tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-171902922024-03-07T14:08:56.663-05:00Bazungu BucksAn occasionally updated personal blog by John PowersJohn Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.comBlogger277125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-17751945949601852692013-09-27T01:41:00.000-04:002015-10-23T00:55:27.493-04:00Link MashupFor the last few years I've been doing a link blog called <a href="http://protoslacker.tumblr.com/">Three Good Links</a>. I post short snippets from stuff I've been reading along with a link. Recently I've been feeling a little bit chatty, wanting to draw some connections and make observations about these links. But it doesn't really fit the format of the blog, so I thought to write here today.<br />
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<a href="http://1boringoldman.com/">1 Boring Old Man</a> is a fascinating blog written by a retired psychiatrist. Over the past few years he's written about the state of psychiatry today and reflections about the profession over his career.</div>
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I'll more or less follow my link format at my other blog, so here's a snippet from a recent post:</div>
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<ul style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #222222; line-height: 19.5px; list-style: none inside; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<li class="type-text mb-id mb-zoom-in" data-id="5243daad8e83c24d85d81a71" data-type="text" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; line-height: 1.6em; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; outline: 0px; overflow: auto; padding: 0px 0px 3px; text-align: left; width: 415px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This falsely inflated market doesn’t have the steep lead-in of a financial bubble, and that graph up there just keeps on rising and taking a bigger and bigger piece of the pie. And back to Psycritic’s question, it doesn’t burst or pop like financial bubbles. It seems to grow unaffected by those usual market forces economists so love to talk about. What do you call a market like that – a falsely inflated market that is unopposed by any apparent forces to hold it in bounds? I personally think it’s called a <strong style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">Monopoly </strong>, and I don’t think we’ll be able to do anything about it until we come to grips with what that means. I wish it were a financial bubble, but it’s not. The medical analogy for an economic <strong style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">Monopoly </strong>is cancer – something that grows without restraint until it destroys its host. That’s a real possibility with the <strong style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">Healthcare Industr</strong><strong style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">y</strong>.</span></li>
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<a href="http://1boringoldman.com/index.php/2013/09/25/a-bubble/">Mickey</a> at <i>1 Boring Old Man</i>. a bubble?<br />
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Ivan Illich wrote about <a href="http://toolsforconviviality.digress.it/radical-monopoly/">radical monopoly</a>. There's a pretty good chance that Mickey has read a bit of Ivan Illich's oeuvre, but I think he's making a point about monopolies in a more conventional sense. In 1976 Illich wrote a book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Medical-Nemesis-The-Expropriation-Health/dp/0394712455">Medical Nemesis</a>. The book is no longer in print and rarely cited, nevertheless the critique is penetrating and Illich's observations are quite relevant if we locate the problem as monopoly. He writes:<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; line-height: 20.796875px;">Ordinary monopolies corner the market;9 radical monopolies disable people from doing or making things on their own.10 The commercial monopoly restricts the flow of commodities; the more insidious social monopoly paralyzes the output of nonmarketable use-values.11 Radical monopolies impinge still further on freedom and independence. They impose a society-wide substitution of commodities for use-values by reshaping the milieu and by "appropriating" those of its general characteristics which have enabled people so far to cope on their own. Intensive education turns autodidacts into unemployables, intensive agriculture destroys the subsistence farmer, and the deployment of police undermines the community's self-control. The malignant spread of medicine has comparable results: it turns mutual care and self-medication into misdemeanors or felonies. Just as clinical iatrogenesis becomes medically incurable when it reaches a critical intensity and then can be reversed only by a decline of the enterprise, so can social iatrogenesis be reversed only by political action that retrenches professional dominance.</span> </span></blockquote>
Ivan Illich in <i>Medical Nemesis</i>.<br />
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danah boyd has a post thoughtfully responding to the news about a California school district hiring a firm to monitor student's online behavior. She asks some pertinent questions:<br />
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<li class="type-text mb-id mb-zoom-in" data-id="5244881e8e83c2655d5aede1" data-type="text" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; outline: 0px; overflow: auto; padding: 0px 0px 3px; text-align: left; width: 415px;">So here’s the question that underlies any discussion of monitoring: how do we leverage the visibility of online content to see and hear youth in a healthy way? How do we use the technologies that we have to protect them rather than focusing on punishing them? We shouldn’t ignore youth who are using social media to voice their pain in the hopes that someone who cares might stumble across their pleas.</li>
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<a href="http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2013/09/24/monitoring-youth.html">danah boyd </a>at <i>apophenia</i>. <span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">eyes on the street or creepy surveillance?</span><br />
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</span> This summer there was a FBI "<a href="http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/what_happened_to_rescued_teen_victims_of_sex-trafficking_at_least_one_is_ja/">rescue</a>" of 105 sexually exploited children resulting in the arrests of 159 alleged pimps. I put scare quotes around the word rescue because at least one of the minors in my state of Pennsylvania was charged with prostitution and jailed! This punitive approach is good example of what danah boyd urges we avoid.<br />
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I was heartened by a piece in <i>Indian Country Today </i>by a<i> </i>former FBI special agent, Walter Lamar:<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Some states, like Minnesota, South Dakota and Oregon, are working to change that by knitting together networks of providers to help these exploited children. Minnesota’s <a href="http://www.theadvocatesforhumanrights.org/safe_harbors_initiative.html" style="border: 0px; line-height: 16px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Safe Harbor Initiative</a> <span style="line-height: 16px;">increases the opportunities for young people to walk in off the street, a method called “No Wrong Door.” Under new laws in these states, children who have been prostituted cannot be charged with juvenile delinquency and are instead treated as victims of a crime.</span></span></blockquote>
<a href="http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/09/24/native-girls-should-not-be-sale-151407">Walter Lamar</a> in <i>Indian Country Today</i>. <span style="line-height: 16px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Native School Girls Should Not Be for Sale on the Street</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 16px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I'm very much in favor of this approach, but I want to highlight Lamar's use of "knitting together networks" as a way of tying these varied links together.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 16px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span> <span style="line-height: 16px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mickey points to monopoly as the cause of the steep increase in medical costs in the USA. The ordinary solution for monopoly is to introduce greater competition. Heaven's knows that policy makers have tried, but such policies haven't slowed the increases. Illich's construct of radical monopoly maybe one reason why not. Certainly the punitive approach helping kids in trouble is informed by radical monopoly too. </span></span><br />
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</span></span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">Radical monopolies in </span></span><span style="line-height: 16px;">psychiatry</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 16px;"> -and the healthcare industry more generally-- preclude, or at least make it difficult to incorporate networks of people outside the system in care. A similar dynamic is involved when law enforcement charge sexually exploited children with crimes. There's an internal logic to it that makes no sense at all. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 16px;"><br />
</span></span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">Weaving networks together offers offers a more sensible approach, but radical monopolies are "radical" precisely because they exclude the </span></span><span style="line-height: 16px;">competencies of ordinary people. Some worthwhile initiatives like Safe Harbor may emerge on the edges, but without the critique of radical monopoly, it's difficult for me to see such initiatives moving to the center. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 16px;"> </span></span><br />
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John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-23614898784618683892012-01-03T18:00:00.000-05:002012-01-03T20:20:45.369-05:00Middle Fingers in the Digital Age<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" mozallowfullscreen="" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/29509963?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="400"></iframe><br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/29509963">Serra Swinging Plates</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user4491818">Daily Serving</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
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I don't really have a clue,but I try to figure stuff out. Stuff like copyright, stuff like obscenity, and stuff like identity. You know, that stuff isn't easy.<br />
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Last night hanging out online, and mostly in the evenings I've got my Facebook page open, Juxtapoz linked to an article, <a href="http://www.juxtapoz.com/Current/richard-serras-qsequenceq-at-cantor-arts-center-stanford">Richard Serra's "Sequence" at Cantor Arts Center, Sanford</a>. The article is really a shorter version of an article at Daily Serving, a best of 2011 article, revisiting and essay by Rob Marks first published in September <a href="http://dailyserving.com/2011/12/best-of-2011/#more-21969">Recovering Site and Mind: Richard Serra’s Sequence Arrives at Stanford</a>. I didn't click through to the article last night, but I did watch the videos.<br />
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Little boys often like trucks and heavy equipment, along with guns, puppy dog tails and stuff like that. Watching these videos sure brought the little boy out in me. I watched them with rapt attention, and identifying with the workers in hard hats, wondering what it would be like to be one of them.<br />
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Something good that can be said about the city of Pittsburgh is there are a great number of public sculptures. There's a Richard Serra sculpture <i>Carnegie</i> that's very well known, because it's big and at a prominent intersection in town. I decided to search for a picture of the piece online, so I entered "Carnegie Museum of Art Richard Serra" into Google. I was surprised to discover at the <a href="http://www.cmoa.org/searchcollections/details.aspx?item=1025523">link</a> that an image of the work was not available due to copyright. Of course for those of you who use Google for search, you know that prominent in the results is a link to Google Images, so a picture was just a click away.<br />
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Facebook is going to a new timeline format for profiles there. I haven't jumped on that particular bandwagon, hoping to put off the effort involved. But moving to the new profile is causing consternation among the people I know on Facebook. Most of us probably have stuff on our Facebook we probably ought to have deleted, but haven't bothered to reasoning: "Who could find it anyway?" The trouble with the new timeline is that stuff becomes easier to find. Then again, just what's stuff I don't want people to find? I'm not sure really? Something I keep hearing in re the frustration with the Facebook timeline is the intention to pack it up and head over to Google+, Google's social networking software.<br />
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I never know what to post to my Google+ <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/116197923267067672519/posts">profile</a>. So far, what I've posted seems pretty boring. I've never given any overall thought to things I "like" in Google's "+1" jargon, but I do click that +1 button here and there on the Internet. So far the running tally of +1's seems somewhat useful to me. If nothing else, another place to look for stuff I think I ought to be able to find but am not finding right at the moment. News travels in a network, and so I had heard about M.G. Siegler's <a href="http://parislemon.com/post/14907295522/dear-google?dupe=true?9d8d4198">middle finger run-in</a> with Google+. Profiles showing extended middle fingers are not allowed.<br />
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Mostly I try to behave, I think most of us do. Sure, some of the impulse is to avoid getting in trouble, but primarily people just want to be good because we are good folks; kind to children and old people and stuff like that. No, really, we want to be fair and kind. Copyright is a matter of law, and as a matter of law is backed up with coercion and the very real threats of legal consequences. It's not that most of us don't think about that, but mainly when it comes to copyright we think in terms of fairness rather than in terms of law. Nowadays it's very easy to share copies of things, to share copies of copyrighted works. How easy it is to share makes negotiating matters of copyright both as a matter of fairness and as a matter of law not so easy.<br />
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I started posting posting to a Tumblr <a href="http://protoslacker.tumblr.com/">blog</a> last spring. Tumblr is a site that makes collecting stuff you encounter online quite easy. Actually Tumblr makes publishing on the Internet quite easy in general. Tumblr makes it very easy to reblog posts. Something good about that is attribution becomes somewhat automatic. Among my creative friends Tumblr is viewed as copyright violation machine and they're leery about putting anything they make on Tumblr. Once copyrighted material is improperly posted, the ease of re-blogging makes it quite a difficult matter to rectify. <br />
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My Tumblr blog is really quite simply a link blog. I post three links to stuff I've read during the day. I read multiple articles online most every day. But to make the links useful to me, if for nobody else, I copy a brief snippet of text from the articles and post it with a link. Finding a sentence or few which can somehow stand alone and still make a bit of sense, turns out to be harder than I expected at first. I'm quoting from articles, but not everything I post is really a quotation which fits with Tumblr's template for posting quotations. <br />
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Stowe Boyd wrote a piece for his Tumblr blog, <a href="http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/12895684087/we-need-a-manual-of-style-for-tumblr">We Need a Manual of Style for Tumblr</a>. Boyd makes some very good points about attribution at Tumblr. I thought I was being pretty good with the way I was aggregating content there. I was only copying brief bits of published work for education and discussion purposes and I was providing a link. Still, Boyd's article was enough to make me see that the way I was offering links wasn't enough attribution for the Tumblr ecosystem where sharing is so easy. I've tried to improve on what I was doing. It's probably not especially good style as far as style manuals go--there isn't so far as I know a Tumblr Manual of Style--but it is a good-faith attempt not only to properly attribute work but to make sure that attribution survives recopying. <br />
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I want to post a picture of Richard Serra's sculpture <i>Carnegie</i> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/raquelcamargo/5440019933/">here</a>. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSUwt3qqf2174XjDIb52VamA84L-kn3XWrXD0kDbhpcnoxASepvIX3mFCEcjHDlWVQb9CUUncRxBnJEHiQ6q2hcm3ZUOzEr3aYQV23SsJ1Dz_fqvAsqTER43Qctd2pG1P73GPu/s1600/5440019933_4d675ece1e.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSUwt3qqf2174XjDIb52VamA84L-kn3XWrXD0kDbhpcnoxASepvIX3mFCEcjHDlWVQb9CUUncRxBnJEHiQ6q2hcm3ZUOzEr3aYQV23SsJ1Dz_fqvAsqTER43Qctd2pG1P73GPu/s400/5440019933_4d675ece1e.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>The license for the photo is <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/">Some Rights Reserved</a> by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/raquelcamargo/">Raquel Camargo</a>. I haven't asked Raquel Camargo if I could use the photo and asking is always good form. I am happy that she's made the photo available. But I feel a little creepy about using the photo because of the people in it, especially the guy in the blue jacket in this photograph. I see from other photos in Carmargo's Flickr pictures the same fellow shows up. He looks like a cool guy, and I don't mean to take his privacy away.<br />
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It turns out there are a couple of very good photographs of Serra's work on Flickr which do not show extraneous people in them. There's a very good article about the photographers who to those pictures at the Indianapolis Museum of Art Web site, <a href="http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2011/04/25/why-you-should-know-hanneorla/">Why You Should Know Hanneorla</a>. Hanneorla are a husband and wife team and have published over 40,000 photographs at Flickr, many of them of art works in museums around the world. I love their work. But their pictures are available by license with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images">Getty Images</a>. Getty Images is well-known on the Internet for purveying <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt">FUD</a>. Getty Images doesn't serve take down notices when a unlicensed work is found on a Web page, they simple send a bill and let bill collectors handle the rest. <br />
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Some of my creative friends know about and use Creative Commons licenses for some of their work. Most of my creative friends think CC causes more harm than good. I'm not trying to make money from content I put up online, so CC makes sense for me, but I do understand the reservations my friends have. Copyright is hard and Creative Commons licenses are no panacea. But it's hard to think that Getty Images licensing work at Flickr is an unmitigated good either. <br />
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The Carnegie Museum of Art owns Richard Serra's work <i>Carnegie</i>. It's one of the most important pieces of sculpture in their collection. It's a site-specific work and so the relationship of the sculpture to the museum building is an integral part of the sculpture's visual meaning. One of Hanneorla's <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/hanneorla/2950626498/">photos</a> captures this relationship very well. Nice work! But it's interesting to note that the Carnegie Museum allows photographers to take pictures of Serra's work, but Richard Serra's assertion of copyright prevents the Carnegie Museum of Art from showing a photograph of the work on the museum Web site, or making an image of the work which the museum owns available to scholars and teachers without a lengthy contractual process. I'm not sure how Hanneorla has addressed Serra's copyright on the work, except that they offer to take down any image they're asked to. I am uncertain whether they know that their arrangement with Getty Images means that same courtesy isn't extended to people who use their work without license from Getty Images.<br />
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I forget what atrocity was being protested one day when I was visiting New York City, but something was being protested and I found myself in the middle of it. I'm a lousy protester, I'm shy and timid. The protest was in front of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building. I wasn't adding anything to the protest, and frankly when I saw a line of police cars arrive on the scene, I thought the better of being involved at all. So I headed around to the back of the building. I was curious because I knew that in the plaza one of Richard Serra's most famous sculptures <i>Tilted Arc</i> had once stood. One of the judges who worked in the building did not like <i>Tilted Arc</i> and after its installation set about getting it removed. The judge literally made a <a href="http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/tilted_arc.htm">Federal case</a> about it. <br />
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<i>Tilted Arc</i> is no more, it wasn't there when I went to see the place it had once stood. Issues of copyright were featured in the trial over the destruction of the work. I only have a vague idea about all of this, but I do get that ideas are of the essence. Because I'd been to a place where Richard Serra's <i>Tilted Arc</i> was removed, and sort of understood what that piece meant because of the hullabaloo over it's removal, I had a little appreciation for why Serra asserts copyright claims preventing the Carnegie from making photographs of his sculpture <i>Carnegie</i> available. Still, the prohibition of photographs of it over copyright claims mostly seems ridiculous to me.<br />
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Getty Images is privately owned. An incredibly large number of photographs are under license by Getty Images,including a surprising number of pictures on Flickr, notably most of Hanneorla's pictures. The ownership of Getty Images was acquired by the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman in 2008. <br />
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Here in the USA the 2012 presidential elections are heating up. The Republican front-runner is Mitt Romeny. Mitt Romney is a very wealthy man. He has been reticent in releasing information about concerning his vast assets. When pressed for perfunctory information his campaign responded by demanding that president Obama release his <a href="http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/12/mitt-romneys-son-obama-should-release-birth-certificate-grades.php">birth certificate and grades</a>. Inside the USA the response is an obvious racist "dog whistle." Anyhow the fortune that Romney has amassed comes from his partnership in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bain_Capital">Bain Capital</a> a private equity firm with over $65 billion in management. <br />
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Romeny's partnership in the firm is notable in that it was structured so that the young Mr. Romeny did not put any of his own money at risk or into the pot. Nice work, if you can get it. Bain Capital is involved with some of the most odious firms in the USA. The other day <a href="http://agonist.org/numerian/20120102/peak_money_arrives">Numerian</a> at The Agonist blog made a very good point:<br />
<blockquote>Wherever you see compound growth rates of 5% - 10% per annum in the US economy, you are sure to see active federal government subsidies for that industry.</blockquote>Maybe my using the word "odious" was a bit harsh, perhaps safer to say that Romeny's firm has sought out industries which depend on government subsidies. Oh hell, I do think <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_Corporation_of_America">Hospital Corporation of America</a> and C<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_Channel_Communications">lear Channel Communications</a> odious. <br />
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Intellectual Property is one of the chief ways that our government delivers financial subsidies to corporations.<br />
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I do go on. Ownership, intellectual property, government coercion, copyright, fairness, and decency, these are all hard to sort out and to stay on the side of the angels about. <br />
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One last link is to an article by Randy Kenny in The New York Times, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/arts/design/richard-prince-lawsuit-focuses-on-limits-of-appropriation.html?pagewanted=all">Apropos Appropriation</a> (NYT has a modified paywall). Kenny writes about a lawsuit against artist Richard Prince over copyright violations. I found it a very interesting and well-made article. Among the comments posted to it, several of them accuse Kenny of being biased in favor of copyright violation. I didn't get that impression myself, but then again, I'm of the opinion that issues around copyright are difficult. It's not something which matters only to successful artists, these issues touch all of us. <br />
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And pretty much, that's the point of this post. But there is also the matter of M.G. Siegler's picture showing an extended digit. <a href="http://gigaom.com/2012/01/03/hey-google-you-cant-have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too/">Matthew Igram</a> has some smart things to say about that. I'm not so smart as Igram. Still I'd hate to loose the use of my middle finger, especially in times like these, times of <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3629">The assoholcracy</a>. So while I'm all for being nice, on balance Google banning Sieger's picture seems a dick move to me. These issues are hard, man.<br />
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<br />John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-87863688280072414802011-12-01T16:13:00.001-05:002011-12-02T00:48:08.729-05:00Hard Drive Replacement<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPRonx_2ZboinOKLhns-llWgx6hhXhIWalXT-1kyL2yHQpQiPYaIE4vIUYnQhstDinIPcSOKjwVRjaQf81bs7jpACExjjGEUKkLLDNJTzlli0RO1vB2uUbEq85zi5_PBXEHm0w/s1600/cof_orange_hex1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="285" width="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPRonx_2ZboinOKLhns-llWgx6hhXhIWalXT-1kyL2yHQpQiPYaIE4vIUYnQhstDinIPcSOKjwVRjaQf81bs7jpACExjjGEUKkLLDNJTzlli0RO1vB2uUbEq85zi5_PBXEHm0w/s400/cof_orange_hex1.png" /></a></div><br />
Recently my computer hard drive went bad. Well, or at least that's what I think, I'm not at all sure how good my diagnosis was. In any case I ordered a new hard drive and installed it.<br />
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Computers are complicated and I don't know much about them. And what I know about using computers is what I've picked up on my own and listening to what other people say online. Many people get to watch other people use computers, but I've had few opportunities on that score. <br />
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Anyhow I feel dumb when it comes to computers.<br />
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Along with the hard drive I ordered a SATA/IDE to USB adapter. Using this cable allowed me to recover files from my "broken" hard drive. This also allowed me to look at the files on broken older computers I have. As I say, my grasp of technical aspects of computing is pretty feeble, but this whole undertaking made me reflect on my experience of discovering the Internet from circa 1998 or 1999.<br />
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The orange-colored logo is for <a href="http://http://www.ubuntu.com/">Ubuntu</a>, a flavor of the free and open source operating system called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux">Linux</a>. The current computer I'm using runs Ubuntu. Previously I had computers using various Microsoft operating systems. Were I still using a MS operating system, it's unlikely I would have attempted to change my hard drive.<br />
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We live on top of a hill and over the years lightening strikes have reeked havoc on electronic appliances and our telephones. My last computer didn't work after a lightening strike. As chance would have it, I was preoccupied with other matters and didn't really attempt to fix the computer. A friend lent me a Dell Mini netbook computer which happened to be running Ubuntu. After using it for about a month, I was convinced that I wanted a desktop computer running Linux. <br />
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The netbook seemed surprisingly capable to me, so I felt like I didn't need to go in for power when looking for a computer. In fact lower electricity usage seemed like a positive attribute. I've got expensive tastes and little money. That combination in my case often leads to muddled purchasing decisions. Sometimes I pay too much for too little. One of the first computers I looked at was System 76 <a href="http://www.system76.com/desktops/model/meerkat">Meerkat</a> Ion NetTop. I looked at plenty of alternatives and debated the matter internally for a couple of weeks. I ended up getting a bare bones model of the Meerkat, half-way thinking the only reason was because I saw it first. As far as specs go, there were cheaper alternatives, but I've been very happy with it.<br />
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Using computers running Microsoft operating systems over the years had brought a bunch of problems and going about solving them always was frustrating. Oddly the memory of those frustrations kept me from adopting Linux earlier. I thought you had to know a lot about computers to use Linux. Any of you who tried to figure out Microsoft issues using their six-digit entitled articles are sure that knowing a lot about computers is a daunting undertaking. Some of the Linux articles are no less daunting, but there is also a rich ecosystem of peer to peer information sharing that comes with adopting Linux. I've found it's been much easier to find out stuff about Linux than Microsoft. <br />
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A friend of mine in an incredible act of generosity bought me a computer and an AOL Internet connection in November of 1998--it could have been 1999. I had used computers before that, but mostly as a sort of glorified typewriter. I had also read about the Internet, but nothing prepared me for my real encounter with the Internet. I recall having dinner around my birthday around this time and being bleary-eyed having stayed up late the night before wallowing down some rabbit hole online. I asked at the table if others had found the Internet so addicting. A friend told me at first yes, "but the novelty wears off." It didn't wear off in my case.<br />
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Everyone always says to "back up" your computer. It seems easier said than done. None of my multiple backups to CD using software that came with computers running Microsoft software ever worked. When I suspected the hard drive on my latest computer was going I tried to backup to online storage, but came up with errors which made those attempts failures too. I haven't gotten to the bottom of those issues yet, but with Linux I think I can. Anyhow I haven't had, and don't have now a system for doing back ups. Over the years I have put photographs onto CDs. So running my old hard drive.on the bench was a bit like opening time capsules.<br />
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Mostly what I've found on my hard drives are a digital version of disorderly shelves of papers and magazines which I have in my own room. I've got to learn to be better about throwing stuff out.<br />
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I was intrigued to look at my documents on my ten-year old computer. The first thing I noticed was several file folders of letters. I used to write a lot more letters than I do today; letters I would print and send in the mail. The second thing was the absence of a Photo file folder. I was sure that I had photos saved. I did, but discovered them in various files, for example among the saved correspondence in folders marked with friends' names. I was surprised to see how much my use of the computer then was premised on analogy to the world of paper, and it's astonishing to think about how many of the files there I actually printed out to read back then.<br />
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When lightening struck I took that computer around to repair shops. The thing weighs easily four times what my current computer weighs. The repair shops all told me it was better to think in terms of replacing the computer. The primary reason for that was upgrading to Windows XP as an operating system. <br />
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I went ahead and bought a new computer, opting for as much power as I could afford at the expense of installed software. I got a shop-built computer with only the Windows XP operating system installed. Within seconds of connecting the computer to the Internet to download Microsoft updates the computer was infected by the Blaster worm. Drat! I stayed up all night trying to fix that. There was some problem with the computer that showed up a month or so later. The technicians told me it was a virus, but it was not. I had it in the shop for a couple of week-long repairs, which apparently had only consisted of their running anti-virus software. The third time I returned to the shop they sent it away and whatever electrical problem was resolved. The whole repair sequence took over a month.<br />
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XP was a great improvement over Windows 98. And since I didn't have Microsoft Office I used Open Office instead. That was my first introduction to FOSS software. I used a proprietary email client software which doesn't seem to be around anymore, although <a href="http://www.chaossoftware.com/index.aspx">Chaos Software</a> is still around. The main selling-point to me was it kept the contact list in a document file so was very hard for malware designed for Microsoft's email client which send out emails from the address book .<br />
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The main impression from looking around the documents on that hard drive is how my thinking had shifted from the analogous world of paper and print to a digital view. My saved photos are all in a single file. I'd purchased a digital camera so there are lots of photos too. There's still a file of "Letters to the Editor" but most were sent online anyway. I no longer saved email in friend's files, just let the email software save them. There is music on this drive, mostly it's copies from my CDs, so there's nothing I've been missing, but I was using the computer for music listening whereas I hadn't been before. <br />
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The Internet has changed the way I attend to music quite a lot. It's strange that I haven't gotten the knack of making mixes to burn to CD as so many of my friends have. I still like to make mix tapes on cassette, but nobody is interested in those anymore. CDs seem a clunky way to share music, it's the lists that matter most in sharing nowadays. It just seems more natural to share online than with a CD. <br />
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While it's clear that this transition to a digital view happened before getting a DSL instead of dial-up Internet connection,the shift to faster Internet cemented it.<br />
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There are many good reasons that people might want a computer running Apple's OS X operating system or one of Microsoft's operating systems. The big reason, of course, is that they want to run a proprietary piece of software or service which requires one of those operating systems. But for many people almost everything they want a computer for doesn't require proprietary software installed on the computer. That's hard for many people to believe, but it's certainly been my experience. <br />
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The years of using Microsoft products certainly left a bad taste in my mouth, and I know I'm not alone in that feeling. Recently several of my friends have gone to Macs for precisely this reason. For one friend the Apple Store was a big factor in her decision, as she can make an appointment to have questions answered for a year. Apple products have always been too expensive for me to consider, but I don't lust after them. The walled garden makes me skittish. Even if I had lots of money I'd use Linux now. It's silly to think too much about what one would do with lots of money, I'm very happy with the computer I have. <br />
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When my operating system didn't boot, I simply plugged a flash drive with the operating system on it into a USB port. I was able to check out the hard drive that way. Even for people using MS or Mac having an Linux operating system on a flash drive can be handy. When I replaced the hard drive I simply plugged the flash drive back into the USB and installed the operating system. Once my computer was up and running, I attached the SATA/IDE to USB adapter to the old hard drive and was able to copy my home file to the new drive. It all was quite easy, and something I'd never attempted to do if I were running a computer with a Microsoft OS. I didn't have to worry about entering streams on numbers as a Microsoft ID. Or that one of Microsoft hidden rules would come into play, for example, since the hard drive was replaced Microsoft might decide I was trying to install the operating system on another computer. And I didn't have to worry about encountering an endless loop of Microsoft demanding I insert CDs--my computer doesn't even have an optical drive. I didn't have to worry about Microsoft breaking my stuff. <br />
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As I look back over the ten or so years I've been online, I feel very grateful for the many people and ideas the technology has has allowed me to connect with. Now that I like the Internet so much, it's easier to pay attention to threats to the whole ecosystem. A root problem is that so many people are dumb about computers like me. Using a Linux operating system on my home computer has not been a hardship, to the contrary it's been a relief. Open source software is a key reason for the Internet we have and key to protecting the Internet. There's little chance that I'll ever become computer smart. But in all likelihood I'll get smarter and I think most of the rest of us will too. Using Linux over the past year or so has made me smarter. It's a small step, but one many others can take too. <br />
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<br />John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-34559752621547542732011-11-05T01:19:00.000-04:002011-11-05T01:35:46.633-04:00Koowall<!--[if lte IE 8]><br />
<iframe id="koowall"
src="http://koowall.com/soul-music?iframe=1&demo=1&height=300&width=400&wagon=0"
style="width:400px;height:300px;position:relative;
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<p>soul music</p></iframe><br />
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type="text/html"
data="http://koowall.com/soul-music?iframe=1&demo=1&height=300&width=400&wagon=0"
style="width:400px;height:300px;position:relative; padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px;"
title="Koowall"> <p>soul music</p></object><br />
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<a href="http://koowall.com/">Koowall</a> is a new online site that I like. I'm in love with the idea of online collaboration. As it turns out reality is quite different from my imagination of it. For example I think wikis are wonderful for collaboration, but over the years I haven't been successful in convincing anyone or any group to contribute to a wiki I've made--I've made plenty. I'm not sure what creeps people out about wikis. <br />
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As sort of a negative example of how collaboration is hard to master, I'd point to my bad habit of "blogging" on other people's blogs in their comments. I'm not too hard on myself about that because I think we're all trying to figure out what sorts of customs make sense for online communication. And I'm surely not alone in wanting to collaborate online.<br />
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A friend asked me a while back what the easiest way was to put up some links and resources to a workshop she was presenting. I told her that <a href="http://www.tumblr.com/">Tumblr</a> and <a href="https://posterous.com/">Posterous</a> were super easy. I was pretty sure that was true, but at the time I hadn't actually used either of them. So I tried them out just to make sure. <br />
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Tumblr uses a Dashboard, which is a little like the newsfeed at Facebook and a little like the Twitter feed. I thought to get a handle about what Tumblr was like I needed to have a Tumblr blog and subscribe to a few Tumblr blogs to see what it's about. Without thinking much I thought to post three links. Setting up a blog is incredibly easy, at least if you don't try to customize things. Honeslty in fifteen minutes I'd set up a blog and provided my first three links. Here's a link to my blog <a href="http://protoslacker.tumblr.com/">Three Good Links</a>. <br />
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My blog is solo, but my experience of Tumblr is through the dashboard so the experience of Tumblr feels quite social and collaborative. Part of the success of it as a platform is how easy it is to control your space. I don't have to contend with jerks like me leaving long and ponderous comments on my blog. But another reason it's so successful is it provides easy ways to engage with other Tumblrs through the dashboard.<br />
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At Facebook, well, I'll use myself as an example, I put up some political stuff. As it turns out people disagree. It's funny how strongly I react when someone disagrees with me on my Facebook page: fiercely. There are lots of places online where fierce arguments are appropriate. For example arguments in Facebook groups might be quite acceptable, and arguments on Twitter seem so to. Of course everywhere arguments are acceptable only to a point. But I don't think I'm alone in not wanting arguments to go on too long on my Facebook page. Part of the reason for that is what I put up is something of a personal profile. People can look at my links, find them interesting or boring, still it's something of a profile of me that I want to maintain a higher degree of control than in other settings. Tumblr makes this sort of control pretty easy without shutting down channels for communication.<br />
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Koowall is more than a social bookmarking site, but it has that capacity. They call it a "Collective Jamming platform." I think it has that potential. When I first found the site I contributed to a few Koowalls and made a few Koowalls myself. I tried to choose subjects for the Koowalls I made that were of general interest so others might contribute to them. Musical genres seemed a safe bet. The first widget is Soul Music, I think you may be able to click the arrows to see more of the wall. (<b>Update</b> Yes indeed, you can scroll on the wall by clicking the arrows. And clicking on "Shout Here" will take you to the site.<br />
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I love soul music. While I have posted mostly older songs, I had it in mind that younger people would post Neo-Soul. At least that was what I was hoping. The trouble with the platform is that in most cases people seem to treat the Koowalls as the possession of someone--that the Soul Music Koowall is mine. The good manners was the opposite problem from what I expected. I expected the walls might be like certain telephone poles which get plastered with every damn thing and with a slight intention of vandalism.<br />
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The Koowalls that show collaboration from many people seem mostly ones from conferences. I've seen pictures where the Koowalls are being projected on to real walls in physical space where people are congregating. That's very cool.<br />
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I made a Koowall that seemed silly enough that I thought it would engage some collaborators. I named it Creative Hairstyles. It seems to have garnered so little attention to have disappeared. But it still can be found by searching "hairstyles." <br />
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data="http://koowall.com/creative-hairstyles?iframe=1&demo=1&height=300&width=400&wagon=0"
style="width:400px;height:300px;position:relative; padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px;"
title="Koowall"> <p>creative hairstyles</p></object><br />
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My Monster Music Blog wall has had a couple of posts by others and is up front and easy to find. But I'm not sure what will spark mass collaboration there. Perhaps when more people sign up that will happen. I anticipate that when people do start posting on walls, when the spark light a fire, then there will be some epic battles of wills. I don't really look forward to that, but think the social rules for online sites mostly come about from an organic process where a few people testing the limits are important.<br />
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Tumblr isn't perfect. There's Spam, which I'll hasten to offer Tumblr does address. But it is impressive how the developers embedded a few technical barriers to keep bickering to a minimum. <br />
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The social aspects of online social networking sites are not simple. It's nice to see that various approaches to making online social engagement possible. I think Koowall has some kinks, but is a useful new tool.John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-29612322940172540242011-10-27T01:57:00.000-04:002011-10-27T01:57:02.472-04:00Think DifferentSometimes I wonder why my thinking and writing always rambles so, and often tries to connect things that probably don't belong together. It's probably a symptom of undiagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder an my extremely undisciplined character. I like blogs because they don't matter very much. I can't feel too bad about rambling on and on here when with a click of the mouse or tap of a finger the post can disappear for the reader.<br />
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While I am writing this post and the previous post because some friends were talking about ideas and because I was invited in on the conversation online, the fact of the matter is I doubt my friends will read any of this. <br />
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The discussion focuses on a particular neighborhood in Pittsburgh, and so what they're interested in are specific responses. Meanwhile my thinking veers off to bigger picture concerns. And in my last post I mentioned other friends who don't live in the same neighborhood this conversation is about. Everyone involved in these distinct conversations knows one another, but I'm obscuring their names as posting on the blog is public.<br />
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Dubos">René Dubos</a> is an author of the popular Baby Boomer maxim:<br />
<blockquote>Think globally, act locally.</blockquote>Part of the reason for going off onto the subject of Occupy! is to think globally. From what I've been told the discussion about a neighborhood me is really about trying to respond to the very hard economic circumstances that are especially acute among young adults living there. Because nobody involved in these discussions is flush with money the attention turns to alternative economic schemes. Globally, at least so far as Occupy! is global, one of the messages of the movement is the current economic arrangements aren't working out so good.<br />
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Here are two links that probably don't belong together, and which are far afield from the neighborhood discussion, but about Occupy Wall Street: First Matt Taibbi <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/owss-beef-wall-street-isnt-winning-its-cheating-20111025">Wall Street Isn't Winning – It's Cheating</a>. And second Slavoj Žižek <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/slavoj-zizek/nobody-has-to-be-vile">Nobody has to be vile</a>. Taibbi nails the popular sentiment in the piece. Loads and loads of people are feed up with the cheating. Žižek's piece where he talks about "liberal communists" rubs more people the wrong way, even those down with the Occupy! movements. <br />
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Žižek reproduces Olivier Malnuit 's he liberal communist’s ten commandments. The slogan of Occupy! is "<i>We are the 99%</i>." "Liberal communists" are probably in the ranks of the 1% yet still enjoy broad support. Žižek singles out George Soros and Bill Gates as perfect exemplars of liberal communist. It would be easy to find many who'll praise their good works. Žižek will have none of that approbation. I'm not terribly consistent so am inclined to support good works, and less inclined to single Soros and Gates out as enemies. But I appreciate his caution about their views. <br />
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In my last post I suggested that bubbling up in conversations with my friends is a realization that we've not so much facing problems to be solved as faced with a predicament we somehow need to respond to.<br />
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I'm bemused in conversations that responses to me would seem to imply that my interlocutors think me a Marxist. I'm far too lazy to be a Marxist, or even an acknowledged leftist. My friends probably know that and are just arguing from a kind of template. Noam Chomsky is a leftist many Americans love to hate, of course many other Americans love him. Love him or hate him it's difficult not to pause with his <a href="http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/09/201192514364490977.html">observation</a>: <br />
<blockquote>Systemic risk in the financial system can be remedied by the taxpayer, but no one will come to the rescue if the environment is destroyed. That it must be destroyed is close to an institutional imperative. Business leaders who are conducting propaganda campaigns to convince the population that anthropogenic global warming is a liberal hoax understand full well how grave is the threat, but they must maximize short-term profit and market share. If they don’t, someone else will.</blockquote>We're heading into an off-year election in early November. I hard watch TV or listen to the radio, but I feel beseiged by elections ads by Clean Coal<a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/and-another-one-takedown-hall-shame-peabody-energy">™</a> urging citizens to resit "Obama's EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)." The ads want to protect antiquated electric power plants from necessary upgrades as well as to keep the depletion of Marcellus Shale gas fracking operations unfettered. <br />
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Take a musical interlude and watch John Prine perform <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDCsc3CU5ww">Paradise</a> if you care too.<br />
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I'm not really sure, but I suspect that my reaction to these ads is not so different from many. I know I'm complicit in exactly conundrum business leaders face: "If I don't someone else will." I'm sure anthropogenic global warming is no hoax and the consequences of it boggle my mind.<br />
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The trouble with Bill Gates and George Soros isn't them so much as their hubris that solutions to big problems are right around the corner. I'm also filled with righteous indignation about the cheating by financial titans, but I'm much less convinced by the prevalent consensus Taibbi suggests that everything would be alright without all the cheating. <br />
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Thinking about a particular neighborhood it's patently obvious that the solutions to big global problems are going to be found. Instead local responses can make things a little better rather than less. But thinking globally is necessary to figure out what sorts of responses are desirable and possible. And local actions can be and ought to be actively engaged with others acting locally in their own communities.<br />
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As usual I veered off with a bunch of useless words. Starting out, before setting anything down, I thought to juxtapose two links. One to a wiki page by <a href="http://synaesmedia.net/">Phil Jones</a> on <a href="http://www.nooranch.com/synaesmedia/wiki/wiki.cgi?NetoCracy">NetoCracy</a>. Thinking about theories of networks is a sort of global thinking that's important and relevant. But I rather quickly find my thinking going around in circles about the subject, so it's not surprising not to get around to it this time. The other link is to the <a href="http://ghanathinktank.org/">Ghana Think Tank</a>. That one seems worth a few words.<br />
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The Ghana Think Tank may be a bit artsy, but it's not a joke. One reason I encourage my friends to try to make friends with Africans online and to pay attention to news happening in Africa is that I think there are ways people in the West can be of service to them. But the other side of collaborations is that African people are coming up with all sorts of innovative responses to living in these interesting times and there's so much to learn and copy from them. The Ghana Think Tank isn't limited to Ghana but rather is a world-wide network of think tanks.<br />
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It probably busts a hole in my harping about the distinction between problems and predicaments, but the way the Ghana Think Tank solicits Western problems for the think tanks to address is quite genius. <br />
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The participants that I know of engaged in the discussion about neighborhood responses are Boomers and GenXers. But central to the discussion is the condition of the GenY folks in the neighborhood. I notice that in responding to a question about accessibly and reading that the Think Tank of Incarcerated Boys weighed in. The conversation my friends are having would certainly be enhanced by finding out what the GenY neighbors think. Of course one way to go about it is to ask them. The Ghana Think Tank provides a model for soliciting concerns of a particular group--in this case affluent Westerners. But perhaps the better fit is to take the model of networks of think tanks as an example for collaboration. I'm not sure how to go about convincing groups to start think tanks. The conversation between my friends seems a spontaneous formation of a think tank--not that they know it yet.<br />
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I Know of a perfect spot to set up something like the Ghana Think Tank's <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ghanathinktank/6252401452/">custom trailer</a>. I would suggest a duct taped <a href="http://hexayurt.com/">hexayurt</a>. I don't think it would be too difficult to connect with hexayurt enthusiasts to get one made. It would be nice to have as a way to engage with other neighborhood think tanks around the city. I'm sure there are discussions going on in every neighborhood, probably nobody's calling themselves a thinktank yet. But I suspect there's a good pattern involved in naming these discussion groups as such.<br />
<br />John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-67425674711332859372011-10-26T01:23:00.001-04:002011-10-26T01:23:31.071-04:00Community ThinkingI really haven't gotten the hang of Google+ Mostly the way I've been using it so far is to send links to individual people, an attempt to share links in a fairly innocuousness way. So there's hardly anything in my public stream. However the other day I reblogged a link from Howard Rheingold to <a href="http://spacebank.org/index_en.html">spacebank</a>. It was Howard Rheingold's tag that caught my attention:<blockquote>Don't hate banks, become the bank.</blockquote>A friend responded saying that he'd been talking with friends about his neighborhood community and the link was barking up the same tree.<br />
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He gave me just enough encouragement for me to try to put together a few thoughts and a few links. Of course I'm so spacey that's easier said than done!<br />
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I was having dinner with another group of friends the other day and the subject of Occupy Wall Street came up. I was very surprised how negative my three friends were. One of them was down on it because she thought it was turning off--scaring--somewhat liberal professionals like her brother. As chance would have it, I had an opportunity to spend some time with her brother planting spring bulbs in his mother's garden yesterday. I was curious about what he thought and got him talking about it. One of the reasons I was so interested to hear his views is there's about ten years difference between us. I'm firmly in the Baby Boomer generation, and he's in Gen X. While Occupy! is a multi-generation movement, Gen Y seems to be getting most of the credit or blame for it. The names for generations are a bit fishy, indeed the whole construct of generations seems suspect, but painting with a broad brush there's something to it.<br />
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My fellow Baby-Boomer discomfort over Occupy Wall Street seems more her own than what her brother thinks, although there's discomfort all around. In any case the issues of Social Security and Medicare are beginning to have great salience for us Boomers. Most of the plans to "reform" Social Security and Medicare are premised on a generational divide and conquer pretext: <i>Boomers will get theirs and screw the rest</i>. But most Boomers aren't so far removed from Gen X to think we don't care about them. And having lived through so many years, it's hard to escape that Gen X has been dealt a bad hand. <a href="http://www.emptyage.com/post/11591863916/generation-x-doesnt-want-to-hear-it">Generation X Doesn’t Want to Hear It</a> is an eloquent lament and has a epic comment thread. So if Boomers and Gen X can find common cause, the best hope for divide and conquer is to gang up on Gen Y. Alas, this seems all too prevalent and gets my knickers in a twist. Perhaps the more obvious coalition is between Gen X and Gen Y against us Boomers, and that's frightening.<br />
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I scared myself in my conversation with friends because I swore like a drunken sailor. One of the messages of Occupy! is that the economic system which only benefits the 1% isn't working out so well for the rest of the 99%. That seems glaringly obvious to me, and the tenor of the conversation seemed to be along the lines that protesting isn't going to do a damn thing. So I found myself saying the F-word or variations about every other word in polite company. I know that's no way to win hearts and minds! I managed not to say much at all to my friend's brother and listened. Strange that he found me convincing in our conversation about Occupy Wall Street!<br />
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Early in September I had been ranting to one of the other friends at dinner about the <a href="http://www.tarsandsaction.org/">Keystone xl Pipeline protests</a>. What had me wigged out that evening was the largest civil disobedience action in front of the White House since the Vietnam War protests had garnered practically no press. My friend hadn't heard about it and quipped that she was terribly out of touch with the news. But I've know my friend since college and knew that she buys both the New York Times and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and reads them every day. That seemed a winning point to make about the discouraging the absence of coverage. My friend also had not heard about the Alberta Tar Sands. I told her that if she did nothing else to do a Google Image search for <a href="http://www.tarsandsaction.org/www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=hp&biw=1351&bih=724&q=alberta+tar+sands&gbv=2&oq=alberta+tar+sands&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=6425l10439l0l10950l17l10l0l0l0l0l0l0ll0l0">Alberta Tar Sands</a>.<br />
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Anyhow at the more recent dinner, between my profanity strewn ranting, my friend pointed out that she had done some research about oil sands. Another friend interjected that nothing is gonna make a big difference in our lifetimes. But in the context of other stuff we had been talking about at dinner, especially concerning some children he's close to, I think this line of argument seemed weak even to him.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSCWiMvvKQg7qEzKZVw3QI8Z8ZH4dVChKcxLHPBZzwGKm0V5WsSyKel-tsygRL1BNJDiZ82CnI0HmS9XO8O6KfjGyFxycux1D2yYLmaABRyOs2qKmdU4RAYGZjEebujE9ZhKU0/s1600/Templars-of-Earth1-150x150.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="150" width="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSCWiMvvKQg7qEzKZVw3QI8Z8ZH4dVChKcxLHPBZzwGKm0V5WsSyKel-tsygRL1BNJDiZ82CnI0HmS9XO8O6KfjGyFxycux1D2yYLmaABRyOs2qKmdU4RAYGZjEebujE9ZhKU0/s200/Templars-of-Earth1-150x150.png" /></a></div><br />
Vinay Gupta got some pushback for his post <a href="http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/templars-of-earth-2831">Templars of Earth</a> but there was something of the message of the Templars of Earth oath which came up in our dinner conversation when my friend mentioned the tar sands. Here's the oath:<blockquote>I understand and accept fully that the human race is harming the natural world by driving species to extinction, releasing long-lived pollutants, changing the climate and poisoning nature.<br />
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I understand and accept fully that the human race makes many suffer horribly and die in war, famine, injustice, poverty and oppression, and that we are not choosing to provide a good life for all of humanity.<br />
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I understand and fully accept that my own efforts appear unequal to the task of changing these facts.<br />
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I swear by the bones of the earth, the roots of the mountains to always treat those who understand and accept fully these Three Truths with dignity and respect, myself included.</blockquote>Out of habit, I'm tempted to add the coda: <i>We're fucked</i>. The problem with that is profanity is disrespectful. I've got to mind my words better.<br />
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John Micheal Greer makes a very useful distinction between <a href="http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2006/08/problems-and-predicaments.html">Problems and Predicaments</a>. It seems what happened in our dinner conversation with all the contentiousness about Occupy! was thinking in terms of problems, but once the subject of oil sands was broached we made a turn towards predicaments. Now most of my friends are proudly not slackers like me. They don't like to think about predicaments. They go to work to solve problems and do the best they can. It seems to feel as if that should be enough. A common taunt directed at the Occupiers is: Get a Job! Still, sometimes most of us grok there's a gap; Here's Greer: <blockquote>The difference is that a problem calls for a solution; the only question is whether one can be found and made to work, and once this is done, the problem is solved. A predicament, by contrast, has no solution. Faced with a predicament, people come up with responses. Those responses may succeed, they may fail, or they may fall somewhere in between, but none of them “solves” the predicament, in the sense that none of them makes it go away.<br />
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My friend talking with his friends about their community are probably talking in some sort of hybrid mode between problems and predicaments. They all know it's a problem that so many young people not only can't find work, but have little chance to. It's a problem that so many dwellings in the neighborhood are abandoned and decrepit. There's even a sense there's a solution along the lines of putting the unemployed to work on the dilapidated structures. Alas, the devil is in the details. And it's when we begin tumbling around in those damned details that solutions begin to seem remote and alternative responses more promising. Indeed as community members the heart of the discussion isn't so much how to solve problems, but how to respond constructively in these dire circumstances we're facing.<br />
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Among the damned details--ha and I said I'd watch my mouth--is money. Besides the point, the Flying Lizard's rendition of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ooF27ABwmg">Money</a> is compelling. Yeah, money is such a strange topic. Bazungu Bucks was a lame attempt to create a special purpose alternative currency. While the experiment didn't work in any way, shape or form, it did pique my interests about alternative currencies. I do think that alternative currencies can be appropriate in many situations. As strange as alternative currencies may seem, good old money is seeming strange these days too. <br />
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Julian Assange says Wikileaks is starved for cash. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/world/europe/blocks-on-wikileaks-donations-may-force-its-end-julian-assange-warns.html">Here's a link</a> to a New York Times article about that. The article of course is subject to the Times's wimpy paywall. You can't give money to Wikileaks without having the banks do it for you and the banks refuse. Back with the legislative arguments about banking reform, Dick Durbin in a fit of candor said: <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/29/dick-durbin-banks-frankly_n_193010.html">Frankly, the banks own the place</a>. Meaning the government is hamstrung to regulate them, but it rather holds for the Wikileaks financial woes too. People want to give Wikileaks money, but the banks tell them they may not. It's a bit obscure, and perhaps far afield, but Louisiana has made it essentially illegal to sell secondhand items in the state using cash. The law requires sellers accept payment only through banks. Old assumptions about legal tender are falling by the way. Increasingly in order to pay for some good or service or to give money away, we're being told that first we must ask a bank: "Mother may I?" Like they own the place!<br />
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Well, the sorts of responses my friends are imagining for their community are the sorts of things one can be reasonably sure that banks will say "No!" to. That negative answer stops thinking in terms of solving problems dead, but has the advantage of opening up a range of responses if instead we're trying to respond to a predicament.<br />
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I have more to say but I've blathered on too long as it is, so I'll put it to rest now and will write some more tomorrow or next.<br />
<br />John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-3747597435982598292011-09-28T23:30:00.000-04:002011-10-04T22:43:15.999-04:00Internet Identity<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwj7brI64jFv7Ue2K0k7ESGL4lIZUsC2W4gtMWie6BxI5_PTsJtWBidHzOiY8LQbosxaplQlcO6Ib4i5IYshWM2pR0qax9emmbPYk0AFU1eQhvab4hwUXNsl4kR5qbhPlqLj4O/s1600/koowall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwj7brI64jFv7Ue2K0k7ESGL4lIZUsC2W4gtMWie6BxI5_PTsJtWBidHzOiY8LQbosxaplQlcO6Ib4i5IYshWM2pR0qax9emmbPYk0AFU1eQhvab4hwUXNsl4kR5qbhPlqLj4O/s400/koowall.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Sometimes it seems to me that "identity" is over-rated. At least when it comes to filling out those online forms which say, "Tell us about yourself" I'm at a loss to know what to put down. I rather admire young digital natives encountered online who seem to know what sort of performance online will say a little something true about them. It used to be that women and girls were the ones who knew what to do in front of a camera lens, that is, had a sense in advance what the picture would look like and what they could do to look good in it. Nowadays this sort of knowledge seems much more widespread. And it seems much more noticeable that I don't get it.<br />
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When commenting at blogs I often leave the address for this blog. The thought behind it is so a person could get a glimpse of my identity. I'm afraid the messages this blog leaves about me is an identity crisis, especially so because I update so infrequently these days.<br />
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I have meant to get around to posting here. One reason was to try out Blogger's new interface. Holy smokes! The first thing I notice is the blog stats, which I've managed to ignore over the course of blogging here. I was surprised to discover people land on the pages. I wonder why? I guess I'll have a look at that feature later.<br />
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Another reason I've wanted to post is because of Google+ and the new additions to Facebook. Both of these places are calling themselves "identity services." Apparently there's an algorithm to say what I have such a hard time saying: Who am I?<br />
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Algorithms are powerful, witness Google. Ha, Google has turned 13 which seems an impossibly short amount of time for something which seems so necessary I would have thought it's always been around. When I go to Youtube for a song, I always look for the suggestions because almost always find something remarkable. Still, I'm lacking enough imagination to think an algorithm will really do a good job telling others who I am. <br />
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Nowadays when first going to a new Website we're often encouraged to "Sign in with Facebook" or to sign up with an email. Whether or not Google or Facebook are good at serving up our identities, it's certainly true they hold the keys to lots of places online we'd like to hang out and participate. And if my imagination isn't so good about how well these services will do in re my identity online, it's not at all hard for me to worry about what would happen if Facebook and Google decide to "disappear" me. The consequence seems not limited to Google and Facebook, but rather extends to the many sites which they hold the keys for me.<br />
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For years I've been reading <a href="http://scripting.com/">Dave Winer</a> and other tech luminaries who warn about corporate silos online. I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to technology. I could see the point being made, but was pretty much unwilling to do anything about it, even too lazy to worry. I rather like walled gardens. Over the years I've put stuff up that's nowhere to be found anymore. It is true in a way that the Internet doesn't forget, that nothing which is put up is ever completely lost. The warning back in the old days in school, "That will go on your permanent record!" has got more weight these days with so much stored in digital files online. Still there's lots of writing of mine posted online which I wouldn't mind a copy of, but its retrieval beyond me now. So stuff does get lost, lots and lots of stuff. <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-09/27/the-deleted-city">Mark Brown</a> points out about Geocities:<blockquote>Within months of announcing the site's closure Yahoo had evicted its tenants and bulldozed more than 38 million user-built homes.</blockquote>Digital archaeology is a burgeoning field.<br />
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Barely computer literate, it still seems to me I ought to pay more attention to the ways to keep the Internet a distributed system. I like open source software, even though my contribution to it hasn't gone beyond using it. Likewise I haven't set up a node with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(software)">Diaspora</a> but I did sign up for it tonight. It will probably take me a long time to find some utility for it. Terry Handcock's article in Free Software Magazine, <a href="http://http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columms/why_you_should_join_diaspora_now_your_freedom_depends_it#">Why You Should Join Diaspora Now, Like Your Freedom Depends On It</a> convinced me it was a good idea to <a href="https://joindiaspora.com/">sign up</a>.<br />
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Meanwhile I've been busy putting my stuff up into silos. I've got a link-blog on Tumblr called <a href="http://protoslacker.tumblr.com/">Three Good Links</a>. It really consists of me copying quotes and links I put on <a href="http://readon.ly/">readon.ly</a> a neat service I was worried about disappearing one day. I figured that Tumblr probably had a greater likelihood of being around for a while. Tumblr's search function isn't anywhere as good as search on my bookmarking service <a href="http://pinboard.in/">Pinboard</a>. I copied my bookmarks from <a href="http://www.delicious.com/">Delicious</a> when it leaked that Yahoo was trying to sell it. To my surprise Yahoo did manage to sell Delicious. Not only did they manage to sell it but Chad Hurley and Steve Chen the founders of Youtube <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/apr/27/youtube-founders-buy-delicious">bought</a> it! I'm really happy that they saw the potential of Delicious. I'm so lazy that I haven't begun to save bookmarks on Delicious again. But I do check in to see where things are headed over there.<br />
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My bookmarks at Pinboard are a mess. I really am never quite sure what I will want to find again one of these days, so I liberally save bookmarks to the place thinking possibly one day I might want to find the page again. Wow, it's a big help to me. Pinboard's funny tagline is "social bookmarking for introverts." It really is a strong and fast service. But the extroverted bit about Delicious is a strength, at least a part of it that interests me. What my Tumblr blog experiment has shown me is that there really is something to the idea of online curation. Ideally I'd like to more or less dump bookmarks on Pinboard and then curate them at Delicious. <br />
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A friend recently started a Website where he talks about music called <a href="http://musicasaurus.com/index.html">Musicasaurus</a>. Every two weeks he puts up a playlist with great commentary. As an unauthorized activity I've been taking his playlists and matching them as best I can to videos at Youtube. You can see my <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/Afrowig?feature=mhee#p/p">playlists</a> there if you're interested. I don't think my friend approves, but I've asked him point blank and he hasn't told me not to do it. Something I would do if he approved was to add the tag "Musicasaurus" but that seems his so I don't. Anyhow there's no worry because most of the playlists have exactly zero views. I started out doing this just as a way to hear my friend's playlists. But the addition of video to the music adds something and makes the list different. Even though nobody else is enjoying it, it still seems like a worthwhile activity, an activity that adds some little bit to the common good.<br />
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The photo is a screenshot of a wall at <a href="http://koowall.com/">Koowall</a>. That particular wall is the Monster Music Blog wall. I don't have any music blogs in my RSS feeds, but I do run across links to pieces at music blogs. And lately when I do I've put a link to the blog over on the Monster Music Blog wall. So far there are almost 150 links to a wide variety of music blogs. The idea of Koowall is people can add text, photos, and videos to walls. Each entry is tagged and there are buttons to send a link to the particular entry to Facebook or a notice via email. The idea is that people who've signed up for Koowall can add content to the various walls and support (like) various entries on the walls. It seems a pretty cool way of sharing and encouraging social production. So far I don't see much sharing, and it doesn't appear to me that unregistered users can see the walls. For all of that the sort of curation I do at Koowall seems worthwhile. I look forward to more people sharing. If anyone wants an invitation send me an message by email and I send you one.<br />
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The point of this long ramble is it appears those in the know think that online identity is the big thing. But it seems to me that people sharing, peer to peer production is what seems more important to me. Many of the online silos do facilitate P2P interactions and I use them enthusiastically. But the recent focus on identity over what people produce online is a pretty clear signal that my interests and the interest of large corporations aren't perfectly aligned. It's not that I don't think their algorithms capture a glimpse of my identity. Rather it's that I don't want, and can't really imagine, my identity limited to their algorithms. I guess that means I'll have to start paying a little to support more open and distributed platforms. <br />
John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-53181069407582639442011-08-01T23:34:00.001-04:002011-08-02T16:58:39.539-04:00What Did You Listen to Today?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu0bLxvwp3eUdMEJmqVgdyLp0P2RDpSulfk6sUwN4LDCCg_htt9cXginAU9bg_DyMHBXzByAu8mwlAusMQhFKUptVVTdCaMjRvnolUpEl91ofcnltPkIpoh0nD8Q5LepNl0bJp/s1600/Artists%252BUnited%252BAgainst%252BApartheid%252Bsuncity.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="319" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu0bLxvwp3eUdMEJmqVgdyLp0P2RDpSulfk6sUwN4LDCCg_htt9cXginAU9bg_DyMHBXzByAu8mwlAusMQhFKUptVVTdCaMjRvnolUpEl91ofcnltPkIpoh0nD8Q5LepNl0bJp/s320/Artists%252BUnited%252BAgainst%252BApartheid%252Bsuncity.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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<blockquote>I was posting at an online forum on a thread <i>"What did you listen to today?"</i>. I afraid it was something I did, like posting pictures like this, anyhow the account got suspended. So my online sand castles got washed away. I didn't save all the posts, but did save a few. I thought to post some of them here.<br />
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Aside from reformatting them into HTML from BB formatting, I'm a bit curious about what stuff I said about myself there I'm leery about saying here. Ha, these posts seem innocuous enough.</blockquote><br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joYTCwNMdq8">Let Me See Your ID</a> (YouTube)<br />
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Scott-Heron">Gil Scott Heron</a> passed away May 27th and so lots of people have been posting remembrances of him, but today saw this song posted from the Artist United Against Apartheid <i>Sun City</i> album. I've never been cool, my copy of this is on a cassette tape. The whole project never really caught fire with the national imagination. Steven Van Zandt founded <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artists_United_Against_Apartheid">Artists Against Apartheid</a> and I think some people who listened to the record were looking for an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Street_Band">E Street Band</a> kind of vibe and then wondered what was up with all the Rap. I never really listened to this album with others much, but this track is one I listened to over and over. <br />
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I liked to make mix tapes for my own amusement and kept trying to fit this track in mixes and I don't think I really was ever successful, not the least of the reasons was I probably only ever had like 50 albums or something. This talk about cassettes makes me think about the time of music scarcity. It's very nice that music is so available today and it makes it hard to imagine what it was like when it was so much more scarce; like when there were only 3 TV channels. One of the cassette tapes I had though was <i>Sun City</i> and I think because of that, and maybe also because of hearing <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm7p-RLFg2I">The Specials</a> <i>Free Nelson Mandela</i> I very distinctly remember where I was the minute I heard the news that F.W. de Klerk had announced that Nelson Mandela was to be released from prison. It was one of those "pinch yourself" moments where the news was too hard to believe.<br />
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I had only heard of Gil Scott Heron from many years earlier with his piece <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6OASOH_66A">The Revolution Will Not Be Televised</a>. I can't place where I first heard that, my brain searches way back to 1970 when I was in high school, but I really wonder if that's right. I can't figure out how I would have heard it--you can be sure it wasn't on the radio in Charlotte, North Carolina at the time. Then my mind forwards to about 1974 when I was in college, which makes more sense cause that's when the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGaoXAwl9kw">version with a band</a> behind it was released. Then zooming in to a bar in East Liberty, Pennsylvania in about 1976. It's possible it was on the Juke Box, but I'm suspicious of my memory. I know I'd heard <i>The Revolution Will Not Be Televised</i> but honestly don't remember when and figuring out where and how doesn't really add up to me. <br />
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What I take from my memory that I heard Gil Scott Heron is that obscurity doesn't mean no influence. Gil Scott Heron wasn't obscure, just not played in the mass media. Yet I heard <i>The Revolution Won't Be Televised</i> and noticed. Even if what we do is as small as a bee sting, a bee sting isn't nothing, a bee sting is noticed.<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiVFfOOm_GI">Trouble Everyday</a> (YouTube)<br />
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My previous post made me think of mushy memories and subversive record albums. I don't remember when I first heard <i>Freak Out!</i> my mind places me in a particular location probably in 1969, but I'm not too sure. However I do have a distinct memory of when I first saw the Album. It was 1967 in the Woolworths in Greenville, South Carolina. I noticed it because it was hung high up along with other "blue" records. <a href="http://bazungubucks.blogspot.com/2006/03/rose-colored-glasses-rose-colored.html">Here's</a> a blog post I wrote about that album and my high school days back in 2006.John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-42910023682326412412011-07-25T22:54:00.000-04:002011-07-25T22:54:53.797-04:00Social Media<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEind62IBXKPK1EVIiFE8fmm50NHvhJ1BXM3G-lDwlCRf_9Ufyy35jtXZxEhsBIsafgcUtPw51jIxKDM4f3om9VDef4bJ7bzPbaZWoxbJwJpmBRUMb2vtlOcs4eYOWXs91u9wihp/s1600/800px-2191_-_McKees_Rocks_Bridge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEind62IBXKPK1EVIiFE8fmm50NHvhJ1BXM3G-lDwlCRf_9Ufyy35jtXZxEhsBIsafgcUtPw51jIxKDM4f3om9VDef4bJ7bzPbaZWoxbJwJpmBRUMb2vtlOcs4eYOWXs91u9wihp/s400/800px-2191_-_McKees_Rocks_Bridge.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Yikes! It's been a long time since I posted anything here. And you guessed it, what I have in mind is talking about that. Gad, blog posts about blogging have to be the worst, so fair warning.<br />
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The picture is of a local bridge over the Ohio River. I got it off <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2191_-_McKees_Rocks_Bridge.jpg">Wikipedia</a> (cc by 2.0). I also want to link to the photographer Rob Strover's <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/artisticpursuits/">photostream</a> at Flickr because I love the area where I live and Strover has many great photos from around Pittsburgh up and they're really worth checking out.<br />
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I first started the blog thinking that Africans and Americans could benefit from Internet-enabled dialog. I still think so, but if anything the last years have proven to me is I have little authority in this regard.<br />
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Last time I was here I eliminated my blogroll, not because I stopped reading the blogs, but rather feeling embarrassed. I thought it would be better just to present myself as some guy who rambles on the Internet. It's all I've ever been anyhow. <br />
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I thought I'd feel more free about posting, but in fact haven't posted since then.<br />
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I post three links a day on a Tumblr <a href="http://protoslacker.tumblr.com/">blog</a>, post links at <a href="https://www.facebook.com/jfpowers">Facebook</a> and tweet at <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/protoslacker">Twitter</a> very occasionally. And to some extent this post comes about from trying to get my head around <a href="https://plus.google.com/116197923267067672519/posts">Google+</a> which doesn't seem to be happening very quickly for me.<br />
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None of these venues seem very well suited for rambling on as I'm wont to do, as if there is such a place. But if any place is this would seem to be it. Well, something like this place.<br />
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<a href="http://scripting.com/">Dave Winer </a> thinks that more of us should produce content on our own sites and then send it out to walled-garden services, like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Tumblr and the like, instead of making our stuff behind closed walls. He makes a good point, and his <a href="http://poets.scripting.com/">EC2 for Poets</a> makes clear that's not out of reach. So far that's beyond me, however he keeps talking about his blorking tools and I think I want one.<br />
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<blockquote>Andrew Feldmar, a well-known Vancouver psychotherapist, rolled up to the Blaine border crossing last summer as he had hundreds of times in his career. At 66, his gray hair, neat beard, and rimless glasses give him the look of a seasoned intellectual. He handed his passport to the U.S. border guard and relaxed, thinking he would soon be with an old friend in Seattle. The border guard turned to his computer and googled "Andrew Feldmar,”<br />
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And on April 23. the same article went up on The Tyee’s website with this headline: <br />
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LSD as Therapy? Write about It, Get Barred from US<br />
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BC psychotherapist denied entry after border guard googled his work.<a href="http://www.vancouverobserver.com/life/2009/10/01/whatever-became-andrew-feldmar">Link</a></blockquote>I haven't written any scholarly articles. But I am quite aware how the Internet is often used in a game of "Gotta." If blogging has taught me anything, it's that I need an editor, and without one I'm sure to loose that game.<br />
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Really I'm happy not many people see what's here, but it's more open than some places. Google+ is a nice tool for choosing who you want to share communications with. And it's a tool that will surely become quite useful, I just haven't figured out how it might be for me. As a method of pointing to my rambling prose, not so much. <br />
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I rather do like posting in somewhat out of the way places online. Sometimes even comments on other people's blog can seem "out of the way." Recently I've been enjoying posting on a board <a href="http://thekeenone.tumblr.com/">TheKeenOne</a>. One of the threads on the board is based on the simple question: "What did you listen to today?" <br />
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This question is cool because almost everyone listens to something. I found myself bloviating on there, not because I'm particularly knowledgeable about music, I'm not, but because I thought somebody might be amused by my messy prose and some links. <br />
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There's a problem: very often what I find amusing few others do. <br />
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At root it's a Hip Hop board and one of the posts I did there had I done it here I would have entitled "<a href="http://thekeenone.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4&start=10#p64">Horowitz Weeps</a>." Yes, that's right a post full of links to classical music on a Hip Hop board. <br />
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Of the many wonderful things I might say about TheKeenOne, what stands out to me is how supportive she is of the creativity of others. I think her idea for the thread was for people just to post one thing, but so far she's been quite tolerant of my posts.<br />
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The simple solution rather than spamming a discussion board would be to post here and then put links up at the board. Somethings give me pause. First is photographs. I've used publicity shots for musicians, album covers, and screen shots from YouTube videos with my posts. I think that all such uses are legitimate Fair Use, especially on a discussion board. The waters are slightly less clear on a blog. Still I hate to get involved with copyright craziness. Second, I feel free to cuss a little bit over there and not so comfortable doing so here. Third,is mention of various state of inebriation and other foolishness that mostly I've avoided here. <br />
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It seems silly to worry, but at least in part what Google+ is for is negotiating worries like this. Although, I suspect, all the sorting we do of people into circles and the like on a site that stores our email, that it isn't lost on us that Google's business is search. That is, Google is in a unique position to make all that we wouldn't like widely known about us readily available. <br />
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The insanity of recent American politics, where those very eager to use democratic means towards undemocratic ends seem ascendant, makes the search capacity of Google feel threatening.<br />
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I thought of the picture of the McKees Rocks Bridge because years ago some foolish young people would race their autos along Ohio River Boulevard. After turning onto the Mckees Rocks Bridge drivers would sometimes approach 100mph to finish first. The Mckees Rocks Bridge is actually two bridges in one. The first part is across the Ohio River and then an equally long part that crosses over McKees Rocks Bottoms. The road ends in a Tee, so drivers had to slow done before it. So the end of the river crossing bridge was the finish line.<br />
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If you're not from the area it maybe hard to fathom how dangerous all this was. If you're from around here the question that comes to mind is: What were they thinking? Both Ohio River Boulevard and the McKees Rocks Bridge--then four lanes now two--are impossibly narrow for high speeds. <br />
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I've heard many an old codger tell stories of their racing days. Such mischief is a heck of a lot worse in terms of potential harm to life and property than the sorts of things people worry about young people putting up online. The difference is that what gets put up online can be searched for and presumably has a permanence that can't be shook. <br />
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I figure we're all busted now. I'm plenty worried in general. So the worries that have made me not want to post here seem ridiculously small. Perhaps I'll start rambling on over here more often. I hope to anyhow.John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-43235428193726741242011-05-17T22:35:00.001-04:002011-05-17T22:36:38.525-04:00Paul Theroux Loathes Blogs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfcjglnyidTHBku9yvCg-ta4MA-GBfsfNNy9KXIgDMN5Qlq69qeUt6f4CrhCwr2uk4k4LpGz_a6Cy6jRk7XWUYi8t_fvAC8gnh9cuHdELRbp5ip8anZCwApES4L53VqjKTktkT/s1600/watershed.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="176" width="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfcjglnyidTHBku9yvCg-ta4MA-GBfsfNNy9KXIgDMN5Qlq69qeUt6f4CrhCwr2uk4k4LpGz_a6Cy6jRk7XWUYi8t_fvAC8gnh9cuHdELRbp5ip8anZCwApES4L53VqjKTktkT/s320/watershed.png" /></a></div><br />
Travel writer Paul Theroux in an interview at The Atlantic--pushing his new book--remarks:<blockquote>I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look to me illiterate, they look hasty, like someone babbling. To me writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. A blog doesn't seem to have any literary merit at all. It's a chatty account of things that have happened to that particular person.</blockquote>Ha! That's my blog, although surely there are blogs which do have "literary merit." Still, I'm a bit puzzled as to why blogs as he defines them should provoke such loathing. I rather like babbling and chatty accounts and of course that's what I have in mind for this post.<br />
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Daisy's <a href="http://daisysdeadair.blogspot.com/2011/05/dead-air-church-our-facebook-era.html">post</a> about the Facebook era still has me thinking round in circles and want to attempt to write more about that.<br />
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The picture comes from a National Park Service page, <a href="http://www.nps.gov/miss/riverfacts.htm">Mississippi River Facts</a>. In case you've missed it big news in the USA is flooding along the Mississippi River. If you look at the right hand side of the map you'll notice the Ohio River. I live about three miles from the Ohio River and about twenty miles from where the Ohio begins at Pittsburgh. The Ohio River is no small river. With the record flooding it's a reminder that the Ohio is just a portion of the great Mississippi River Watershed.<br />
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It's wet here. I've got my rubber boots on. The <a href="http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11137/1147103-455.stm">paper</a> today tells us to expect another two months of unusually wet weather. Yikes! In May the grass grows so fast, grass along with everything else. What I can mow now determines what areas I'm able to keep mown the rest of the summer. And there's always a crush because May is also the time for planting. The grass can't be mown when it's too wet, and the rain only makes the grass grow faster. And the ground can't be turned when it's too wet and seeds planted. When I go out to work it starts to rain and by the time it's not raining I'm inside doing something else. I'm not getting much done. Wet weather is part of my personal story right now, but I sure have it better than so many of my fellow Americans, some of them with homes under the water.<br />
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Theroux is right that such chatty excursions are outside the boundaries of literature. I'm not sure that blogs are an existential threat to literature, but there's no question media is changing and we are changing along with it. <br />
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When I started writing this blog I used a pseudonym. I was also visiting and writing at a social network called <a href="http://tribe.net">Tribe</a>. Tribe was a pretty free-wheeling place at the time, lots of nudity, profanity and the like. Because it was popular with younger folks I was a bit concerned that some of my younger relatives might happen upon my goings on there. But ultimately with all the linking I did at Tribe it became clear to me that because I hadn't organized myself from the beginning for online anonymity the pseudonyms I was using online did little to make anonymous. Web searches clearly associated with my real name brought up links to stuff I put up under screen names, especially at Tribe for some reason. <br />
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After using Tribe for a while I discovered the Omidyar Network (ONet), which was sort of an online social network for dogooders. The charitable foundation called the Omidyar Network is alive and well, the social network has been defunct since 2007. The culture at ONet was for people to use their true names. While it's not 100% that's also the norm at Facebook. Anyhow I figured the easiest thing was just to accept that I wasn't anonymous online. There are, however, many good reasons why people publish anonymously online, not the least of which is some people are creepy.<br />
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Nowadays I participate at a forum where the convention is for people to participate using screen names. I hesitate to link to that forum because it isn't clear to me what the ripple effects not just to me, but to the users of the forum, might be to linking my pseudonym with my real name. Over at that forum for the last few weeks there's been a long thread on misogyny. The title of the thread seemed pretty generic, but I wondered if using the title links to the forum thread would come up high in search results. Of course they do, and in that search I discovered blog posts, anonymous of course, which were a sort of back channel to the thread. <br />
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Certain topics can be quite incendiary and misogyny is one of them. The thread has meandered between talking about misogyny and examples of misogyny, even if providing examples of was not explicitly the intent. Some of the talk was pretty bad but my default reaction was don't feed the trolls because some of the talk seemed pretty good. The problem with that approach was getting called out on the thread for not calling out the BS. I knew that there was some private discussion going on between members, even posting a few private messages myself. What I hadn't known before today was the commenting about the thread and nasty stuff about some of the posters on blogs. Jeez, people can be such dicks! <br />
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The xkcd comic pane <a href="http://xkcd.com/386/">Duty Calls</a> with the line "Someone is wrong on the Internet" is so often passed around because we human beings seem easily obsessed with being right to the detriment of online comity. Sometimes people anonymously post online because it is unsafe for them to be exposed. <br />
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Drima at <a href="http://www.sudanesethinker.com/">The Sudanese Thinker</a> probably had danger in the back of his head when he started the blog five years ago. Probably more prosaic reasons along the lines of my not wanting young relatives to stumble upon my Tribe postings seemed more important. Recently Drima exposed his real name at Twitter and at his blog. He didn't offer a long explanation for why he did so, writing:<blockquote>I have numerous personal reasons for and that I cannot explain adequately in a simple short blog post. Let’s just say the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, and the changes sweeping the region now have inspired me and forced me to come to a simple conclusion.<br />
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Screw anonymity.</blockquote>With the events in Tunisia late last fall I began following events at Twitter. Andy Carvin (@acarvin) of PBS was curating tweets, he sort of vetted Tweets. I hadn't been following @SudaneseThinker at Twitter, but had read his blog over time. His tweets came up in Carvin's retweets and I promptly followed him at Twitter. Even though Drima is a pseudonym, I knew enough to have some confidence in him and his tweets. When he retweeted people's tweets, especially in re Egypt, it added to the authority of those tweets.<br />
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Dave Kenner at Foreign Policy Magazine recently posted an article <a href="http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/05/12/heres_your_reading_list_mr_president">Here's your reading list, Mr. President</a> which consists mostly of a list of blogs about the Middle East. The premise of the post is that it's possible to get a realistic picture of political conversations going on in the region. Of course it would be great if the President of the United States sought to hear these views and so as not just to hear the inside Washington policy debate, but the larger point is any of us can be privy to it too.<br />
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The impetus for this blog was quite a simple idea of explaining to some of my friends why I was taking an interest in the life of a young Ugandan man. Quickly it became obvious that most of my friends had little interest in blogs, but plenty of Americans were turning attention to Africa often from quite stereotypical frames of reference. As a white middle-aged American the topic of "privilege" come up in many different contexts. It rankles me when it does, but on the other hand turning my attention towards Africa has demonstrated time and time again that there's potency in the construct of privilege. <br />
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Offline and online I was being asked about Darfur. In Pittsburgh there are some refugees from the North-South civil war in the Sudan. As I was also trying to find out more about Uganda it was hard for me to discuss Darfur without first making the North-South conflict part of the context. Very often I was sharply criticized for doing so. I'm a fairly incompetent activist in any case so pointing that out comes as no surprise to me. While Darfur was awful by anybody's standards opinions outside Sudan as to what to do sharply differed. Among people I like an admire, my views about US policy towards Sudan were often anathema. Being basically needy, I want very much for people to like me so Darfur was posed something of a dilemma for me.<br />
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I read and still read Alex De Waal's blog <a href="http://blogs.ssrc.org/sudan/">Making Sense of Sudan</a>. It's really excellent. As far as online discussions about Darfur activism went, De Waal's analysis of the situation was an unpopular. I'm hardly an expert so I didn't spend much time trying to argue from a perspective which was already disparaged. Just in ordinary face to face conversations the sorts of perspectives that The Sudanese Thinker provided were more helpful than the academic perspectives at Making Sense of Sudan. <br />
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People wanted to talk about basic information like: Who are the Sudanese in our area? How close is the Sudan to Uganda and what are the relationships? Are Sudan and Somalia the same place? Who are the Somali-Bantu's in our community? The Italians, in Africa, you're kidding me! The tenor of such conversation might seems a little daft. Nobody really likes to be thought of as ignorant, but let's face it I like most Americans are ignorant about Africa. Much of the activism here around Darfur seemed to demand political commitment and such a demand rather pointed up a common ignorance of a large and populous continent. <br />
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Here's a post by Drima from early February 2007 entitled <a href="http://www.sudanesethinker.com/2007/02/03/sudan-arab-or-african/">Sudan Arab or African?</a> It's the sort of post probably of marginal interest to political scientists and political activists, I guess from an assumption"everybody knows that," but just the sort of post helpful to most of us who didn't know what we were supposed to. I can't remember once Drima writing anything to make it seem that not knowing something was tantamount to being stupid.<br />
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I do remember Drima talking about being a college student, hanging out with friends, getting a new CD, eating good food, being exhausted from studying from exams, all of the boring stuff Paul Theroux thinks has no place in literature. Perhaps blogs aren't literature because the boring stuff is important for lots of blogs.<br />
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As the events in Egypt unfolded on Twitter, I noted who the Sudanese Thinker was following and often followed those people. People were arrested, people died, sadly Egyptians still are being arrested and are dying. It's hard to have a very detached view of events when following people who know the people arrested and killed, post pictures of them and link to blogs by them. <br />
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It's so far fetched to think of Drima, whose real name is Ahmad, as a friend. Ha an Internet-friend, but there's real value in Internet friendships. I was moved when I read the post at his blog giving his name, Amir Ahmad, especially because he connected it to the experience of the the political events in Northern Africa, events which in a way I followed on Twitter along with him and others. I know saying revealing his name comes with some danger attached. I respect that saying his name publicly is to trump fear with love. <br />
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Amir Ahmad is writing a <a href="http://www.sudanesethinker.com/my-book/">book</a>, <i>Islam: A Love Story – How Fundamentalism Stole My Mind, Broke My Heart, and Blogging Freed My Mystic Soul</i>. It's sure to be carefully considered writing,as Theroux maintains literature ought to be. The irony is the book is at least in part about blogs. Ahmad writes:<blockquote>Set in Sudan, Qatar, Malaysia, the United States and the new frontiers of the Arab and American political blogospheres, Islam: A Love Story is ultimately about my journey of spiritual awakening and why and how the internet will not only help reform the political landscape of the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also significantly shape the future of Islam as well.</blockquote>It's sure to be carefully considered writing,as Theroux maintains literature ought to be. The irony is the book is at least in part about blogs. Ahmad writes:<blockquote>Set in Sudan, Qatar, Malaysia, the United States and the new frontiers of the Arab and American political blogospheres, Islam: A Love Story is ultimately about my journey of spiritual awakening and why and how the internet will not only help reform the political landscape of the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also significantly shape the future of Islam as well.</blockquote>I've babbled on about the author Paul Theroux, about the wet spring where I live, about flooding in the American Midwest, about brutishness on Internet forums, and about a blogger named Ahmad, also known as Drima. Is there a thread that connects? I think there is, and imagining a thread is probably why unlike Theroux I rather love blogs instead of loathing them as he does. Love them or hate them, blogs and Internet communications in general are changing how we view and experience the world. Those changes are neither all good, nor all bad.John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-81203904550996765082011-05-16T02:31:00.001-04:002011-05-16T02:32:35.084-04:00Riffing About Facebook<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLlUaY4CwhXNTbPd-PX2eq80zQLdJNe5Fv0fWeTg0YOE8oPEAp1Cy7ECpZA7kPmirFSwjcnsjJmWzWOaPLx9h-QIe9tjdyXQQoy7yQuhqgJT5u6Im3mo5MRQh8CsCpy-EM0qBZ/s1600/tumblr_ll633aFsn41qzpwi0o1_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLlUaY4CwhXNTbPd-PX2eq80zQLdJNe5Fv0fWeTg0YOE8oPEAp1Cy7ECpZA7kPmirFSwjcnsjJmWzWOaPLx9h-QIe9tjdyXQQoy7yQuhqgJT5u6Im3mo5MRQh8CsCpy-EM0qBZ/s320/tumblr_ll633aFsn41qzpwi0o1_500.jpg" /></a></div><br />
The image was lifted from <a href="http://tease.thedailywh.at/2011/05/13/kinky-links-10/">here</a>. If it's hard to read, it says: <blockquote>Dear Senior,<br />
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Please be safe at the prom. I would like you to <i>wear a condom when you are getting freaky</i>.<br />
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Sincerely,<br />
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Emma C.<br />
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P.S. Here is a picture for you!</blockquote>One of my favorite bloggers, Daisy at Daisy's Dead Air has a <a href="http://daisysdeadair.blogspot.com/2011/05/dead-air-church-our-facebook-era.html">post</a> ruminating about our Facebook era. <br />
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It's definitely worth reading the post and while you're at it reading her wonderful <a href="http://daisysdeadair.blogspot.com/2011/05/ben-masel-1954-2011.html">remembrance</a> of Ben Masel* posted earlier. Masel was an old friend of Daisy's and they'd reconnected recently on Facebook, so news of Masel's death seemed to feel different. Feeling a difference led her to write a bit about how Facebook changes us. Among the observations she makes is that she's glad that "the various addled twists and turns of my life are not available for public consumption." That's a luxury today's digital natives probably won't have. Daisy writes: <blockquote>And then again, there is Gatsby, the quintessential American character. We re-create ourselves throughout our lives, in numerous ways, large and small. Is Facebook making Gatsby more or less possible and is that a good thing? </blockquote>It's a pretty straightforward question, but the Internet is a big honking question and my mind started circling in various directions when thinking about it.<br />
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The way that Facebook makes us aware of friends of friends is something that makes a big difference. I saw the picture of second grader Emma C. that I posted here over at Tumblr. I didn't actually see it originally at the link I posted for it. At Tumblr it's easy to reblog posts that come up in your own feed of people you follow. By the time I saw it it had been reblogged over 8,500 times. I didn't scroll down the list of 8,500 plus names of people who'd reblogged it, but simply that such data is viewable provides an ordinary example of how social networking data makes friends of friends visible to us. The visibility of extended networks seems strange to an old guy like me, but a matter of course for young people today. What stood out to me about Emma's school work wasn't so much a seven or eight year old writing about "getting freaky" so much as teachers nowadays thinking that what a second-grader has to say would influence a senior in high school to behave at the prom. I doubt that back in my high school days teachers would have thought a second grader could have much if any impact on what an older teenager does, now we assume she does.<br />
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It's been wet here. I looked at the 10-day weather forecast and rain is forecast for every day. Spring has sprung in these parts and growth is exuberant. The problem with that is both keeping all the growth beat back, in particular trying to keep lawn areas mown without contemplating taking in hay, while at the same time trying to work the soil to plant seeds. Behind the eight ball in the best of years, I'm quite in a muddle with all the rain this year. Yesterday I went down to a Pittsburgh suburb to help a friend with a gardening project of his. Miraculously the rain held off and we managed a complete makeover of his front yard. <br />
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My friend was in the music business for more than forty years. He's got a curious mind and is a good writer. Recently he's been talking about a Web site he's beginning to make. I'm very eager for him to launch it. Talking about the site with him it's clear I'm coming to it from a different perspective. My friend isn't being critical so much as incredulous when he says "People must spend hours on the Internet." I do spend hours on the Internet daily and it seems the comments and questions I pose about his Web site are incomprehensible because he does not.<br />
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For many people my age that younger people have their Facebook open in a tab and and some sort of chat client open during work seems immoral. I say that, but also since I'm on the Internet a lot I also read what people basically my age write sometimes while at work, so I know this sort of "immorality" isn't solely among younger folk. Closely coupled with this disdain for the sort of news streams online denizens depend on is the lament: "Why can't they just pick up the phone?" A running joke about a good friend is that the best way to get in touch is to write her a letter. In business and life in general what's the right way to get in touch with people is in flux.<br />
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Ethan Zuckerman recently wrote a <a href="http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/04/19/protocol-by-sharing-how-you-want-to-be-contacted/">post</a> about the dilemma of not know what's the best way to contact people nowadays. He points to an experimental site called <a href="http://protocol.by/">Protocol.by</a> which is a Web site and an email signature which lets people know the best ways to get in touch with you. It seems a good idea, although so far as I can tell nobody has trouble contacting me. Some people do complain that I don't have a cell phone or message machine. It probably would horrify some of my friends to say that Facebook is probably a pretty good option if they want to contact me during the day.<br />
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The friend for whom a paper letter isthe best way to reach her, likes to write everything in neat cursive handwriting. Everyone has preferences about writing and probably for most of us nothing seems quite perfect. <a href="http://www.quietwrite.com/#">QuiteWrite</a> is an online text editor whose promise is to reduce the number of distractions. I can see it, but so far haven't actually used it. Right now I'm writing in the Blogger composer. I like to use it for blog posts because it's easy to handle links and certain formatting options. I asked my friend working to create a Web site how he writes. The question I posed really had to do with coping with HTML. His answer was that he writes using Word. It's been years since I've used Word, but I feel sure Word makes it easy to create an HTML document just like the <a href="http://www.libreoffice.org/">LibreOffice</a> Writer which I use. But he isn't thinking of HTML. <br />
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I looked at his Mac with the Safari Browser and wasn't smart enough to go to the View menu to show him the HTML of a Web page. He does get that there's something that has to happen to see a page on the Web, but so far that "what happens" is handled by sending copy to the guy making his Web site in the form of a Word Document. I don't think it's occurred to my friend yet that he's going to want to add links to his online text. As he gets online not only what makes for a comfortable writing will change but his ideas of what it means to write will change too.<br />
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All this is pretty far afield from Daisy's question about how Facebook may be altering our capacity for re-inventing ourselves. I'm not tech savvy, talking about things like HTML makes it sound as if I ought to know something technical. But when I talk with my friend about his Web site any technical matters seem so much less important than a shift in perspective which comes along with reading and writing on the Internet. Having Facebook open at work may seem immoral, but if it's a good way to contact people you need to at work, then how different is it from the phone on the desk? The point telling stories about pre-Internet folks like me is to show that the Internet makes a difference. The differences are both hard to see if you're not "swimming in it" and hard to see when you always are. <br />
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There's a sweet little YouTube video getting spread around <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0la5DBtOVNI&sns=tw">It's Okay to Not Like Things</a>. The punch line of the song is "But don't be a dick about it." It is embarrassing that not only are there pages online revealing me being a dick about things I don't like, but also that I know where to look for them. An example, perhaps not so much of being a dick but of being a total asshat, is that I used a picture of me wearing an Afro wig as my Blogger profile picture for a time. I have a thumbnail copy of the picture up now at Flickr with a link to <a href="http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/">The Jim Crow Museum</a>. Once I had finally grokked how offensive the image is, it had been on the Internet for a while, and I felt it important to own up to my mistake by keeping it online in some form. I suppose that enough time has elapsed that it's probably alright now to delete the damn thing.<br />
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The fact that once something is on the Internet it's not easy to scrub it off has consequences. Everyone knows we ought to be careful and everyone whose been putting stuff on the Internet for any length of time knows some foolishness is inevitable. Often we can remember exactly where an example of our own foolishness lives online. It's not just about foolishness. The life of a thirteen year old seems eons away to the same person at sixteen. But that's only three years, and millions of sixteen year olds now can visit their thirteen year old selves online. Growing up really isn't quite the same as "reinventing" ourselves, it's just growing up. In a sense the Internet keeps a record of it all and that makes a difference.<br />
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I don't really know of a good way to go back an see my 2007 Facebook pages. It's quite possible that 13 year olds using Facebook now will still be using Facebook when they're 16. Facebook chronicles our lives, but it isn't so easy to go back and read from the beginning. Perhaps part of the current popularity of Tumblr has to do with blogs being much easier to travel backwards in than Facebook. But while it's hard for users to go back in time on Facebook, the Facebook corporation has been collecting data all along our use, for example keeping track of our "likes" over time. <br />
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I've already rambled on for too long, so in winding to a close will <a href="http://lifehacker.com/5697167/if-youre-not-paying-for-it-youre-the-product">point</a> to a much linked to quotation:<blockquote>if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold</blockquote>Most of us are content to Google, use Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, etc. without giving much thought to who owns the data. People haven't stopped growing up or stopped re-inventing themselves. As we live more and more connected online, I suspect that more people will see the value in asserting ownership over their own data. <a href="http://scripting.com/">Dave Winer</a> has advocated that for a long time. If you're interested in a short snapshot of what Winer is up to in that regard this <a href="http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/02/take-back-the-tubes/">post</a> by Scott Gilbertson is quite helpful. <a href="http://tantek.com/2011/010/b1/owning-your-data">Tantek Çelik</a> is all over that too.<br />
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The difference the Internet makes is a big subject. I like that Daisy is asking questions about how the Internet, and Facebook in particular, is changing our interior landscapes. I've rambled here and there about it only to get nowhere. After reading Daisy's post I left a comment. <a href="http://marshallmcluhan.com/biography/">Marshall McLuhan</a> came to mind. There are many super cogent thinkers about the Internet nowadays, and they're worth paying attention to. But I think McLuhan is important especially for older folks like me. Lots of American Baby Boomers read <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Media-Extensions-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/0262631598">Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man</a> and many more with the gist of McLuhan's ideas about media.<br />
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The short version of the 1964 book is that media extends our senses and as a sense is extended the ratios among the different senses are altered. For example with the invention of printed books sight became more important and hearing so important attenuated. So as sight is extended a portion of our hearing amputated. Clearly people didn't loose their ability to hear as books rolled off the presses. What's important is the ways in which the interrelationships between our sense are changed with the development of new media. While these changes are happening to the many, those of us who lived long before the Internet notice the change. Well, and a surprising number of old folks like me feel that resiting such changes is virtuous. McLuhan provides something of an accessible theory for what we fear to loose; for every extension is an amputation. But on the other hand fear without understanding creates moral and ethical confusion which perhaps on a trivial level gets expressed in outbursts of "These kids today!" Old folks would do well to put more effort into understanding rather than leap to ethical judgement. The changes that networked computers and widespread access of people to those networks create require ethical and moral judgments; it's good not to be a dick about them. <br />
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* I checked and there doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia article for Ben Masel. A Google search yields dozens and dozens of remembrances. Reading some of those is fun if you're in the mood. It may be helpful for understanding who Ben Masel was to read the Wikipedia article <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_International_Party">Youth International Party</a> (YIPPIE).John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-27980537810647250242011-05-03T21:24:00.000-04:002011-05-03T21:24:29.919-04:00Another Post About BloggingOver the last week the leaves on the trees have begun to open and many blossoms burst forth. That has nothing to do with not posting here for months, except that my posts generally begin with an off topic remark and proceed to rambling from there.<br />
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This blog has been the place I've most consistently posted about what's happening in my day to day life.<br />
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I was surprised the other day looking for something I once posted that I've been posting here since 2005. Originally the idea for this blog was to encourage some of my friends to pay more attention to people in Africa along with a half-baked idea I had for alternative currency scheme to encourage that attention. Quickly it became apparent that very few of my friends pay any attention at all to blogs which exposed the premise of the blog as fairly useless. I posted anyway. <br />
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Generally when I comment other places I leave behind the URL for this blog, so it represents something of my online identity. Many who write online enjoy having a large following. I've been content being hardly visible knowing that my opinions tend to rub the wrong way and being fairly thin-skinned happy to have limited exposure. If the purpose of this blog is to somehow represent who I am online, it makes sense to make some changes here, but the revealing aspect about me is my voluminous capacity to shirk anything resembling work. So I just made a few easy changes now and will see what comes up as I go along.<br />
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Curious about Tumblr and knowing that the way learn best is to jump right in, I made a blog other there called Three Good Links. The idea was a simple link blog posting three short snippets from daily reading. The blog doesn't add much to the Internet ecology, but it's been enough to discover that Tumblr is fun. While a link blog reveals my interests to some extent, surely what I write offers more clue as to what I'm like than snippets of what others say.<br />
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Curious about Tumblr and knowing that the way learn best is to jump right in, I made a blog other there called <a href="http://protoslacker.tumblr.com/">Three Good Links</a>. The idea was a simple link blog posting three short snippets from daily reading. The blog doesn't add much to the Internet ecology, but it's been enough to discover that Tumblr is fun. While a link blog reveals my interests to some extent my interests, surely why I write offers more clue as to what I'm like than snippets of what others say.<br />
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I do want to keep blogging here. Anyone whose read any of my posts knows they're rambling ones, mostly my stabs at trying to make sense of things. I hope that the changes made make the blog more transparent about what it's about.John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-45246950599198475672011-03-03T21:46:00.003-05:002011-03-03T22:09:51.752-05:00Insert Caption<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi41nlTMkZzdwf5ltoO2z5raWZR_ejLcNwF_Zv3qPuVslffbhKsSeA-giPxmw3BfoaDAWchpgbhCQMUakGcQq1vXHSJFzNHg53HRl2I8AfoOcU7bkOX9L7xmyxcQ23_srMlwOug/s1600/Rooster.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 291px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi41nlTMkZzdwf5ltoO2z5raWZR_ejLcNwF_Zv3qPuVslffbhKsSeA-giPxmw3BfoaDAWchpgbhCQMUakGcQq1vXHSJFzNHg53HRl2I8AfoOcU7bkOX9L7xmyxcQ23_srMlwOug/s320/Rooster.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5580050906504574546" /></a><br /><br />I saw this photo today and it made me laugh. Clearly it's been around for a long time, but it's a slice of Americana--like the <a href="http://www.jackalopearts.org/jajackalope.html">Jackalope</a>--that I hadn't run across before. Oh I had run across the Jackalope, even thinking they might exist when I was a kid, I had just never seen this big chicken. I put the obvious two-word caption into a Google image search and the photo was represented on dozens of Web sites. That's a pretty dodgy search term. There's a popular sporting goods store locally called Dick's. Hunting for their Web site is the stuff of legend around here. The key to a safe-search is to include the "sporting goods" along with Dick's.John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-7210512054899592162011-03-01T00:40:00.000-05:002011-03-01T00:40:22.450-05:00Useless<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoqk2j56vY3-pZceM88IrA3esfO5pwBwR94gbFPngu2WOm-C5Ycr8YZ9dYKhHKdgDf6b8eW7UTpy9zoqQRW_Qmx-yY3F0gaLaSZbp9X9yWIucHNgPegZWI2tvG-lC2TbJskssL/s1600/2720315445_11288e07cb.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoqk2j56vY3-pZceM88IrA3esfO5pwBwR94gbFPngu2WOm-C5Ycr8YZ9dYKhHKdgDf6b8eW7UTpy9zoqQRW_Qmx-yY3F0gaLaSZbp9X9yWIucHNgPegZWI2tvG-lC2TbJskssL/s400/2720315445_11288e07cb.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5571808840875583426" /><br /></a><br /><br /><blockquote>"The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real." ~<a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-be-of-use/">Marge Piercy</a></blockquote><br /><br />Photo: Some rights <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en">reserved</a> by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/redcarpet/">Mickipedia</a> Photo by Alex Johnson in New York City subway. Micki Krimmel's wonderful <a href="http://www.mickipedia.com/">Mickipedia</a> site. Okay the message of the photo is: "Use less." But I've been feeling awfully useless lately and that's what's been on my mind.<br /><br />I live with my elderly father. In the USA women are disproportionately the care givers. There are probably a quite a few people who think that because that's the case, men must really suck at being care givers. Alas, that stereotype probably hold true for me, but it's not for lack of trying. It's not an easy thing when someone who has always been strong is now frail. <br /><br />Anyhow something my father and I do together several times a year is to attend <a href="http://www.pittsburghsymphony.org/pghsymph.nsf/home+page/home+page">Pittsburgh Symphony</a> concerts. Several years ago he passed out at one of the concerts and left in an ambulance. Every time we go I try to figure out how to make the whole excursion as easy on him as I can. There are probably ways of making it much easier than we do, for example there is an elevator, but getting my father to use it is a whole 'nother kettle of fish. So I pause on the stair landings and point to the architecture. My father always gives me a look that says, "What the heck are you doing?" but I never mention what I'm doing is to let him catch his breath. Being out of breath is exactly the sort of thing a once strong man never notices or wants to be noticed.<br /><br />This Sunday's program was quite interesting. The program was Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68; Concerto No1 in C major for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 15; and Leonore Overture No. 3, Op 72A. What really interested me in reading the program was the performances were dedicated to the memory of Vince Calloway the long serving doorman at the performance hall who had died this past October.<br /><br />The write-up in the program notes seemed understated. Towards the end of it I read: <blockquote>Born on Nov. 21, 1924 in Roberta, GA, Calloway was one of five children. He received an honorable discharge from the Navy in 1946 and received his bachelor's degree from Carnegie (Tech) Mellon. He worked at Westinghouse in West Mifflin for 42 years before retiring in 1992. He married his wife Marie in August 1951. They had five children.</blockquote> <a href="http://www.westinghousenuclear.com/our_company/history/timeline/1846_1899.shtm"> Westinghouse</a> has a storied history in Pittsburgh and as a corporation. The mention of "Westinghouse in West Mifflin" has a particular meaning, the <a href="http://www.bettislab.com/">Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory</a>. I turned to my father and read the paragraph to him, pointing out the guy was a nuclear engineer.<br /><br />Vincent Calloway was a nuclear engineer for about as long as he was doorman at the Heinz Hall with a good many of the years overlapping. It's a nice thing he'll be long remembered by the Pittsburgh Symphony. But "nuclear engineer" seems on its face more prestigious than "doorman" and it's the latter he'll be most remembered for. <br /><br />In 2001 the Pittsburgh Symphony gave Calloway a Customer Service Excellence Award, in fact they named the award after him. Here's a <a href="http://www.pittsburghsymphony.org/pghsymph.nsf/bios/Penny+Anderson+Brill">bio</a> for one of the orchestra's violists. Her bio mentions that she received the Vince Calloway Award for her work using music with critically ill cancer patients. The Pittsburgh Symphony takes the award seriously.<br /><br />I got the idea from the dedication of the program to him, and a little plaque the Pittsburgh Symphony unveiled this weekend, that they really loved the guy and miss him terribly. But the write-up left me a little unclear as to why he'd made such an impression: He will be remembered for "his good humor, kindness, independence, generosity and dedication" sounded a little bit canned, or just faint praise.<br /><br />I had noticed Vincent Calloway at the door over the years. I'm afraid over the last few years when I saw him my mind was always racing trying to imagine if somehow I could convince my father to allow me to drop him off at the door while I parked the car. I wondered if that guy in the scarlet coat and cap could get my cranky father who doesn't want help from anybody through the door? I never tested it, but the Vince Calloway always had a nice smile on his face for us as he held the door for us, so I do remember smiling back at him. And the answer to my question was almost certainly, "Yes." Calloway was only a few years younger than my dad, and getting cranky old people through the door was exactly what he was especially good at. The vice president of the Symphony said: <blockquote>He was someone patrons got to know and, as they got older, depended on him. He would always be there for them.</blockquote> I was curious to see whether the newspaper had done a news obituary for him when he died. I didn't find one, but did see his online <a href="http://www.legacy.com/guestbook/postgazette/guestbook.aspx?n=vincent-calloway&pid=146001059">guestbook</a>. He was known for giving away candy and food. One of the Heinz Hall ushers wrote that he probably didn't know it at the time but the food he gave her was so appreciated because it was a time she didn't have enough money to buy enough to eat. Another person remembered how she first met Calloway when she was in the <a href="http://www.pittsburghyouthsymphony.org/">Pittsburgh Youth Symphony</a> and then how proud he was of her when she won a spot playing in the Pittsburgh Symphony. There were little vignettes about how he managed to make sure ushers found their way safely home after work. The picture emerges of a man who was kind to both grandees and humble workers alike. <br /><br />We think that being kind is what we ought to be, so kindness often seems hardly noticed, or even an afterthought. What was so remarkable about Vincent Calloway was his kindness, but just saying he was kind doesn't quite capture the difference he made to quite a large number of people. Just as saying: "He was a real dignified gentleman." doesn't cut the mustard. But how else to describe someone exquisitely kind? <br /><br />It's rare for the Pittsburgh Symphony to dedicate programs to people. Maybe I just haven't noticed, but in the many years of attending concerts I can only think of one other time the Pittsburgh Symphony has honored someone like this, and that was to honor one of the most generous patrons of the orchestra. Pittsburghers are very proud of our symphony. And I feel proud of the organization for honoring their long-time doorman.<br /><br />I can only guess about the story from Calloway's perspective. Given the timing and knowing he had five kids, I suspect he started out just to earn a bit of cash to help out with the expenses of putting his kids through college. Somewhere along the line he made the job of doorman mean much more than anyone expected that job ought to mean. He made the job real by making sure others knew they were important. His job was to be kind and what a difference he made. Sometimes the most useful gestures are simple ones, a smile, a little treat, a sympathetic ear, or a ride home in the dark. Vincent Calloway's life is a lesson not so much about the dignity of work, but rather the importance of being of use. We all can be of use.John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-10936209715284280292011-02-03T01:30:00.003-05:002011-02-03T04:15:55.594-05:00"We Are the Medium"<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCQbgakML-PZUDpwvULj3HygjveUH5hnvfA2XVSEqPoZP0j8vKiJFmb2Qz1mXYwo2mk0wK1RXg7pLOZKicJjO9jXIwlkXlu6-QVvrSlS_9deZjIlS0qVVa0VJmHyLF4E1uJkX6/s1600/861062345_3dad4cc59b_z.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCQbgakML-PZUDpwvULj3HygjveUH5hnvfA2XVSEqPoZP0j8vKiJFmb2Qz1mXYwo2mk0wK1RXg7pLOZKicJjO9jXIwlkXlu6-QVvrSlS_9deZjIlS0qVVa0VJmHyLF4E1uJkX6/s400/861062345_3dad4cc59b_z.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5569347685880162626" /></a><br /><br />It's February and winter seems long during the shortest month. The photo is by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/pointshoot/861055999/">Eddie~S</a> published with a CC 2.0 license. <br /><br />February 2nd is Groundhog's Day here in the USA. One of our silly customs takes place not so far from where I live in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. A group of men in waistcoats and top hats get together to determine whether a groundhog, named Punxsutawney Phil, who is kept in a little zoo there, sees his shadow or doesn't at the dawn's early light. The outcome is supposed to predict an early spring or whether winter will be long. This year Punxsutawney Phil failed to see his shadow meaning an early spring.<br /><br />It's a silly custom, yet oddly cheering, if for no other reason that people can all say aloud that winter is hard. February 2nd is also the day Christians celebrate <a href="http://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/common/candlemas">Candelmas</a>. I don't have the story straight but our own little pageant involving a groundhog is thought to be some adaptation of German custom. There aren't groundhogs in Germany, and the animal in question there is a badger. There are plenty of groundhogs around here. They're burrowing animals that hibernate, so are snug in their burrows now. <br /><br />David Weinberg wrote a blog post a few days ago and I took his title. Here's a bit of what he <a href="http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2011/01/31/the-new-medium-is-us/">wrote</a>: <blockquote>I mean by “We are the medium” something I think we all understand, although the old way of thinking keeps intruding. “We are the medium” means that, quite literally, we are the ones through whom information, messages, news, ideas, videos, and links of every sort move — and they move through this “channel” because we decide to move them. Someone sends me a link to a funny video. I tweet about it. You see it. You send a Facebook message to your friends. One of them (presumably an ancient) emails it to more friends. The video moves through us. Without us, the transport medium — the Internet — is a hyperlinked collection of inert bits. We are the medium.</blockquote>With the events in Tunisia and now in Egypt I've been glued to the Internet. I don't really think of the links I post at Facebook as being particularly political, or controversial. I think of them more as "human interest" stories. Oh and lots of Youtube music videos. But people still read into my posts certain assumptions about my politics. Clearly the major social networking sites all have algorithms to peg me to, for example Twitter is happy to provide a list of people like me and their recommendations make a lot of sense.<br /><br />Anyhow at Facebook I put up a half dozen or so link in re Egypt. It seemed as though I got quite a lot of pushback, essentially the message to the effect that I was awfully naive and perhaps stupid in my opinions. What struck me as strange was I hadn't really imagined that I was expressing opinions, but rather pointing to sites aggregating news and to a few posts by people with informed comments--yes including <a href="http://www.juancole.com/">Juan Cole</a>. <br /><br />Meanwhile I was also posting the normal sort of "feature" articles. I posted a video of Orlando Napier singing <a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2F&h=1b6c9">Yesterday</a>. I hadn't heard Napier before I read a <a href="http://zone5.org/2011/01/dan-dennett-in-cork-what-should-replace-religion/">blog post</a> recounting a speaking engagement by <a href="http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/dennett.html">Daniel Dennett</a> in front of a gathering of Irish athesist. I linked to the post because a few of my Facebook friends are atheists and Dennett is a star player on their team. However the main reason for including the blog link along with the video link was I thought it interesting that Dennett had played recordings of Napier singing as an example of "secular Gospel" music. I thought it interesting that Dennett was apparently a fan of Napier's work. The whole notion of Dennett thinking "secular Gospel" music important and the the Irish crowd didn't like the sound much seemed a bit funny to me; a joke I thought might amuse some of my other American friends.<br /><br />I'm reluctant to copy an old friend's comment here, or to name him. The comment itself is carefully couched, but I took the gist of it as a negative stereotype about Muslims. Later, the next day, I linked to a <a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D7hBV0ApIh_4&h=1b6c9">moving video</a> of an Egyptian in England protesting outside the Egyptian consulate in London. My friend left a comment "Be careful what you wish for." that comment lead some more back and forth in re Egypt.<br /><br />I's <a href="http://bazungubucks.blogspot.com/2011/01/american-portraits.html">still</a> trying to find some conservatives to love. It seems a useful exercise, but is slow going. There was lengthy <a href="http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=1795">report</a> released recently by The Pew Center for People & the Press. One factoid from that is about 18% of Americans think of themselves as liberal. "Liberal" in American parlance has all sorts of meanings, some of which I would distance myself from. But in most contexts I cop to the term. Probably overall my views, which I hardly consider far left, are left of the views many American liberals hold. So I'm out there on the fringe, and sometimes I forget that. <br /><br />Before the American invasion of Iraq I was at a party and the same friend who commented on my Facebook links and I had a somewhat contentious conversation about it. Now I was out, and I'm sure I was trying to be on my best behavior. I can rant on obscenely and my poor father has has endured those, although even then I do try to retrain myself. Anyhow it seems to me the way that discussion is remembered by other friends at the party is that I was fighting, and being impolite. And in the Facebook thread my friend warned me to stay "just this side of a fist fight." <br /><br />I like that some friends my age are using Facebook now. It's something new, and the culture of Facebook is pretty nice. That's nice. But I think it a little strange that my old friends seem to have any idea how heated conversations on the Internet can be. Yes, I think they've heard of flame wars, but don't know. Good grief, I surely do disagree with my friend, but his standards of politeness seem awfully fragile to me.<br /><br />It's very strange to think how people imagine me, especially based on links, based on what I point to on the Internet. Ah, but of course I'm th3e same way. I follow people on Twitter for example and construct some sense about them, however the more important thing seems to be whether what they say and point to seems interesting to me. All this rambling to make the banal point: if we are the message the old chestnut "Don't blame the messenger" really isn't such an obvious distinction nowadays. <br /><br />My the argument I was pursing about the events in Egypt very roughly was to make the point that neo-liberalism was hitting the wall. Of course it may be the roughness of my argument, but it made little sense to my friend. This <a href="http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2011/02/great-unravelling-tunisia-egypt-and.html">post</a> by Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is polished and makes some points well that I only attempted to make. I doubt my friend would read it, but if you've gotten this far along in this post, I recommend it to you. <br /><br />February is also Black History Month in the USA, another of our quaint customs. Cornell West tweeted on the first day of February: <blockquote>Black people's struggle for freedom is the key to the moral and political history of the democratic experiment called America.</blockquote>. Yep, that's why I don't think Black History Month silly at all; many Americans do think it silly.<br /><br />Anyhow, tonight an Arab American tweeted that <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=130J-FdZDtY">this video</a>, a portion of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. last speech with a photo montage, was being shared widely by his Egyptian friends on Facebook this morning (The night was very violent in Egypt. And the Internet after being cut off in Egypt was just being restored.) "We Shall Overcome" moves me. Here's part of what King said used in the video, but the <a href="http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_remaining_awake_through_a_great_revolution/">whole speech</a> is worth reading:<blockquote>I can still sing "We Shall Overcome."<br /><br />We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.<br /><br />We shall overcome because Carlyle is right—"No lie can live forever."<br /><br />We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right—"Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again."<br /><br />We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right—as we were singing earlier today,<br /><br />Truth forever on the scaffold,<br /><br />Wrong forever on the throne.<br /><br />Yet that scaffold sways the future.<br /><br />And behind the dim unknown stands God,<br /><br />Within the shadow keeping watch above his own.<br /><br />With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair the stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.</blockquote>Irish atheists may not know what to make of "secular Gospel" music, but I think it's charming such a hard-headed atheist like Daniel Dennett thinks such a category is worthwhile. I suspect his relationship to this speech and others where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. refers to Gospel songs is one reason why. It's very moving that Egyptians after such hardship would rush to post the video this morning. "We Shall Overcome."John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-51706190478254042552011-01-23T00:10:00.007-05:002011-01-23T22:16:29.076-05:00Steelers<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii3Vw0GJeMT94b0yqupLE1RyPmCMZ3HGi0nTDEv833GRK_dmXo2nd75-NmEPuXH9nvaU_k1TrWeo-ZuJl6cNBsanGtlXNejECYXrBLC5acUbtVgoA0J6WHyM385tHGPjrnl-L5/s1600/Steelerbaby.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii3Vw0GJeMT94b0yqupLE1RyPmCMZ3HGi0nTDEv833GRK_dmXo2nd75-NmEPuXH9nvaU_k1TrWeo-ZuJl6cNBsanGtlXNejECYXrBLC5acUbtVgoA0J6WHyM385tHGPjrnl-L5/s400/Steelerbaby.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5565244648107979122" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://steelerbaby.com/">Steelerbaby.com</a><br /><br />I'm not sure how it happened, but I'm not a sports fan, and never was one. Nonetheless the local football franchise the <a href="http://www.steelers.com/">Pittsburgh Steelers</a> are headed into a big game on Sunday. It's a game against the <a href="http://www.newyorkjets.com/">New York Jets</a> to determine the Conferencre Champion and who will go to the <a href="http://www.nfl.com/superbowl/45">Super Bowl</a>. It's sad that I'm so lost when it comes to football because the excitement around here is palpable.<br /><br />Seven or eight years ago I went regularly to the African Student Association meetings at the University of Pittsburgh. A few of the friends I made there have stuck around this area but most have moved on. But it's fun to see on Facebook what big Steeler fans some of them are. <br /><br />John Michael Greer has a recent post, <a href="http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/01/onset-of-catabolic-collapse.html">The Onset of Catabolic Collapse</a>. Catobolism is the breakdown of molecules, it's also the name used for wasting to death. Greer uses the notion of catabolic collapse to describe the process of empires falling, especially in connection to peak oil. Greer provides a very readable account of the process in the post and then makes a good point:<blockquote>That being the case, the question is simply when to place the first wave of catabolism in America – the point at which crises bring a temporary end to business as usual, access to real wealth becomes a much more challenging thing for a large fraction of the population, and significant amounts of the national infrastructure are abandoned or stripped for salvage. It’s not a difficult question to answer, either.<br /><br />The date in question is 1974.</blockquote> Wow, he hits the nail on the head for people in the Pittsburgh area. The collapse of the steel industry here was huge and began right about then. More than two hundred thousand people were directly employed in the industry in the early 1970's in Allegheny County--where the city of Pittsburgh is--by 1980 there were less than five thousand employed. One of the results is there are Pittsburghers all over the country, they moved away to find employment. Lots of them are Steeler's fans to this day. <br /><br />One of my brother's daughters is a huge Steeler fan. She's never lived in Pittsburgh and I bet that most of her school chums are Miami Dolphin fans. It's hard to account for it. My brother has a more normal interest in sports than I have, but he was never a rabid Steelers fan. My little niece could qualify as one though.<br /><br />I was looking for a picture for this post and one way I was searching was to search photos marked as <a href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons</a> at Flickr. It was fun looking at the results, but I didn't find just the right picture. Lots of the pictures seemed related to particular people's experience. There were many pictures of new born babies dressed in Steeler branded clothing. We're maniacs around here for the Steelers. Wherever I've gone this week there have been folks dressed in Steeler clothing. The baby pictures at Flickr reminded me of <a href="http://steelerbaby.com/">Steeler Baby</a>. It's a fun site to get the flavor of our town.<br /><br />I have been reading up on conservatives. Nothing really to report yet, except my heart's not in it. One nice thing about enthusiasm for sports is that it seems to infect liberals and conservatives alike. Ha! And there's a certain working-class sensibility about the Steelers. People all over the USA are Steeler fans--probably many more loathe them. Still, tell someone anywhere in the USA you're a fan and it means something solid, maybe even a bit stodgy.<br /><br />Go Steelers!<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Update</span>: The Pittsburgh Steelers defeat the New York Jets to become the 2011 American Football <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AFC_Championship_Game">Conference Champions</a>. The Steelers will face NFC Champions the <a href="http://www.packers.com/">Green Bay Packers</a> in the <a href="http://www.nfl.com/superbowl/45">45th Super Bowl</a> February 6, 2011 in Arlington, Texas.John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-36592693404286998962011-01-15T01:57:00.001-05:002011-01-15T01:57:55.244-05:00American Portraits<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEi5k4fdgqS1qh7aH8zmRnVN7OrOSXQsLBiSU1mXz0iDLI5ATjfQnFW7NA-6aodUiY-EZ5stOjkwsbxyQXtPS5LsE8ctzJR2f43j1lMwouEvFoLLI6CzorjDHYZuuxLlEm3wBW/s1600/americans_book_cover.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 272px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEi5k4fdgqS1qh7aH8zmRnVN7OrOSXQsLBiSU1mXz0iDLI5ATjfQnFW7NA-6aodUiY-EZ5stOjkwsbxyQXtPS5LsE8ctzJR2f43j1lMwouEvFoLLI6CzorjDHYZuuxLlEm3wBW/s320/americans_book_cover.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5561054621179537810" /></a><br /><br />It's been a month since I've posted here. That just goes to show that however addicted I am surfing the Internet, and I am addicted, blogging is not addictive. It's more a slightly nagging sense that I'd like to.<br /><br />As a kid I liked the card game <a href="http://www.thehouseofcards.com/kids/authors.html">Authors</a>. The game is simple: there are 13 authors and the object of the game was to collect sets of the individual author cards in each suit. The cards name some of the major works of the authors and include a little picture of a character from the books. It was a quick and fun way to learn the names a few authors and what they were most famous for. The game has a certain appeal to imagination planting the seed to want to read the books to find out more.<br /><br />Long before I ever used a computer, I was excited by the idea of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlinks">hyperlinks</a>. I suspect that the game of Authors provided an analogy for how I thought about hyperlinks. I liked the idea about learning that seemed so different from books with a beginning middle and end. I liked the idea that people could collect and curate a set of links to share with others. I really had no idea how cool hyperlinks actually are then without exposure to computers. I'm still a bit behind the curve when it comes to making and curating collections of them. I like collections, but my lack of organization appalling.<br /><br />I recently discovered Robert Shetterly's Web site <a href="http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/">Americans Who Tell the Truth</a>. Shetterly's collection has it all: The portraits are real and travel as an exhibit. There's a book and well printed cards of his portraits of Americans. A Web site to view the portraits and biographical information about the subjects. On the Web site is a curriculum and space for teachers to talk about how they've incorporated the work into their lessons.<br /><br />Robert Shetterly's project began as a response to the 9/11 events in New York City, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania. I hadn't got to his Artist Statement yet when I went to Amazon to look for the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Americans-Tell-Truth-Robert-Shetterly/dp/0142411086/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1295057276&sr=8-1">book</a> (on sale now). I noticed there were 15 5-Star reviews and 8 1-Star reviews and nothing in between. This puzzled me, wondering: What's not to like?<br /><br />Here are a few snippets from 1-star reviews:<blockquote>The book does not inform readers of the extremist backgrounds of the personalities upheld as heroes when in fact they are all simply Anti-American radicals upheld as 'role models for citizenship.'</blockquote> <blockquote>This book cannot be taken seriously and I hope it remains within the inner circle of the hard left crowd. The sad thing is that they're trying to pander this off to children. For shame...</blockquote><blockquote>The title of this piece of dreck should be "Marxists Who Can't Tell The Truth".</blockquote> I was startled, not so much by the negative reactions as my not anticipating them. People in the USA have polarized views. I make some effort to encounter views from the other end of the spectrum, especially online. I guess my surprise was simply seeing that my rather unconscious notions of a consensus view of things hardly lacks a consensus.<br /><br />The question that came to mind was what would an analogous book from an American conservative perspective look like? <br /><br />I'll admit that the first thoughts were a devious collection of portraits of Americans of a conservative persuasion with one quote or another that I find odious. That's childish and it also misses an essential element of Shetterly's project. Portrait painting takes quite a lot of time and effort, not to mention his considerable craft. To do just one portrait takes a considerable commitment. Shetterly has done a hundered or more by now. To sustain that, the subjects of his painting have to hold his interest; he has to love them. And if the portraits work then people seeing the portraits will love the subjects too. Artists know that the best portraits are complimentary in some way, and it's only great artists who've ever gotten away with painting unflattering portraits. Looking at my question about a book of portraits of conservatives from the perspective that I might be moved to love them seemed much more interesting than my initial take.<br /><br />I thought of <a href="http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/675">Wendell Berry</a> as a sort of conservative I admire. Ah, but Berry is on Shetterly's list. I was born in Virginia and my formative years were spent in the South, but my parents were both New Englanders. Yankees are conservative and Southerners too, even a boy can see. But in my childhood animosity against Yankees was a recurrent theme, and I felt it. Anyhow, I do think Berry represent a strong thread in the conservatism of the American South. Also on Shetterly's list of portraits is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Chase_Smith">Margret Chase Smith</a> who was a long-serving Republican senator for the State of Maine. Shetterly lives in Brooksville, Maine and has since he moved there right out of college. Several of his portraits are of Maine folks and there's a strain of Yankee conservatism is familiar to me visitable in those portraits. The old New England philosophy, "Use It Up, Wear It Out, Fix It or Do Without" would be just as familiar to Wendell Berry and his southern kin, but it tends to be ascribed it to New Englanders.<br /><br />Realizing that I wasn't getting close to the sorts of portraits that American conservatives would love nowadays I tried to come up with another tack. I did some Internet searches with terms like "conservative heroes," "Republican heroes," "Hume scholar," etc. I couldn't seem to come up with productive search terms. <br /><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman">Milton Friedman</a> did come up quite a few number of times. Progressivism sorts would probably find Friedman hard to love, especially after the Naomi Klein's popular book <a href="http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/the-book">The Shock Docrine</a>. But I think Friedman is a person who left-leaning folks can at least understand in a sincere and charitable way why conservatives love him.<br /><br />It gets complicated because as much as conservatives love Friedman it seems to me that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bernanke">Ben Bernake</a>, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and a <a href="http://reason.com/archives/2009/11/17/bernankes-philosopher">disciple</a> of Milton Friedman is reviled by most conservatives. <br /><br />I would like to compile a list of American conservatives that conservatives would recognize as a list of admirable people. I'm not very confident I can come up with such a list. Despite political differences it seems to me that with possibly a few exceptions that American conservatives could see the people Shetterly has painted portraits of as decent and in a positive way why others might admire them even when on balance they might not feel admiration.If I expect that of others, I ought to be able to do something analogous. My lack of confidence that I can do it suggests I've got a problem, so I want to try.John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-51448379975943932202010-12-15T16:11:00.004-05:002010-12-16T03:09:49.780-05:00No Dumping<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEShLo8AG51eKWyxKk6A9MowoVa0glME8EsjRJ3Cc7UZJ_TIBgHA6JPriW5VZABy6F3IbChTB2rWus4dOq-_q7lY-Hs1ykk7I0ZTkeUydS-yQZMvzT_a17-eGDtTxBbJgNQrnS/s1600/RichardHolbrook2009_200_1+%25281%2529.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 250px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEShLo8AG51eKWyxKk6A9MowoVa0glME8EsjRJ3Cc7UZJ_TIBgHA6JPriW5VZABy6F3IbChTB2rWus4dOq-_q7lY-Hs1ykk7I0ZTkeUydS-yQZMvzT_a17-eGDtTxBbJgNQrnS/s320/RichardHolbrook2009_200_1+%25281%2529.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5551020418489487266" /></a><br /><br />Somewhere recently I read an essay about blog posts condemning exactly the sort of posts I write; saying "No dumping." I can't be arsed to find a link, it looks like I didn't save it anywhere. The weird thing about blog posts is they aren't really conversations, but they do allow for comments and open up the possibility of conversations. My posts are like big question marks without any real sense that someone will answer them.<br /><br />I write here mostly as a way to put my thoughts in some sort of order. And like the rest of my life my efforts tend more to disorder than to order.<br /><br />Read Write Web posted a story <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/3_new_browser_tools_you_should_know_about_embedly.php">which</a> mentions a <a href="http://readon.ly/index.php">readon.ly</a> a new favorite tool. My obsession with WikiLeaks can be seem with the links I've saved <a href="http://readon.ly/user.php?id=8010942">there</a>. I'm a bit pleased to see the links aren't just WikiLeaks. I use <a href="http://www.delicious.com/protoslacker/">Delicious</a> and have often thought there's a need for good ways to bookmark stuff for my friends using public computers. Readon.ly requires a bookmarklet so it really won't do for that, but there's something simple enough about how it works that it seems on the right track for that sort of thing. Anyhow I do like to use readon.ly. I kept looking at highlights there by "missrogue" and finally followed her to Twitter to discover missrogue is <a href="http://www.horsepigcow.com/about/">Tara Hunt</a>. I promptly followed her on Twitter.<br /><br />The past week or so has me addicted to Twitter, primarily as a way to follow the news about WikiLeaks and <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/10/world/la-fg-britain-students-20101210">protests</a> about tuition fee increases in the UK. The Internet is really good for finding others with opinions like our own. It's also good for looking for contrary opinions, but find that part harder. At Twitter I've tried for a a little diversity of opinion with my choices of whom to follow. I haven't been too successful with diversity, really and part of the problem is the links I follow tend to be ones I think I'll be interested in. So even with what diversity there is in my Twitter stream I don't pay enough attention to views very different from my own. Still I try to pay a little attention and glad that Twitter makes that possible.<br /><br />The photo is of the late <a href="http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/129337.htm">Richard Holbrooke</a> the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was not surprising to me that with the news of his death some of the links and comments in my Twitter feed were along the lines of "That bastard!" but I was surprised in going through obituaries and remembrances of him yesterday what seemed a forgone conclusion that Afghanistan is a lost cause. I expected more sentiments like Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen:<blockquote>Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Holbrooke's presence would be especially missed this week as the Obama administration finishes its review of the Afghan war, expected Thursday. Mullen said Holbrooke helped write and "deeply believed in" the war strategy.<br /><br />"That we have been making steady progress in this war is due in no small measure to Richard's tireless efforts and dedication," Mullen said. "I know he would want our work to continue unabated. And I know we will all feel his bully presence in the room as we do so."</blockquote>Adm. Mullen sent out tweets wishing Holbrooke a speedy recovery after he'd fallen ill. I noted them because General Stanley McCrystal seemed to <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236">loathe</a> Holbrooke and that was part of McCrystal's undoing. There's plenty of circumstantial evidence which suggests the military brass hates Obama.<br /><br />My father is 89 so very much a part of the WWII generation. Towards the end of the Vietnam War almost everyone--despite what many present-day Republicans say--thought the war had been a tragic mistake. Many of the children of the WWII generation got pretty cynical about the USA being a force for good, but I don't really think the WWII generation ever really did. Anyhow my father was interested in the news that Holbrooke had fallen ill. No entirely uncritical of Holbrooke, still in my dad's eyes Holbrooke had a good reputation. I know my dad admires <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_J._Mitchell">George Mitchell</a> for his diplomacy in the Northern Ireland peace. His sense of a favorable reputation of the two is probably pretty close.<br /><br />My mother was a New England Republican but Nixon and Vietnam throughly disillusioned her not just about Republican politics but American Empire. She detested Jerry Ford and didn't vote for Reagan. I think my dad has been more conflicted about neoliberalism than she. I shouldn't suggest either one of them had more interest in politics than they have had. The simple point though is my parents, I think typical of their generation, have felt that the USA has tried to act as a force for good internationally even if sometimes the nation fell short of that ideal.<br /><br />George Bush's re-election in 2004 was in no small part won on the basis of the idea that as a country the USA could be a force for good in the world; as strange as it sounds a force for good in Iraq! I've been against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from the start. My mother died in 2002, but suspect she wouldn't have been in favor of the wars. If my father has sometimes agreed with me in private about my views, he's been uncomfortable about my making them public because they're unpopular. And I've appreciated my father's views as an indication of what people generally are thinking.<br /><br />Zunguzungu has a <a href="http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/the-bad-sleep-well-richard-holbrookes-deathbed/">post</a> up about Holbrooke where he writes:<blockquote>The sooner we put his life as the functionary of an amoral state power behind us, the sooner we can bury him and what he represents, the sooner we can close the door on a past that should never have happened the way it did.</blockquote> Were my mother living perhaps she would have been okay with the notion of "amoral state power," I doubt my father ever will be. <br /><br />Few of the mainstream remembrances of Holbrooke praised the Afghanistan war in moral terms, Mullen is an outlier in that regard. <br /><br />It's odd here in the USA how the words "liberal" and "conservative" have become so charged. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism">Neoliberalism</a> is a good term that's hard to use here, I think in part because of the way the words liberal and conservative have come to represent polar opposites. So I think there's a pairing of neoliberal and neoconservative in people's minds where the dichotomy of liberal/conservative is assumed. Really it's more like the neoconservatives are the military wing of the neoliberals.<br /><br />Richard Holbrooke was certainly a proponent of neoliberalism and a fair reading of his career would seem to make him a neoconservative as well. The sense I got from reading his obituaries and remembrances of him is neoliberals are wary of trumpeting their position these days. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars really don't make any sense and people are wondering how we got into them in the first place. It's not that I detect much serious opposition emerging, it's just the wars have made it more unpopular to praise the neoconservative project.<br /><br />Republicans will take control of the House of Representatives in the new year and the Democratic party majority in the Senate is quite fragile. Josh Marshall <a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/12/they_trust_obama_more.php">notes</a> that the public has more confidence in President Obama to solve problems than they do congressional Republicans. He notes that in two recent shifts of power in congress, 1994 when Republicans took the lead and in 2004 when Democrats did there was more confidence in congress by big margins than the president. <br /><br />Despite the political polarization of popular opinion, neoconservatism has seemed up to now a big tent with both Republicans and Democrats under it. President Obama's escalation of the Afghanistan war was hardly a surprise as he campaigned on the issue--still it seems to have taken some by surprise. I suppose it's not surprising that Republicans didn't step up to praise Holbrooke, but on the other hand not doing so feeds the opinion abroad in the land that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't in the national interest. The Republicans are vested in their militarism, so much so they take support for it for granted. I wonder if they are smart to do so?<br /><br />68% of Americans in polling say WikiLeaks has hurt the USA and 59% want Julian Assange arrested. I'm not sure what that means. An awful lot of Americans seemed in favor of the wars motivated by revenge and these numbers about Assange suggest a similar knee-jerk response. <br /><br />Representative Eric Cantor will become the Majority Leader in the House. Shortly after the November elections he <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/12/eric-cantor-benjamin-netanyahu-israel_n_782738.html">met</a> with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and told Netanyahu that the Republicans will "serve as a check" on the Obama administration. Cantor is the only Jewish Republican in the House. The Republican House leadership will have to contend with a substantial contingent of the Tea Party in their ranks. That contingent has nativism, racism and antisemitism baked-in. The senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell <a href="http://www.thesunchronicle.com/articles/2010/11/05/news/8202059.txt">said</a> after the election that the main goal of congressional Republicans will be to deny Obama re-election in 2012.<br /><br />I find president Obama's neoliberalism and militarism noxious. But I'm rather surprised by the Republican leadership urge to cripple the president; especially if I'm right that there is an increasing reluctance for Americans to identify strongly with neoliberalism as the prospects of good outcomes of the wars grow dim. <br /><br /><a href="http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/audacious-man-called-petraeus.html">Digby</a> at Hullabaloo is a very smart observer of the American political scene. She has pointed out numerous times the intense political ambition of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Petraeus">General David Petraeus</a>. Digby links to an <a href="http://security.nationaljournal.com/2010/12/afghan-review-tipping-point-or.php#">article</a> by Michael Brenner a professor of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh about Petraeus. While hardly ever mentioned as a possible Republican candidate for president in 2012, he is often described as politically ambitious in the press. Bob Woodward <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/21/AR2010092106706_2.html?sid=ST2010092106707&sub=AR">reports</a> that in the development of the escalation plans in Afghanistan <blockquote>During a flight in May, after a glass of wine, Petraeus told his own staffers that the administration was “fucking with the wrong guy.”</blockquote>If the Republicans are intent on destroying Obama both in his conduct of foreign and domestic policy with an ambitious general in the wings, it would seem to me to risk the broad acceptance by the public of the big-tent of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism can be summed up in the nutshell-slogan: "More power to the corporation!" <br /><br />Obama has hewed closely to the neoliberal agenda, while rage from the fallout over massive financial sector abuse has simmered. George Bush frequently <a href="http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/2002/10/29_Dictator.html">joked</a> that it would be a lot easier if he were dictator. There's little doubt that captains of industry might agree with him about the usefulness of dictators. It may be there's a steady plan toward that end in progress. My hunch is that Americans are just stumbling towards dictatorship carelessly. <br /><br />Adm. Mullen was quick to praise Holbrooke and to emphasize that Holbrooke was fully in support of the war. The absence of many others saying as much suggests to me that the support for the effort is waning. Mullen was suggesting that the civilians are in charge of the policy. While it is certainly true that both parties are in the thrall of the military complex, the open question is how the politics will play out when this sentiment against the war turn from a simmer to a boil?John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-73090511666753251072010-12-08T23:17:00.004-05:002010-12-09T03:35:53.053-05:00Capitalism and Four Antagonisms<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP-f3Oc-vp6LiGLE5LRbq3w0T4jKQQwxgXFFOoIWcl1b6qODl1WC16_3VvUkZXdVI8VxxIfYt_n88Hq-HjTW4OoaS9Ocl-k8sufs3zr1RTLE1N_OyMnDGatoc7qJGCicpDpJRx/s1600/poster+%25281%2529.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 216px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP-f3Oc-vp6LiGLE5LRbq3w0T4jKQQwxgXFFOoIWcl1b6qODl1WC16_3VvUkZXdVI8VxxIfYt_n88Hq-HjTW4OoaS9Ocl-k8sufs3zr1RTLE1N_OyMnDGatoc7qJGCicpDpJRx/s320/poster+%25281%2529.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548532143778569730" /></a><br /><br />Last night I was chatting online with a thirty-something friend. I knew December 8, 2010 is was the thirtieth anniversary of the murder of <a href="http://www.johnlennon.com/">John Lennon</a> and there would be a buzz about it. So I asked my friend if he'd ever heard of John Lennon. The answer was that the name didn't ring a bell. I said that Lennon had been a member of the band called <a href="http://www.beatles.com/">The Beatles</a>. He said I follow music much more than he.<br /><br />Next time we talk I'll have to ask if he's ever heard of <a href="http://www.elvis.com/">Elvis Presley</a>. I bet he has, going on music I know he likes and also the quite possibly wrong premise that Elvis is an international icon. <br /><br />My friend <a href="http://http://www.davidpohl.com/">David Pohl</a> pursued art adventures exploring Elvis. David has an encyclopedic knowledge popular music. The Elvis adventures involved deep reading, travel and emersion in the subject. His <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/houseofpingting/sets/72157594206017964/with/216966309/">Elvis Set</a> provides a sample of some of the art he created (David's Etsy Shop, <a href="http://www.etsy.com/shop/houseofpingting)">House of PingTing</a>). <br /><br />Here's what he says about the set: <blockquote>This series of images reflects on the mythology of America's king Elvis Presley. 30 years after his death, Elvis continues to mirror the times, reflecting what is both good and bad about American society. The rise and fall of Elvis reflects what has happened or can potentially happen to us, both individually and collectively.</blockquote>I'm afraid mentioning Elvis is quite off-topic from what I intend to talk about, it's just I can't quite figure out what people mean when they call <a href="http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/biography/">Slavoj Žižek</a> "the Elvis of cultural theory."<br /><br />It's easy to associate only with people who share your interests online, in fact the social part of the Internet make this <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophily">homophily</a> inevitable to some degree. So I've heard words to the effect, "Everyone knows who Žižek is." I'm not so sure about that, what I am sure is people who think they know generally seem to have strong opinions about him. The comparison to Elvis or a rock star probably has less to do with his notoriety, while great doesn't extend so far as popular music artists, but rather to the strong reactions his speaking provokes. <br /><br />I snagged the picture from the <a href="http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/index.php">Zeitgeist Films</a> page for the 2005 Astra Taylor film <a href="http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/film.php?directoryname=zizek">Žižek!</a>. That page has some further links.<br /><br />I haven't read any of his <a href="http://www.powells.com/s?kw=slavoj+zizek&class=">books</a> so I can hardly provide very much useful commentary about Slavoj Žižek (SLA-voy ZHEE-zhek) but I recently watched a talk he gave posted at the <a href="http://www.lacan.com/lacanblog/">Lacan Dot Com Blog</a>. In the talk he spoke of four antagonism to capitalism and I thought I'd try to sketch those out briefly. The lecture is split among several videos and the bits I'm talking about are mostly in the 3rd and 4th videos at the Lacan blog.<br /><br />Definitions are always tricky. A short definition of capitalism might be: <blockquote>An Economic system based on private ownership of captial. </blockquote>That's probably an noncontroversial definition and I suspect that people who would quibble with it would suggest that capitalism is not only an economic system but a social system as well. It's a good point, but that's where controversy floods in. I think definitions for "socialism" and "communism" are harder to find consensus about because the aspect of a social system seems baked into them. The simple definition for capitalism seems sufficient for understanding Žižek's antagonisms.<br /><br />The first antagonism is Democracy. <br /><br />The second antagonism is intellectual property which he also describes as "symbols of social substance." <br /><br />The third antagonism is bio-genetic property, for example Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs).<br /><br />The forth antagonism are slums or apartheid. <br /><br />Žižek notes that the first three antagonisms all represent conflict between the commons and capitalism's ownership of property.<br /><br />Žižek points out that the prevalent way of linking capitalism to democracy is not a necessary linkage. He notes that China's market economy is not antagonistic to authoritarian governance. Democracy presumes a consensus with political power derived from the people which is not necessary to capitalism. Nevertheless democracy requires a commons to arrive at consensus.<br /><br />The antagonism to capitalism by intellectual property is illustrated by noting Bill Gates as an anomaly. Likening market oscillations to a heart beat Žižek notes that extreme concentration or monopoly produce oscillations resembling a heart attack.<br /><br />Bio-genetic property provides antagonism not only from the social ethics involved with the creation of new life forms, but internal changes to people themselves. Intellectual property provokes antagonisms in re external nature whereas bio-genetic property in re internal nature.<br /><br />Each of these three present contradictions of what people hold in common and what is made private property. He also notes that governments as well as commerce make private property which intrudes on the commons.<br /><br />Slums are where the excluded live, with the commons made property a chasm between the excluded and included create antagonisms. With each of the three antagonisms related to the commons, slums are the visible result of wide swaths of people not integrated into governance, the symbolic social substance of society nor the social ethics entailed in bio-genetic manipulations.<br /><br />He does a much better job discussing these ideas than my summary suggests. <br /><br />This week I've been obsessed with my Twitter feed. A good deal of that obsession stems form an interest about what people are saying about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks">WikiLeaks</a>. Titter is used by about <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/09/tech/main7132610.shtml">8% of online Americans</a> with about of them viewing at least once a day. Lots of people, but a small percentage of Americans. What's more because people choose who they follow the content of Twitter streams are quite variable. <br /><br />At Facebook I've got a few friends who follow and post <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement">Tea Party</a> links. So I get to hear that "Obama is a socialist." presented with real acrimony. <br /><br />Among the other subjects that has had me obsessed with Twitter this week involves fiscal issues and a tax deal which Obama made with the Republicans this week. I do get that social democracy has few followers in the USA. Nonetheless there is very broad support for Social Security. Among the political class there's a steady march towards very substantial restructuring of Social Security which alarms almost everyone paying attention to the issue. <br /><br />American author Gore Vidal in a book, Matters of Fact and of Fiction: Essays 1973–1976, wrote:<blockquote>There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.</blockquote> The observation, "there is no difference between the two parties" is kind of a sore spot for many, for one thing there was the role Ralph Nader's presidential campaign played in the 2000 election. There are many other reasons that a difference seems to make a difference even while admitting the kernel of truth that there is only one party, "the property party" or "<a href="http://agonist.org/grandbetrayal">the money party</a>."<br /><br />It seems absurd to think president Obama a socialist. The polarization of political rhetoric is extraordinarily frustrating. I'm not interested in arguing against Obama with Tea Party folks, because I'm none too happy with the present politics either. I am interested in discussing the some of the issue raised by Žižek's four antagonisms. I don't need to refer to Žižek, socialism nor communism in such discussions, but it's rather hard not to mention capitalism or the system of property. It's damned hard to get past the hollering about party politics. I'm still trying to dream up ways to initiate and participate in conversations. Mostly I fail.John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-71918373012393944212010-12-07T13:24:00.000-05:002010-12-07T01:43:25.837-05:00You See What You Want<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7F-7vfEscQKIfiP0wms1rQLP3yoG9_bQG0NZj7Pj-xeQnwmXtHf3WR78qZqjvwXZkS49La9E6gT3dNRb7k3_m18w0hxZyG9oGquGnDEzOBM5EWMloKqyW2uld-UeE0BaOrSZH/s1600/world+oil.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 233px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7F-7vfEscQKIfiP0wms1rQLP3yoG9_bQG0NZj7Pj-xeQnwmXtHf3WR78qZqjvwXZkS49La9E6gT3dNRb7k3_m18w0hxZyG9oGquGnDEzOBM5EWMloKqyW2uld-UeE0BaOrSZH/s320/world+oil.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5541856589223516658" /></a><br /><br />A couple of weekends ago I had the pleasure of spending a little time with an old friend I've rarely seen over the last twenty-five years. In reminiscing and catching up she asked me if I remembered her daughter's birthday party who was five or six at the time. I did remember the party, but was taken aback by her relating a memory from it. Apparently I'd tied-up one of her nephews, who was 10 or 12 years old then. She laughed remembering him flailing and rolling around in the grass. I don't remember that, but I'm sure it's true.<br /><br />A few summers ago with a family visit here I was effusive in praise of one of my little nieces not allowing herself to be tricked into barking by me. Most of my nieces and nephews are adults now and it's only in their adulthood that I've come to know I was the source of much childhood terror by telling them ghost stories. At first I was incredulous that I had told them ghost stories, but their relating the stories prompted immediate recognition. <br /><br />An older niece scolded me about trying to trick my younger niece into barking, pointing out that it wasn't nice to make someone seem foolish for my own amusement. She made a good point. Even though I'd managed to trick my sister-in-law into barking and other animal sounds, her wily daughter wouldn't be duped. But the whole charade from my perspective wasn't solely for my amusement; it was more to the idea that a family who howls together is happy. Likewise I'd tied up the boy as a Houdini escape challenge. I feel sure that I knew he would escape with some effort. The pay out was that his escape would bring adulation from the five and six year old party-goers. <br /><br />This is the silly post has giving me writers block. I'm not sure where I want to go with it, all I know is that I seem to have a lot on my mind. Yet have a hard time developing a story. The best think is probably to simply delete the post; what I'm afraid of is that won't stop the block. So I think I'll put together some links.<br /><br />The title of this entry comes from a favorite song by Zap Mama <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://luakabop.com/directory/album_pages/?zap_mama_7.html">Nostalgie Amoureuse</a></span><br /><br />The picture is from a report--links in this <a href="http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-11-11/iea-acknowledges-peak-oil">précis</a>--by the IEA <a href="http://www.iea.org/">International Energy Agency</a>. Click on the image to see it larger. It's a graphic that may not provoke a sense of panic in others as it did me.<br /><br />Lately I've been using a fun Internet tool called <a href="http://readon.ly/index.php">Readon.ly</a>. It's quite simple and the How Does It Work link at the site is brilliant for it's brevity. I'll give the wrong impression of it with too many word, but here goes. Readon.ly provides a bookmarklet for your browser. It allows you to select a section of text from an article or Web site. A popup window makes it easy to assign tags as well as to edit a tweet which includes a shortened URL. It will then put your highlight on the Readon.ly site along with any tags you've assigned. The first page provides the highlights from various users in chronological order. Each highlight has a little bird you can click on to tweet other's highlights. People who click on the Readon.ly tweets are taken directly to the page where the highlight comes from along with an obvious to close popup of the highlight. It sounds complicated but is easy and obvious in use.<br /><br />I don't often find myself asking myself, "What did I tweet today?" and then looking, which is easy to do. I do sometimes look over things I've linked to over time at Facebook. And I find that I enjoy looking over the readon.ly highlights I've made. The highlights are not date stamped. I remember posting three to day which I'll share and the one just before which I posted last night.<blockquote><span style="font-weight:bold;">“As the cybernetician Stafford Beer once said to me: “If we can understand our children, we’re all screwed.”</span></blockquote>Brian Eno <a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/11/brian-eno-next-big-thing/">"What Happens Next?"</a>. . . and then:<blockquote><span style="font-weight:bold;">“Telling students that they can’t read or discuss the primary documents is “absolutely contrary to any decent practice in international affairs or any other field of study,” Sick said."</span></blockquote>Gary Sick who received his PhD in political science from Columbia in 1973 about warnings communicated from the State Department against discussing WikiLeaks. . .and then:<blockquote><span style="font-weight:bold;">“the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures”</span></blockquote>That's from selections of Vaclav Havel's 1978 essay "<a href="http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165havel.html">The Power of the Powerless"</a>. . . and finaly:<blockquote><span style="font-weight:bold;">“What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.”</span></blockquote>Jimmy Carter July, 1979 speech, <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_crisis.html">The "Crisis of Confidence"</a>. <br /><br />I highlighted at various times of the day, so there were hours between posting each of these highlights. Each article was different stuff before and after, yet at the end of the day what's posted seems to have a common thread.<br /><br />I have no idea whether readon.ly will find a following. It would be very different if a lot of people do, a world-view collection of great sentences. Well, there may be problems to scaling. But readon.ly seems quite fun now. I didn't mention that there's a tag cloud at the top of the page. It's easy to see pages of highlights by tag name. So far my favorite thing to do is to look at pages of highlights sorted by user. Readon.ly is worth looking at.<br /><br />Okay well I think I got this post as a writer's block out of the way.John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-89951633209303336852010-12-04T21:40:00.006-05:002010-12-05T03:23:22.066-05:00Gregory Bateson<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtKbcUEM8o52AlgGNPrE_jerk1Mqd5s3z91zlHerG6LaenDK6gmDYkZmyH0kbLv5LQTKK4qJxogBe5Qn98ylaJM5VOpKje4e7c5YtOBYHF8HZ9x_MYeMn7dsYSwberw_x8biUM/s1600/Bateson.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 241px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtKbcUEM8o52AlgGNPrE_jerk1Mqd5s3z91zlHerG6LaenDK6gmDYkZmyH0kbLv5LQTKK4qJxogBe5Qn98ylaJM5VOpKje4e7c5YtOBYHF8HZ9x_MYeMn7dsYSwberw_x8biUM/s320/Bateson.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547022761582491666" /></a><br /><br />I've been having writer's block for the last three weeks. I've been trying to find in my mind a way to combine my ordinary banal stories with Slavoj Zizek, the quality without a name, peak oil and the relationships between common general worldviews. Just listing the topics in a row makes it obvious why the post isn't coming together--geez. On top of my thinking about a blog post that won't come together, events with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks">WikiLeaks</a> have been unfolding and occupying my attention.<br /><br />Sometimes it takes a while for me to get the utility of various Web sites and services. I was signed up at Twitter for a long time before finding it interesting. What changed my opinion about Twitter was when the G20 Meeting was held in Pittsburgh. On the last night there was a major police action in the Oakland section of town, that's where CMU and the University of Pittsburgh are located. I tuned into Twitter for reports about the G20 Meetings and by the time heavy hitting went down I was convinced of its importance. Lately I think I'm probably paying too much attention to my Twitter stream in response to WikiLeaks.<br /><br />There's a heavy hand of government to suppress news about the recent release of some USA State Department cables marked "confidential." Certainly some news of the release and about WikiLeaks has been disseminated in the mainstream media, especially in opinion pieces. But there is a sufficiently coordinated effort by the government of the USA to control news about them that it's hard to gage to what degree my fellow Americans know the story. <br /><br />In October news of <a href="http://www.propublica.org/blog/item/gmacs-robo-signers-draw-concerns-about-faulty-process-mistaken-foreclosures">Robo-Signers</a> got a little traction in the press. I'm no expert in law or economics, but it seemed to me that the story was important in the larger context of the economy, politics and law. But most people I know don't get news primarily online. I found it incredibly difficult to explain why it seemed like such a big deal. Part of the difficulty it seemed to me followed something like this: If it's such a big deal, then why aren't I reading about it in the newspaper and seeing reports on TV? To which I can only wonder why too, but part of it surely has to do with the differences between how news is delivered via newspapers and TV versus on the Internet. For me the implications to the economy from mortgage fraud seem huge, but for most people I've talked with about it the big issue seems to be the people who took out the mortgages on homes. Primarily that's how it's been covered in the mainstream press.<br /><br />The latest <a href="http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20101213,00.html">Time cover</a> has a photo of <a href="http://www.ted.com/speakers/julian_assange.html">Julian Assange</a> with American Flag duct tape <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/02/AR2007010201219.html">gagging</a> his mouth. The thesis of the <a href="http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2034276,00.html">cover story</a> written by Massimo Calabresi is:<blockquote> Rouge activist Julian Assange wants to curb government secrecy, but his massive leak of classified U.S. diplomatic cables is undermining the Obama Administration's efforts to do just that.</blockquote>The premise has a kernel of truth. One of the first things Obama did as president was to issue a <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment/">Transparency and Open Government Directive</a>. Not unpredictably the <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9176290/Agencies_struggle_to_meet_Obama_s_Open_Government_Directive">response</a> has been mixed. Notably neither the Department of Justice, which is charged with the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act, nor the Office of Management and Budget, which is charged with overseeing large portions of this Open Government Directive, have produced viable responses to it. I haven't found any reporting suggesting that these failures have had any repercussions or that Obama still has any interest in the matter. Certainly the authoritarian responses of the administration, government agencies, and elected Representatives of the government to WikiLeaks making .002% of the State Department cables public suggests Obama has little taste for openness nowadays. <br /><br />My government's responses to the current WikiLeaks embroiglilo truly frightens me. The State Department has warned <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/04/state-department-to-colum_n_792059.html">students</a> not to discuss WikiLeaks on Twitter and Facebook. The Department of Defense has ordered <a href="http://beta.gawker.com/#!5705639/us-military-in-iraq-tries-to-intimidate-soldiers-into-not-reading-wikileaks">soldiers</a> under penalty of law about even reading public accounts of them. These actions are just the tip of the iceberg. Glenn Greenwald has a <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/01/lieberman/index.html">post</a> with more links. Public opinion is bound to become even more polarized when the government attempts to forbid discussion of important news by threats of force. It's a dramatic shift from "-- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." (Video <a href="http://vimeo.com/15402603">here</a> of the Gettysburg Address)<br /><br />As always I'm too long in the preliminaries. The picture is from a short <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmeRvNSgtbs">video clip</a> on a kinescope of an appearance By <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson">Gregory Bateson</a> on TV in the 1950's. I was introduced to Bateson's book, <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780226039053">Steps to an Ecology of Mind</a> in 1974 and have been reading it ever since. My copy is battered and falling apart. <br /><br />"Steps to an Ecology of Mind" is a fascinating book because it's a collection of writing over a fairly long swath of Bateson's career. The Wikipedia article notes that Bateson was an "anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields." So the articles proceed from the perspective of various fields, but taken together suggest a unified focus, if only able to be seen in retrospect. What Bateson was interested in is "the pattern which connects."<br /><br />As the heat was being turned up on WikiLeaks I was reminded of a lecture that Bateson had given at "Two Worlds Symposium" at Sacramento State College in 1966 entitled From Versailles to Cybernetics" published in the book. I looked to see whether I could find the chapter "liberated" somewhere on the Internet. Excerpts are and there appear to be several sources for the entire book in illegal digital form--I seem to have downloaded a RTF file of the book translated into Italian while looking. But I couldn't find a good link to the article so I'll have to tell a little about it.<br /><br />Bateson begins by saying that the proverb:<blockquote>"The fathers have eaten bitter fruit and the children's teeth are set on edge." </blockquote> and a statement by James Joyce: <blockquote>"history is that nightmare from which there is no awakening."</blockquote> had echoed in his mind as he prepared for the talk. Bateson identified two events of the 20th century to that point that had been especially important. As the title of his lecture says these two events are the Treaty of Versailles and the development of cybernetics as a discipline.<br /><br />Bateson viewed the Treaty of Versailles as a gross betrayal of humanity. He notes that people care less about episodes and care very much about patterns of relationships. If "all is fair in love and war" it doesn't follow that treachery in a truce or peacemaking is fair. The betrayal at Versailles demoralized Germany but also the allied powers who perpetrated it. This change in attitude, "unfair whiplash" set the stage for the tragedies of World War II and more troubles. <br /><br />Bateson identified cybernetics as the other significant event of the 20th century: <blockquote>Cybernetics is, at any rate, a contribution to change--not simply a change in attitude, but even a change in the understanding of what attitude is.</blockquote>Bateson was hopeful that cybernetics might make people more able to change the rules in such ways to break the cycle of violence stemming from Versailles which he likened to the house of Atreus in Greek tragedy. But he was not a cyber-Utopian, rather he was sure that cybernetics held dangers of its own. He wrote: <blockquote>We do not know, for example, what effects may follow from the computerization of all government dossiers. </blockquote> There are many complex and subtle issues regarding WikiLeaks, the issues are precisely the sort that require conversations. The polarization about the leaks where one end supports authoritarian control over the conversations--there can be none--strikes me a huge attitude change at least for Americans. It's this shift that tells me that how WikiLeaks has become so controversial is extremely significant. My position is poles apart thinking the only responsible approach is more speech about WikiLeaks. Note that I'm not saying we need more leaks, or that governments ought not to be privileged to keep secrets. The suppression of discussion by government is the appalling change. The privilege of the government to keep secrets follows the consent of the governed. <br /><br />Governments contend that they need to deliberate in private confidence which seems reasonable within limits. It's an entirely different matter when my government conspires to suppress public deliberation. That's precisely the concerted response of American officials and private business leaders to the recent WikiLeaks release of a tiny portion of confidential correspondences vetted by respected international news organizations. I'm horrified that so many of my fellow citizens side with this effort to make public deliberations under the purview of private hands in the government. It's completely flips the relationship between the people's sovereignty over the government. How that's okay, I cannot even begin to fathom.<br /><br />Nora Bateson has made a documentary film about her father called "An Ecology of Mind" which was released just recently. Here's a <a href="http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2010/11/18/movie-review-an-ecology-of-mind/">review</a> of the film, the <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/An-Ecology-of-Mind-The-Gregory-Bateson-Documentary/155784421112208">Facebook Page</a> and the film's <a href="http://www.anecologyofmind.com/">Web site</a>. One of the quotes from Bateson used in the film is:<blockquote> The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.</blockquote> The issues of WikiLeaks and responses to it have very much to do with the way people think. Nevertheless Bateson is right to point out the danger in the disconnnect between how nature works and the way we think. WikiLeaks draws attention to the urgency with which we ought to address the way that we think. The suppression of speech in this matter makes it all the harder to address the major problems facing us all.John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-73584802566185260642010-11-09T17:29:00.004-05:002010-11-09T17:42:22.135-05:00Some Links I LikedI found myself responding in a thread somewhere today when I should have been making paper hats I've promised to make. I'm afraid my comment will annoy the few who will read it there. I generally don't cross-post, in part because where I wrote it there's an odd wiki mark-up convention which means I have to fiddle around with the text. Not meaning to annoy, in fact I liked these links and wanted to share them.<br /><br />This discussion of scaling is interesting. As some of you already know I've stopped thinking by myself and just think links these days ;-)<br /><br />The rise in inequality is something that concerns me a lot, and I think there's lots of reasons too much inequality is a very bad thing. I also think <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructal_theory">constructal theory</a> is pretty cool. So I groaned when I read <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/Examiner-Opinion-Zone/max-borders-The-Tea-Partys-weird-science-106903288.html">The Tea Party's weird science</a> in the Washington Examiner.<br /><br />The Examiner is owned by Philip Anschutz, a really rich guy, who we might say is "all about scaling."<br /><br />I think it gets a bit tricky when physical laws are applied to social systems. I think physical science informs the social, but it's a common hazard not to see the trickiness. Anyhow I am discomforted that the Tea Party bigwigs have discovered constructal law and the rule of thumb: “few large, many small.” But I go along with the usefulness of the rule.<br /><br />Robert Patterson has a really great piece on scaling <a href="http://smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/2010/10/twitter-and-the-dunbar-number.html">Twitter and the Dunbar Number</a>. Lawrence Goodwyn pointed to Thomas Jefferson in an article <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/148582/lawrence_goodwyn:_the_great_predicament_facing_obama?page=entire">The Great Predicament Facing Obama</a> about scale and democracy:<blockquote>I refer now to Jefferson's understanding that democratic relations need a political home that was literally close to home. He advocated for what he called "ward republics" to be organized across the land. He suggested that each republic be kept small, not more than 100 people, so that in the aggregate thousands of them could form the structural base of the political nation. In fact, his most elegant term of description was not "ward republic" but rather "elementary republic." </blockquote>When we think of scale and enterprise most of the time we think about the right size and arrangement of people in the company. The reference between the company and customers is thought to be adequately conveyed in terms of a measure of money. I think this view falls short, indeed it is the essence of greed. <br /><br />The focus is "You can't manage what you don't measure." That quote is generally attributed to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming">W. Edward Deming</a>. The Wikipedia article on Deming points out that Deming didn't say that and in fact gets what Deming did say wrong.<br /><br />The thing is in systems and organizations there's a constant interplay between Structure/State and Flux/Event.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm">Ivan Illich</a> made an important observation about schooling, which applies to how we think of business too:<blockquote> Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success.</blockquote>Deming was keen for businesses not to be so confused.<br /><br />Implicit in the Washington Examiner piece about the Tea Party and constructal theory is an argument in favor of inequality. Or to put it another way that the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few is a measure of success. Such inequality reveals a natural law!<br /><br />Deming knew that much of what matters most cannot be measured. He knew that wisdom makes a difference. That dollars don't add up to wisdom, wisdom isn't quantitative at all.<br /><br />Control in the Tea Party version of business and Government is often seen as the function of the big men--most often men--extracting rents by virtue of size--they are the key nodes of a vascular system. In contrast, Deming and later-day system thinkers know that control is actually an interplay between feedback and calibration; an interplay of form and process. "Scale" isn't the same as "size." Sometimes less is more. Escalation does not always lead to success but to often to catastrophe. <br /><br />Wisdom lies in not confusing process with substance. And in not focusing too much on processes without regard to form, or the other way around. Wisdom isn't out there hard and fast. Wisdom is like dancing, in the interplay and relationships.John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-67267357509145932712010-11-08T10:09:00.007-05:002010-11-09T14:49:50.332-05:00What do masks reveal?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoxd6qwYJVohgnqavwb7Bw9zHxuXHevJqDJ_jRxlIUaz8AaGJDqJp1-IELB7cG4IP0xEV30EiVGXk5MjCFRPK-kKOot05XW1puDqt-tNb5XIIQNa951QI8DtIyrHmCdPyrs0Ug/s1600/Lagbaja.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 238px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoxd6qwYJVohgnqavwb7Bw9zHxuXHevJqDJ_jRxlIUaz8AaGJDqJp1-IELB7cG4IP0xEV30EiVGXk5MjCFRPK-kKOot05XW1puDqt-tNb5XIIQNa951QI8DtIyrHmCdPyrs0Ug/s320/Lagbaja.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5537196843753725554" /></a><br /><br />The picture is a screen shot from the video <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAhlp1kGmzc">Bling Bling Panda</a> masked Nigerian musician, Lágbájá, Bisade Ologunde. I saw the video via <a href="http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/meet_lagbaja_the_masked_king_of_afrobeat_music/">Dangerous Minds</a>. I was interested how Ologunde becomes Lágbájá, which means something like "a common man" by way of the mask. <br /><br />American musician Johnny Cash performed in black clothing and explained his reasons in the song <a href="http://www.metrolyrics.com/man-in-black-lyrics-johnny-cash.html">Man in Black</a> <blockquote>just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back/ up front there ought to be a Man in Black</blockquote>Easy enough not to notice a Man in Black, harder to ignore a Masked Man.<br /><br />I liked the video Bling Bling Panda a lot and if you're inclined to view videos it's worth your while. The story in the video follows a teenager's quest to be accepted by peers through acquiring bling bling. The boy comes to Lágbájá to complain and what is offered in turn to him seems all wrong, not the right kind of bling, but is right in a way too.<br /><br />Last night I watched an <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWB0zw_02O0">interview</a> of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariq_Ramadan">Tariq Ramadan</a> by Harry Kreisler. Kreisler is the director of Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and has a long-running televsion program called <a href="http://conversations.berkeley.edu/content/harry-kreisler-0">Conversations with History</a>. There are over 450 episodes at YouTube with fascinating people. Ramadan noted in the interview that religion cannot exist outside of culture but that religion and culture are different. <br /><br />When people ask about my religious belief I say that I don't believe in God; or if they ask to describe that in terms of who I am, I say I'm agnostic. Often people say they don't believe me. I once told a friend, "I am not a Christian." He replied: "You can no more be not a Christian than I can be not a Jew." He then added with a grin, "I guess I can not be not-Christian either." This notion of being culturally Christian is complicated.<br /><br />I was brought up in the Anglican tradition of Christianity. Anglicans are paedobaptists. That sound awful doesn't it? All that it means is that Anglicans baptize infants. While I have no memory of it I was baptized as a baby. Part of the ritual the priest marks on the forehead of the child the sign of the cross and proclaims: <blockquote>you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ's own forever.</blockquote>So I don't remember my own baptism but surely remember many baptisms. In the history of Christianity there's a great deal of persecution over the idea of baptism as it's fundamental to Christianity. So not speaking precisely theologically, rather more practically, here's one way baptism has influence me culturally. I saw babies marked as Christ's own and that's made me think of people as equal. <br /><br />Because Anglicans baptize infants there is another ritual around the time kids are entering puberty. After a period of instruction in Christianity kids are confirmed, a ritual more or less repeating baptism where this time a bishop lays his hands upon the heads of kids. As children one of the things we have to learn about Christianity--there is a long list of questions we have to answer-- is the answer to the question: "What are the sacraments?" The answer in part is: "The sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace..." Baptism is a sacrament and so there is a quality of it that is like: Don't look at my finger, but rather look to where my finger is pointing. <br /><br />The shorter version of how baptism has impressed upon me the equality of people is in the notion "We are all God's children." Surely that's not the only lesson people might take from baptism, but it's not one peculiar only to me. While for various reasons I say truthfully that I am agnostic about my belief in God, I also have to admit that my belief in the equality of all people is fundamental to me and in this religious way.<br /><br />My friend was pointing out how Christianity is rooted in me. He was pointing out both that we, growing up as we have, are culturally Christian, and that teasing out culture from religion isn't as straight forward as we might expect. <br /><br />My friend recently attended his 40th high school reunion and a running theme there was being told he was the first Jew any of them had ever met. It's the sort of observation for biting ones tongue, but he wanted to say he was different in so many ways they don't know. My friend married a woman from a family of atheist, and my friend in his adult life has never been a practicing Jew. Their daughter grew up among Christians, although labeled a Jew. It was only in her first year of college she got to know Jewish kids. I smiled when she told me: This is how I describe myself. I'm Jew"<span style="font-style:italic;">ish</span>." <br /><br />The seams of religion and culture are not easy to tear apart. <br /><br />Tariq Ramadan is a Swiss philosopher and theologian, a professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University. He is also the grandson of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_al_Bann">Hassan al-Banna</a> the founder of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood">Muslim Brotherhood</a>, a Muslim revivalist organization. Ramadan was infamously <a href="http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/Clinton_ends_US_visa_ban_on_Tariq_Ramadan.html?cid=8131190">denied a visa</a> to enter the country after an appointment to teach at Notre Dame. Ramadan notes that he's culturally-Western and religiously-Muslim. He's a French-speaker, an Arabic-speaker and an English-speak. He is many differnt things. We all are.<br /><br />Lágbájá is masked but like every pop star there's intense interest in his private life and gossip about it. There's an <a href="http://www.thesourceng.com/crazyidentitysept17.htm">amusing story</a> where he goes to the hospital to see a friend, another famous musician, but he arrives as Bisade Ologunde without a mask. The nurses won't give him the time of day and certainly won't allow him to visit his friend. The next day he comes to visit as Lágbájá and is ushered to his friend's bed side.<br /><br />The mask obscures and reveals. One one level of course it's a gimmick, a device to be a character. But on another level obscuring his identities allows some semblance of truth about his real self. This is a part of a quality without a name. All which we identify ourselves by is not the same, or the sum total, of our being. <br /><br />I found Zizek's lecture <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9S3vvPe9IM">Materialism and Theology</a> quite thought provoking. Towards the end he asks rhetorically: "What dies on the cross for me?" While he's been talking for forty minutes about theology, his posing still surprised me a little bit. Zizek is an atheist, but the question isn't posed from an objective distance but rather in a genuinely religious frame. He's not putting on a mask to mock religion, but rather to see through a religious perspective. That makes a difference.<br /><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Midgley">Mary Midgley</a> has a recent piece at Eurozine, <a href="http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-11-03-midgley-en.html">Against humanism</a>. And there's an essay at SSRC by Eduardo Mendieta, <a href="http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/11/03/religion-rationalization/">Religion as a catalyst of rationalization</a> concerning <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas">Jurgen Habermas</a> and religion in the public sphere. Zizek explicitly takes on Habermas in his lecture. The area of disagreement concerns Zizek's views on ontology which I'll write about another time. Midgley isn't explicitly mentioned by Zizek.<br /><br />Youtube comments too often are mean. There are some remarks by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Schirmacher">Wolfgang Schirmacher</a> the program director at the European Graduate School where Zizek presented his lecture. Many of the comments in re Schirmacher are to the effect: "What an ass!" But I appreciated the fact that Schirmacher directly responded to Zizek's religious framing. Zizek makes light of his irritation with Schirmacher, but suffice it to say Zizek framing is a little odd. Midgley makes an interesting point in her essay:<blockquote>The language that has been developed over the centuries for talking about the mental and spiritual side of life is not some feeble, amateurish "folk-psychology". It is a highly sophisticated toolbox adapted for just that difficult purpose</blockquote>It seems to me that Zizek finds the tools in the box useful so Schirmacher questioning whether he ought to be using those tools seem inconvenient to ask. Zizek is implying the question "Who is God?" matters very much and Schirmacher responds, one atheist to another: "Oh really?" (Neither are genuine quotes, but I dont think distort the exchange.) <br /><br />Of course the question: Who is God? has never been simple to answer. Indeed even the word "god" is problematic as is certainly true naming. Donning a mask Bisade Ologunde becomes every man, Lágbájá. He is less a character than a question: Is there is anybody's children who can tell me: what is the soul of a man? (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYOz-turJ3g">Bruce Cockburn video</a>) The quality without a name is is vital.John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-52272698240920617232010-11-05T22:52:00.004-04:002010-11-06T01:29:39.995-04:00Rambling On<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfc4GNaRQVWKMEJ75AGAXbcFyX81FwfPKiGfbTfbB403t3BYfNm7CU60T2AnXdk4hWqUqvxYWyoKRPwD_MWtJWCp25GYj9IhQB9vN33pxjRfvDIv_cGhcZ067Qq1HcKcO9cgCf/s1600/76900_493628665438_611800438_7039057_5706847_n.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfc4GNaRQVWKMEJ75AGAXbcFyX81FwfPKiGfbTfbB403t3BYfNm7CU60T2AnXdk4hWqUqvxYWyoKRPwD_MWtJWCp25GYj9IhQB9vN33pxjRfvDIv_cGhcZ067Qq1HcKcO9cgCf/s320/76900_493628665438_611800438_7039057_5706847_n.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5536264472315179890" /></a><br /><br />A picture of me :-) Some people say that when we're in costume, like for Halloween, we're more our real selves. It's something along the lines that a mask can show something that's true about ourselves but is not otherwise able to be seen. <br /><br />I'm not sure what my problem is, but I never seem to be able to think up a costume for Halloween. I had a poncho and a cowboy hat too and a friend helpfully suggested that I was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Valdez">Juan Valdez</a>, a fictional character to advertise Columbian coffee. I was happy that how I was dressed could even mildy be construed as a costume, as I was wearing clothing I ordinarily wear. But the costume did not reveal the truth that I'm actually a fictional character; or did it?<br /><br />Anyhow it's nice to have a picture. I haven't yet tried to put any pictures from my camera onto my computer. I have an old digital camera that has a resolution of less than 2 pixels, nowadays it seems cameras, even cheap ones have 12. And besides, I'm not good at taking pictures. But I really like pictures and always want to post them here.<br /><br />Lately I've not posted anything to my <a href="http://hatsforhealth.blogspot.com/">Hats for Health</a> blog. The premise of that blog is that <span style="font-style:italic;">people need clean water and we need more parties</span>. To the first point: well obviously! I thought that people making party hats might be a way to raise money for water and sanitation initiatives. So far not so good. Paper party hats could only raise a little money and that's why the second part is so important. We need more parties because it's at parties we can talk about the really important things. Killing two birds with one stone, the idea of paper party hats for health.<br /><br />I'm so lazy that often I will Google for a URL so I can copy and paste rather than just typing. When I just did that I discovered <a href="http://www.hatsforhealth.com/">hatsforhealth.com</a> a site of a hat maker who gives some of the proceeds for cancer patient care.<br /><br />I'm not sure who took the photograph as I got it from another friend. But I think the photo was taken by Teresa Foley, who I met for the first time at the party. Teresa was in costume, some sort of magical autumnal sprite, although I should have inquired about her costume. I didn't think to inquire because I heard her talking about one of her very cool projects <a href="http://locallytoned.wordpress.com/">Locally Toned</a> and wanted to hear more about that. When I visited the blog I saw a <a href="http://vimeo.com/16211246">link</a> to a video she made telling about the project at the <a href="http://www.waffleshop.org/">Waffle Shop</a>.<br /><br />The Waffle Shop is so cool, yet another great effort to co-produce culture. It's a real restaurant with a talk show which can also be engaged on line. So both Teresa Foley's Locally Toned, The Waffle Shop and it's sister restaurant <a href="http://www.kubidehkitchen.com/">Conflict Kitchen</a>--now serving Iranian take out--are ways to get people to make something good together and be together in something good. That's what my hats are about too.<br /><br />A friend has parties where he deftly V-jays recorded music performances. For many years now he's organized, with help from his friends, a big party to raise money for the Pittsburgh Food Bank. I was delighted to be asked to make some hats for the party.<br /><br />I really want to get to a post about Zisek's lecture <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9S3vvPe9IM">Materialism and Theology</a>. There's a general thread about the quality without a name I'm trying to say something about. I think this quality without a name is very important when it comes to culture. There is also a thread of the metaphor of culture as software going on. I want ot contrast Gregory Bateson, Slavoj Zizek and Jack Balkin on one hand with Douglass Rushkoff, Terrance McKenna and John Lilly on the other. But I'm stuck.<br /><br />Something that both Lilly and McKenna had in common was meeting entities while under the influence of psychoactive drugs. I thought of this and thought that I could elide the topic. It's not easy to talk about how we know, that is to talk about epistemology, even when there's general agreement about the nature of things or the basic ground of reality, that is ontology. But Zizek's talk deals to a great extent with ontology. Yikes, I find myself in over my head the more I think about it. I'm sure that won't prevent me from taking a stab, but not tonight.<br /><br />This week there were elections in the USA and that's had me depressing about it. A friend's mother passed away this week and I caught a nasty cold. The Halloween party I attended last Saturday was the bright spot. At root there's so much wrong. Early on doing this blog I read that when G. I. Gurdjieff was asked what we can do in the face of evil, he replied:<blockquote>Create something good.</blockquote>That's been something of a slogan here. I am depressed about politics, but it cheered me to go to a party and especially to meet Teresa Foley for the first time. People coming together to make something good is truly a positive way to respond when so much is wrong.John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17190292.post-36100319081163218022010-10-29T23:44:00.007-04:002010-11-01T20:37:24.989-04:00What I Think<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghkwXwoPqq0EM-nMqTE1VuhBf-36BH6FAIHe0qeEWB9WbPWrpcic1LJX0zLaaE1BBF60HrkaXxZg7dmslQzAWGr9a5rtbuOQDR5qeGvQ8c2mNfo9tVBEV-TmuygtM1uHGUBIoq/s1600/Simulations+of+God.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 194px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghkwXwoPqq0EM-nMqTE1VuhBf-36BH6FAIHe0qeEWB9WbPWrpcic1LJX0zLaaE1BBF60HrkaXxZg7dmslQzAWGr9a5rtbuOQDR5qeGvQ8c2mNfo9tVBEV-TmuygtM1uHGUBIoq/s320/Simulations+of+God.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5533681101263937682" /></a><br /><br />What I think hardly matters to anybody but me. Anyone who has read almost anything I've written knows that I'm quite naive. Still, I find my online excursions thought provoking and wonder about the ideas I encounter. The nice thing about blogs is that there is a space way out here on the long tail where I can ruminate about and point to what interests me without being told to often not to speak about what I don't know; simply because so few people see what I write. It's also nice that online is a social space and by sometimes sharing what I think on my blog at least I needn't be completely anonymous to others, especially others whose blogs I leave too-long comments on.<br /><br />Christopher Alexander's idea of the quality without a name seems very important to me, but I find it hard to talk about it. Part of the difficulty is the absurdity of "the quality without a name" is the name of a quality without a name. And of course part of the difficulty is that I haven't really thought out why this idea seems so important to me carefully.<br /><br />Recently I've been talking about computers, because I got a new one. But I'm also very interested in general by technologies: How the upsides are rarely clearly envisioned in advance, but can only be seen in retrospect, and that the downsides are almost always unintended.<br /><br />For the last couple of weeks I've been thinking of a contrast of two views about culture. The first from Constitutional Law scholar J.M. Balkin's book <a href="http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/cs.htm">Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology</a>. Here's a short snippet taken from the first chapter <a href="http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/7">here</a>: <blockquote>Cultural software does not merely obscure; it also clarifies. It does not merely limit the imagination but empowers it as well. The theory of cultural software thus rejects a uniformly pejorative conception that views ideology as a disease or a decrepit form of human thought. In the theory of cultural software, the mechanisms of ideological thought are the mechanisms of everyday thought. In this theory, truth and falsity, deception and empowerment enter through the same door</blockquote>. The second view is that of ethnobotanist and psychonaut <a href="http://erocx1.blogspot.com/2007/12/terence-mckenna-culture-is-not-your.html">Terrence McKenna</a>:<blockquote>This is something, culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people's convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture.</blockquote> Not in the partial written transcript at that link, but ending the video clip posted there, the question was asked: "How do we fight back?" McKenna answers:<blockquote>By creating art...By putting the art pedal to the metal we really maximize our humanness and become much more necessary and incomprehensible to the machines.</blockquote> Both authors have spoken about what to make of our thoughts using the metaphor of computer software. Both are pointing out the importance of freedom and that's something important about the quality without a name. <br /><br />My general temperament aligns me more closely with Balkin's use of the metaphor of software as applied to culture. His chapter begins with a metaphor from the Talmud:<blockquote>God knew that He was finished with the task of creation, He endeavored to bring into existence everything that might be needed later on. At the end of this list of necessary items is a curious addition: the first set of tongs, for, as the Talmud tells us, tongs can only be made with other tongs.</blockquote> Central to Balkin's conception of cultural software is the idea of "a tool that can be made only from another tool." Balkin locates cultural software in us, which seems pretty convincing. But I'm left wondering how to account for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect">network effects</a> and the observation that Balkin's metaphor of software seems to depend on a pre-Internet notion of what software is. Nevertheless, Balkin is speaking about a rather formal way of thinking, or is speaking in formal language, which is more in my comfort zone than where McKenna is coming from.<br /><br />I haven't read Douglass Rushkoff's book <a href="http://www.orbooks.com/our-books/program/">Program or be Programmed</a>, but I have seen a few videos and read a few Web pages about it. I'm not sure the connections I make are very good, but more generally connect Rushkoff to McKenna in re these quotes. The point about Balkin's fromal language is about outward forms or structure. McKenna, Rushkoff and Lilly--I'll get to him--pay more heed to processes than structure.<br /><br />Terrence McKenna died in 2000 and I only discovered him in the last year or so. I'm not sure how I missed him before. In 2005 I went to an Afrobeats night at a local club and met some nice young folks who suggested that I connect with them through Tribe.net. I think I probably was already on Friendster, but never connected with anyone there, so it seems like Tribe was my first exposure to online social networks. Very lively discussions there and I soon got a vivid picture of myself on the other side of a generation gap. Because there was so much discussion going on at Tribe then, there was ample opportunity for me to learn more and to begin bridging the gap. But it goes to show how clueless I still am not to have stumbled upon McKenna and his ideas directly at Tribe.<br /><br />At Tribe.net there were ideas which in one way or another people were talking about back in the seventies, but the vocabulary and orientations to these ideas had changed. Because I've been lately thinking about the ideas which struck me as important in the 1970's and have continued to think about, I was reminded of John Lilly's book "Simulations of God." I lost my copy along the way but found a place to download it <a href="http://www.4shared.com/account/document/tHlqoP6r/John_Lilly_-_Simulations_of_Go.html">here</a>.<br /><br />I mentioned in a previous post that writing a philosophy paper about Kierkegaard was very hard for me--my paper was exasperating to my professor. It was hard because I was thinking of studying social science of one sort or another and "objectivity" and "subjectivity" and notions about them were driving me nuts. I've got a textbook on my shelf by Robert E. Ornstein, "The Nature of Human Consciousness." The old saw goes something like "If you can remember the sixties, you weren't there." I think that applies to the seventies too. Anyhow I can't remember what course the textbook is from. I think it was probably from a course in what was then the School of Library and Information Sciences, entitled "Cybernetics." I'm embarrassed to say that I walked out of the class after a session about defining "information" after asking the sophmoric question: "Then what is wisdom?"<br /><br />I regret not having paid better attention in school. Nonetheless while not articulating <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness">the hard problem of consciousness</a> in quite the way it's stated today, and without paying attention to my studies, I'd concluded even then that human consciousness was a hard problem. Lazy as I am I tend to put hard problems aside. That's probably why I don't still have my copy of "Simulations of God" even though I remember it impressed me back in the day. <br /><br />Mary Catherine Bateson speaking of her father Gregory wrote: <blockquote>[I]t seems that we have the capacity to be wrong in rather creative ways--so wrong that this world we cannot understand may become one in which we cannot live. But it is important to remember in this context Gregory's commitment to the principle of double description. The richest knowledge of the tree includes both myth and botany. <span style="font-style:italic;">Apart from Cretura, nothing can be known; apart from Pleroma, there is nothing to know</span>. Gregory, convinced that the artist and visionary sometimes knows more than all our science, might have ended with this fragrant of prayer embedded in a poem by William Blake:<br /><br /> May God us keep<br /> From Single vision & Newton's sleep!</blockquote>The emphasis is mine. Bateson thought of himself as a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monism">Monist</a> but certainly not a Physicalist. Whenever I've tried to talk about Bateson's ideas I always seem to give the impression that Bateson was a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism">Dualist</a>. A part of what I think about when I think about "a quality without a name" is Bateson's contention of "mind and nature: a necessary unity." With emphasis on the "unity" bit.<br /><br />I certainly don't think I can solve "the hard problem of consciousness," but I think I can't really compare Jack Balkin's use of the metaphor of "software" with Terrence McKenna's without touching on the issue of human consciousness.<br /><br />After re-reading "Simulations of God" recently I happened upon a lecture by Slavoj Zizek, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9S3vvPe9IM">Materialism and Theology</a> on YouTube. Zizek doesn't really talk about consciousness, but is critical of "vulgar materialism" while stridently advocating materialism. I think it's a good jumping off point to explore being and thinking and in turn consciousness. I'll leave that for another day, but this is some of what I've been thinking lately.John Powershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com1