadi might once have passed. same same, right? morale bombing for victory.

aside => in a Letter to Norm reporting suspicious activities in 2012, this tipster drew on a twenty-or-so-year-old-memory of marketing materials read once to characterize a so called smart bomb as one detonating "at or within fifty meters of its target, one try out of two," and assuming that over the intervening years -- during which we've seen the ascendancy of public GPS and a proliferation of other appliances characterized as "smart," while we, ourselves, collectively, have remained just as dumb if we didn't lose ground -- the targeting precision and reliability of such systems would have improved. that assumption was more or less built into the whole premise of the piece. so i was really surprised to hear -- in i don't remember which episode of DemocracyNow!'s coverage of the recent bombardment of gaza (nor can i, with some but not too much patience, find it now) -- the guest talking-head assert just that same metric of precision while crowing about the belligerent state's unprecedented precise targeting of schools, hospitals and united nations bomb shelters. i was surprised that bar has not been raised over the interval.<=

not too long ago, mr. greenwald wrote a fun blog post over at The Intercept lampooning the "redundant presidential ritual" of bombing iraq for "humanitarian" reasons (ironic quotation marks in original) and reflecting on humanitarian military interventions accomplished remotely, with bombs, and the consistent practice of at least the last five american administrations, spanning 25 years, in characterizing the enemy of the fiscal quarter/polling cycle (and iraq, in the event iraq isn't already the enemy of the fiscal quarter/polling cycle) as morally and geopolitically akin to nazis (because his focus was iraq, he did not reminisce about that serbian hitler whom we all remember), and i had to go find a favorite paper on the development of the international treaty framework codifying humanitarian restrictions on the behavior of bellicose states and contrasting ever-increasing civilian death tolls over the corresponding period.

i was not sure i still had it. do you, dear reader, have a folder, bag, portfolio, box, suitcase or bureau where you amass documents-which-you-expect-you'll-want-to-refer-to-later, as i have? my folders have exceeded their capacities, graduated to boxes and filing cabinets. the document i remembered i remembered as likely having been retained in one of those boxes. of course, that was a long time ago and there have been several episodes of triage since then, as well as some furious collage, to maximize information density. the long and short of it is that, i found it:

The Legitimation of Violence: A Critical History of the Laws of War, by Jochnick and Normand,

challenges the notion that the laws of war serve to restrain or 'humanize' war. . . . [D]espite noble rhetoric to the contrary, the laws of war have been formulated deliberately to privilege military necessity at the cost of humanitarian values. As a result, the laws of war have facilitated rather than restrained wartime violence. Through law, violence has been legitimated.

published in two parts in 1994 (35 harv. int’l l.j. 49 and 387) the article features a thorough critical review of the historical development of international humanitarian law together with an examination of the behavior of states in wars during that period, and an argument that the 1991 "gulf war" supports the thesis “that powerful nations deliberately formulated the laws of war to advance the primacy of military violence over humanitarian concerns, despite noble rhetoric to the contrary.”

i found the first part posted on a blog; here it is. i did not find the second part, which, anyway, is a little dated. there have been so many more new humanitarian interventions since 1994 to study, contemplate and compare with the proposed heuristic! i think the thesis stands, and that states would rather wage elective war over and over than wield the subject international instruments as tools to restrain criminals.

while i struggle to keep up with yesterweek, check out the facelift and daily content over at The Intercept: it is really looking like a news organization now, and the content refresh rate has picked up significantly. alas, that gives me that much more to read and consider (and cross reference and ruminate upon).

how time flies. more again anon.

doing nothing wrong, nay: doing right via dissent and resistance

Eben Moglen is a magnificent speaker well worth watching. Last autumn he offered Columbia Law School a series of lectures, Snowden and the Future, in four parts, what seems to be the full text of which was published Tuesday in the Tech section of The Guardian.com. Mr. Moglen and the Software Freedom Law Center have also made full video, audio and text available.

A bit from the Guardian that struck me:

When Snowden disclosed the existence of the NSA's Bullrun programme we learned that NSA had lied for years to the financiers who believe themselves entitled to the truth from the government they own. The NSA had . . . subverted technical standards, attempting to break the encryption that holds the global financial industry together. . . .

Part I: Westward the Course of Empire begins with more familiarity with the details of the decline of the Roman empire than I am afraid I have retained, or, indeed, was ever exposed to.

Edward Snowden committed espionage on behalf of the human race. Knowing the price, knowing the reason, knowing that it wouldn't be up to him whether sacrificing his life was worth it. So I would think that our most important effort, first, is to understand the message: to understand its context, to understand its purpose, to know its meaning, and to experience the consequences of having received the communication. Others will of course regard the first imperative as being to eliminate the message, and the messenger, and the meaning: to render everything as invisible as possible. Because invisibility is where listeners have to live in order to work. But I think we must let them go about that business. We must let them try to obliterate the message as best they can, and do our work, which is the work of understanding first.

This struck me because I have wished to interject something like this each time the water cooler is roiled with the artificial debate of partisans ranting past one another, or to challenge some mouthpiece of surveillance --who again and again deflect, asserting certain journalists' (and former agency insiders') characterizations of programs described by leaked documents are errant, and that we should address the real ongoing programs and view such documents with due regard for context -- to produce that context, forthrightly, together with sufficient evidence to support the veracity of such information proffered by parties who have squandered their credibility through the consistent disclosures of their consistent earlier lies. Mr. Hayden and his ilk cannot in honest debate defer open examination of the parameters of surveillance programs on grounds that we should all be able to talk with particularity about the same real programs and activities, while failing to disclose (and continuing to otherwise prevaricate and mischaracterize) such relevant facts concerning such programs as are within his cognizance. Until such a time, the documents sure appear to speak for themselves, and are, nevertheless, the best available information.

Watch here. Listen here.

Part II: Oh, Freedom considers  two constitutional traditions of resistance, arising out of the founding narrative of liberty and subsequent history of slavery leading eventually to the abolition of chattel slavery and the political and social enfranchisement of its former objects.

For analytical purposes let us take this word "privacy," that we are growing accustomed to using quite freely, and see what it really is. Privacy—as we use the word in our conversations now all around the world, and particularly when we talk about the net— really means three things. The first is secrecy, which our ability to keep messages "private," so that their content is known only to those who we intend to receive them. The second is anonymity, which is our ability to keep our messages—even when their content is open—obscure as to who has published them and who is receiving them. It is very important that anonymity is an interest we can have in both our publishing and our reading. The third is autonomy, which is our ability to make our life decisions free any force which has violated our secrecy or our anonymity. These three are the principle components of the mixture that we call "privacy". With respect to each, further consideration shows that it is a precondition to the order that we call "democracy", "ordered liberty", "self-government", to the particular scheme that we call in the United States "constitutional freedom."

Mr. Moglen also addresses two common responses to the scope of the revealed programs: the "it's hopeless" and the "if you're doing nothing wrong -" tropes, the latter of which he answers with

If we are not doing anything wrong. then we have a right to resist. If we are not doing anything wrong, then we have a right to do everything we can to maintain the traditional balance between us and power that is listening. We have a right to be obscure. We have a right to mumble. We have a right to speak languages they do not get. We have a right to meet when and where and how we please so as to evade the paddy rollers.

watch or here/listen

Part III: The Union, May it Be Preserved presents the present privacy crisis, "government abuse of the systems of surveillance and listening" deployed by "those who wish to earn off you" -- Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and the like -- and adopted by we the statistical datasets,

this form of pervasive spying on societies which has come into existence, results from a larger environmental and ecological crisis brought on by industrial overreaching. It is not the first, the last, or the most serious of the various forms of environmental crisis brought on in the last two centuries by industrial overreaching. Industrial overreaching has begun to modify the climate of the whole earth in unexpected and damaging ways. Against that enormity this is merely an ecological disaster threatening the survival of democracy. So we need to understand the ecological harm done underneath, before we can begin to restrict the listening of government to its appropriate sphere, and abate those violations of the constitution. . . .

With an ecological framework, he proposes an environmental law approach to questions of privacy in the, ahem, private sector. Also:

The anonymity of reading is the central, fundamental guarantor of freedom of the mind. Without anonymity in reading there is no freedom of the mind. Indeed, there is literally slavery.

watch/listen

Part IV: Freedom's Future

I haven't made it to the fourth part yet to poach passages. Not sure what will happen, but hopefully that sense of hope described in Part II will be transmitted. Also, it is certain to be as deep, informative and thoughtful.

watch/listen

happy birthday DN!

going through the barn door

The Cavilrests are a proud and stubborn people, or, I have been led to believe so by the assertions and behavior of the handful of Cavilrests I've known. That narrow perspective, though, would seem to undermine any general claims concerning all Cavilrests, as a class or collective, stretching to right here from all the way who-knows-where, way back who-knows-when. Who knows what qualities characterize that collection?

In search of the most primordial source of the ol' Cavilrest ancestral rage, I have been dabbling in genealogy. Dear Reader, there are a lot of ways to spell Cavilrest!

You might think it strange that a person, who earns his living patiently and carefully reading clients' documents all out of context on a screen in a document review sweatshop surrounded all day by babbling and braying jackasses and occasionally given instruction or secondhand-mania (or some combination) by crazy people, would kick back at night and unwind by patiently and carefully reading [some archiving or archived institution]'s documents more or less out of context on a screen in his home, and find it relaxing and rewarding. And you'd probably be right; I cannot explain it, although it is quiet, here.

The genealogy of the Cavilrests and Shorbeddes has been a passing interest of mine for some time, and I have dabbled before, though tending to avoid the commercial genealogy emporia and also avoiding the fantastic and fantastically-accessible research and resources of the Church of the Latter Day Saints so as at least to not be complicit in giving up everything I know about my family to the end-times soul-colonization program.

Nowadays, though, in light of the massive collections of all transmitted information by certain intelligence organizations (themselves well populated with LDS adherents, who, as a class are just right for responsible top secret positions, for their well known clean living, worldliness, and respect for authority), which will be subjected to various automated and personalized interrogations, perhaps minimized, and then stored in a mammoth facility in Utah (not to mention Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and all the rest of the big-data collection and collation points) for whoever gains access to use to whatever ends they choose, continuing to not take advantage of the LDS genealogy resources would be just like that proverb about the door of that barn from which the horses have already departed.

I have found a lot of stuff - the richest and most consistent vein, so far, being the Quebec Catholic Parish Registers where Cavilrest is spelled sixty-seven different ways, cross-referenced with this map of the parishes - but have not gotten to the root of the ancestral rage. It stands to reason that those who packed up and left their wherever-they-were-from and sailed two or three months blindly across the north Atlantic, took the land they found on the other side by force and trickery from the people who inhabited it, cleared the forests and then farmed for subsistence for generations north of the forty-fifth parallel, likely started out with some rage to have undertaken such arduous trials in the first place. But I bet the not-really-subsistence farming didn't help, nor the fact that, however far away one may go, before long other people are going to show up there and subject one to their opinions.

My efforts have not attained the initial immigrant generations of the northern farming folk, though patient reading of the indices and registers of the Parishes has made some great strides toward definitive linkages with some of the already-established family genealogies of the region. Some of the Shorbedde progenitors can be found in the Ellis Island rolls, perhaps fleeing the poverty of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the turn of the twentieth century - and just in time! (Their parish records - those I've found, in the old country - are in Latin). Other Shorbeddes can be linked to the lines published in a nineteenth-century (and now public-domain) genealogy of the Shorbedde line all the way back to George PraiseYeGod Shorbedde the first, himself. Yes, of the Braintree Shorbeddes.

Records within the United States, and among non-Catholics, seem to be far more haphazard than for Catholics in Quebec, or else sequestered behind that organization's damn paywall. Same result. So, to a significant degree, the QC parish record research is the low hanging fruit among the vast bulk of other not-yet-discovered ancestors.

Anyway, that's my status update. Carry on.

take a bow

Here is Dave Canterbury presenting, for The Pathfinder School, a practicum in crafting a formidable bow with rudimentary tools and materials from the eastern woodlands: The Osage Bow (pt.2,3,4,5,6) That man demonstrates that he knows what he's talking about, and, if you listen with a modicum of attention, you too might run the risk of being mistaken for a savant.

By way of contrast, here is the construction of the traditional Korean bow, the hwal, -- a sinew-backed bamboo core with oaken handle and water buffalo horn belly, spliced with black locust or mulberry siyahs, glued with fish bladder and wrapped in birch bark, according to Wikipedia and probably the narration, the latter, albeit, in Korean -- by Bowyer, Kwon Mu-seok, in three parts (pt.2,3). (sorry, i guess number three gets cut off short --ed.)

Barely tangentially related are ancient martial secrets revealed at last by this guy & this guy.

the jewel of the international proletariat revolution resides within

Two interesting articles on the subject of envisioning a postcapitalistic world.

In Occupy Buddhism, or Why the Dalai Lama is a Marxist, over at the Tricycle Magazine website, Stuart Smithers contemplates a confluence of Marxism and Buddhism, encouraging engaged Buddhists to consider becoming conversant with Capital and Finance in theory and practice in order to inform their Buddhism and better engage with "the real."

I think it is important to say that Zizek and cultural critics increasingly see differences between East and West dramatically diminished as Asia has been absorbed by global capitalism.  Asia might be the geographic origin of Buddhism, but the distinction is of little importance as the world becomes modern, Westernized, and the hegemony of global capitalism has become total, worldwide. So it is not surprising that Zizek would maintain that Buddhism globally is becoming Western Buddhism—and increasingly functions as a fetish that ultimately enables the status quo to maintain its continuing control, dominance, and expansion.

If Buddhism is finally about liberation from ignorance and errant views, both individually and collectively, then we might consider studying not only what we are but also the culture that invisibly influences and dominates us. Quite apart from advocating any alternative to the current system, we may discover sources of suffering and new patterns of desire and ignorance that are embedded in our actions. The study of capital would quickly become the study of suffering and false consciousness. The study of capital and the revelation of the conditions for what we might call an “emergent communism” could supplement our contemplative approaches as the movement of the real. 

In The Red and the Black, over at the Jacobin Magazine, Seth Ackerman actually does envision something postcapitalistically transformative: the socialization of finance.

The lesson here is that the transformation to a different system does not have to be catastrophic. Of course, the situation I’m describing would be a revolutionary one — but it wouldn’t have to involve the total collapse of the old society and the Promethean conjuring of something entirely unrecognizable in its place.

At the end of the process, firms no longer have individual owners who seek to maximize profits. Instead, they are owned by society as a whole, along with any surplus (“profits”) they might generate. Since firms still buy and sell in the market, they can still generate a surplus (or deficit) that can be used to judge their efficacy. But no individual owner actually pockets these surpluses, meaning that no one has any particular interest in perpetuating or exploiting the profit-driven mis-valuation of goods that is endemic under capitalism. The “social democratic solution” that was once a contradiction – selectively frustrating the profit motive to uphold the common good, while systematically relying on it as the engine of the system – can now be reconciled.

I find myself arguing with aspects of the former article (and many of the commenters thereon), or with some of the arguments of others which Smithers presents and addresses, and sort of hopefully struggling to actually grasp the structure proposed by Ackerman and its implications. Of course, Dear Reader, I claim no expertise in any of the relevant fields: I certainly am no economist, Marxist theorist, Buddhist hagiographer, radical Occupier, rock-star cultural critic, or significant participant in the American Sangha. Both articles remind me of Martin Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology (more), as many things frequently do.

Meanwhile, I'm reading a biography of Nikolai Bukharin.

schmitt/stux redux

A reader expressed disappointment that my recent post describing the Schmitt analysis and suggesting its application to stuxnet did not then go on and apply the analysis to the presumptively state-sponsored information operation. I had thought not applying it left a nice expanse of negative rhetorical space there at the end of the post inviting the engaged reader to jump in and apply the analysis him or herself, being, myself, not particularly more qualified to do so than you, Dear Reader, or than any average user among the great gibbering internetworked masses who might have read that post.

necrology

It has been too hot to run the computer. I'm not sure it is not too hot now, though the ambient temperature in my apartment is reading down around 90 degrees F for the first time in a couple weeks. I have blown out a lot of laptops, frying them after burning out the poor little fans, running them summers in this apartment, and have been hoping to have this one a bit longer. Which is just as well, as I have been busy.

Several people have died. Expecting some of them to, and wanting to be informed of obituarial particulars without troubling the deceased's nearer bereaved, I considered subscribing to the RSS feed of the obituary section of the local newspaper, but felt a little ghoulish and did not. Until, later, when an old dear friend informed me via email (which email I forwarded) of the surprising and sudden demise of a mutual friend from school, which he, in turn, had learned from the deceased's facebook page. I did not join facebook, but I subscribed to the newspaper's obit feed, or tried. It did not work: I received about 200 death notices in the first day (and, if it seems callous and morbid to scan obituaries looking for people you know, how much worse it is to just idly scroll past one after another dismissing it at [the] glance [that reveals an unfamiliar name]!), and not another one since. Saving me, so far, the trouble of unsubscribing. And I found out later, through personal channels, that the two other people had passed.

something something i ching*

56:wanderer

if once you believe
each beneficent event
becomes evidence

each tribulation
ev'ry obstacle makes you
believe yet fiercer

64:guess

mountain over fire
it furthers he who works now
in might and power

64:grace

mountain over fire
thus does the superior
in small things further

schmitting stux into the spectrum of conflict

Perhaps, like myself, Dear Reader, you wonder what ever became of the United Nations and the Geneva convention, and the many international agreements setting the bounds for unacceptable use of state force; you may have lost hope for veracity from your public leaders who address such issues or despair of finding basic comprehension and competence from your journalists. I know that I have made many a conclusory statement with respect to what may or may not be viewed as "legal" or "permissible" under any number of the legion instruments that make up the international framework for the international conduct of states, at certain times when high dudgeon and flowing rant have overlapped, but sometimes I want to go back to the texts themselves to make sure I understand what I am talking about and, generally, to hedge that conclusory statement in hopes of being able to converse and communicate rather than merely shout "Is too!" -- "Is not!" through lips dripping with partisan venom.

If, like me, you would like to assert that development and release of the Stuxnet code [by a state or states -- recently apparently credible sources have allegedly verified it to be a product of a U.S./Israeli joint venture] specifically targeting the Siemens industrial machines that control Iran's uranium centrifuges, is an act of war, or to make any evaluation of nonconventional means of applying state force, then a critical first step lies in becoming familiar with the standards and descriptions of such actions, and approaches to the evaluation of specific operations with respect to such standards.

Please find below an excerpt from a longer essay introducing the spectrum of conflict from jus ad bellum through jus in bello under the international charter framework of the United Nations, and presenting "the Schmitt analysis" for assessing an operation's warlike character.

elaborative encoding (echos tofu-novum everville)

Pursuing a story on competitive memorization, science reporter Joshua Foer explored ancient and traditional mechanisms of memory, and modern theory, and then exploited them to win the 2006 USA Memory Championship.

Once upon a time this idea of having a trained disciplined cultivated memory was not nearly as alien an idea as it seems to us today. Once upon a time people invested in their memories, in laboriously furnishing their minds.

In his address to a TED conference, Foer effectively presents some of the rich .history and tradition of the "memory palace" technique, to which I once elliptically referred while destructively writing in this space, and explains that the key to remembering is

to take information that is lacking in context, in significance, meaning, and transform it in some way so that it becomes meaningful in light of all of the other things that you have in your mind.

Here, Joshua Foer presents "Feats of memory anyone can do"



How I elaboratively encode twenty different ten-digit phone numbers into evocative and lurid images populating the piles, passages, and meager furnishings of my squalid digs, though, I still don't know.

wendell berry!

Transcript of Berry's remarks is available here. A couple samples:

But . . . we are no longer talking about theoretical alternatives to corporate rule. We are talking with practical urgency about an obvious need. Now the two great aims of industrialism—replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy—seem close to fulfillment. At the same time the failures of industrialism have become too great and too dangerous to deny. Corporate industrialism itself has exposed the falsehood that it ever was inevitable or that it ever has given precedence to the common good. It has failed to sustain the health and stability of human society. Among its characteristic signs are destroyed communities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses, and small farms. It has failed just as conspicuously and more dangerously to conserve the wealth and health of nature. No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it, no pointless rhetoric on the virtues of capitalism or socialism, no billions or trillions spent on “defense” of the “American dream,” can for long disguise this failure. The evidences of it are everywhere: eroded, wasted, or degraded soils; damaged or destroyed ecosystems; extinction of species; whole landscapes defaced, gouged, flooded, or blown up; pollution of the whole atmosphere and of the water cycle; “dead zones” in the coastal waters; thoughtless squandering of fossil fuels and fossil waters, of mineable minerals and ores; natural health and beauty replaced by a heartless and sickening ugliness. Perhaps its greatest success is an astounding increase in the destructiveness, and therefore the profitability, of war.

. . .

That we live now in an economy that is not sustainable is not the fault only of a few mongers of power and heavy equipment. We all are implicated. We all, in the course of our daily economic life, consent to it, whether or not we approve of it. This is because of the increasing abstraction and unconsciousness of our connection to our economic sources in the land, the land-communities, and the land-use economies. In my region and within my memory, for example, human life has become less creaturely and more engineered, less familiar and more remote from local places, pleasures, and associations. Our knowledge, in short, has become increasingly statistical.

anthropic principle & the multiverse(s)

This is the best of all possible times to appreciate the particular
cognoscibility of the anthropic principle among the multiverse(s).

Or is it?

persistence of true grim & frostbitten small world

1. Dali / Disney short film "Destino," set to Opeth track, "I feel the dark":

 

And a couple other things, while we're feeling grim and frostbitten (and, perhaps, anticipating frost, permafrost and the other colder modes of water, to be in significant decline).

2. A compelling op-ed by (former?) Republican meteorologist Paul Douglas describing his "climate change epiphany."

These are the Dog Days of March. . . The scope, intensity and duration of this early heat wave are historic and unprecedented. And yes, climate change is probably a contributing factor. "Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get." 129,404 weather records in one year, nationwide? You can't point to any one weather extreme and say "that's climate change". But a warmer, wetter atmosphere loads the dice, increasing the potential for historic spikes in temperature and more frequent and bizarre weather extremes. You can't prove that any one of Barry Bond's 762 home runs was sparked by (alleged) steroid use. But it did increase his "base state", raising the overall odds of hitting a home run. A warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, more fuel for floods, while increased evaporation pushes other regions into drought.

3. From UCSD's "Do The Math": Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist, portrays a dialogue on economic growth (and energy), perhaps revealing several economic articles of faith withering under well-elucidated laws of physics, as recounted by the prevailing physicist.

So I can twist my head into thinking of quality of life development in an otherwise steady-state as being a form of indefinite growth. But it’s not your father’s growth. It’s not growing GDP, growing energy use, interest on bank accounts, loans, fractional reserve money, investment. It’s a whole different ballgame, folks. Of that, I am convinced. Big changes await us. An unrecognizable economy. The main lesson for me is that growth is not a “good quantum number,” as physicists will say: it’s not an invariant of our world. Cling to it at your own peril.

4. Finally, hone your discourse and disputation with this handy guide to logical fallacies.

injustice, groupthink and spatial proprioception

1. Equal Justice Initiative founder, Bryan Stevenson, addresses the power of identity and injustices related to mass incarceration, in his inspiring presentation. Highlight excerpts:

We have a system of justice in this country that treats you much better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.
. . .
[I]n another ten years the level of disenfranchisement will be as high as it has been since prior to the passage of the voting rights act. And there is this stunning silence.
. . .
When I teach my students about African American history, I tell them about slavery; I tell them about terrorism the era that began at the end of reconstruction and went on until the end of World War II. We don't really know very much about it, but for African Americans in this country that was an era defined by terror. . . . People had to worry about being lynched, they had to worry about being bombed. It was the threat of terrorism that shaped their lives. 

But, by all means, watch "We need to talk about an injustice" yourself:

2. In "The power of introverts" Susan Cain (no relation, but even if they had brushed past each other at some family reunion, Herman Cain would not recall whether he remembered her, should he try) presents the introvert/extravert spectrum, and offers some insight into the tyranny of the extravert cultural hegemony, and some things it may be overlooking or denying itself when it discounts introverts and their potential input. Ms. Cain recently researched and published Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking. Also see Jonathan Rauch's classic 2003 essay from the Atlantic, "Caring for Your Introvert."




3. Whatever you may think of the premise and its substantive points, Sir Ken Robinson's "Schools kill creativity" is hilarious:




4. Finally, in his fascinating talk, "How your brain tells you where you are," cognitive neuroscience researcher Neil Burgess presents some findings about the activiation of certain sets of spatially significant neurons:

"Perfume Causes Breast Cancer!"

I just made that up based on almost absolutely nothing, because it's catchy!

Actually, it strikes me as the English-language phrase best suited -- due its seven pithy, terrifying syllables, and the terrible clash of fashion values they imply -- to minimizing my exposure to whatever compound, or compounds, in manufactured fragrances (yes, and in some natural ones, too) gives me migraines.

I'm not going to say that it is not true because I, perhaps like you, Dear Reader, am not sufficiently equipped to assess the truth of such a statement. I do not know that it is not true; but I do not know that it is true. But I did make it up, . . . and do suspect, someday,  that some such link will be acknowledged.

(And, on reflection, I guess, the number of women on the pill who continue to smoke, notwithstanding the well-publicized heightened risk of those two factors conjoined, and the ambiguity of the word "perfume" -- a conscientious woman gripped by whatever mania drives some women to coat themselves in those chemicals, avoid perfume in deference to her own health, may yet think that tawdry vanilla-scented body lotion is something other than perfume and wear it anyway -- make the prospects of even such a bold propaganda putsch appear a little dubious.)

apropos

A mixed bag of references today, Dear Reader:

First, Jonathan Lethem's Harpers piece: The ecstasy of influence: A Plagiarism, a moving reflection on the cultural commons of creativity, notable not least for its rare reference to Heidegger's theory of the "enframing" capacity of art, composed entirely of the (attributed) words of others, and recently referred to me by a friend pursuant to discussion of private ownership of things.

If it were all Lethem's original work, it would be a persuasive and thought-provoking essay on some aspects of the tension between notions of property and forces of creativity; it remains at least that in light of it's appropriated and repurposed constituent verbiage, and becomes also an additional work of art beyond its formal structure, a pointillist painting/sculpture/score of such an essay, that, upon inspection, blossoms into many essays addressing a broad range of issues in a variety of traditions and discourses.

It is, however, difficult to cite excerpts according to scholastic form (which is probably as it should be), and so no highlighted verbiage. Go read the whole thing.

That work begins by considering several stories sharing features we commonly attribute to one story by Nabokov, as a way to approach the question of originality, influence and appropriated content. In the lecture below, Slovenian rock-star philosopher Slavoj Žižek also touches on this idea, suggesting that often what cultural forces understand to be the primal version of a story, is just a more polished reworking of other, earlier stories or versions. His example is Antigone, which we non-classicists lamely take to be originally told in the Sophocles tragedy dating from circa 442 B.C.E., but, Žižek claims, the stories of myth of Antigone vary among more primordial sources.

Available courtesy of the Backdoor Broadcasting Company, Slavoj Žižek's very long lecture, entitled "The Wire, or the clash of civilisations in one country," delivered at the University of London last week, can be streamed or downloaded here. Succinctly, Žižek offers a far-ranging assessment of the HBO series, "The Wire" as a cultural phenomenon, as a text, and as a lens into contemporary society, touching on a wide range of contemporary, historical and cultural issues with an essentially Marxist analysis. Much of it is worth quoting, but, as the entire lecture is an hour-and-a-half long, transcription is challenging.

If you thought that was an excellent series, and are curious, like I have been, as to what makes a philosopher a rock-star philosopher, then check it out. Your time (except for those three or four times he plays a scene from the show, which the mic does not pick up, but you know those scenes anyway) will be invested well. Also, like myself, you may find that you disagree with his descriptions -- I don't think he got Omar quite right -- but, try to allow yourself to disagree and keep listening, because if you stop to argue you might not get through it all, and the many fascinating tangents might thereby turn into derails. For those of us who can afford to spend our attention on long philosophical lectures, plenty of time for arguing will remain. 

Separately, while looking for an audio clip of a statement made by the President to a Disney journalist in December 2003 (and failing), I stumbled across The George W. Bush Public Domain Audio Archive (as well as this, somewhat more staid archive from the Presidency Project at UCSB), which led me to the Bots' delightful songs, Bushwack2 and Fuzzy Math. I suppose this is not, actually, entirely separate from the foregoing, as I stated at the top of this paragraph, for the search was occasioned by a destructive-writing project and related DJ-Pebkacery involving content repurposing, and I could not locate the target soundbyte, perhaps for Disney-related intellectual property reasons, perhaps just because my search was poor and lazily implemented.

two TEDs, terrifically terrible; terribly terrific

Which is not to say each is not also stunning, excellent and thought-provoking.

First, take off your sunglasses, remove the accelerometer-containing device from beside your keyboard,  switch off your implantable cardioverter defibrillator's wireless antenna, and check out what Avi Rubin has to say about all of your devices: