IMproPRieTies

Occupy the debate

2012-01-21T08:12:00.002-05:00

The notion of a surging Newt is pretty funny, if insupportable. The current debates tell us nothing.

Where is USian life, culture, reality, represented in political debates? Here are a few debate formats we'd like to see:

1. Have the candidates read a good piece of fiction - e.g. The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Metamorphosis, Michael Kohlhaas, The Overcoat, or The Queen of Spades. Require would-be surgers to speak about the story in some probing depth.

2. Have some fine ensemble perform a sonata or quartet. Each surger-in-waiting talks about its form, emotional range, complexity.

Fire Belly Newt
3. Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Stiglitz, Taibbi and semblables ask probing questions. See who's surging after that.

4. Eminem take them for a tour of Detroit, then asks more probing questions. Lady Gaga, JayZ, Yo Yo Ma, Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Occupiers, join the panel, one by one. Kind of a countersurge.

5. Bring in a sampling of hedge fund managers, big bankers, oil men, media moguls. The surgers take turns deciding either to grill these "job creators" or lick their scrota.

etc. Your suggestion here: ________________________

JSTOR, frail Angel

2012-01-13T10:33:00.001-05:00

From here:

Register & Read (Coming soon!)

Register & Read Beta is a new, experimental program to offer free, read-online access to individual scholars and researchers who register for a MyJSTOR account. Register & Read follows the release of the Early Journal Content as the next step in our efforts to find sustainable* ways to extend access to JSTOR, specifically to those not affiliated with participating institutions.
How will it work?
Find an article that’s part of Register & Read, click on a “Get Access” option.

Register for a free MyJSTOR account, or log into your account if you already have one.
Add the content to your shelf to read the full-text online. After 14 days, you may remove it and add new items to your shelf.
PDF versions of some articles will also be available for purchase and download. If you purchase articles from your shelf, the PDF versions may be stored and accessed in your MyJSTOR account at any time.
At launch, Register & Read will include approximately 70 journals from more than 30 publishers, a subset of the content in JSTOR. This includes content from the first volume and issue published for these journals through a recent year (generally 3-5 years ago). We plan to add more titles at a later date. See a list of the titles and publishers. Register & Read is a beta program, and we expect to adjust aspects of the program as needed. This may include both functionality and the available content.
If you would like to be notified of the launch of Register & Read, you may follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

*"Sustainable" here has to include the sense: "supporting the salaried philanthropic lifestyle to which we good people at JSTOR have become accustomed."

Renting knowledge: Zizek

2012-01-11T13:43:00.001-05:00

Zizek

The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension). Yet this is at the core of today’s struggles over intellectual property: as the role of the general intellect – based on collective knowledge and social co-operation – has increased in post-industrial capitalism, so wealth accumulates out of all proportion to the labour expended in its production. The result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge. more...

Roy - the supranational elite

2011-12-18T15:44:00.000-05:00

You know these borders -- now it's becoming difficult to even use words like America, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan -- because you have the elites in all these countries that have actually seceded into a country of their own, and then you have the rest, you know, so what does one mean when one says "America" or "India," you know, I don't know what we mean by that...

19:28

Graeber on mathematics and violence

2011-12-13T22:08:00.001-05:00

^QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Your latest book is called Debt. One of the arguments you make is that the reason the idea of debt has so much power is because no one has any idea what it actually is. Did you get any closer to understanding what debt is?

^ADAVID GRAEBER — Yes. Debt is the perversion of a promise, a promise that has been perverted through mathematics and violence. I’m not saying mathematics is bad, but the combination of mathematics and violence is extremely bad. A debt is a promise to give a certain sum of money, in a certain amount of time, under certain conditions. It is a contract that is ultimately enforceable through the threat of force. The problem is that through a genuinely perverse historical alchemy, we’ve come to see such acts of violence as the very essence of morality.

^QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Do you see this reflected in the current economic climate?

^ADAVID GRAEBER — I think that’s the situation that we see around us today, and I’m surprised that people are not more outraged by this direct assault on every fabric of their lives. It’s an assault on the very idea of community, and an assault on the commitments that we make to each other through the medium of government. Why is it that a promise made by a politician to the people that elected them—to provide free education for instance—has a less moral standing than the promise that politician has made to a banker? It seems insane. But it’s simply assumed nowadays.

Interview in The White Review.

2011-11-23T22:35:00.001-05:00

Civil War in Corcyra

2011-11-21T22:55:00.001-05:00

The Peloponnesian War 3.82-83

(82) So savage was the factional strife that broke out - and it seemed all the worse in that it was the first to occur. Later on, indeed, all of Hellas (so to speak) was thrown into turmoil, there being discord everywhere, with the representatives of the demos (i.e. the extreme democratic factions) wanting to bring in the Athenians to support their cause, while the oligarchic factions looked to the Spartans. In peacetime they would have had no excuse nor would they have been prepared to summon them for help, but in the midst of a war, the summoning of outside aid readily offered those on both sides who desired a change in the status quo alliances that promised harm for their opponents and, at the same time, benefit for themselves. (2) Many harsh events befell the various cities due to the ensuing factional strife - things which always occur in such times and always will occur, so long as human nature (physis) remains the same, although with varying degrees of violence, perhaps, and differing in form, according as variations in circumstances should arise. For in peacetime, and amid prosperous circumstances, both cities and individuals possess more noble dispositions, because they have not fallen into the overpowering constraints imposed by harsher times. But war, which destroys the easy routines of people's daily lives, is a violent schoolmaster, and assimilates the dispositions of most people to the prevailing circumstances. (3) So then, affairs in the cities were being torn apart by faction, and those struggles that occurred in the latter stages of the war - through news, I suppose, of what had occurred earlier in other cities - pushed to greater lengths the extravagance with which new plots were devised, both in the inventiveness of the various attempts at revolt and in the unheard-of nature of the subsequent acts of retaliation. (4) And people altered, at their pleasure, the customary significance of words to suit their deeds: irrational daring came to be considered the "manly courage of one loyal to his party"; prudent delay was thought a fair-seeming cowardice; a moderate attitude was deemed a mere shield for lack of virility, and a reasoned understanding with regard to all sides of an issue meant that one was indolent and of no use for anything. Rash enthusiasm for one's cause was deemed the part of a true man; to attempt to employ reason in plotting a safe course of action, a specious excuse for desertion. (5) One who displayed violent anger was "eternally faithful," whereas any who spoke against such a person was viewed with suspicion. One who laid a scheme and was successful was "wise," while anyone who suspected and ferreted out such a plot beforehand was considered still cleverer. Any who planned beforehand in order that no such measures should be necessary was a "subverter of the party" and was accused of being intimidated by the opposition. In general, the one who beat another at performing some act of villainy beforehand was praised, as was one who urged another on to such a deed which the latter, originally, had no intention of performing. (6) Indeed, even kinship came to represent a less intimate bond than that of party faction, since the latter implied a greater willingness to engage in violent acts of daring without demur. For such unions were formed, not with a view to profiting from the established laws, but with a view toward political advantage contrary to such laws. And their mutual oaths they cemented, not by means of religious sanction, but by sharing in some common crime. (7) Fair proposals offered by the opposing faction were accepted by the party enjoying the superior position in a guarded fashion, not in a truly generous spirit. More concern was placed on exacting vengeance from someone else than on not suffering a wrong yourself in the first place. And if ever oaths of reconciliation did come about, having been exchanged in the face of some temporary difficulty, they remained in force only so long as the parties possessed no resources from any other source. The one who was quicker to seize the opportunity for some daring outrage, if ever he saw his opponent off his guard, took more pleasure in taking vengeance in this way than if he had done so openly, considering this method to be safer and thinking that, by getting the upper hand through deceit, he had won in addition the prize for cleverness. And indeed, most people accept more readily being called clever, when they are knaves, than being called fools when they are honest: the latter they take shame in, whereas they preen themselves on the former. (8) The cause of all of these things was the pursuit of political power, motivated by greed and ambition. And out of these factors arose the fanatical enthusiasm of individuals now fully disposed to pursue political vendettas. For the leading men on both sides in each city, employing fine-sounding phrases and advocating either equality before the law for the masses (in the case of the democrats) or the moderate rule of the best men (in the case of the oligarchs) made a show of serving the common good but in fact engaged in competition for personal advancement. Competing in every possible fashion to get the better of their opponents, they went to the farthest extremes of daring and executed even greater acts of vengeance, not limiting themselves by the demands of justice or the interests of the city, but only by their whims at any particular moment. In their efforts to gain power either through the use of trumped up lawsuits or by force, they were always ready to pursue the political vendetta of the moment. The result was that neither side was wont to pay any regard to personal integrity: those who succeeded in accomplishing some act of malice under cover of some fine phrase were the ones to gain general approval. By contrast, those citizens who chose the middle course of moderation perished at the hands of both factions, either for their failure to join in the struggle or due to envy at the fact that they were surviving amid the general chaos.

(83) Thus moral degeneration of every type took hold throughout Hellas due to factional strife, and simplicity of character — with which a concern for honor is intimately connected — became an object of mockery and disappeared. People were ranged against one another in opposite ideological camps, with the result that distrust and suspicion became rampant. (2) For there was no means that could hope to bring an end to the strife — no speech that could be trusted as reliable, no oath that evoked any dread should it be broken. Everyone, when they had the upper hand, reckoned that there was no hope of any security by means of promises or oaths, and so concentrated on taking precautions not to suffer any injury rather than daring to trust anyone. (3) And, for the most part, those of more limited intelligence were the ones to survive: in their fear regarding their own deficiencies and their opponents' cleverness, lest they might be defeated in debate (e.g. in a political trial) or be forestalled in laying some plot by their opponents' cunning, they turned to action right away with a boldness born of desperation. (4) Their opponents, overconfident in their assurance that they could anticipate the plots of their less intelligent antagonists, and feeling that they could attain their ends by cunning rather than by force, tended to be caught off guard and so perished. (Italics mine)

More JSTOR jokerama

2011-11-03T10:56:00.004-04:00

Re JSTOR cartel, fake scarcity, bullshit economy, etc.:

via techdirt:

Academic Publishing Profits Enough To Fund Open Access To Every Research Article In Every Field
from the let's-just-do-it dept
The arguments against open access have moved on from the initial "it'll never work" to the "maybe it'll work, but it's not sustainable" stage. That raises a valid point, of course: who will pay for journals that make their content freely available online?

There are many open access business models that are being tried, and one of the most obvious ones is to charge authors a publication fee – in fact, many traditional academic journals do that as well as making readers pay a subscription fee. In practise, the fee is usually paid by the author's funding institution as part of their overall support for research.

A per-article publication fee is the approach adopted by one of the leading open access publishers, Public Library of Science (PLoS). Its announcement earlier this year that revenue now covers its operating costs is an important data point in establishing the viability of the open access approach.

Meanwhile, on the traditional publishing side, Heather Morrison has been analysing the profits of the major academic publisher Elsevier (disclosure: I worked in one of Reed-Elsevier's divisions a few decades ago) on her splendidly-named blog "The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics":
If the total profit from Elsevier and Lexis-Nexis is added together and converted to U.S. dollars, the total is $2,075m. Divided by the estimated worldwide scholarly article output of 1.5 million articles per year (Björk et al, 2008), this comes out to $1,383 U.S.
That figure is very close to the $1350 article fee charged by PLoS for its biggest title, PLoS ONE, which means:
the profits of this one company alone could fund a global, fully open access scholarly publishing system, at a rate of $1,383 U.S. per article.
A comment on a post on another blog with a fantastic name - "Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week" (what is it about open access advocates and their blogs?) - pointed out that this calculation was incorrect, and that the actual figure was more like $730 per article. But adding in the profits of another major academic publisher, Springer, would bring the overall profit per article published back up to the PLoS ONE level.

But those are just details; what really matters is the fact that collectively the top two or maybe three publishers take out of the academic world enough profits to pay for every research article in every discipline to be made freely available online for everyone to access using PLoS's publishing fee approach.

As Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week's Mike Taylor explains, that would mean:
Dentists would be able to keep up with the relevant literature. Small businesseswould be able to make plans with full information. The Climate Code Foundationwould have a sounder and more up-to-date scientific basis for its work. Patient groups would be able to understand their diseases and give informed consent for treatment. Medical charities, amateur palaeontologists, ornithologists and so many more would have access to the information they need. Researchers in third-world countries could have the information they need to cope with life-threatening issues of health, food and water.

We can have all that for our $2.075 billion per year. Or we can keep giving it to Elsevier’s [+Springer's] shareholders. Giving it, remember: not buying something with it. Don’t forget, this is not the money that Elsevier absorbs as its costs: salaries, rent, connectivity, what have you. This is their profit. It’s pure profit. This is the money that is taken out of the system.

So, yes, open access is cheaper. Stupidly cheaper. Absurdly, ridiculously, appallingly cheaper.
It's an intriguing thought: to provide global access to all current academic research we just need to flip from one system – the present one, where a few giant corporations make billions of dollars a year – to one where open access publishers break even, and where academic institutions save money. So what are we waiting for?

Feel free to post this article in full anywhere you please...

The root of work, enslavement and robotics

2011-10-31T12:24:00.005-04:00

orphan

c.1300, from L.L. orphanus "parentless child" (cf. O.Fr. orfeno, It. orfano), from Gk. orphanos "orphaned," lit. "deprived," from orphos "bereft," from PIE *orbho- "bereft of father," also "deprived of free status," from base *orbh- "to change allegiance, to pass from one status to another" (cf. Hittite harb- "change allegiance," L. orbus "bereft," Skt. arbhah "weak, child," Arm. orb "orphan," O.Ir. orbe "heir," O.C.S. rabu "slave," rabota "servitude" (cf. robot), Goth. arbja, Ger. erbe, O.E. ierfa "heir," O.H.G. arabeit, Ger. Arbeit "work," O.Fris. arbed, O.E. earfoð "hardship, suffering, trouble"). The verb is attested from 1814. Related: Orphaned; orphaning.

US figures out how to have a General Strike

2011-10-28T21:15:00.002-04:00

Corporate USia thought it had rendered the General Strike harmless, moot, because instead of unions enabling workers to own their labor, corporations figured out how to own their workers. ows is the only way corporate USia could have a general strike.

Inverted Totalitarianism

2011-10-27T11:21:00.000-04:00

Chris Hedges

Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, a free press, parliamentary systems and constitutions while manipulating and corrupting internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens but are ruled by armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington, Ottawa or other state capitals who author the legislation and get the legislators to pass it. A corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. Mass culture, owned and disseminated by corporations, diverts us with trivia, spectacles and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. “Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics – and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.”

I relate.

Black on White collarcriminalsinusia

2011-10-21T19:52:00.006-04:00

William K. Black, author, The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry Democracy Now.

Well, I mean just what we say in the law: fraud is when you use deceit to steal something from someone. And so, the essence of fraud is, I get you to trust me, and then I betray that trust for gain. And as a result, there’s no more effective acid against destroying trust than fraud, particularly at the elite levels. And when you destroy trust, you destroy economies, families, democracies.

The US is Unconstitutional

2011-10-18T12:20:00.012-04:00

"I'm Joe, I'll be your economic manager"

I'm not a worshiper of Larry Lessig, but do listen because he's got a lot more law knowledge than I have, etc.

His new book -- Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It-- makes a point that needs to be heard and not immediately ground into teabags: The idea of the good framers of the US was to defend the people from undue power, money and influence -- the Constitution says folks in Congress are barred from accepting gifts from kings, foreign sovereign powers, etc.

Alas, they did not envision the new kings of Wall Street and Finance.

The frame has been subverted, Lessig describes, as Congress people now spend most of their time sucking up to the .5% who fund Congressional campaigns -- this is mostly corporate wealth, sucked from consumer-taxpayers.

That makes nearly every human being in the US the other 99.5%.

So while we were watching Friends, or playing Wii, an actual coup a la X Files was taking place. Thugs with money reached around the defenses of the people and powned Congress and D.C.

As a dear friend put it a few years ago, "The pigs won."

We now enjoy a representational system that represents .5% of the "people." And, if representation means anything at all*, this suggests that the actual people have been left undefended against undue power, money, and influence. This would appear to be unconstitutional.

Because corporations have become the uncrowned sovereigns, economic planners, and socialist-too-big-to-not-bail-outs of the US. I'd wager that the only difference between the corporate state that is now US, and the totalitarian state of Stalinist Russia, is that our totalitarians are distributed behind a bunch of screens of economy-planners that say EXXON, MOBILE, Bank of America, Citibank, and American Express.

Nice work, "Dickie" -

"Dick" Fuld, Lehman Bro.

Express this: The current US political system is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has abetted this metamorphosis. Media has missed it only entirely. OccupyWallSt has not.

Another Lessig interview.

*The opposite of representation is the casino -- unsullied chance. This is the preferred system of Wall St., Las Vegas, and the Mob.

Graeber: Debt, the sovereign, peasants and amargi

2011-10-14T07:29:00.009-04:00

via Occupyweb

delanceyplace.com 10/14/11 - kings forgive loans

In today's excerpt - in ancient city-states such as Babylon, Sumeria and Judaea, rulers found it necessary to cancel all consumer debt from time to time to keep peasants from becoming permanent debt-peons and thus to keep society from being torn apart - a phenomenon all the more interesting from the perspective of our debt-laden 21st century:

"Mesopotamian city-states were dominated by vast Temples: gigantic, complex industrial institutions often staffed by thousands - including everyone from shepherds and barge-pullers to spinners and weavers to dancing girls and clerical administrators, [and these Temples owned many of the assets of the city-state]. ...

"We don't know precisely when and how interest-bearing loans originated, since they appear to predate writing. Most likely, Temple administrators invented the idea as a way of financing the caravan trade. This trade was crucial because while the river valley of ancient Mesopotamia was extraordinarily fertile and produced huge surpluses of grain and other foodstuffs, and supported enormous numbers of livestock, which in turn supported a vast wool and leather industry, it was almost completely lacking in anything else. Stone, wood, metal, even the silver used as money, all had to be imported. From quite early times, then, Temple administrators developed the habit of advancing goods to local merchants - some of them private, others themselves Temple functionaries - who would then go off and sell it overseas. Interest was just a way for the Temples to take their share of the resulting profits.

"However, once established, the principle seems to have quickly spread. Before long, we find not only commercial loans, but also consumer loans - usury in the classical sense of the term. By C2400 BC it already appears to have been common practice on the part of local officials, or wealthy merchants, to advance loans to peasants who were in financial trouble on collateral and begin to appropriate their possessions if they were unable to pay. It usually started with grain, sheep, goats, and furniture, then moved on to fields and houses, or, alternately or ultimately, family members. Servants, if any, went quickly, followed by children, wives, and in some extreme occasions, even the borrower himself. These would be reduced to debt-peons: not quite slaves, but very close to that, forced into perpetual service in the lender's household - or, sometimes, in the Temples or Palaces themselves. In theory, of course, any of them could be redeemed whenever the borrower repaid the money, but for obvious reasons, the more a peasant's resources were stripped away from him, the harder that became.

"The effects were such that they often threatened to rip society apart. If for any reason there was a bad harvest, large proportions of the peasantry would fall into debt peonage; families would be broken up. Before long, lands lay abandoned as indebted farmers fled their homes for fear of repossession and joined semi-nomadic bands on the desert fringes of urban civilization. Faced with the potential for complete social breakdown, Sumerian and later Babylonian kings periodically announced general amnesties: 'clean slates,' as economic historian Michael Hudson refers to them. Such decrees would typically declare all outstanding consumer debt null and void (commercial debts were not affected), return all land to its original owners, and allow all debt-peons to return to their families. Before long, it became more or less a regular habit for kings to make such a declaration on first assuming power, and many were forced to repeat it periodically over the course of their reigns.

"In Sumeria, these were called 'declarations of freedom.' - and it is significant that the Sumerian word amargi, the first recorded word for 'freedom' in any known human language, literally means 'return to mother' - since this is what freed debt-peons were finally allowed to do. ...

"Nehemiah was a Jew born in Babylon, a former cup-bearer to the Persian emperor. In 444 BC, he managed to talk the Great King into appointing him governor of his native Judaea. He also received permission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem that had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar more than two centuries earlier. In the course of rebuilding, sacred texts were recovered and restored; in a sense, this was the moment of the creation of what we now consider Judaism.

"The problem was that Nehemiah quickly found himself confronted with a social crisis. All around him, impoverished peasants were unable to pay their taxes; creditors were carrying off the children of the poor. His first response was to issue a classic Babylonian- style 'clean slate' edict - having himself been born in Babylon, he was clearly familiar with the general principle. All non-commercial debts were to be forgiven. Maximum interest rates were set. At the same time, though, Nehemiah managed to locate, revise, and reissue much older Jewish laws, now preserved in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus, which in certain ways went even further, by institutionalizing the principle. The most famous of these is the Law of Jubilee: a law that stipulated that all debts would be automatically cancelled 'in the Sabbath year' (that is, after seven years had passed), and that all who languished in bondage owing to such debts would be released.

"Freedom," in the Bible, as in Mesopotamia, came to refer above all to release from the effects of debt."

Author: David Graeber
Title: Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Publisher: Melville House
Date: Copyright 2011 by David Graeber
Pages: 64-65, 81-82

author:	David Graeber
title:	Debt: The First 5,000 Years
publisher:	Melville House
date:	Copyright 2011 by David Graeber
pages:	64-65, 81-82
tags:
Should you click through our site to purchase a book, delanceyplace proceeds from your purchase will benefit a children's literacy project. Delanceyplace is a not-for-profit organization.

Pulled from Delancey Place, which has an odd habit of disappearing its excellent selections. This is from David Graeber - haven't yet read it, but it seems like it might be, uh, relevant. He's an anthropologist (Rick Scott says Florida needs no more of them). Graeber is busy, among other ways, suspending the ivied wall between academia and the world.

widget

2011-10-13T20:19:00.001-04:00

#occupywallst

2011-10-10T12:52:00.004-04:00

It's not about articulating demands - that comes much later, after a new sort of cultural form actually stabilizes - this takes time. At the moment, we don't know what this is. But we can hope.

Why here, why now - one possible reason:

What the Germans lack:

4 ...

Culture and the state — one should not deceive one-self about this — are antagonists: "Kultur-Staat" is merely a modern idea. One lives off the other, one thrives at the expense of the other. All great ages of culture are ages of political decline: what is great culturally has always been unpolitical, even anti-political. Toti

If #ows is an actual cultural birth-thing,it would be absurd to present the newborn with a demand that it present a list of demands. #bloomberg #ows

WHAT THE GERMANS LACK

2011-10-09T09:19:00.002-04:00

I put forward at once — lest I break with my style, which is affirmative and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily — the three tasks for which educators are required. One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see — accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to "will" — to be able to suspend decision. All unspirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the inability to resist a stimulus: one must react, one follows every impulse. In many cases, such a compulsion is already pathology, decline, a symptom of exhaustion — almost everything that unphilosophical crudity designates with the word "vice" is merely this physiological inability not to react. A practical application of having learned to see: as a learner, one will have become altogether slow, mistrustful, recalcitrant. One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one's hand. To have all doors standing open, to lie servilely on one's stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into, others and other things — in short, the famous modern "objectivity" — is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence. @#$@#$

Natural history

2011-10-04T23:54:00.002-04:00

A third kind, again, is remarkable for the skill which it displays in its operations. These spin a large web, and the abdomen suffices to supply the material for so extensive a work, whether it is that, at stated periods the excrements are largely secreted in the abdomen, as Democritus thinks, or that the creature has in itself a certain faculty of secreting² a peculiar sort of woolly substance. How steadily does it work with its claws, how beautifully rounded and how equal are the threads as it forms its web, while it employs the weight of its body as an equipoise! It begins at the middle to weave its web, and then extends it by adding the threads in rings around, like a warp upon the woof: forming the meshes at equal intervals, but continually enlarging them as the web increases in breadth, it finally unites them all by an indissoluble knot. With what wondrous art does it conceal the snares that lie in wait for its prey in its checkered nettings! How little, too, would it seem that there is any such trap laid in the compactness of its web and the tenacious texture of the woof, which would appear of itself to be finished and arranged by the exercise of the very highest art! How loose, too, is the body of the web as it yields to the blasts, and how readily does it catch all objects which come in its way! You would fancy that it had left, quite exhausted, the thrums of the upper portion of its net unfinished where they are spread across; it is with the greatest difficulty that they are to be perceived, and yet the moment that an object touches them, like the lines of the hunter's net, they throw it into the body of the web. With what architectural skill, too, is its hole arched over, and how well defended by a nap of extra thickness against the cold! How carefully, too, it retires into a corner, and appears intent upon anything but what it really is, all the while that it is so carefully shut up from view, that it is impossible to perceive whether there is anything within or not! And then too, how extraordinary the strength of the web! When is the wind ever known to break it, or what accumulation of dust is able to weigh it down?

tertium eorundem genus erudita operatione conspicuum. orditur telas tantique operis materiae uterus ipsius sufficit, sive ita corrupta alvi natura stato tempore, ut democrito placet, sive est quaedam intus lanigera fertilitas: tam moderato ungue, tam tereti filo et tam aequali deducit stamina, ipso se pondere usus. texere a medio incipit, circinato orbe subtemina adnectens, maculasque paribus semper intervallis, sed subinde crescentibus ex angusto dilatans indissolubili nodo inplicat. quanta arte celat pedicas a scutulato rete grassantes! quam non ad hoc videtur pertinere crebratae pexitas telae et quadam politurae arte ipsa per se tenax ratio tramae! quam laxus ad flatus ac non respuenda quae veniant sinus! derelicta lasso praetendi summa parte arbitrere licia: at illa difficile cernuntur atque, ut in plagis, lineae offensae praecipitant in sinum. specus ipse qua concamaratur architectura! et contra frigora quanto villosior! quam remotus a medio aliudque agenti similis, inclusus vero sic, ut sit necne intus aliquis cerni non possit! age firmitas, quando rumpentibus ventis, qua pulverum mole degravante!

Pliny the Elder

ταυροκαθάψια

2011-09-18T20:33:00.004-04:00

---

Hungarian Squat

2011-09-11T23:30:00.004-04:00

After 31 years, it's great to encounter, again, some fragments of The Squat Theatre. There's some history, archival stuff, and images there, and more, I hope, to come.

Some images from Baltimore -- didn't know they'd been there. Staged funeral in advance of Peter Halasz's 2006 death.

Death and Media

2011-09-10T11:08:00.003-04:00

Don't normally recycle old posts, but in light of the 9/11 anniversary observation going on in the media, this one seemed worth resurrecting:

FRIDAY, APRIL 08, 2005
eternal life will not be televised
papolatrie - the help of ritual - bigness, inflation, costumes, dirge, convenient fixity of death.

Probably nothing more and less like news than death. It's factoidal, verifiable, and opens media elan to savor a perfectly controlled routine. It's control over the news, not the news, that we want. Not news, but a sort of mechanized Big Gulp O' the Thrill and the Chill of Memento Mori, the frisson of horror slowed to images of a gelid crawl of thousands of the assembled, moving in medievalesque slo-mo, the hyperbolic elongation of the photo-op.
more

From reality to rhetoric

2011-09-07T14:07:00.011-04:00

It's been some years since I last spoke with JSTOR's Bruce Heterick. Today from him I learned of a kind of change in JSTOR's degree of openness, or closure:

JSTOR–Free Access to Early Journal Content and Serving “Unaffiliated” Users

Nearly 500,000 articles in more than 200 journals are now freely available on JSTOR

The press release from JSTOR's Laura Brown begins:

I am writing to share exciting news: today, we are making journal content on JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere, freely available to the public for reading and downloading. This includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals, representing approximately 6% of the total content on JSTOR.

The release goes on to spell out details of this alteration and goes out of its way to say that the indictment of Aaron Swartz could have affected the timing and substance of this step, but ultimately did not.

Mr. Heterick concluded his brief email with:

I’m not a big fan of your rhetoric, but in your work as an independent scholar, I thought you’d find this beneficial.

Ok.

Bruce,

I'm not a fan of JSTOR's reality, but such as it is, this is a small step toward acknowledging the factual truth of my argument. Human knowledge, gleaned by humans in taxpayer-funded institutions of higher learning, could even now be freely available in toto to all who seek it. Unfortunately, the desires of craven academic publishing houses to continue to subsist in antiquated form, coupled with the highly lucrative artificial scarcification of academic data thanks to the walled garden stratagem of JSTOR and its imitators, continue to transform this potential reality into a chimaera.

This transformation is the real rhetoric, in all its material voracity. Except that this can now be qualified as, "material voracity after 1922."

Thanks for the update.

Tom

When, Lord...

2011-08-31T14:09:00.003-04:00

Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist

So when does academic publishing get disrupted?

Update:

Academic publishers run a guarded knowledge economy

How hard is this to get?

2011-08-04T10:24:00.003-04:00

Requiring individuals and institutions to pay for access to scholarly publications, publications that shape not only the future of the accessing individuals, but also the future and progress of sciences on the planet is an inexcusable violation of human rights.

Comment in thread to this article.

Paywalling Pays

2011-07-19T22:25:00.005-04:00

Who knew Times' readers had it in 'em! The comments on the NYT's dull article about Aaron Swartz's liberties being stolen by JSTOR are fun!

Especially this one:

26.
Bill Harbaugh
Eugene, Oregon
July 19th, 2011
4:11 pm
Go to the IRS 990 for JSTOR,http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2009/133/857/2009-133857105-06a328... It's a "non-profit" dba "ITHAKA HARBORS".

I count 8 employees with compensation over $250,000. They put academic research behind a paid firewall, so they can bring in the money for these salaries.

Who is the criminal here?

The president of JSTOR, Mr. Kevin M. Guthrie, has a combined compensation of upwards of $420,000.

Aaron Swartz, JSTOR Misfit

2011-07-19T14:53:00.010-04:00

Once upon a tome, Aaron Swartz saw an "open library"

JSTOR dreams it has a closed garden.

Into it crept an allegedly feral fellow.

To "steal" its golden apples.

Some apples!

The apples which are still there.

JUSTICE dreams

Petition here

Cockpits will not be televised

2011-06-29T19:29:00.002-04:00

GROSS: You had the opportunity to actually sit with men who are actually controlling drones. This was in Vegas, am I right?
Mr. SHACHTMAN: Yeah, so north of Vegas, pretty far north, you go up past the city, past the big prison that's out there in the desert, and you keep going and going and going to this little, you know, sort of one-street town with a mini-casino off the edge.
And just past the casino, inside the gate, is a pretty nondescript office building, and inside that office building is basically a series of cockpits. And each one of those cockpits has guys flying in Iraq or Afghanistan.
here.

More Man

2011-06-21T19:09:00.014-04:00

I heard a Republican say something intelligent today -- it was Huntsman, declaring his candidacy, and saying something that made sense -- to me at least.

Part of the clarity came from that 10,000-mile perspective he touts. Part came from the generational FAIL that he pinpointed as the first in living memory.

Interestingly, none of the print media stories about his speech that I've looked at, including the Boston Globe, the NYT, WAPO, LAT, etc., had the lines that seemed powerful to me. These asshats can maunder on about his credentials, his complex non-appeal to asshats of the right, etc.

"No matter how hard they work, the deck is stacked against them by forces beyond their control." -- Brilliant, true, true. No matter what USians do, how hard they try, the game is done.

Oh, ok, oops: That wasn't Huntsman, that was Mara Liasson on NPR, introducing his speech. His actual statement followed her pungent intro. He pulled "UNAMERICAN" out of his ass.

But that sense of being caught in larger magnitudes of cause, of ruin, of debacle is timely and right, and perhaps it is latent in the talented, honorable gamesmanship of Huntsman. It just might be, and if so, it's a powerful message -- far stronger than all the declarative chest-beating of the seven dwarfs last week.

What connects with people is that the tracks on which we ride are not just out of all our hands, but everybody's hands -- the hands of elected leaders, presbyters, bankers, billionaires -- Chuck Norris's hands. There really is a deep, deep fatalism taking hold. Not surprising, given the infantilization, de-education, and mass reduction to the common denominator of shitfaced folly that has been the primary mission of the US media for 60 years.

So what I'm hearing, maybe, in this guy, is, he's got a word-gun, a major weapon. He's locked on to something powerful that people will hear and they won't care whether he's a Morman or a Tabonga. For the ephebe, the Tabonga is perhaps the least interesting evil monster Dan and Jack Milner ever spawned -- no easy FAIL.

What did Mr. Huntsman say?

Mr. Huntsman, a former Republican governor of Utah, declared that it would be “totally unacceptable and totally un-American” for the nation to pass on a less successful country to the next generation.

“It need not, must not, will not be our permanent condition,” Mr. Huntsman said at a New Jersey park in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. “We will not be the first American generation that lets down the next generation.” NYT

This resonates -- if you buy the argument that he's selling fate (I have no idea whether fate is part of the Mormon vocabulary) -- because it is true. It is true because this is the trending reality, which is driven by corporations.

Take just a few points which a lot of people don't seem to have picked up on. For the past 90 years or so, corporations have been the nodes around which USian loyalty, sense of fealty, of community, of obligational priority, of history, have formed. The private sector successfully turned around the original idea. No longer is it a minor parasite upon the public; rather, all our loyalties bend to the monsters of production and economic success. There is our religion. The state, the nation, the idea of the larger public res, is now the parasite. All this spewing of hatred toward the government, toward Obama, is merely the bilious churning of that displacement.

So there's no question of thinking we're going to "elect" someone to fix things. Things are so out of our hands -- our small democratic hands. They're in the hands of a Who. Or perhaps in no hands at all, just like the housing bubble.

Therefore we are not looking to select someone with hands to fix things. We're looking for someone to eat the sins of the corporations, while looking manly and Reaganesque.

Perry has the look. Romney has the look of the old school corporate ceo, but that's not what we need. Those guys ruined us -- we understand as much -- and they continue to do so. We want a guy who can look big, strong, and cool (so much depends upon the size and shape of the head) while taking it up the arse, visible 10,000 miles away, or from space, by the elongate dong of the Tabonga. We don't know what the next power on earth will be, though we have our suspicions. All we can do is prepare ourselves and our descendants for the movie that will follow its installation.

Perry has the look, but Huntsman has the weapon. The thing about having the weapon is, you still have to aim it. There is where Mr. Huntsman will go astray. He'll shoot the right gun at the wrong thing. And blast my wayward thought that here was a guy who saw it straight. Told it plain. Made it sing.

Who's on board?

2011-06-18T01:06:00.000-04:00

Rebel Deluxe

2011-06-09T10:53:00.000-04:00

Britain decides to emulate USian University Epic Fail

2011-06-07T21:46:00.003-04:00

Eagleton on a new, private university in London:

If a system of US-type private liberal arts colleges like this one gains ground in Britain, the result will be to relegate an already impoverished state university system to second-class status. So far, British society has held the view that the education of doctors, teachers, social workers and so on is too momentous a matter to be left to the vagaries of the profit motive. This is why though there are already one or two private universities in the country, nobody has a clue where they are. This new college, however, could be the thin end of an ugly wedge. Why should Grayling, Dawkins and their chums care about that, though, when they will be drawing down mega-salaries for what is reported to be an extremely modest amount of lecturing?

In the US, getting yourself a decent education depends in part on the whims of the well-heeled. It is they who decide whether to obtain their tax breaks by donating a new theatre or lab to your college, or whether to find some more devious way of avoiding the inland revenue. This new venture in Bloomsbury is said to be backed by multimillion pound funding from private investors. While the Graylings and Colleys spout on in the classrooms about humane values, they are in the pay of those who would not recognise such things if they were to move into their living rooms.

Fairy Tales

2011-06-07T00:09:00.005-04:00

Kia weaves some thinking about Pan's Labyrinth and her reading of Benjamin Constant on usurpation into a rich post, of which this is but a sliver:

When this logic of despotism establishes itself it spreads downward; the whole system is maintained by lesser functionaries who, to prove their competence, must be sharp, resolute and prompt in dispatching threats to order, in neutralizing anything that may undermine their place. While they thus wage a quiet war against external enemies (the journalist who demands information, the writer of protest songs, the dissenting activist, the widow of the partisan denied a pension, the victim of land theft) they are waging another secret war against themselves, against the enemy within. People who are willing to make a sacrifice of their inner selves will naturally turn to making a sacrifice of others. More.

Creditor-Media Matrix Manifesto

2011-05-26T10:01:00.002-04:00

There will be no radical changes in the personnel of the present efficient staff. Mr. Charles R. Miller, who has so ably for many years presided over the editorial pages, will continue to be the editor; nor will there be a departure from the general tone and character and policies pursued with relation to public questions that have distinguished The New-York Times as a non-partisan newspaper — unless it be, if possible, to intensify its devotion to the cause of sound money and tariff reform, opposition to wastefulness and peculation in administering public affairs, and in its advocacy of the lowest tax consistent with good government, and no more government than is absolutely necessary to protect society, maintain individual and vested rights, and assure the free exercise of a sound conscience.

Adolph Ochs, upon purchasing the New York Times in 1896 - via A Tiny Revolution.

Beta Sprint toward enclosed open system?

2011-05-23T10:21:00.004-04:00

Cambridge, MA — The Digital Public Library "of America"(DPLA) Steering Committee is delighted to announce today a Beta Sprint that aims to surface innovations that could play a part in the building of a digital public library. [air quotes added]

Digital Public Library "of America": Data Sprint.
Brief intro by John Palfrey.
Concept Note.
Intellectual Property Policy

Predictable comment: Why "of America"? Why not, in the spirit of truly open systems, drop the nationalizing, the proprietization, geographication, localization, domination? Why not The Digital Library, tout court?

Indeed.

2011-05-19T14:44:00.005-04:00

On Father’s Day three years ago, biologist Jonathan Eisen decided he’d like to republish all his father’s papers. His father, Howard Eisen, a biologist and a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, had published 40-some-odd papers by the time that he died by suicide at age 45. That had been in Febuary 1987, while Jonathan, a sophomore at college, was on the verge of discovering his own love of biology. At the time, virtually all scientific papers were just on paper. Now, of course, everything happens online, and Jonathan, who in addition to researching and teaching also serves as an editor for the open-access, online-only journal PLoS Biology, knows this well. So three years ago, Jonathan decided to reclaim his father’s papers from print limbo and make them freely available online. He wanted to make them part of the scientific record. He also wanted, he says, “to leave a more positive presence” — to ensure his father had a public legacy first and foremost as a scientist.

How hard could it be?

More -

See also Jonathan Eisen's blog.

h/t Alan Herrell.

For writers, not tweeters

2011-05-13T14:21:00.002-04:00

you have to be unafraid of solitude. Not solitude as in no mate or pet or relatives, but that other solitude; the one that makes you retreat from the path your own thoughts want to take because you don't see anybody else already there. Kia.

(This replaces the same post from a day ago which somehow took its own solitary path during the Blogger Black-Out)

Cost-per-action in San Marino

2011-04-22T11:43:00.004-04:00

SCEPSI - European School of Social Imagination
Conference 20-22 May 2011, Republic of San Marino

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM:
PRACTICAL INFORMATION:

Reinventing the autonomy of knowledge is the task of our time. It’s not only a political task. The epistemic foundation of research and learning as autonomous activities is at stake, when dogmas of profit, growth, competition take the lead in the old institutions of production and transmission of knowledge. This is why we are calling students and researchers, artists and scientists and social activists to gather in the first conference of SCEPSI that will take place in San Marino, on 20-22 May 2011.

Protests against the financial aggression and the destruction of the
public school in the European continent are spreading, but we have to
create new institutions, aimed to self organization of cognitive workers
and to the reactivation of social sensibility and imagination. The
conference will be the first act of the activity of the European School of
Social Imagination, that in the next year will organize seminars in San
Marino, and in European cities like Helsinki, London, and Oslo.

The activity of the School starts from four question[s]: 1. How can we think
the consequences to every day life in the face of a possible economic
failure of the European Union? 2. How can art and poetry arouse new
energies and revitalize the social field weakened by precarization and the
alienation of (digital) labour? 3.How can emergent scientific imagination
reconstitute the social body? 4. How can we open up spaces for the
autonomy of knowledge within the process of the marketisation and
capitalisation of the education system?

These questions will be foundational for the emergent curriculum of the first year of seminars and engagements of the European School of Social Imagination. The following is the program of the conference, that may change slightly during the next weeks.

One apparently must go to San Marino to find people talking about something worthwhile. Of course we USians gave up the autonomy of knowledge early on - was it at the time we decided that all speech should be impregnated by advertising? Or was it endemic to our method of escaping history -- making all speech, all public records, merely somebody else's marketing, to which we triumphantly suggest our counter-marketing?

If Europe is concerned for the destruction of the public school, it is now in need of referring to our history.

Ovid in America

2011-04-12T17:53:00.005-04:00

From my good friend Peter D'Epiro, author of The Book of Firsts: 150 World-Changing People and Events from Caesar Augustus to the Internet, comes this fascinating "first":

The first literary work composed in English in what became the US was a translation of the Metamorphoses by George Sandys (1578-1644): Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures. He was treasurer of the Virginia Company for its settlement at Jamestown from 1621 to 1624.

Cover of George Sandys's 1632 edition of Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished

Ezra Pound on the Tea Party

2011-04-12T11:40:00.007-04:00

Guide to Kulchur, (page unavailable) cited in The Celestial Tradition by Demetres Tryphonopoulos.

A Blight from JSTOR

2011-04-11T11:41:00.008-04:00

Here's a book about Ezra Pound, pounder of the flesh of Usura, that you can purchase as a paperback for $17.86 on Amazon:

Here's an academic note on Surette's book that's little more than one page long. You can purchase it from JSTOR for $34:

Hey JSTOR: "It gnaweth the thread and the loom" -

Wanted: Bore

2011-03-09T06:48:00.000-05:00

From McClatchey:

The Bradenton Herald, a McClatchy newspaper in the competitive Tampa Bay market, is seeking a business reporter who embraces watchdog journalism and has strong analytical, writing and multimedia skills. As the economy struggles to recover, this beat is among the most critical – and needs someone who can tell the stories of small businesses, entrepreneurs, key local industries and their efforts to grow again. Two years’ daily reporting experience preferred; experience in business writing is a plus.

Benefit package includes medical, dental, vision, life, disability plans and 401(k) plan. Please send your resume and writing samples to

Executive Editor Joan Krauter at [Click Here to Email Your Resumé]

Chich

2011-02-24T22:20:00.002-05:00

No matter what the conversation chanced to be about, he always contrived to maintain his part in the same. Did the discourse turn upon horse-breeding, upon horse-breeding he happened to be peculiarly well-qualified to speak. Did the company fall to discussing well-bred dogs, at once he had remarks of the most pertinent kind possible to offer. Did the company touch upon a prosecution which had recently been carried out by the Excise Department, instantly he showed that he too was not wholly unacquainted with legal affairs. Did an opinion chance to be expressed concerning billiards, on that subject too he was at least able to avoid committing a blunder. Did a reference occur to virtue, concerning virtue he hastened to deliver himself in a way which brought tears to every eye. Did the subject in hand happen to be the distilling of brandy--well, that was a matter concerning which he had the soundest of knowledge. Did any one happen to mention Customs officials and inspectors, from that moment he expatiated as though he too had been both a minor functionary and a major. Yet a remarkable fact was the circumstance that he always contrived to temper his omniscience with a certain readiness to give way, a certain ability so to keep a rein upon himself that never did his utterances become too loud or too soft, or transcend what was perfectly befitting. In a word, he was always a gentleman of excellent manners, and every official in the place felt pleased when he saw him enter the door. Thus the Governor gave it as his opinion that Chichikov was a man of
excellent intentions; the Public Prosecutor, that he was a good man of business; the Chief of Gendarmery, that he was a man of education; the President of the Local Council, that he was a man of breeding and refinement; and the wife of the Chief of Gendarmery, that his politeness of behaviour was equalled only by his affability of bearing. Nay, even Sobakevitch--who as a rule never spoke well of ANY ONE--said to his lanky wife when, on returning late from the town, he undressed and betook himself to bed by her side: "My dear, this evening, after dining with the Chief of Police, I went on to the Governor's, and met there, among others, a certain Paul Ivanovitch Chichikov, who is a Collegiate Councillor and a very pleasant fellow."
To this his spouse replied "Hm!" and then dealt him a hearty kick in
the ribs. #

Pieties of the Right Stuff dept.

2011-02-06T23:45:00.001-05:00

when Agathocles defeated Carthage, the Carthaginian nobles believed they had displeased the gods by substituting low-born children for their own children. They attempted to make amends by sacrificing 200 children of the best families at once, and in their enthusiasm actually sacrificed 300 children. ~ Moloch.

"His excellency ... used to love tame birds ..."

2011-01-30T21:26:00.004-05:00

Seventy years ago The Master and Margaritacould not conceivably have been published in Stalinist Russia. It pretended to believe that even a fragment surfacing would bring madness upon its maker. But its reception into cult novel, tourist attraction, web fetish, Iron Maiden fodder - did it know of that?

Brief Genealogy of Legal Fiction

2011-01-12T14:43:00.007-05:00

Wikipedia case sensitive?

2010-12-18T09:15:00.002-05:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclades

Hapax blogomena

2010-12-02T21:41:00.003-05:00

Here's a Google result you don't see every day.

The first time I clicked, there were precisely four results: DN, Informant, Informant, and Friendfeed (same as Informant). Now Alternet, and presumably others, at some point. But it remains a singular result: the biggest story of the day, Julian Assange says this and not a single "media" outlet picked it up for hours. Just Informant.

Protection Rackets for Philistines

2010-11-26T12:11:00.002-05:00

Link via wood s lot

In the cool of the day

2010-11-25T18:40:00.003-05:00

The invisible work of reading

2010-11-21T07:01:00.000-05:00

Joan Bakewell wonders where wisdom will come from if the public loses access to libraries and to free reading. Oddly, the availability of this BBC podcast is limited to the next seven days.

Hacking Hacker

2010-11-14T18:36:00.002-05:00

Note: I've not read Hacker, who seems to have many thoughtful approaches to where and whereof philosophy can speak. But I'll quibble with this (found via Zo)

By doing philosophy you come to realise things about the structure of our conceptual scheme that you would never have realised otherwise. Realization is indeed a dawning of knowledge. But the knowledge here is not knowledge of the world we live in. It is knowledge of the structure of our conceptual scheme. It very often looks like “metaphysical knowledge” of reality – as it were knowledge of the scaffolding of the world. But it’s no such thing.

ok.

The world doesn’t have scaffolding.

If the preceding statement is true, then how can you categorically make any claim about what "the world" does or does not have?

Rather, in doing philosophy, we come to realise the character of the grammatical and linguistic scaffolding from which we describe the world, not the scaffolding of the world.

A more careful analysis might find that such a clean and neat separation of res and verba is one thing philosophy teaches us not to take for granted.

When did you last have something to think?

2010-11-07T18:41:00.001-05:00

"God has not died for the white heron...God has not appeared to the birds."

Yeats

more here

Genre definition

2010-11-01T13:46:00.000-04:00

Given that advertising is Speech + Bullshit, why is political advertising legal?

2010-10-18T11:31:00.002-04:00

Open Access Week 2010 from SPARC on Vimeo.

Premiers in St. Pete Tonight

2010-10-12T13:21:00.000-04:00

Grand Hilarious Delusion of the Citizenry

2010-10-07T11:33:00.006-04:00

The splendid Dan Ariely has done another study, along with Michael Norton at Hahvahd, of the amazing BULLSHIT USians believe about wealth distribution in this land (which is your land).

Ariely, author of The Upside of Irrationality and other interesting tomes, is half economist, half ironist in the manner of the Yes Men.

There's a graphic on Ariely's blog showing the actual distribution at the top, the estimates given in the survey by USians broken down by income, vote, and sex, and the "ideals" described by the deluded populace. (Hint: The "ideals" are basically Sweden.)

NPR interview with Norton.

Here's a simplified version from the survey summary made by me. The bar on the left is the wealth held by the top quintile (84%), on the right, the goods of the second highest quintile (11%).

The amassed wealth of the third quintile is 4%, the fourth is .2%, the fifth is .1% (or "nothing" as Norton notes). See the study's "USA" pie below:

The survey, done in 2005, tapped over a million USian respondents.

JSTOR to INDIA: Go to FUCK U

2010-10-05T22:28:00.001-04:00

A disaster of monumental proportions is brewing in Indian academia. For some years now, Indian universities and research centres have had access to a resource called JSTOR, a site that publishes online editions of a wide range of journal articles in a variety of subjects. The initial phase of this access was paid for very generously by the Ford Foundation, with the understanding that after a stipulated period the UGC would take over responsibility for the funding. JSTOR is hugely important for researchers in India because, as a third world country, we can’t afford to regularly visit hard currency countries and stay there for long periods for research. This is still unavoidable for primary and archival material, but the huge cost of consulting secondary material, subscribing to individual journals whether hard copy or online, and waiting while they show up in the post is greatly reduced with a resource like JSTOR. There are some downsides: JSTOR doesn’t carry current stuff, and all the articles are a few years old, but this is more of a problem for the social and physical sciences than the humanities.Even for the sciences, they now need only subscribe to a few key journals, and look up the minor ones on JSTOR.

However, this happy state of affairs has come to an end. Some two weeks ago, JSTOR abruptly became inaccessible. When you log on from JU, it still says “Your access is provided by Jadavpur University”, but when you actually try to read anything, you get an “access denied” message. The service is provided to subscribed IP addresses. The reason for this disruption, we are told, is that the entire country has failed to pay its dues.

More here

Google Award winner thinks educational content should be free

2010-09-24T13:06:00.002-04:00

Idea: Make educational content available online for free.

Project funded: The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization that provides high-quality, free education to anyone, anywhere via an online library of more than 1,600 teaching videos. We are providing $2 million to support the creation of more courses and to enable the Khan Academy to translate their core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages.

How UnJSTOR can u get.

we exist only in order to teach some great lesson

2010-09-11T11:05:00.011-04:00

The other day I was telling a friend about a book by Petr Chaadaev (described as "a major figure in Russian cultural history") and assumed it was still available at the link where I once blogged it. But, like much of the material that at one time was free for all to share, it's now gone, occluded, presumably, behind some mercantile copyright bulwark. Chaadaev's book was sufficiently displeasing to the regime that he was eventually distinguished with the honor of being adjudicated insane.

The portion of the book in which it has found its way into English is excised (along with much else) from Google Books. (We decry control of "free"speech, but support its effects everywhere.)

This "path" the Web is taking is really not so different from the itinerary Chaadaev describes in this fragment of letter 1: "We move through time in such a singular manner that, as we advance, the past is lost to us forever."

Here's what's left, from here:

It is one of the most deplorable traits of our strange civilization that we are still discovering truths that are commonplace even among peoples much less advanced than we. This is because we have never moved in concert with the other peoples. We are not a part of any of the great families of the human race; we are neither of the West nor of the East, and we have not the traditions of either. We stand, as it were, outside of time, the universal education of mankind has not touched us.

Look around you. Everyone seems to have one foot in the air. One would think that we are all in transit. No one has a fixed sphere of existence; there are no proper habits, no rules that govern anything. We do not even have homes; there is nothing to tie us down, nothing that arouses our sympathies and affections, nothing enduring, nothing lasting. Everything passes, flows away, leaving no trace either outside or within us. In our homes, we are like guests; to our families, we are like strangers; and in our cities we seem like nomads, more so than those who wander our steppes, for they are more attached to their deserts than we are to our towns...

Our memories reach back no further than yesterday; we are, as it were, strangers to ourselves. We move through time in such a singular manner that, as we advance, the past is lost to us forever. That is but a natural consequence of a culture that consists entirely of imports and imitation. Among us there is no internal development, no natural progress; new ideas sweep out the old, because they are not derived from the old but tumble down upon us from who knows where. We absorb all our ideas ready-made, and therefore the indelible trace left in the mind by a progressive movement of ideas, which gives it strength, does not shape our intellect. We grow, but we do not mature; we move, but along a crooked path, that is, one that does not lead to the desired goal. We are like children who have not been taught to think for themselves: when they become adults, they have nothing of their their own--all their knowledge is on the surface of their being, their soul is not within them. That is precisely our situation

Peoples, like individuals, are moral beings. Their education takes centuries, as it takes years for that of persons. In a way, one could say that we are an exception among peoples. We are one of those nations, which do not seem to be an integral part of the human race, but exist only in order to teach some great lesson to the world.

Discreet Illusion of Academic Freedom

2010-08-26T23:25:00.001-04:00

The latest JSTOR imbroglio - see here and here for instance - culminates in the wisdom of concealment:

Giving libraries the power to change the default setting such that non-accessible articles remain hidden is now a “number one priority,” see: Inside Higher Ed

McCandless at TED on beautiful data

2010-08-23T12:37:00.002-04:00

The seductive power of visualizing data, beautifully explored by David McCandless. Many great moments - near the end, he touches on the requirements of and desired aesthetic preferences for the visual image - for balance, for symmetry, for beauty - and how simply obeying them can cause a change in thought. To what extent is thinking dependent on images it likes to believe are merely helpful utilitizations? How can we know if the beauty of data usurps truth?

Question about signs

2010-08-11T11:43:00.005-04:00

AKMA remarks on a seemingly hasty and confused NPR piece about "symbols" and evolution:

I’m persuaded that we do better to theorise about meaning on the broader, more prevalent evidence of non-verbal expression and inference.

As AKMA notes, NPR's Alix Spiegel enjoys making huge radio leaps in causality and time without acknowledging that we are leaping. I would merely note that this seems in line with numerous other signs of flimsy, careless, and negligent editorial oversight inside the All Things Considered production effort. Not the first time to wonder if the program should be named Certain Things Adverted To Via Single Source Marketeers, Attention Deficit Disorder, and Punishingly Cute RadioTricks (CTATVSSMADDAPCRT.)

All Things Considered

One problem with the piece is, it mushes various signifying modes into one catchall word, "symbol." An entire field deriving from Pierce and de Saussure in the last century tried to make some headway in sorting out different modes of signification, even as grammar theory and rhetorical analysis looked more closely at the conditions of making meaning, the tricks of arranging signifiers and the tropes that mould, bend, and transfer signification. But hey, this is NPR radio, we're doing science here, not egghead, or even eggcorn,stuff not on the radar of our sponsors.

My question for AKMA is, to what extent he views "non-verbal expression and inference" to be distinct from linguistic entanglement. That is, are we to view verbal language as a subset of a larger realm of signifying powers that may use different sensory and expressive means, but share, at some more basic level, the same structures that produce meaning? Or is it more a matter of other modes of representing meaning that fall completely outside the material, means, and ends of verbal forms and communicative structures?

I ask because while it certainly seems worth saying that the study of meaningful articulations all too frequently remains narrowly concerned with verbal forms of language, it seems equally fair to suggest that in our haste to comprehend all kinds of signs, artifacts, and modes of expression within terms like "symbol," we tend to minimize the role of words, of linguistic structures. We tend to see the verbal element as non-problematic, which might be the same as saying we tend to not see them at all. We overlook our linguistic medium with all its peculiar properties and peculiarities and still not very well understood manners of development in time, we take its apparent transparency for an open window, and leap to conclusions about evidence, truth, objectivity, and so forth with NPR-like ease.

So that's my question to AKMA, who has a longstanding fascination with non-verbal expression, but not just to him -- to you as well, allthingsconsidering reader: If human nature involves making signs, do our modes of expression in all their multifarious glory relate to the verbal order, and if so, how, or do they seem to you to exist free from it?

Hard to find

2010-08-07T11:31:00.006-04:00

Mike, who used to blog frequently as informant38 among other personae, could well be - in fact, is - my candidate for Quartermaster of Microsustainability, if ever we all must go aboard a fragile ship in a dark time. He lives on virtually nothing in a rural area of CA. To get to a networked computer anymore he has to hike, or hitchhike, quite a ways.

This hasn't prevented him from blogging here and here, as well as other places. The top photo of informant38 always clicks through to another photo. The relationships between them are fascinating (often involving flags and pyramids).

Some of Mike's words:

http://furioso.blogspot.com/2006_03_19_archive.html#114305638524847629

http://furioso.blogspot.com/2006_07_16_archive.html#115312613820651069

http://furioso.blogspot.com/2004_04_04_archive.html#108141518144351282

http://furioso.blogspot.com/2003_11_09_archive.html#106854435453499361

Elements of the flag/pyramid juxtapositions can be found here and here.

He uses words, images, sounds, colors, links and does not stop, regardless of how precarious his perch on this world becomes. I used to hear from him fairly often, but now more rarely.

The donate button is here, or here.

Clarification

2010-07-31T17:18:00.001-04:00

"It's not sentimentality that makes me find Breitbart and his methods so loathsome: it's his dishonesty and malice."

A Forbes columnist who has some trouble pinpointing the trouble with Andrew Breitbart gets a comeuppance he'll need to remember. I'd hoped to say more about this, but the day has been more than a little hectic. I can't think of a finer application of Dr. Johnson to a matter of journalistic morality. Do read it.

WikiLeaks or WikiLedes?

2010-07-28T12:44:00.001-04:00

[NYT correspondent Mark] MAZZETTI: Well, as a reporter, you're very rarely confronted with this amount of information, and so it's almost - it's the reverse of the situation you're normally in, which is too little information. Here, we are confronted with such a volume of information that it's hard to make sense of it and it's hard to know how to - which parts to emphasize and which parts not to. NPR transcript

If nothing else, the WikiLeaks exposure should test the claims of journalists and bloggers with regard to the quality of their attention to data.

Journalists still pretend they own the space of creating/reporting news. Bloggers will continue to contend that without intelligent and ethically responsible interpretation of what is reported, the journalistic niche doesn't amount to very much.

An actual journalist would rename WikiLeaks to WikiLedes - because the 92,000 or so documents are so many leads (or ledes) into the complex world of the Afghan war, and this is a relatively small set of documents (the NYT calls it "exhaustive," but probably just means "exhausting").

What Mr. Mazzetti points to as exceptional is in fact the normal case: the actual data out there for any story are potentially infinite. Newsmen deal with digested digests, rarely with the raw. But they forget they are dealing with pre-digested regurgiatives, and think they possess mastery over a certain genuine terrain. They do not.

Wikileaks exposes the abbreviative power of news media. Faced with something like the complexity of the real, Mr. Mazzetti thought he was dealing with something unusual. He was not. The gap between the NYT accounts of Afghanistan before WikiLeaks, and the density of the documents now available is vast. What Mr. Mazzetti and the NYT are looking at is the abyss that is always there in any bit of actuality, but which their customary defenses have always dealt with deftly and obliviously. They'll need a new set of defenses if the leaks keep coming.

The Times had three weeks or more to examine the documents. Others now have more leisure, and might find more there than the Times did. And pursue different inquiries. On Democracy Now, Julian Assange raises a question about the Pentagon's decision to fire up a criminal investigation into the source(s) of the Wikileaks material:

Why is it that an investigation is announced to go into the source, before an investigation is announced to deal with the potentially criminal conduct that is revealed by this material? DN

Wikileaks is lifting two veils: one on the war, the other -- perhaps more significant -- on the unreality of everyday journalism, the fictional, smooth, clear narrative arcs of the Times, NPR, MSNBC, etc.

After cataract surgery, the eyes can be sensitive to light.

Some Stuff on the Menu at Cape Canaveral

2010-07-27T19:52:00.000-04:00

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	Spend the day at the Kennedy Space Center, including having lunch with an honest-to-goodness astronaut*

*We're tempted to go for the sub-prime, beer-bellied Astronaut if it's not too much to ask. With goatee please?

Daniel Schorr

2010-07-25T08:35:00.013-04:00

In memory, the Cronkite of the evening news and the Cronkite of "You Are There" are indistinguishable. The actor and the newsman served the same Muse, the goddess of spectacle, of history acted by men in costumes, monumentalized leaders and dramatic events fraught with consequences. But all this did was turn the drama into History: events appealed as spectacle, but like large historical paintings, they were museum pieces of no living relevance to us.

Daniel Schorr began in the now, which would trigger the memory of some lived moment that refracted the current instance. He'd strive to render both moments, past and present, more intelligible and present. His recollection, rooted in his direct observations and meditated awareness of contexts, transformed Historical Personages into persons for an audience that included Schorr musing to himself.

Schorr was musical, reflective; Cronkite, theatrical, sensational. Cronkite introduced the Beatles in 1963; Schorr delivered a eulogy on Frank Zappa in 1993.

Cronkite dispensed bulletins of News - the Official Version sanctioned by the ("that's the way it is") State. Schorr evoked events steeped in experiences - the burden of the storyteller.

Cronkite retired from CBS with dignified ceremonial auto-monumentality. Cronkite begat ingrate Rather, weepy witness of news as Melodrama. Schorr, fired by CBS for putting journalistic integrity above corporate interest, may have no worthy professional heirs.

Refusing to name source of leak in 1976

/more maybe on this later -/

nobody knows

2010-07-20T23:04:00.003-04:00

Support for public access expands in Congress

Washington, DC – The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Policy, the Census and National Archives announced it will hold a hearing on the issue of public access to federally funded research on Thursday, July 29. The hearing will provide an opportunity for the Committee to hear the perspectives of a broad range of stakeholders on the potential impact of opening up access to the results of the United States’ more than $60 billion annual investment in scientific research.

For more information, contact:
Jennifer McLennan
(202) 296-2296 ext. 121
jennifer [at] arl [dot] org

In brief, knowledge is the property of nobody.

Big Pipe, small beer

2010-07-19T22:40:00.001-04:00

A small footnote to our Big Pipe motif:

Big ISPs usually rely on peered connections to other major ISPs, connections which incur no per-bit cost. As for the cables in the ground, they've been there for years. The equipment back at the headend must be installed once, after which it runs for years. Cable node splits and DOCSIS hardware upgrades are relatively cheap. Requesting one additional bit does not necessarily incur any additional charge to the ISP.

If most Internet costs are fixed (and the National Broadband Plan agrees that they are), and if bandwidth is dirt cheap, what "charges" are heavy Internet users ringing up for ISPs like Time Warner? ...

TWC's revenues from Internet access have soared in the last few years, surging from $2.7 billion in 2006 to $4.5 billion in 2009. Customer numbers have grown, too, from 7.6 million in 2007 to 8.9 million in 2009.

But this growth doesn't translate into higher bandwidth costs for the company; in fact, bandwidth costs have dropped. TWC spent $164 million on data contracts in 2007, but only $132 million in 2009. - Nate Anderson

in your country

2010-07-07T22:48:00.002-04:00

NYT's lobotomy needs a lobotomy

2010-06-28T17:52:00.000-04:00

Turns out it was Time.com and Politico, both well-financed, reputable news media organizations, that blithely stepped over the line and took what was not theirs. (**(&*(

The Intellectual Property thing has apparently gotten even dumber in the world of print journaljism. The above is from David Carr, in the New York Times, accusing news organizations of "stealing" the news.

The simple fact is, the Rolling Stone story was no longer a story about a general. The effects it triggered themselves became front page news - understanding Obama's actions with regard to General MethChrystal required awareness of the story that caused them. The story at that point was itself news.

Only the New York Times would fail to see this. Fail to see that news is inherently public property. Rolling Stone blew it by failing to be first to post its own story (then posted a really lame mark-up), but the Times blows tout court when it confuses actual news events with proprietary reportage about them, because it fails to see that these linguistic entities can indeed bleed "across the line."

Prepare to launch

2010-06-21T11:08:00.000-04:00

"As for Mabuse, it would be impossible to make in the United States: the idea of the superior race, of a race of masters, simply doesn't exist. In Germany, even when you are dead, you must obey, "your corpse must obey." I don't believe there is another people who are as ready to die without knowing why." Fritz Lang: interviews

Man of the Hour

2010-06-17T12:32:00.001-04:00

'shroom de Trop

2010-06-06T22:27:00.003-04:00

The other day a small group of us visited the St. Pete pleasure palace known as the Tropicana, home of the Tampa Bay Rays, razed, eheu, of their diabolical nom de guerre. Concepts of sport, crowd massage, mass media, and the spectacle of fun have evolved. (We don't get out much, and we now know why.)

The indoor ballpark is really more a destination than a place to watch a game. Long before we got there, which was just as the game was starting, large crowds had navigated a complex parking scheme, entered the dome, and spent hours spreading out among a large number of food bins, retail outlets, novelty shops (get a life-sized baseball card of YOU!), more food bins, etc. As at most international airports, all this is at the level you come in on, and marks the yellow brick road you take, up escalators, along endless corridors, to your seats. And as at airports, they are paranoid about YOU. No thermoses filled with water in the arena. All bags are checked. The next Rays bomber could be standing right where you're standing.

The scoreboard one sort of doesn't see at first. The eye is drawn instead to what it thinks is the scoreboard, a giant TV monitor surrounded by Fox News-style info widgets. Lots of insta-data about each player as he comes to bat -- height, college, what he did earlier in the game (complete with visual graphs) mother's middle name, other stats, etc. Every few seconds the large TV screen goes to a commercial break, and all the information vanishes while we are adverted to. For a good portion of the game this was bothersome, as I was always looking across the field to this board to check Outs, Hits, etc. Around the sixth inning I realized there was another scoreboard that didn't just go away, and that it was in fact THE scoreboard. This other thing was just Media flapping itthemselves at us, which is what itthey doesdo best.

It does it by crowdcosseting. People were always being featured on the giant screen, blown up large, as they danced to the music, chanted for their heroes, or did the funny thing that was going to win some exciting something. So the crowd watched as members of itself, writ large, were seen pointing to themselves, writ large. As Fox, Disney, Universal, et al understand quite well, the story is always you, because you will continually attend to you. Media know they can sell beer and food and future events and cotton candy to you while you get your willies off digging you.

All that's missing up there was a giant Twitterized text space.

"C'mon Rays"

"Yeah c'mon you Rays!"

"Evan, I love you!"

"Me too!"

"Sox sux!"

"Me too!"

"Me toooooooooooooooooo!"

This is not to say we didn't enjoy the game. The visibility is good -- odd when high pop-ups hit the lights up there, or nearly scrape the ceiling. So it's a bit much to constantly be prodded to "MAKE NOISE!" at crucial moments, as in the bottom of the 9th, when the Rays were down by 2 and the bats were ominously silent. They were the only thing that was. 40,000 cowbells rang out, along with innumerable incantations, building out of sound a sort of Stimulus Package of Ain't it Grand Energy which, 45,369 people believed, would wake dem bats and blow the White Sox to Obamaland in a puff of Tampa Bay West Wind Witchery.

At this level of crowd prodding, it didn't feel as though I was attending a sporting event. The crowd is there exploring its own features, its resources, its powers. Cosseted by media on one side, forced to see boundaries, in the form of stern looking Protectors of the Field, who got up and faced us between innings, in case the multitude, forgetting where it was, rushed the field, intending to play the game it originally was summoned only to watch, seeing as the spectacle it had paid for as become so intermingled with the watchers thereof as to make it perfectly understandable that it believes its presence is needed, is summoned upon the field of dreams, on the other. The Trop is a magic mushroom; the crowd is Alice, and the boys of summer, they're the animals in a Florida zoo -- part of the somewhat antiquated premise, but, in a roiling media-rich world of prizes, hot cars, food, baubles, Bud, tribes, terrorists and teapartiers and YOU -- no longer entirely where the action is.

autotweet

2010-06-06T21:04:00.000-04:00

crowdedfalafel

Just as your eye cannot see itself, so the media cannot see itself; can't see that it is the malaise it purports to tell us of.

Getting it in Oaxaca

2010-06-04T12:41:00.001-04:00

un poquito

Un Poquito de Tanta Verdad

Worship Touring Halliburton in the Gulf

2010-05-15T17:13:00.001-04:00

From friends who happened to drive through Galveston the other day:

. . . one of the brochures I’d collected had looked pretty interesting: a self-guided tour through an actual oil-drilling rig . . .

While the museum was in a real shallow-water drilling rig, it wasn’t, as I’d imagined, just as it had been when working; instead, it was a self-guided worship tour of the oil-drilling business itself: gadgets and intricate machines each displayed with enormous pride and explanations of how they worked. Among others, there was a display by Halliburton describing how cementing is done—one of the suspects in the recent spill. They claimed, and after this tour I believe it, that deep-water drilling is at the cutting edge of our scientific work—akin, in the complexity of its working, to our putting men on the moon! (Indeed, the divers wear suits very like the space suits our astronauts wore.)

Going through this, as we were, right in the aftermath of a gigantic new “spill” in the gulf, was a schizophrenic experience. I found myself taking pictures of each mention of the cementing process. Since my mechanical store of knowledge is…uh…slim, even the explanations offered on the first two floors of exhibits wasn’t sticking very well; but the third, top, floor was much more comprehensive and thus interesting to me. It was kind of a huge recruiting display, describing all the different kinds of personalities and skills that are needed to run the mammoth business. I was immediately drawn to a large display that reminded me of a horoscope chart. At the top of each column a personality type was described, followed by which of the many kinds of skills it takes to run the industry would be appropriate for such a personality. Bean counters, risk takers, bleeding heart people carers, P.R. types, chefs, etc., etc. In short, it seems that any reasonably intelligent, reasonably well-educated person in the country (the world?) could find employment in the deep-sea drilling industry. If you were working shifts on an actual platform in off hours you’d have access to fitness rooms, a library, a movie theater, and gourmet meals (it sounded like a stay at a resort). If you were an actual go-down-to-the-depths employee you could be making various thousands of dollars a day!!! And wear one of those groovy suits, to boot!

Merdest proposal

2010-05-15T14:54:00.008-04:00

For all Media, Bloggers, Tweeters, etc. When you wish to say "bank" in any financial context, say "bunk."

To wit:

Bunk of America.

Just do it.

1923 od 1924

2010-05-09T21:38:00.000-04:00

link

Workhorse Moyers retires

2010-05-03T22:26:00.005-04:00

Mr. MOYERS: The Carnegie Commission put together a recommendation for what became the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, and it - we attended a meeting at the Office of the Education, the commissioner of education, to talk about it and to see what we could do about it.

The mission of public broadcasting was to create an alternative channel that would be free not only of commercials, but free of commercial values, a broadcasting system that would serve the life of the mind, that would encourage the imagination, that would sponsor the performing arts, documentaries, travel. It was to be an alternative to the commercial broadcasting at that time.

Moyers talking on Fresh Air.

"The Life of the Mind" in USia is bogosity that leads to asshaterie like this.

The University system in the US, the educational system, and the "enlightened" media are equally devoid of genuine critical thinking, or any concept of materialism. Bill Moyers is one of the best critics of USian journalism we have had, but sadly this is not saying much. If there is a difference between the effective critical power of Bill Moyers and that of Mr. Ed, I don't see it.

Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)

2010-05-03T22:08:00.001-04:00

From the ALLIANCE FOR TAXPAYER ACCESS
http://www.taxpayeraccess.org

Washington, DC – The provosts and presidents of 27 major private and public research institutions have voiced their support for the Federal Research Public Access Act in an “Open Letter to the Higher Education Community,” released Friday by the Harvard University Provost. The Act, first introduced in the Senate last year, was introduced in the House of Representatives on April 15. The letter signals expanded support for public access to publicly funded research among the largest research institutions in the U.S.

The letter reads, in part:

“As scholars and university administrators, we are acutely aware that the present system of scholarly communication does not always serve the best interests of our institutions or the general public.

No shit, Sherlock. Got any other bright ideas?

Were you thinking newspaper folks were starting to wise up?

2010-04-30T20:54:00.000-04:00

Narrative Science automates the creation of editorial narratives across a wide range of content verticals. Their technology application requires no human authoring or editing and can be used to generate narratives about any event that produces significant quantitative data (think sports, financial, health, community data). Saridakis saying kthxbye to Gannett

Content automated like your ILECs and ISPs always imagined it: Are Sportswriters Really Necessary?

Title this

2010-04-26T20:18:00.001-04:00

Suggest a name for the list of which Kennesaw, GA is the #1 item:

In 1982 the city passed an ordinance [Sec 34-1a] requiring every head of household to maintain a firearm together with ammunition. It was passed partly in response to a 1981 handgun ban in Morton Grove, Illinois. Kennesaw's law was amended in 1983 to exempt those who conscientiously object to owning a firearm, convicted felons, those who cannot afford a firearm, and those with a mental or physical disability that would prevent them from owning a firearm. WP

Class Consciousness arrives by train

2010-04-25T13:47:00.008-04:00

There's an extraordinary moment in Possessed (1931) when Joan Crawford has just dumped her ambitious but dull suitor, informing him that she's not about to become the distaff side of him in their small town featuring careers at the Acme Paper Box factory.

Crawford is walking away from him when a large dark train pulls in, slowly moving across her path.

Every train window unveils a scene. We are voyeurs over her shoulder as she steals a look at labor and its fruits: Black bartenders in one:

a black maid ironing in another:

a waiter:

A woman in lingerie:

A couple in evening clothes dancing.

At the caboose is Skeets Gallagher, a St. John-like spirit of the train in a tux, drinking champagne. He pours her a glass and tells her, "Only two kinds of people: the ones in and the ones out."

He expresses no interest in her -- he's a boozy, gay or asexual device for getting Crawford from Paperboxville to New York, where she meets Clark Gable and undergoes a metropolitan paideia of the 20th Century USian female. In a wonderful cut, she goes from puzzlement at the menu in a French restaurant to ordering wines in French for a dinner party she and Gable are throwing. Four years have passed: 1928-31.

The marked irreality of the train is very fine. It's all media in one: film, radio, newspapers, television, web, twitter. It is the unveiling of class, romance, and access to power. It's also the locomotive means of moving to the city. Might as well have eyes on its wheels.

I don't know whose idea the train was -- the screenplay was by Lenore J. Coffee and Edgar Selwyn; the film was directed by Clarence Brown, produced by Harry Rapf, Brown and Thalberg. if anyone knows, I'd be curious, tho' it's not hugely important -- no IP rights on allegorical images.

Skeets tells her the only way for a woman to make it in the big city is to "find a rich man to help her, keep a cool head, peek at his pocketbook, and never tell him anything." "Men like to think they're Christopher Columbus discovering America."

True to the traditional bumpkin peasant type, Crawford is disarmingly blunt, telling Gable that it's important that he's rich, because she wouldn't waste her time with him if he weren't.

For a splendid contrast to this MGM heroine, see Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face, Warner Bros.' 1933 study in female ascendance. There Stanwyck is living in a nightmare; when it goes up in flames thanks to her drunken father, she hops a train to New York with a black girlfriend, sleeping with a railroad worker to avoid getting thrown off.

Her education had begun at her father's bar, where one of the customers introduced her to the works of Nietzsche, featuring a large screen shot of the cover of The Will to Power. Neither the seduction of the worker nor Nietzsche made it past the censors even in that pre-code era.

In Possessed, Crawford ultimately saves Gable's political viability (he's a Union League man) by being silent, then by speaking out. In Baby Face, Stanwyck has no mercy on the series of males whom she rides to the top. They pine, lose all compass, and a few of them kill themselves. George Brent's failed suicide brings her around in the end. Darryl F. Zanuck was a writer and producer.

How to make a movie in Florida

2010-04-16T09:59:00.001-04:00

And doing this with no money, I just had a camera, puts you in some pretty interesting situations. I was looking at some footage the other day of when I went to go interview Iggy Pop, and it was pretty funny because I didn’t have a camera person and I was down in Miami and didn’t know anyone. So, I talked to my friend and she said, “Yeah, I know someone who shoots porn, she can do it.” But in the end she couldn’t do it because she was also a repo man and had to repo some cars. She hooked me up with someone else and after he shot it we were driving back in his fancy Mercedes Benz, and he told me I had to give him all my money and my wallet before he gave me my equipment back and let me out of his car. - Yony Leyser.

A pretty good movie at that, screened last night in Sarasota.

ubu Burroughs

More socialism

2010-04-15T22:37:00.001-04:00

Congress takes another stride toward public access to researchApr 15, 2010

Fueling the growing momentum toward openness, transparency, and accessibility to publicly funded information, the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2010 (FRPAA) has been introduced today in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) and a bi-partisan host of co-sponsors. The proposed bill would. . . require federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from funded research no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

And Project Muse and JSTOR?

The irrevolution will be televised

2010-04-13T11:46:00.010-04:00

The Colbert - Assange "interview" is remarkable for its confluence of horror and televisible humor. It offers suppressed information about an apparent war crime, which, moved into the open, is discussed with comedic flair. The revelation involves the deaths of Iraqi citizens, harmed children, chuckling US soldiers. Assange of Wikileaks is allegedly concerned for his personal welfare.

Something seems shared here, in the provocative binding of the release of forbidden knowledge with comedy. At the very least, there's a trust, both in emancipators of repressed realities and in comedy's preference for the vernacular, that bringing something out into the public light of day will be better than keeping it secret. Indeed Colbert riffs on that theme in the segment. For Freud, jokes find socially performable ways to liberate the hostile and the obscene.

One common element between intelligence leaks and laughter is surrender of control. As forbidden speech is uttered, those who wished it to remain unspoken lose their power over it, and over the conditions of ignorance enabled by its suppression. When a comedian climbing a ladder suddenly finds the ladder heading backward to the floor, his situation is similar -- the crash is the explosion of the unforeseeable surprise, the force of the punch line.

Though here, the force derives from the detonation of an artificial stranglehold on what is true. As Zizek has noted:

Truth has the structure of a fiction: what appears in the guise of dreaming, or even daydreaming, is sometimes the truth on whose repression social reality itself is founded.

The rhetorical features of parody -- sober, straight-faced presentation of something too absurd to be real -- are pressed into the service of its inverse: This time, the truth is not a hoax, the tongue-in-cheek presentation strangely melds with the horror of war that is always unfamiliar to the public whose soldiers are waging it somewhere else. In all comic seriousness, it's not unlike an April Fool's jape coming home to roost.

Associative reasoning

2010-04-11T19:11:00.001-04:00

text.

film.

the hazards of incalculable hazards

2010-04-07T00:30:00.002-04:00

Ulrich Beck -

News from JSTOR

2010-04-04T13:14:00.000-04:00

JSTOR gets current, almost, not quite yet, a bit. Is the model changing? If so, why?

First time in print

2010-03-20T11:26:00.004-04:00

The idea I've been beating to death here has found its way into The Atlantic, only sort of reversed:

Derek Thompson offers "7 Ideas That Could Save Online Journalism" . We pass in silence over #'s 1 through 6. Here's #7, as he formulates it:

7) Make Verizon Pay. Think cable. Last, here's an idea that sounds impossible at the moment, but has ancestors in cable: sharing fees with Internet service providers. Basically content providers would band together in groups -- maybe like Journalism Online -- and lobby broadband internet providers like Comcast and Verizon. I see no indication that something like this is possible in the short term, Pew reports that a company called Clickshare believes it can implement a service in which "consumers have an account at one service (such as a news, cable or Internet service provider site) and can be periodically billed for access to information from a plethora of other affiliated content sites."

One would not imagine that Clickshare would see it quite the way we do:

...we who use the Internet think of the Net as both mechanism and mind - pipes and content. We believe that when we've paid our Internet Service Provider, we've done our share. The stuff we find when we connect is what we have already paid for.

Only, the corporate "owners" of the pipes do not see it this way. They make a clear distinction between pipes and content (and then proceed, if they're Verizon or Comcast, to offer miserable excuses for content), and tell us we are only paying for the pipes.

What strikes me in all the discussions, white papers, and bloggery among journalists and commentators is, they apparently buy this hokum -- hook, line, sinker, and mouse turd. Not once have I seen the savvy content gurus suggest that the money we end users intend for content is all being waylaid, ripped off, by the pipe guys. Somewhere back in the day when the pipes were being laid, there was a logical moment when Big Pipe had to think: "What if no one puts any content out there? Then who will use our infrastructure?"

Fortunately for Big Pipe, no content provider apparently ever raised the issue with them, saying, in effect, "That's a nice pipe you've got there - want some content? Let's make a deal."

At this point, the impending doom facing journalism will require Content and Pipes to rethink the current model of content economics. Or, failing such gumption, Content and Pipes will attempt to throw us, the end users, the folks they are allegedly there "for," under the bus.

If we do find ourselves under the bus, it might be necessary to show Large Content and Fat Pipes that indeed, without a model adequate to the economic realities of human users, they are dreaming the phantasmagoria.

the expanding frontier in the United States made for an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear that was ideal for phantasmagoria shows^[11].

A quibble regarding Lola Montes with regard to Sarah Palin

2010-03-19T12:44:00.006-04:00

as perpended by Andrew Sarris, in his last notice of Lola Montes:

In his own cultivated way, Ophüls (1902-1957) proved to be something of a prophet.. . .

As the ever menacing Sarah Palin proves once again that mere mediocrity is no obstacle to gaining a frightening degree of power, the Ophüls vision is timelier than ever. As I watch Ms. Palin in fearful rapport with hordes of hockey moms, I am reminded not so much of Lola Montès herself as of the larger numbers of celebrity-worshippers with proudly limited intellects in our own time threatening to plunge us irrevocably into the abyss.

Sarris, who called Lola Montes the greatest film of all time, does Montes a small disservice here, I think. The issue is not the mediocrity of the character, but the ingenious professional Barnum-esque machine that employs a legendary "liberated woman" for its own mercenary purposes. The film seems to have been misread by many reviewers. For example, one suggests that the circus is staging her memories. Clearly it is staging some idiotic USian scandal sheet notion of what her memories *must be.*

Lola : Ludwig I :: Wagner : Ludwig II (for discussion)

Ophuls' machine is Hollywood, of course. And the magic box of TV, and now the magic manicals of corporate media whatever the form. The object is always the same: take whatever breathes most of life, control it, present it, for a price. Succès de scandale is sacred fire -- Murdoch hopefully will extinguish it by using Palin for TV banalities.

Update: By the way, the film was remastered in 2008:

Open e-missions

2010-03-17T20:27:00.002-04:00

"No one can anticipate all the useful analyses that can be made of data from planetary missions, and so it is important that it be placed in a public archive where anyone can access it." - Ralph Lorenz, a scientist who studies Titan, Saturn's moon, in Titan Unveiled.

Change (or delete) "from planetary missions" and you have a very good reason for open systems. Indeed, it's Popperian (and Sorosian) Reason Itself.

From the much neglected blogroll

2010-03-16T22:24:00.002-04:00

“White-collar area cases, I think, are distinguishable from terrorism or drug crimes, for the primary reason that, often, people are plotting their defense at the same time they're committing their crime. They are smart people who understand that they are crossing the line, and so they are papering the record or having veiled or coded conversations that make it difficult to establish a wrongdoing.” Ted "Taibbi" Kaufman via pas

"It's our democracy: we bought it, we paid for it, and we're going to keep it."

text via Lohmann

Adorno on Comcast

2010-03-12T21:16:00.003-05:00

This seems more than mildly relevant to Comcast's effort to substitute itself for the reality principle:

the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardisation and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system.

And this reaches past relevance to approach prophesy:

The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or of the motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic of the whole sphere, whose individual branches are themselves economically interwoven. All are in such close contact that the extreme concentration of mental forces allows demarcation lines between different firms and technical branches to be ignored.

Both are from The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, (1944), Adorno's chap. 3 of Dialectic of Enlightenment, (h/t to Gifthub). I'm not sure if the extreme concentration is of mental forces, or of demental forces, but the piece seems like actor's notes for this telenovela (and of course this one) in which is illustrated the goosestepping logic of the "ruthless unity" of kelcha:

The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what will happen in politics. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organising, and labelling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are emphasised and extended. The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type. Consumers appear as statistics on research organisation charts, and are divided by income groups into red, green, and blue areas; the technique is that used for any type of propaganda.

Read it, archons of Twitter, and retweet:

There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him.

Ad hominous signs

2010-03-12T10:51:00.001-05:00

Upon hearing that Comcast is once again raising its rates, even as it moves from monopoly of pipes to ownership of content (NBC):

If we are serious as a nation – both public and private sectors – about connecting America;

about leading the world technologically and economically; about ensuring that all Americans have

meaningful access to on-line education, healthcare, and information essential to citizenry, then we

should be very concerned about these ominous signs. Mignon Clyburn, FCC Commish.

freepress:

Brian Roberts.

This is the same guy who recently made the list of the top five “highest-paid, worst-performing” CEOs in the country. That's no exaggeration. Do you know what Roberts makes in a year? $40.8 million. That's more than $100,000 a day . . .

Earlier this week, Comcast announced that it will again raise its rates for Internet access. The company already records a profit margin of 80 percent for this service, charging customers $40 for something that costs just $8 to supply.

==

See: It is risen, and it eats your brain on stale crackers. Also: Big Pipe, passim

Headlines from Marketplace read aloud

2010-03-09T19:46:00.000-05:00

Poor neighbors, go fuck your brown selves.

Students, prepare for serfdom.

Maximizing Broadband can only mean, TV.

Monetizing mortality efficiently.

we do put a dollar value on human life everyday, we just put different dollar values on different human lives.

Big Pipalooza

2010-03-05T12:52:00.001-05:00

Asymmetric Internet Economic Model begins to get so out of whack as to approach infinity at one focus, zero at the other.Or is that a parabola. Or a hyberbola. What ever it is, the nostril takes offense.

Thin sliced thoughts even thinner

2010-03-02T10:25:00.000-05:00

Two footnotes to yesterday's comment on Andrejevic's "Thin Sliced Thoughts" piece:

1. A friend forwarded this Angier piece (in the Times, of course) about filmmaking, pink noise, and the control of attention:

Hollywood filmmakers, whether they know it or not, have become steadily more adroit at shaping basic movie structure to match the pulsatile, half-smooth, half-raggedy way we attend to the world around us. This mounting synchrony between movie pace and the bouncing ball of the mind’s inner eye may help explain why today’s films manage to seize and shackle audience attention so ruthlessly...

She's all, like, gaa, with no awareness of the exploitative potential in the utility of brain scanning efforts discussed by Andrejevic.

2. As regards the very well-described effect of introducing competing narratives into the info-glut, which Andrejevic sums up as:

By multiplying the narratives—and in particular, those narratives that cast uncertainty on one another—the goal is to highlight the absence of any ‘objective’ standard for arbitrating between them.

It should be noted that this strategy has tremendous leverage -- maximal, really -- within a journalistic practice that attempts to present fair and balanced, equally weighted but incompatible judgments (or perspectives) because this sort of cravenly feckless (candyass) approach is precisely what the USian journalistic establishment calls objective.