"The feed is so pixelated, what if it’s a shovel, and not a weapon?" I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian’s life all because of a bad image or angle.

You may wonder what discrimination and social justice have to do with the technical and economic nature of the web; the short answer is, everything.

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(via Dead and Going to Die – The New Inquiry)

When we accuse people of being too lazy to take care of themselves and cook a proper meal, we assume they all have pots, pans, knives, sinks. There are people on social media who get on their high horses and call people who don’t make their own pasta “idiots”. Are you kidding me? My children were used to eating mangoes and avocados for snacks and having unlimited access to the cupboards and refrigerator. Now there is rationing. Woe to the person who eats the last egg I was saving to add protein to the salad. I turn into Mommie Dearest within seconds now, on edge all the time, trying to be the food police.

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All hell broke loose when the cover came out. Several advertisers took their money and ran. Subscribers demanded refunds. Angry letters flowed in. Photo History: George Lois Gives America a Black Santa

I almost cried and thought I might, but then didn’t, since I had a way to go before I got home and didn’t want anyone to have to see a 6’3”, 230 pound bearded man running down the street in tears in bright workout gear on their way to work or school.

“It’s cool!” I would have assured them, “I’m just thinking about men and boys kissing each other in the context of fatherhood! Not a big deal.”

I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.

The black people who Phil Robertson knew were warred upon. If they valued their lives, and the lives of their families, the last thing they would have done was voiced a complaint about “white people” to a man like Robertson.

Just add “if you’re white” or “because I’m white” to each generalization or anecdote in the article. For instance: “I find when you act confused but polite then people want to help if you’re white. There was a line behind me. I wasn’t fighting or angry. So there was no reason for anyone to get angry at me, because I’m white.”

Standards and practices still insisted on the removal of specific shots, like Mix doing push-ups on the butt, or other really tight butt shots.

Pop culture says that if a black girl is to be taken seriously, she has to assimilate and be as white as possible, to the point of bleaching her hair blonde. But the entire point of the song was the opposite.

There’s a world of possibility in telling me more about my own listening habits. If I could choose only one feature to add to Spotify, it would be play histories. When was the the first time I played a song? When was the last? When did I first add an album to my collection? How many times have I played it? Given my listening history, how likely am I to like a new album? How often do people with similar histories play a given album? How long did it take me to play one album twenty-five times in comparison to the last album I played that often?

In a sense, the most amazing thing about Mr. Mandela is that he is not a fiction. He actually lived in our lifetime.

Some of the questions asked by the incisive audience were polite versions of “What are the dangers of having this much data about so many people?” and “What does Facebook as a company do to help society?” These Zuckerberg dodged so expertly that by the time he was done “answering” (with a hefty & convincing confidence), I had forgotten exactly what the question was.

This leads him to a controversial conclusion: that the saturated fat in butter, cheese and meats does not contribute to the clogging of arteries — and in fact is beneficial in moderate amounts in the context of a healthy diet (lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and other fresh, unprocessed foods). His own diet attests to that. Along with fruits, vegetables and whole grains, he eats red meat several times a week and drinks whole milk daily. He cannot remember the last time he ate anything deep-fried. He has never used margarine, and instead scrambles eggs in butter every morning. He calls eggs one of nature’s most perfect foods, something he has been preaching since the 1970s, when the consumption of cholesterol-laden eggs was thought to be a one-way ticket to heart disease. “Eggs have all of the nine amino acids you need to build cells, plus important vitamins and minerals,” he said. “It’s crazy to just eat egg whites. Not a good practice at all.”

It is on record. Rapes in the dozen. So stop hedging your words and when you tell me what a brilliant ode to pussy Black Panties is, then realize that the next sentence should say: “This, from a man who has committed numerous rapes.” The guy was a monster! Just say it! We do have a justice system and he was acquitted. Ok, fine. And these other women took the civil lawsuit route. He was tried on very narrow grounds. He was tried on a 29 minute, 36 second video tape. He was tried on trading child pornography. He was not tried for rape. He was acquitted of making child pornography. He’s never been tried in court for rape, but look at the statistics. The numbers of rapes that happened, the numbers of rapes that were reported, the numbers of rapes that make it to court and then the conviction rate. I mean, it comes down to something miniscule. He’s never had his day in court as a rapist. It’s fifteen years in the past now, but this record exists. You have to make a choice, as a listener if music matters to you as more than mere entertainment and you and I have spent our entire lives with that conviction. This is not just entertainment, this is our life blood. This matters.

The day will come — sooner than you think — when you’ll want to be able to conduct a security audit on your own sex toys.

Such a strange existential dilemma. I spend hours looking at this hole and poking at it with my fingers. I know that I cannot “have” a hole, as a hole is not a thing that can be had. A hole is an absence. And yet this is supposed to be a list of the things I want, and I want this hole in the hardwood floor the way Gandhi wanted peace. The way the dog wants to lick my face. The way my mother wants me to stop pulling off her eyeglasses.

I cut my teeth on the open web of the early 2000s. It was APIs, and mashups. Mac OS X turned my laptop into a web server and coding machine, just the same as where I hosted the toys and tools that I wrote. This is what the future was going to be like.

And then it didn’t happen. Code is fragile because APIs keep changing and nobody cares about scripting anymore. There are no text and image file formats anymore, practically speaking, because there’s no file interchange. Once photos are on Instagram, that’s it.

We’ve lost the ambition of the early web and early internet to create an inclusive, level playing field. It’s clear what the technical challenges are - HTTP needs micro-payments at the protocol level to support businesses outside advertising, we need portable high level standards for photos, streams and identity - but we’re kinda not thinking like that anymore.

So in reaction I stick with plain text as much as possible, and continue my computing life vaguely resenting the software world we’ve built.

I can guarantee you that in the seconds between the first blow to the right shoulder and the second blow to the left, you’re not thinking about anything else or anywhere else, and your full attention is on the here and the now.

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Gargoyle, drumming

(via Signed Japanese boxwood Okimono of a Gargoyle playing drums from quirkyantiques on Ruby Lane)

So, I’ve only read the lengthy quote I posted below, but I can’t help thinking the whole Amazon drone delivery thing was timed to distract from this amazing reporting which was clearly deeply researched and, in a different news cycle, would have distance-runner’s legs. It’s one thing to have nagging suspicion that it’s unpleasant to package up Amazon orders as your day job. This Guardian article is another thing.

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new-aesthetic:

My week as an Amazon insider | Technology | The Observer

The first item I see in Amazon’s Swansea warehouse is a package of dog nappies. The second is a massive pink plastic dildo. The warehouse is 800,000 square feet, or, in what is Amazon’s standard unit of measurement, the size of 11 football pitches (its Dunfermline warehouse, the UK’s largest, is 14 football pitches). It is a quarter of a mile from end to end. There is space, it turns out, for an awful lot of crap. […]

On my second day, the manager tells us that we alone have picked and packed 155,000 items in the past 24 hours. Tomorrow, 2 December – the busiest online shopping day of the year – that figure will be closer to 450,000. And this is just one of eight warehouses across the country. Amazon took 3.5m orders on a single day last year. Christmas is its Vietnam – a test of its corporate mettle and the kind of challenge that would make even the most experienced distribution supply manager break down and weep. In the past two weeks, it has taken on an extra 15,000 agency staff in Britain. And it expects to double the number of warehouses in Britain in the next three years. It expects to continue the growth that has made it one of the most powerful multinationals on the planet. […]

If Santa had a track record in paying his temporary elves the minimum wage while pushing them to the limits of the EU working time directive, and sacking them if they take three sick breaks in any three-month period, this would be an apt comparison. It is probably reasonable to assume that tax avoidance is not “constitutionally” a part of the Santa business model as Brad Stone, the author of a new book on Amazon, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, tells me it is in Amazon’s case. Neither does Santa attempt to bully his competitors, as Mark Constantine, the founder of Lush cosmetics, who last week took Amazon to the high court, accuses it of doing. Santa was not called before the Commons public accounts committee and called “immoral” by MPs. […]

Because Amazon is the future of shopping; being an Amazon “associate” in an Amazon “fulfilment centre” – take that for doublespeak, Mr Orwell – is the future of work; and Amazon’s payment of minimal tax in any jurisdiction is the future of global business. A future in which multinational corporations wield more power than governments. […]

"They dangle those blue badges in front of you," says Bill Woolcock, an ex-employee at Amazon’s fulfilment centre in Rugeley, Staffordshire. "If you have a blue badge you have better wages, proper rights. You can be working alongside someone in the same job, but they’re stable and you’re just cannon fodder. I worked there from September 2011 to February 2012 and on Christmas Eve an agency rep with a clipboard stood by the exit and said: ‘You’re back after Christmas. And you’re back. And you’re not. You’re not.’ It was just brutal. It reminded me of stories about the great depression, where men would stand at the factory gate in the hope of being selected for a few days’ labour. You just feel you have no personal value at all." […]

It’s taxes, of course, that pay for the roads on which Amazon’s delivery trucks drive, and the schools in which its employees are educated, and the hospitals in which their babies are born and their arteries are patched up, and in which, one day, they may be nursed in their dying days. Taxes that all its workers pay, and that, it emerged in 2012, it tends not to pay. On UK sales of £4.2bn in 2012, it paid £3.2m in corporation tax. In 2006, it transferred its UK business to Luxembourg and reclassified its UK operation as simply “order fulfilment” business. The Luxembourg office employs 380 people. The UK operation employs 21,000. You do the math. […]

"It’s a form of piracy capitalism. They rush into people’s countries, they take the money out, and they dump it in some port of convenience. That’s not a business in any traditional sense. It’s an ugly return to a form of exploitative capitalism that we had a century ago and we decided as a society to move on from." […]

It’s a mirror image of what is happening on the shop floor. Just as Amazon has eroded 200 years’ worth of workers’ rights through its use of agencies and rendered a large swath of its workers powerless, so it has pulled off the same trick with corporate responsibility. MPs like to slag off Amazon and Starbucks and Google for not paying their taxes but they’ve yet to actually create the legislation that would compel them to do so.

It turned out a city was exactly what I needed at that moment. Only cities can shoot you down in this way, without any regard. I was not special, I realized, standing in the dark at the 40th street transit center.

And yet, somehow, a great many people who are privileged seem to forget this – indeed, they seem to think exactly the opposite. They convince themselves that they have made successes of their lives from raw talent and intelligence and that everyone else who hasn’t succeeded must have failed either because they’re too stupid - as the recent speech of Boris Johnson seems to suggest – or too lazy (as the whole ‘strivers vs scroungers’ agenda supposes) or because they’ve made terrible decisions, can’t budget and so forth.

To reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.

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odinsblog:

Five Myths About Crime in Black America—and the Statistical Truths

In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death [and Renisha McBride and Jonathan Ferrell], we’ve seen a lot of discussion of the larger societal issues that play into how and when people are perceived as criminals. There were hoodies, there were marches, and there were frank talks from parent to child about how to minimize the danger of being a young person of color. On the other side, there were justifications of George Zimmerman’s actions: a smear campaign against Martin’s character, and plenty of writers explaining that statistically, blacks are simply more dangerous to be around.

That framing ignores the realities behind the numbers. Here are five myths about crime and people of color.

—Shani O. Hilton

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femfreq:

In response to my Ms. Male Character video someone made this clever image illustrating what “female as default” might look like. Because we live in a strongly male-identified society the idea of Pac-Woman as the “unmarked” default and Mr. Pac-Woman as the deviation “marked” with masculinizing gender signifiers feels strange and downright absurd. While Pac-man and the deviation Ms. Pac-Man seems completely normal in our current cultural context.

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.

I’ve read outraged responses to his column, from Ta-Nehisi Coates, to Hunter here at Daily Kos, to Salon and more, but still haven’t been able to shake off my own anger at Cohen (and his WaPo bosses)…

'How the hell kids gonna stay straight and help they neighborhoods if these schools getting shut down,' the man says with passion in his voice.

To be sure, the Tea Party types about whom Cohen writes are not racist in the same vein as the cross-burning Klansmen or the angry lynch mobs of decades past. Rather, like Jefferson and millions of whites before them, segments of the Tea Party have been simmering in the soup of white privilege for so long that they don’t even recognize that an earlier form of racial dominance helped make the base of that soup. Thus, one need not be a flaming racist to defend cultural norms that were forged in a far more racist past. The Tea Party genuinely fears the consequences of losing their white privilege. Slavery is obviously no longer the issue, but slavery’s legacy has, as Linda Faye Williams writes, long resulted in the “unequal allocation of educational resources, substantial insider networks that funnel good jobs largely to whites, and social policies that deliver more generous benefits to whites.” These are the modern fruits of white privilege.

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icantellyoumeanseriousbusiness:

sandandglass:

Stephen Colbert talks about columnist Richard Cohen. 

"Richard Cohen has known that slavery is bad for at least seven days." Colbert appreciation minute holla

The issue isn’t that Cohen is a racist. It’s that he holds his position of vast influence while living in some older white man’s cocoon, liberalish in a way but not much, in which he’s either indifferent or unconcerned with the actual America around him and routinely jumps at the chance to normalize and legitimize retrograde views about race. The problem with the article isn’t racism but inaccuracy, both descriptive and moral. And the complacent inaccuracy makes it worthy of criticism and contempt. People who have physical revulsion at interracial couples aren’t “cultural conservatives”; they’re racists.

I erred in not editing that one sentence more carefully to make sure it could not be misinterpreted.

We are being told that Cohen finds it “hurtful” to be called racist. I am sorry that people on the Internet have hurt Richard Cohen’s feelings. I find it “hurtful” that Cohen endorses the police profiling my son. I find it eternally “hurtful” that the police, following that same logic, killed one of my friends.

Hey @washingtonpost, seems like you need some editors. I’m happy to volunteer! Sample work attached. pic.twitter.com/zs3jRoOfhE

— Alison Dame-Boyle (@alfidabo) November 12, 2013

Here’s the thing. There are people who have visceral reactions to inter-racial marriage and relationships. And those people are racist.

I just think that this paragraph is a gratuitously base aside that actually makes you look like a knuckle-dragging, bigoted garbage person, instead of just a conventionally lame political editorialist.

This Richard Cohen column — and perhaps all Richard Cohen columns — should be read as a memo to Jeff Bezos, the new owner of the Post. Cohen is saying, perhaps subconsciously, that he has nothing to offer the Washington Post. He adds no value. “Buy me out,” Richard Cohen begs, between the lines. “Pay me to go away and stop embarrassing this once respected newspaper.” How much will it take? I am not sure, but Jeff Bezos is a very rich man, and I think he can afford it. Indeed, if his mission is to invest in quality journalism, paying Richard Cohen to go away would be one of the quickest and simplest ways to advance that mission.

Almost every teacher in that school came to understand the history they were teaching on—the destruction of the Black Bottom neighborhood, the scattered draft cards of many African-American men drafted into the Vietnam War, and the issues that doomed the school from the very start. … These weren’t the closings of buildings. These were the closings of families and communities.

It seems the only language we have for expressing success is numeric. It may be a universal language, but it’s an impoverished one. Maybe we need a word for “never having to sit in a meeting where someone reads long power point slides out loud.” Maybe we should have an expression that captures the level of success you’ve achieved when you do exactly what you love every day.

Certainly it helps that all these smart people grew up in America, where they never had to worry about clean water or good public schools or political instability. The privileges we enjoy in the United States allow us to succeed on this level, and it’s why I challenge Twitter to extend these kinds of opportunities more broadly by expanding the diversity of its board, and in the process better reflecting its increasingly international and diverse user base.

A feeling I got from working at Google was that technology could solve any problem. Yes it’s fantastic, but what I realized later was there’s technology and there’s people. Google had its list ordered: Technology. People. And I think the right order is: People. Technology. You have to think about people first and technology second. Hopefully technology gets out of the way.

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movieposteroftheday:

1959 Polish poster for DESIRE (Vojtech Jasny, Czechoslovakia, 1958)

Designer: Jerzy Flisak (1930-2008) [see also]

Poster source: Danish Film Institute

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empty rooms of Twin Peaks x

Wow! I’ve never watched Twin Peaks, and nothing has made me want to watch it more than this.

"I like gray skies now, because #drones don’t fly in gray skies.” #dronesbriefing

— Noor✞Mir (@thedronalisa) October 29, 2013

I wrote a thing about OS X Mavericks.

It’s telling a new acquaintance you’re biracial, then furnishing a photo of your family when she insists that you’re lying. You have to do this, though, show her a picture — because you might be the one person who can change her mind about what blackness looks like.

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I often get email intended for a different Sudama. Once in a while it’s really great.

If in some way, you could contribute significantly to the way humans could handle complexity and urgency, that would be universally helpful.

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babylonfalling:

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood

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"My intention is to give some of the wow and wonder of science."

http://miriam-english.org/randomwalks/index.html

I just got a report from someone who did this for six weeks, and his question to me was, ‘Is there any reason to stop?’

I’ve made it a goal to complete a photographic random walk at every subway station in New York City.

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unlikeableprotagonist:

how did that cat get in the sock though

And I thought, how crude, how cruel, how ignorant, how disrespectful of these children. What a set-up. Who would do that to kids?

This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.

I told him he should ask his friend to come over for pizza and play video games but his new friend always had an excuse.

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Brownian motion. Recording random movement as a continuous line. (via Brownian Examples Processing.org)

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misterjt:

A new poster from the National Congress of American Indians makes its post. Here’s some background from Native Appropriations on the push to end the use of Native mascots.

(via bitch-media)

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laryngealprominence:

Came across this site full of high-resolution scans of public domain posters and decided to make iPhone wallpapers out of a few of my favorites. You can grab them here.

Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act is popularly known, could fundamentally change the relationship between working Americans and their government. This could pose an existential threat to the small-government credo that has defined the G.O.P. for four decades.

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"Things in nature often move in complicated ways."

Rather than think of ourselves as isolated islands of microbes, the Hadza teach us that we are better thought of as an archipelago of islands, once seamlessly connected to one another and to a larger metacommunity of microbes via a microbial super highway that runs through the gut and skin/feathers of every animal and water source on the landscape (for those of you keeping up with your homework, this is Macroecology 101). The same can be said for plants and their extraordinary diversity of microbes above (phyllosphere) and below ground (rhizosphere) that the Hadza, and once all humans, interact with on a nearly continues basis.

The boys played endlessly at tracking and hunting, and both boys and girls played at finding and digging up edible roots. They played at tree climbing, cooking, building huts, and building other artefacts crucial to their culture, such as dugout canoes. They played at arguing and debating, sometimes mimicking their elders or trying to see if they could reason things out better than the adults had the night before around the fire. They playfully danced the traditional dances of their culture and sang the traditional songs, but they also made up new ones. They made and played musical instruments similar to those that adults in their group made. Even little children played with dangerous things, such as knives and fire, and the adults let them do it, because ‘How else will they learn to use these things?’ They did all this, and more, not because any adult required or even encouraged them to, but because they wanted to. They did it because it was fun and because something deep inside them, the result of aeons of natural selection, urged them to play at culturally appropriate activities so they would become skilled and knowledgeable adults.

Libraries aren’t free. And the work that goes into keeping them running (which is a lot more than keeping a bookshelf stocked) is complicated, sometimes thankless and under attack from people who think somehow that libraries are not fashionable enough, not hip or current enough, that our day has passed.

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new-aesthetic:

Designed Conflict Territories- Tobias Revell

The thing we have to consider is who and what we are protesting against. I won’t regurgitate the stacktivism or infrastructure fictions ideas. Chances are, that if you’re here, you know them already but there’s a general idea that the very shape of global geopolitics has changed in the last 20 years or so and the people in charge are not who we thought they were. To re-word a great Dylan Moran gag: While we were talking, Google very, very gradually built a future around us. (Please replace Google with whatever or whoever you like to satisfy your own biases.) The point stands that the entities constructing and steering our futures, or what they often like to call the future - with all the baggage of powerlessness and inevitability that that wording brings - aren’t states, and they work on a completely different geopolitical strata: There is no town square for Google.

When Edward Snowden leaked the details of the PRISM program to the world press, he wasn’t revealing anything. We already knew, at some very fundamental level that a vast apparatus existed to observe and harvest us and our ‘data’. Whether through decades of dystopic training or the simple maths of adding ruthless western capitalism and it’s history of paranoia to enabling technology we knew that these things were happening. I wrote some time ago about the fact that the rebalance of power enacted by the PRISM revelations is different to what is easily read - they forced us to react. Snowden issued a call for action, and the world failed to respond. I now have a term for this retreating reaction - shocked acquiescence. When faced with something so large and unfathomable as PRISM or climate change, the most common reaction is to accept or pretend it’s not happening and move on.

So why this response? ‘There’s no town square for Google’ wasn’t just a tweetable bite. We have no space in which we can protest, in which we can occupy and configure a conflict besides or in front of the thing we wish to protest and air our grievances against. For both the new geopolitics and the threat of climate change, there is no common language, no common space, no commons.

Read the full essay.

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chartier:

Siri can flip coins, roll dice

finerios:

So far, I can’t figure out how to make Siri roll a d20. However, Siri’s coin might occasionally fall into a crack.

I’m not sure how far back Siri’s been able to do this, but it’s not an iOS 7 addition. Siri can do it on my iOS 6 test device, too.

[via Jerrod H]

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secret-dollhouse:

“I always get asked, ‘Where do you get your confidence?’ I think people are well meaning, but it’s pretty insulting. Because what it means to me is, ‘You, Mindy Kaling, have all the trappings of a very marginalized person. You’re not skinny, you’re not white, you’re a woman. Why on earth would you feel like you’re worth anything?’ There are little Indian girls out there who look up to me, and I never want to belittle the honor of being an inspiration to them. But while I’m talking about why I’m so different, white male show runners get to talk about their art.”

—Mindy Kaling for the win, ladies and gentlemen.

There is no post-Civil War precedent for what the House GOP is doing now. It is radical, and dangerous for the economy and our process of government, and its departure from past political disagreements can’t be buffed away or ignored.

Larry Page is not going to go to jail. Marissa Mayer is not going to jail - she’s already said she thinks it’s tantamount to treason! The large corporations - whose own business model, after all, is surveillance - have folded their hands and said “we’ve done everything we can within the law to fight this”.

Smashing our smartphones is not a solution. If only it were that simple. That promise of simplicity, in fact, might be why it is so tempting to causally link personal and social problems to certain technologies. It offers a certain comfort to us because we don’t have to look to our own crooked hearts for the source of our problems, and it holds out the promise of a relatively painless and straightforward solution.

The assumption the media makes is that something is not important unless a familiar, male white face does it. So, when Dave Eggers decided to rewrite my book as his own novel about a young woman working her way up through Facebook, the Wall Street Journal called it a treatment of “the essential issues of the day.”

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horreure:

Rick Owens S/S 2014

Paris, 26th September 2013. Rick Owens has raised the bar.

White chicks? Skinny models? Walk-pose-exit-straightface runway show? Forget those. We got something better for you: Rick Owens Spring/Summer 2014 show.

The show was a step dance performance. As if the show wasn’t unusual enough, the cast is truly something different from hundreds of shows we’ve been seeing from New York, London, Milan and Paris in this fashion month. It was performed by step dancer girls, and what makes it different is, the majority of them are black, and all of them are plus sizes.

Of course, there’s definitely debates about the presentation. Some love it. Some hate it. Some confused. Of course, when you see the runway pictures in Style.com you won’t see the usual thing. You’ll be confused, especially if you don’t watch the video of the show. But surely, you can tell something is going on.

I think the message is crystal clear. Fashion is an interpretation of visual beauty. And most of the time, fashion didn’t represent universal beauty. Fashion often represent only one form of beauty: White and skinny. Which is a shame, because fashion should be representing universal beauty. And when you’re not in on of the “white” or “skinny” category, people valued your self less. You, valued your self less.

Even if it’s not the best collection, this is the best show, best casting of Spring/Summer 2014 for me.

Rick Owens is breaking all rules, murdering all stereotypes of fashion with this show. The message is crystal clear here: DIVERSITY

This is a “FUCK YOU” in the face for all stereotyping in fashion industry.

My most positive association with Whole Foods is that it was the place I used to steal tea-tree oil toothpicks from when I was quitting smoking. It worked! So thank you, Whole Foods, for having lousy security guards! What goes on in there otherwise has always been pretty offensive to me. A kind of lifestyle-porn orgy, carefully calibrated to make the affluent feel better about themselves and their place in the world.

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blah blah blah, garbage.

Whether our teens will eventually regret the things they post online is the wrong debate to have—or at least, it’s a debate we should have later on. Instead, we should be asking ourselves why we, as a society, discourage the real teachers, counselors, and principals from seeing a full picture of what their students are up to and what can be done to help.

While gentrification is inevitable, its character is not. Small, personal decisions, like buying your coffee at the local place instead of at Starbucks, can give gentrification in your neighborhood a more organic, human character. So will voting for liberal candidates, who support subsidies for the poor and the elderly, and also donating to and volunteering with charities that support these groups. Don’t be a destructive transient: the future of your neighborhood, and your city, is in your hands.

It’s gotten so that when I ride a Citi Bike I invariably end up thinking of all the buildings with their windows shattered, gray snow falling on people trudging in rags on their way to the rat market to buy a nice rat for Thanksgiving.

I did not observe you, but my daughter was with me packing the groceries and saw it all: “EBT: Yeah, right,” you muttered, with that look of disgust that would have shattered someone feeling just a little bit of shame over needing food stamps. As we walked to the car, my daughter told me what had happened, and I sensed her resolve about having made the right decision to work for social justice as she starts her senior year in a social-work program.

www.youtube.com/watch

carpethedamndiem:

Hey, guys.  ESPECIALLY “guys”… Watch this. It is very, VERY important that you watch this entire video. THIS is how a Man can be a Feminist. This is how WE, as Men, support the Women and Children in our society.

About halfway through, it starts talking about our obligations to not be ‘silent bystanders’ to violence - and it starts with identifying and calling out emotional violence.

When I talk about embracing new Perspectives, pointing out that we are in a battle for the collective soul of our culture, and that every small gesture and change can make a tremendous, unanticipated difference… THIS video demonstrates Perfectly what is possible. So please take up the fight against Indifference.

Am I still going to get bookings? Is the promoter still going to book me if I say, ‘Yeah, occasionally I have fellatio with a transsexual?’

There is no way that I could have experienced what Trayvon Martin did (and other black people do) because I’m white and through white privilege I am immune to systemic racial profiling.

All you hear are your own crazy thoughts, like a river of SHIT, ON AND ON! See your thoughts for what they are! Stop your helping! Stop your planning! There’s NO WAY OUT! Not for others! Not for you!

Humans are involved, as they regretfully always are, but this is also a story about merging ideologies, about one great tentacle-laden corporate-human entity, the Hedgefox, tumefying a tentacle and spraying great blasts of life-sustaining cash all over a smaller, quivering entity, the Foxhog. Then eating it.

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monkeyajb:

"Dear Steve,
Here’s another masterpiece for you to explore — On p187, a line that runs from Shakespeare to Stephen Daedalus starts to emerge by way of Hamlet, see what you think!
With my wish for your continued joy in discovery,
Frimi Sagan
June 2001”

To talk to your private self is the way to talk to all self. Personal is universal simultaneously.

If we do not seize this unique moment in our constitutional history to reform our surveillance laws and practices, we will all live to regret it.

What has struck me about the anti-war movement in America in these last few years –perhaps it is different elsewhere and perhaps it was different before– is generally how polite it has been. How ironic to chant, “Whose streets! Our streets!” while politely walking into pens and free speech zones. How strange to demand an end to the war while politely conceding to the demands of the NYPD that protesters not use Central Park, that they only march on these streets and not those streets so that order can be maintained, so that things can carry on as if there were no protest at all.

I want to make one thing clear: These were not low-level employees. They were what I would describe as upper mid-level managers. They told us that they had a combined fifty-five years of experience at the NSA. Without the support and consent of people like this, the surveillance machine could not exist. I don’t think that they are stupid people or evil people. I do think that they are people who have abdicated their moral agency and thus allowed for something very scary and very evil to come into existence.

There are some surprising cultural impacts of us not having minorities: people here are often condescending (you can probably read parts of that in my post as well) — though there are exceptions — but people get really condescending to: a). people they perceive as dumb and b). types of people they perceive to be dumb. The amount of jokes made about base school kids (i.e. kids who go to the schools that we would be going to if it weren’t for TJ) and judgments made about blacks or Hispanics is staggering. There are kids here who feel validated that kids at the base school are going to “working for them someday” as if someone’s high school in life was any valid indication of their work ethic, perseverance, intellect, and luck. You also hear comments about “ghetto” kids, generally meaning blacks and Hispanics, which is ironic considering we live in Northern Virginia where half the kids have pool tables in their basement and have lawyer/doctor/government-employed parents. Some people I don’t even know are comfortable regarding me as a “nigger” (but in a good way, y’know?) or telling me how I’m black, but not really because I watch avant-garde films and study philosophy. Our BSU (black student union, which no, I’m not a part of) was led by a white guy, which was partially deserved (iirc he had participated in the club all four years) and was partially indicative of how few blacks are involved in the club and how little notoriety the club has at our school versus Namaste (an Indian culture club) or the various Asian culture clubs (including the Asian Awareness club, whose irony does not escape a school whose biggest demographic is Asian). This isn’t to suggest that BSU should be a thriving community when it appeals to so little of the demographic, but I think it does show that when certain cultures are underrepresented at a school, some kids, even if they don’t don a white hat and burning crosses, let racially-inspired tendencies and beliefs get to them.

You would have thought that by now evryone with a browser and a modem would be following the online exploits of webloggers, but this is not in fact the case. Bloggers! We still have a lot of outreach work to do! There are still some people, perhaps even here tonight, maybe in the seat right next to you, who have never seen a weblog or who have never even heard of weblogs. Yes! It’s true! So I make this challenge: To all webloggers, and to our brother and sisters in the e/n, journal and webzine communities, let us join together in links of love and take back what is rightfully ours! Let us join together; for together we can take back the web!

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starring Kiefer Sutherland

Put yourself in Martin’s shoes, based on the scenario exactly as Zimmerman described it in that interview. An adult male has been behaving strangely and following him, first in his car and then on foot. It’s dark and a heavy rain is falling, making these actions even more suspicious. He has traveled on foot away from the street to a place behind condos near his residence, and there’s Zimmerman again. Martin confronts the man to find out why he’s being followed and the man doesn’t explain. Instead, he quickly reaches for something in a waist pocket. At that point, does Martin have any way of knowing the man isn’t reaching for a gun?

America has no functioning democracy at this moment.

This brings us to the second feature: the Zimmerman trial judge’s decision to sharply limit the explicit reference to race—including denying the prosecution the ability to argue that Zimmerman engaged in racial profiling. Studies of the legal system and aversive racism show that the less explicitly race is engaged in the discourse in the courtroom, the more likely aversive racism is to influence the decisionmaking process of the jurors. Thus, the judge’s decision also makes it more likely that race played a role in the outcome of the case.

When our children are gunned down in cold blood, I want it to be enough that they were simply ordinary as opposed to ‘innocent.’ In America, Black people will never be considered “innocent” and frankly it’s a label that we shouldn’t want to claim for ourselves. None of us is ‘innocent;’ most of us are just ordinary and flawed people. That should be enough to have the right to live.

It’s been hammered in my DNA to not “rock the boat”—which since I wanna keep it real means not make “certain people” feel uncomfortable. I mean, that is a crazy way to live. Seriously, imagine a life in which you think of other people’s safety and comfort first before your own. You’re kinda programmed and taught that from the gate. It’s like the opposite of entitlement.

It’s an appealing argument, and widespread, but simplistic and obtuse. It’s a belief most easily held when you’ve not witnessed peace rallies and makeshift memorials, when you’ve turned a blind eye to grassroots organizations like the Interrupters in Chicago working valiantly to stem the tide of violence in the city. It is the thinking of people who’ve never wondered why African Americans disproportionately support strict gun control legislation. The added quotient of outrage in cases like this one stems not from the belief that a white murderer is somehow worse than a black one, but from the knowledge that race determines whether fear, history, and public sentiment offer that killer a usable alibi.

It’s a vivid reminder that we must always be deferential to white people, or face the very real chance of getting killed.

www.youtube.com/watch

LeVar Burton: I put hands outside car when pulled over (by CNN)

Even senators. Even senators must fear to describe America’s laws to America’s citizens. This is, yes, democracy-suppression, but it is a vitally necessary arrangement. It keeps you and your adorable kids and even your cute pet dog alive.

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jack-was-here:

"I stopped at a little shack where a man sold hot red chili in paper containers; I bought some and ate it, strolling in the dark mysterious streets." - Jack Kerouac, On the Road

The shack is still there and they still sell hot red chili.

www.youtube.com/watch

niaking:

If you live in the Bay, and are not choosing to be willfully ignorant, you probably already know that gentrification is a huge problem here. San Francisco’s proximity to Silicon Valley has attracted a lot of techie-type young professionals who are pushing out SF’s previous residents, especially those that are low income people of color. Those displaced are often moving to the East Bay, pushing the East Bay’s low-income residents of color out into far-flung suburbs with little of the resources the “inner-city” provides, such as public transit. Nothing I’ve said so far is anything that hasn’t already been said over and over again.

Resistance to gentrification takes many forms. Some, like Causa Justa and the Right to the City Alliance organize against evictions and foreclosures. Others, like local Barry Jenkins, make thoughtful films like Medicine for Melancholy, a love letter to the city of San Francisco lamenting the fact that many people of color can no longer afford to live there. And then you have Miss Persia and Daddie$ Pla$tik.

When I first saw Miss Persia and Daddie$ Pla$tik perform at Marga Gomez’s Comedy Bodega at Esta Noche in the Mission, I knew immediately I was witnessing something amazing. As someone who wrote my undergraduate thesis on the power of queer and trans people of color’s performance art, I recognized the performance of “Google Apps” as protest art, the likes of which I had never seen before. Even as I watched the performance, I didn’t feel like my mind was open enough to fully comprehend what I was witnessing. Which is why I’m really glad they made a video.

Though the slowly atrophying academic part of my brain is tempted to do a close reading, I will not interpret every line for you. That would be like reading a choose-your-own-adventure book where all your adventures are already chosen for you. I will say that I disagree with the interpretation of the video/song’s message as xenophobic. It’s pretty clear to me that Miss Persia and Daddie$ Pla$tik don’t want to be white, they just want to be able to stay in their homes.

What else can I say about this video? It’s hilarious, it’s obscene, and it’s poignant. Though thousands more words are sure to be spent explaining and opining on the housing crisis in the Bay Area, perhaps none will do so more successfully or succinctly than “Moving to the East Bay/Living life the broke way/SF keep your money/F*** your money!”

I also want to know what are the qualifications that one needs to become a whistleblower because that sounds like a much more interesting job.

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new-aesthetic:

Twitter / AFP: ”Egyptian protestors direct laser lights on a military helicopter flying over the presidential palace in Cairo.”

I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.

Storing and analyzing all global cellphone calls is neither necessary nor sufficient to fight the conflict method of terrorism. Greenwald is right in saying: “It is a globalized system designed to destroy all privacy.” But destroying privacy is not the primary or ultimate purpose of the system. The only plausible purpose of this striving for total information is its use for total control. It is the foundation of a totalitarian state.

Libraries have had a long history of dealing with authoritarian organizations demanding reader records—who’s read what—and this has led to people being rounded up and killed. As a librarian, you take this very, very seriously. So, when you get demands for information about a patron’s activities, there are things that sort of flash before your mind. Where am I? What century is this? What country am I in?

Chicha made with saliva remains an important part of the diet of many South American tribes, and a woman’s ability to make it is important for her husband’s social status. It is rude to refuse it, as this account written up in Salon describes. Given the amount of calories and nutrients such beverages can provide, it amazes me that many ethnographical and anthropological surveys seem to ignore or downplay their presence, as if they were just mere recreation.

To me, each song on “Exile in Guyville” reverberates powerfully, making it patently one of the strongest rock albums ever made.

Few fully understand that the tension between young black men and the police (and by extension, security guards, traffic cops and just about any sort of watchman) is the main thing keeping America from getting past race. If ten years went by without a story like the Martin case we’d be in a very different country.

One evening, I was having trouble with my computer, and I went to Luke’s room to ask him for help. I found him in the midst of shooting imaginary people. After he fixed my computer, he asked me if I wanted to watch him play for a little bit. I said I did not and tried to explain: “You know, I’ve seen the real thing. So I’m not really interested. I’m sorry.”

Don’t forget that the Southern food you have been crowned the queen of was made into an art largely in the hands of enslaved cooks, some like the ones who prepared food on your ancestor’s Georgia plantation.

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If Saturn were as close to Earth as the moon.

Photographer Ron Miller creates incredible pictures of what it would look like if planets were closer — Mail Online

As the world eagerly watches Snowden’s movements today, the public should put aside the mainstream media frenzy buzzing around Snowden’s personal life, and ask the more important question: in a country with the freedom of speech enshrined in the First Amendment, why does a whistleblower have to seek political asylum elsewhere after exposing government wrongdoing?

My wife Ana Hurtado and I have been eating a paleodiet (by accident because of fieldwork) for more than 30 years, because we grew accustomed to that diet (long before the fad). Meats, and unprocessed plant foods are a simple generalized ancestral diet and appear to produce better health than the current standard modern diet. As anyone who knows us can affirm, Hurtado and I are a lot leaner and fitter than most Americans in our age cohort (near 60). Why?

I believe a world in which everything is recorded and persists forever carries the seeds of something monstrous. It is in the nature of computer systems to remember things indefinitely, but there’s nothing difficult about programming machines to forget. It just requires laws to do it. We can’t treat it as a technical problem. And to get the laws passed, we need to politicize the issue.

You have to assume everything is being collected.

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new-aesthetic:

“Over the course of a year, I researched and created ZXX, a disruptive typeface which takes its name from the Library of Congress’ listing of three-letter codes denoting which language a book is written in. Code “ZXX” is used when there is: “No linguistic content; Not applicable.” The project started with a genuine question: How can we conceal our fundamental thoughts from artificial intelligences and those who deploy them? I decided to create a typeface that would be unreadable by text scanning software (whether used by a government agency or a lone hacker) — misdirecting information or sometimes not giving any at all. It can be applied to huge amounts of data, or to personal correspondence. I drew six different cuts (Sans, Bold, Camo, False, Noise and Xed) to generate endless permutations, each font designed to thwart machine intelligences in a different way. I offered the typeface as a free download in hopes that as many people as possible would use it.”

Making Democracy Legible: A Defiant Typeface — The Gradient — Walker Art Center

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92y:

You heard her, sloppy joints. Of course.

Watch the excerpt of Martha telling this story to Bravo’s Andy Cohen, plus who she would “shag marry kill” and - sincerity face - her thoughts on elder care from her new book, Living the Good Long Life: A Practical Guide to Caring for Yourself and Others.

The first time I ever played in a long term D&D campaign I made a half-elf—bi-racial, like me. I’m putting this out there because it’s hilarious and says basically everything you need to know about 18 year old Austin Walker: his name was Xanatos Woodshymn, he was a bard who was raised by orcs and who saw himself as the ‘by any means necessary’ advocate for the kobolds who were being used as slave labor in the nearby mines. He was the reincarnation of the Elven god Corellon—it was one of those D&D games—and at the final moment of the first “season” of our campaign, he sided with the orcs, resurrecting their ancient ‘evil’ god and becoming public enemy number one for all of elf-kind. It was a weird year. I had dreadlocks.

We are not just ourselves anymore. Each one of us has a new, statistical self living in databases around the world. It’s those selves, uniquely identified bundles of behavior, that marketers target and companies try to reach. These are remarkable, distributed portraits of what we read, what we eat, and where we sleep. When it comes to our statistical selves, the difference between the NSA and private companies such as Facebook or Google or Amazon.com lies in what the government can do with the data it collects. It’s building that giant index so that, if it needs to, it can actively cross the line between your statistical self and your real, physical self. It’s the difference between “would you like to receive local coupons for businesses you love?” and “why is there a van in front of our house?”

I began to wonder if abstaining from animal products actually contributed to improvements in animal welfare or just gave me a false sense of moral purity while flesh from abused animals that could otherwise have been eaten just wound up rotting in the trash. I decided I could do more to improve animal welfare by supporting farmers who do treat animals well than by keeping my money from “farmers” that would be better termed “meat production engineers.”

What’s at stake has to do with how power is employed, by whom, and in what circumstances. It’s about questioning whether or not we still believe in checks and balances to power. And it’s about questioning whether or not we’re OK with continue to move towards a system that presumes entire classes and networks of people as suspect. Regardless of whether or not you’re in one of those classes or networks, are you OK with that being standard fare? Because what is implied in that question is a much uglier one: Is your perception of your safety worth the marginalization of other people who don’t have your privilege?

Somewhere around its final passage, which begins when a slacker picks up the Pixelvision camera through which we ourselves see the next few minutes, you realize you’ve been watching something on a higher plane.

Daniel Ellsberg: Edward Snowden: saving us from the United Stasi of America:

In 1975, Senator Frank Church spoke of the National Security Agency in these terms:

"I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

The dangerous prospect of which he warned was that America’s intelligence gathering capability – which is today beyond any comparison with what existed in his pre-digital era – “at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left.”

That has now happened. That is what Snowden has exposed, with official, secret documents. The NSA, FBI and CIA have, with the new digital technology, surveillance powers over our own citizens that the Stasi – the secret police in the former “democratic republic” of East Germany – could scarcely have dreamed of. Snowden reveals that the so-called intelligence community has become the United Stasi of America.

So we have fallen into Senator Church’s abyss. The questions now are whether he was right or wrong that there is no return from it, and whether that means that effective democracy will become impossible.

Ed Snowden is a hero because he realized that our very humanity was being compromised by the blind implementation of machines in the name of making us safe. Unlike those around him, who were too absorbed in their task to reflect on their actions and pause in their pursuit of digital omniscience, Snowden allowed himself to be “disturbed” by what he was doing. More in the midst of technology than most of us will ever be, Snowden disengaged for long enough to be human, and to consider the impact of what he was helping to build. He pressed pause.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6e7wfDHzew

(Then) Google CEO Eric Schmidt on privacy: If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place

Omniscient, automatic, mass surveillance. . . . That seems to me a greater threat to the institutions of free society than missed intelligence reports, and unworthy of the costs.

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Report tyrannical activity.

Discuss: Are there ways in which government or the private sector intrudes upon the privacy of U.S. citizens? What are some of these ways?

patrickrhone:

“They’re not spying on us to prevent crimes, they’re spying on us to retroactively convict us of crimes once we’ve pissed them off.”

—

Twitter / claytoncubitt

I mused this a few days ago, before I saw the (must watch) Guardian video of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, where he specifically confirms it, at 7:10.

(via claytoncubitt)

Yep. This.

You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place.

I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.

You want to know why revolutions happen? Because little by little by little things get worse and worse. But this thing that is happening now is big. This is the key ingredient. This allows them to know everything they need to know to accomplish the above. The fact that they are doing it is proof that they are the sort of people who might use it in the way I described. In the country I live in, they also claimed it was for the safety of the people. Same in Soviet Russia. Same in East Germany. In fact, that is always the excuse that is used to surveil everyone. But it has never ONCE proven to be the reality.

Maybe Obama won’t do it. Maybe the next guy won’t, or the one after him. Maybe this story isn’t about you. Maybe it happens 10 or 20 years from now, when a big war is happening, or after another big attack. Maybe it’s about your daughter or your son. We just don’t know yet. But what we do know is that right now, in this moment we have a choice. Are we okay with this, or not? Do we want this power to exist, or not?

To those who understand state surveillance as an abstraction, I will try to describe a little about how it has affected me. The United States apparently placed me on a “watch-list” in 2006 after I completed a film about the Iraq war. I have been detained at the border more than 40 times. Once, in 2011, when I was stopped at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and asserted my First Amendment right not to answer questions about my work, the border agent replied, “If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics.”’ As a filmmaker and journalist entrusted to protect the people who share information with me, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to work in the United States. Although I take every effort to secure my material, I know the N.S.A. has technical abilities that are nearly impossible to defend against if you are targeted.

The 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which oversees the N.S.A. activities, are up for renewal in December. Two members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both Democrats, are trying to revise the amendments to insure greater privacy protections. They have been warning about “secret interpretations” of laws and backdoor “loopholes” that allow the government to collect our private communications. Thirteen senators have signed a letter expressing concern about a “loophole” in the law that permits the collection of United States data. The A.C.L.U. and other groups have also challenged the constitutionality of the law, and the Supreme Court will hear arguments in that case on Oct. 29.

The retweet allows any user to recontextualize such quips however they please. Anyone, from their computer or Smartphone, can participate in an act of re-framing, of cultural critique or celebrity gossip or found poetry, all dealing with the same 140 characters. The retweet can serve as an implicit comment on the state of our Internet-formulated language, forcing us to consider a barely coherent Martha Stewart rant as a work within itself, rich with Steinian echoes.

In many ways, 1993 did give us our world: globalized and multicultural, libertarian and technocratic at once, target-marketed, relentlessly digital and relentlessly individual, without distinctions between the pursuit of culture and the pursuit of wealth. To put it another way, 1993 might have been the last year of the sellout, when the principle of resistance to the smooth and efficient running of the market began to collapse into our culture of collaboration. It was the year of the first web browser and the forging of both the European Union and NAFTA. Bill Kristol was writing, in Commentary, of how to rebrand conservatism as rebellion in the face of Clinton’s win. MTV’s cultural metabolism was probably at its most rapacious, Tony Kushner brought Angels in America to Broadway, and Toni Morrison won her Nobel. Atlantic Records invested in indie label Matador and Walt Disney bought Miramax. Pulp Fiction, Clerks, and Reality Bites were all in production. Marc Jacobs’s grunge collection was for spring ’93. Harmony Korine was writing Kids, and the former insult-comic editor of Spy had taken over Vanity Fair.

When you used a Commodore 64 or one of the first Macintoshes, you were keenly aware of its limits: the paucity of colors, the tiny memory, the long time it took to load files off a disk. You had to learn to work within the machine’s constraints. The history of computing is the history of human creativity and ingenuity—which is why we should hold on to it forever.

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This guy is definitely dancing to George Harrison: Got My Mind Set on You

I have interviewed many white people who have fond memories of their lives in the 1950s and early 1960s. The ones who never cross-examined those memories to get at the complexities were the ones most hostile to the civil rights and the women’s movements, which they saw as destroying the harmonious world they remembered.

But others could see that their own good experiences were in some ways dependent on unjust social arrangements, or on bad experiences for others. Some white people recognized that their happy memories of childhood included a black housekeeper who was always available to them because she couldn’t be available to her children.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces — forever.

As an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.

To hear “Dark Eyes” for the first time — one of the greatest listening experiences one is ever likely to have in life anyway — with Dylan sitting there, averting his glance, shifting his weight nervously, made me aware of just how rare, how painful it is for him to lay his heart bare this way. The tape ended and there was a long silence as we all stared at our feet.

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China’s First Reading of Howl at Studio No. 5

It may have been the entire function of communes to go big, fail and then go home. At the time we thought we were reinventing civilisation but all we discovered is that free love isn’t free at all, that [when] one guy puts up all the money for your commune he is going to feel robbed after a period of six to 12 months, that gardening is actually hard, and that if you treat your women as people who are supposed to wash the dishes, they will leave after six months.

Rewilding, in my view, should involve reintroducing missing animals and plants, taking down the fences, blocking the drainage ditches, culling a few particularly invasive exotic species but otherwise standing back. It’s about abandoning the Biblical doctrine of dominion which has governed our relationship with the natural world.

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louobedlam:

Strong men also cry… strong men also cry.

How can we design the space and signage to be flexible enough to switch between the two modes of service and to make it clear upon a glance what to do when you enter the space at any given time? I constantly have to examine the interface and imagine the experience from the other side. Honing my sense of empathy is an essential part of being a designer and part of why I was attracted to the discipline in the first place.

I’ve heard people say that if someone is brought up in a sexist society and thus becomes sexist, it’s not their fault. That’s a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand. On the surface, it’s true – but it sidesteps the question of continuing responsibility. If the same sexist (or racist, or whatever) person is capable of re-evaluating their own position but does not do so, then they’re responsible. Perhaps not for becoming prejudiced, but for remaining so.

And I would NEVER try to obtain information illegally! I’m shocked at the suggestion!! (And will contact you in a more private forum…)

My late father, Junius Edwards, was among the first African-Americans to own and operate his own advertising agency in New York City in the 1960s after working for years as a copywriter for Ogilvy & Mather and other Ad agencies Madison Avenue. Some of his clients under Junius Edwards Inc. Advertising were Carver Federal Saving Bank of Harlem, Faberge, Ligget&Myers, Greater New York Savings Bank and more. Junius Edwards Inc. is featured in the book: “Madison Avenue and the Color Line African Americans in the Advertising Industry” by Jason Chambers.

If you start thinking really hard about what “random” really means, first you get a little nauseated, and a little after that you find you’re doing analytic philosophy. So let’s not go down that road.

Burglar Mammy was horrendous, a confirmation of every harsh judgment levied against Mad Men for being too much of a white upper-middle-class historical fantasy, a show that’s not willing or able to really go where it labors to convince us it’s going. If Burglar Mammy were a dream figure attached to a particular character, and if Mad Men had shown any inclination to go anywhere substantive with its allusions to civil rights and racial anxiety, and if it hadn’t given us a black Playboy bunny, a black prostitute, a black mugger, and other disreputable minor characters over the years, but no people of color with personal or even narrative substance, I might feel differently about her.

We need to look at the very heart of the web, the directory that connects the names of our services to the servers they run on, and we need to apply the concept of the Wayback Machine to it. We need temporal DNS, maintainable by librarians to keep the domains of the past connected to their archived futures.

Why tease us with skin color, as if this great simmering issue will finally be addressed, only to retreat again? Why is this great and lingering theme in American culture not addressed as fully as the show addresses, say, capitalism, or gender?

Why did Yahoo! make this acquisition? We know very little about Marissa Mayer’s big goals for Yahoo!, but we know one. She wants Yahoo! to own users’ daily habits. At an analysts conferece recently, she classified these as “searches on the Internet, checking finance, doing your email.” Yahoo! is skating to where the puck is going to be when it comes to “daily habits.” The Tumblr daily dashboard is a daily habit, and by some accounts, moreso than even Facebook or Twitter among teens.

Twenty years ago, at the 1993 Whitney Biennial, fault lines opened up and the ground shifted. About 30 of the 43 artists were in the museum for the first time. More than 40 percent of the participants were women, quite a few were nonwhite, and a generous amount of the work was about being openly gay. One of the exhibition’s admission buttons, designed by artist Daniel J. Martinez, read I CAN’T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE. People went batshit.

It is not my job to convince you to distinguish me from the violent sociopaths that claim to be Muslims, whose terrorism I neither support, nor condone. It is your job.

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laryngealprominence:

My favorite comic author just published the first part of a new online graphic novel “Steve & Steve”. Of interest to fans of early computer culture, California in the ’70s, psychedelics. If this describes you, you’ve already clicked.

Letting children have their own way? Doing just what they like? Wouldn’t that be a total disaster? Yes, if parents perform only the first half of the trick. In the cultural lexicon of modernity, self-will is often banally understood as brattish, selfish behaviour. Will does not mean selfishness, however, and autonomy over oneself is not a synonym for nastiness towards others – quite the reverse. Ngarinyin children in Australia traditionally grew up uncommanded and uncoerced, but from a young age they learned socialisation. That is the second half of the trick. Children are socialised into awareness and respect for the will and autonomy of others, so that, when necessary as they grow, they will learn to hold their own will in check in order to maintain good relations. For a community to function well, an individual may on occasion need to rein in his or her own will but, crucially, not be compelled to do so by someone else.

Although by conventional test-taking rules, the students were cheating, they actually weren’t in this case. Instead, they were changing their goal in the Education Game from “Get a higher grade than my classmates” to “Get to the best answer.”

After a thorough review of the facts, available to our office at this time, it is our opinion that this case can only be seen as a tragic accident.

The problem isn’t that it’s impossible to pick yourself. The problem is that it’s frightening to pick yourself.

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For best results, queue up something around 126.5 bpm. I recommend Daft Punk or Prince.

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17 Moments When Jason Collins Was Super Gay

Clinton is an amazing person. At one point he hadn’t slept in like 30 hours and I heard him very articulately discussing the fine details of the history of ATMs in Malawi.

The very qualities that improve palatability and lengthen shelf life—high sugar content, fats that resist turning rancid, and a lack of organic complexity—make refined foods toxic to your key microbes. Biologically simple, processed foods may cultivate a toxic microbial community, not unlike the algal blooms that result in oceanic “dead zones.”

The act of running a marathon is supposed to be simple, individual—a victory of the will over the body, celebrated by all and untouched by the complicated questions of who in the world can choose to suffer and who only bears suffering.

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29pco:

Little Star Weekly April 12, 2013

dont be afraid to do anything. infact if youre afraid of something, do it. then do it again. and again.

I have watched Dazed and Confused many, many times since that first afternoon, and it has improved with almost every viewing. It now seems like a completely different film. And as I have grown older, I’ve deduced why. Dazed and Confused is not a movie about how things were; Dazed and Confused is a movie about how things are remembered.

vimeo.com/63653873

new-aesthetic:

Google Street View Hyperlapse (by Teehan+Lax Labs), via Tom T.

Create your own at http://hyperlapse.tllabs.io/

One of my central points is that the arrogance and insularity of the old-guard, conventional wisdom creators of social media, including myself, was one of the primary reasons we lost some important values of the early social web. Seeing this resonate with those of us responsible gives me hope that perhaps we can work to remedy our errors.

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Unintentional new aesthetic, yo.

arcticsplash:

this fucking wall.

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ze-tarts:

Done doing these so here they all are in one place! Fully Dressed Redesigns of Superheroines.

Point of this: An exercise in character design, attempting to clothe the heroines nearly all the way and not making them painted-on, while still keeping the look of their original costumes in some way.  Hopefully keeping them looking as iconic as the originally were. Just showing what can be done with a costume breaking outside the barrier of the norm.

NOT the point of this: some moral code I’m trying to push on you

Sorry if there was a character you wanted me to do that I didn’t get to!

This threatens many dearly held beliefs of technology workers: It suggests those at the top aren’t there because they’re the best, but because of hard work and privilege. It suggests that the enormous wealth generated by tech startups and founders isn’t justified by their superior intelligence.

In short, it requires geeks to re-examine their own revenge fantasies of being outsiders who now rule the world and admit that they might, themselves, be actively excluding others.

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alioutfit:

Green puffer jacket with faux fur trim. (And this bag is becoming a favourite I think)

It’s just good, old-fashioned hard work, and there’s not a lot of that now. You know, hard work? Like not on the computer.

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everythingistemporaryanyway:

brain-food:

Artist Jay Shells channeled his love of hip hop music and his uncanny sign-making skills towards a brand new project: “Rap Quotes.” For this ongoing project, Shells created official-looking street signs quoting famous rap lyrics that shout out specific street corners and locations.

this ^ is the.awesome.

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From Jack Kirby’s unpublished adaptation of The Prisoner 

Life expectancy at age 5 was as good or better than exists today, and the incidence of degenerative disease was 10% of ours. Their levels of physical activity and hence calorific intakes were approximately twice ours. They had relatively little access to alcohol and tobacco; and due to their correspondingly high intake of fruits, whole grains, oily fish and vegetables, they consumed levels of micro- and phytonutrients at approximately ten times the levels considered normal today.

Out of frustration, I tweeted ‘Here are the 10 biggest markets for Letter to Jane…’ and the next tweet was ‘If anyone in those markets gave me a job that can pay for an apartment and wifi, I’m yours’ and five minutes later, David Jacobs tweeted me and said ‘DONE!’

monkeyajb:

Google Closes Google Reader

Google Shutters Google+

Google Sunsets Groundbreaking YouTube Service

Google Moves On from Popular Maps Service

Google Makes Difficult Decision to Close Gmail, Focus on Core Users

Google Announces New Enterprise Software Division, Lays Off 20,000 in Search Division

Google Closes Search

The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.

This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it’s efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.

Bob Roth, one of my bosses when I edited Washington City Paper, told me to watch people as they picked it up from a street box and walk away with it: Almost to a one, they would hold it in their hands or fold it under their arms as if to display the paper’s flag so onlookers would know they were City Paper people, whatever that meant.

Been singing this to myself for weeks.

The first thing I ate as part of my new diet was ox liver, so I really threw myself in at the deep end. I was a bit squeamish because you can’t pretend a liver is anything other than part of an animal. It freaked me out a bit but I got through it. The second thing I ate that day was a rare steak. That was when I had a transformative experience.

Like most freelancers of my generation, I prefer to be paid in whiskey and sadness.

"Traffic," they spit. And I get it. The word has been used to bludgeon you into dumb shit. To put great stories on the shelf to build slideshows. To give up on quality and focus on quantity. I do get all that. But that’s precisely why we journalists must understand the numbers! The business side of any publication knows them inside and out. If we don’t understand how to tell good stories with our own data, who do you think wins any argument that involves data, which they all do?

Justice Scalia, when you spew that entitlement discourse from the bench you undermine the very core of our democracy. But you know what? I want to thank you for what you said. Because on Wednesday, you showed us all exactly who you are. And in the words of the late, great poet Notorious B.I.G.: “if we didn’t know, now we know.”

Huber is not a brave man, and his premise is totally false. People will only think you “simply discussing race” is racist if you, like Huber, treat black people like inscrutable extraterrestrials whose moral shortcomings might be responsible for their own poverty.

If this looks good, I’m making one for myself later.

The cover stands out for its cast of black and Hispanic caricatures with exaggerated features reminiscent of early 20th century race cartoons. Also, because there are only people of color in it, grabbing greedily for cash. It’s hard to imagine how this one made it through the editorial process.

It’s OK, I’m just recording video.

www.youtube.com/watch

monkeyajb:

“Improper Tensions”

A video reenactment of scrolling through this page. Embroidery by Maysles Bros.

(earlier: http://rw.adamrice.org/post/44070851932/embroidery-trouble-shooting-page)

They were never included in the Parker Brothers version, but, in all the early boxes, you were given an address to send to [Monopoly creator Lizzie] Magie for her advanced rules. If you did, under the heading of “For Advanced and Scientific Players”, Magie suggested a way to play where, rather than one person owning everything, all the players could share in the wealth.

When the USPS announced that it was planning to stop Saturday delivery, how many of your white friends made snarky comments about being pleased to get junk mail less frequently and how many expressed concern about job cutbacks at an institution that has for decades provided a path to middle class life particularly for black Americans?

My wife roasts a whole chicken in a 90 year old Lisk roasting pan in our 1927 Chambers stove. She then takes it apart and stores the meat in the fridge while making stock from the bones. Want chicken for a sandwich, or a nibble?, or maybe some bites sized pieces in Frank’s hot sauce? It’s all in the fridge, no breading, (unless you want mom to make that, and she will), and very healthy. Come on folks, this is easy stuff to do.

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new-aesthetic:

Sony wants a future of interactive advertising, patents transformation of ads into games | Digital Trends

This is a legit illustration from an advertising patent. The juxtaposition of the viewer exercising control over the experience of watching the ad by debasing themself in a dramatic gesture of surrender to the brand is simply sublime. The bullet hanging in the air, suspended both by the magic of the freeze-frame and by an invitation to participate in the globalized corporate-efficient murder of the planet, is just the cherry on top.

Most of you who are reading this assume that Harvard provides some end-of-the-line safety net for poor students in such calamitous circumstances and that Harvard would never let a student fail, drop out, or not receive medical care for lack of money. I write to assure you that there is no end in sight to the falling.

Coke was Dunn’s concern, and on one trip, as he walked through one of the favelas, he had an epiphany. “A voice in my head says, ‘These people need a lot of things, but they don’t need a Coke.’ I almost threw up.”

It is the largest reported meteor since the one that hit Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “When you have a fireball of this size we would expect a large number of meteorites to reach the surface and in this case there were probably some large ones.”

Now your inbox is empty. You’re welcome. You still have a to-do list, and it is not empty.

As I settled into a state of calm, the thin man in the white robes told me his story. Vijaya was a former leader of the American Hare Krishna cult. He had left the group because they had started to behave — as do pretty much all cults — like gangsters, with all the corruption and violence that implies. He still believed in Hare Krishna’s brand of Hinduism, but he was part of a renegade group of psychedelic Hare Krishnas. And the Hare Krishna cultists had tried to kill him… and he was hiding out.

As a document in literary-critical and literary-theoretical taste in the late twentieth century, Random Walks will prove central.

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"In contrast to his famously hyperbolic statements about his generation, these photographs seem like a secret visual diary filled with more complex realizations about his life and times." Tim Keane: “I Noticed My Friends”: Allen Ginsberg’s Photography (Hyperallergic)

A recent study of Google searches by Professor Latanya Sweeney has found “significant discrimination” in ad results depending on whether the name you’re Googling is, statistically speaking, more likely to belong to a white person or a black person. So while Googling an Emma will probably trigger nothing more sinister than an invitation to look up Emma’s phone number and address, searching for a Jermaine could generate an ad for a criminal record search. In fact, Sweeney’s research suggests that it’s 25% more likely you’ll get ads for criminal record searches from “black-identifying” names than white-sounding ones.

In the 100 years since we really got serious about education as a universally good idea, we’ve managed to take the 15 years of children’s lives that should be the most carefree, inquisitive, and memorable and fill them with a motley collection of stress and a neurotic fear of failure.

I find it all too easy to forget my corporeality, to forget that my life is contingent upon the health of my body. My body is millions of years older than I am; it is skilled and experienced in ways beyond mine or anyone’s comprehension, yet day after day I use it to sit in front of a computer. I look at a screen; I punch keys. I sit down to read; I hold a book. This isn’t using my body - I’m just a mind. As Marwood says in Bruce Robinson’s Withnail & I, ‘We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell, making an enemy of our own future. What we need is harmony, fresh air, stuff like that.’ For me, that is the pull of running.

Tips on how to deal with economic hard times, by Gabe Soria and @josephremnant from unpub’d ish of Arthur Dec 08 * twitter.com/arthurmagazine…

— Arthur Magazine (@arthurmagazine) February 11, 2013

The goal of the North Dakota Man Camp Project was to document the social and material conditions present in the growing number of “man camps” in the Bakken Oil Patch. … The project brings archaeological and historical methods to the study the ephemeral phenomenon of contemporary labor housing.

Meritocracy has been criticized as a myth which only serves to justify the status quo; merit can always be defined as whatever results in success. Thus whoever is successful can be portrayed as deserving success, rather than success being in fact predicted by criteria for merit.

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Top: Title Unknown: "From over his shoulder, we see Bush looking at himself in the bathtub"—Jerry Saltz

Bottom: Title Unknown: "Justin Quinnell’s bath, as seen by his tongue?"—Adam Rice

Every modern life is lived in the teeth of massive evolutionary mismatch. … Nearly all of us receive unconscious biochemical rewards from our pain and emotional distress, and nearly all of us consequently develop literal biochemical addictions to at least some of our painful, distressing, out-of-balance, survival-mode states.

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‘Jane Says’ by Jane’s Addiction is my new jam.

We citizens of a modern democracy claim to believe in equality, but our sense of equality is not even close to that of hunter-gatherers. The hunter-gatherer version of equality meant that each person was equally entitled to food, regardless of his or her ability to find or capture it; so food was shared. It meant that nobody had more wealth than anyone else; so all material goods were shared. It meant that nobody had the right to tell others what to do; so each person made his or her own decisions.

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Justseeds: Mary Tremonte: Queer Scouts Patch and Poster Set

Every American wants MORE MORE of the world and why not, you only live once. But the mistake made in America is persons accumulate more more dead matter, machinery, possessions & rugs & fact information at the expense of what really counts as more: feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling. You own twice as much rug if you’re twice as aware of the rug.

People who like to share what they’re reading are looking at this material in a very different way from the publisher. They’re looking to cut it and paste it.

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Rinsed Chef Boyardee ravioli with a Yellow Tail red wine sauce, peas handpicked from a Cup-a-Soup, and finished with grated string cheese. (Corner Stourmet, The Bold Italic)

At first when the fire trucks showed up, I wondered if they were an intended part of the ‘performance,’ but I was quickly informed that it was DEFINITELY not part of the piece.

I didn’t want to come off as trying to do some D’Angelo stuff, but I can’t think of any other album that’s been so influential. D’Angelo left such a wealth of unexplored territory musically.

We live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis dine at the White House regularly. The idea that the government felt it so essential to insist that this behavior be marked as a felony is just unfathomable.

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infinity-imagined:

City lights photographed from the International Space Station and Neurons imaged with fluorescence microscopy.

Source images; Cities (1) (2) (3) (4) (5), Neurons (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

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spackerdave:

All Watched Over
by Machines of Loving Grace

by Richard Brautigan

I’d like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
   (right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
   (it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.