inkbluesky

Welcome to the Post-Factual Era

“Why is it that in these globalization discussions among college educated professionals, it is always the integrity and motivation of those who challenge the corporate line that is suspect?…Have you asked free-traders if they want to see children in India go blind making rugs, union activists tortured and murdered in Columbia, women workers locked inside filthy factories in China? Or laid off manufacturing workers commit suicide in the US? Of course not. Then why ask me to prove to you that I don’t want to keep the Chinese poor?…It’s a measure of the pervasiveness of class in our culture that “liberals” begin a discussion about globalization with the assumption that political virtue lives on Wall Street and political vice at the AFL-CIO. If anything, the argument for NAFTA was the less serious. It was based on promises of jobs, reduced immigration and prosperity among the Mexican poor that promoters knew were false when they made them. It was a crappy deal for workers in all three countries. Why such contempt for people who turned out to be right?”

The answer, of course, has to do with where the money and power is. The Establishment is reflexively pro-war, and – for obvious reasons of profit making – innately supportive of “free” trade deals that are chock full of corporate protections (patents, copyrights, intellectual property restrictions) but stripped of basic protections for human beings (wages, labor standards, human rights, environmental regulations, etc.).

This short post by David Sirota struck because those of us concerned about America’s working class always seem to start out on the defensive and have to use so many qualifiers when the discussion turns to “free trade”. Sure the general concept of helping other workers in the world is appealing, but protecting American jobs doesn’t automatically mean that its an either or argument. When Wal-Mart argues for free trade so they can supposedly offer working class Americans lower prices they are also arguing for the exportation of American jobs and their right to do so through special legislation that they received by floating all their political donations to fat cat conservatives. That’s a perverse brand of free trade where corporations prosper at the expense of both Chinese and Indian workers that are wage slaves and American workers that lost their manufacturing jobs.

lanterns, kibune shrine 

We’ve had the alleged war on Christmas, the culture wars, the war on science why not Origami Bug Wars, THE ORIGAMI LAB

The laser cutter was growling away, scoring one of Lang’s Hanji sheets. He twiddled with his computer. On the screen was a lacy geometric pattern. Lang had designed it with software he started writing in 1990 called TreeMaker, which is well known in origami circles; it was the first software that would translate “tree” forms—that is, anything that sort of resembles a stick figure, such as people or bugs—into crease patterns. Another program he wrote, ReferenceFinder, converts the patterns into step-by-step folding instructions. This secured his position as the most technologically ambitious of the origami masters. In 2004, he was an artist-in-residence at M.I.T., and gave a now famous lecture about origami and its relationship to mathematical notions, like circle packing and tree theory. Brian Chan, a Ph.D. candidate in fluid dynamics at M.I.T., told me recently, “That was a huge lecture. It got everyone talking.” It inspired Chan to put his hobby of blacksmithing on hold and take up origami; he and Lang are now regular participants in an annual competition that is a friendly continuation of the Bug Wars. Last year’s theme was a sailing ship. Lang wasn’t happy with his entry—a sailboat with its sails down, revealing its skeletal masts—but talks enthusiastically about Chan’s. From a single sheet, Chan created a brig under full sail being attacked by a giant squid.