inkbluesky

nature finds a way 1600×1200

It is difficult to describe artist-cartoonist-illustrator Ronald Searle. Some of his work reminds me of Edward Gorey and some reminds me of Mad magazine. Then again he was versatile enough to have also done some work for Disney. There is a blog that focuses exclusively on his work. Today the latest post features ‘THE SECOND COMING OF TOULOUSE LAUTREC’ - which is probably not safe for work. He is one of those artists that probably most of the western world at least has seen and would recognize the style, but don’t know who he is.

The List: The World’s Most Controversial Religious Sites

Yasukuni Shrine - Tokyo, Japan

What’s the rub: Among the souls enshrined at Yasukuni are 1,068 convicted war criminals. The shrine’s private overseers say these people were unfairly tried. But 14 are Class-A war criminals, including the military commander who presided over the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China and the prime minister who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Potala Palace - Lhasa, Tibet, China

What’s the rub: Unchecked Chinese control. Tibet became a cause célèbre in the 1990s, as Hollywood stars led by Richard Gere protested the Chinese government’s attempts to make the historically autonomous province more “Chinese.” But as Gere’s star has faded, so too it seems has his cause. Tibet barely registers on the international media radar anymore…

Bob Jones University - Greenville, South Carolina, United States

Why it matters: While not a religious site per se, Bob Jones University (BJU) is nonetheless a pilgrimage center for political candidates hoping to court religious conservatives. Founded in 1927 by its evangelical preaching namesake, BJU is the self-declared “citadel” of fundamentalist Christian thought in the United States. For political candidates from both parties, a trip there is considered a litmus test of red state appeal.

There are a few more religious sites listed at the link with more background on each. BJU ( note the irony of the initials) is probably the only one that can be readily taken down a in importance - a completely undeserved importance at that. Treat them like the Faux News debates - if the Democratic candidates just stay away and note the reasons such as the school’s recently changed banned on interracial dating and their political back stabbing of John McCain in 2000 then all but the die hard kool-aid drinkers will have any respect for BJU. By continung to make pilgrimages there the canidates lead BJ an unearned and certainly undeserved legitmacy. As for Yasukuni Shrine, the place should be bull dozed, but the Japanese like every other nation in the world retains pockets of misplaced nationalism that makes that scenario unlikely. Lastly, China is likely to get little in the way of pressure of the U.S. because one, Bush needs them to help keep North Korea under control - another wall that the neocons have pushed us up against and two, conservatives have embraced China’s non-union cheap labor at the expense of American workers and made Muslims the new boogie man to replace communism to feed their addiction to paranoia.

broke down in flip-flops 

Pop-Up Cities: China Builds a Bright Green Metropolis

Three years ago, Alejandro Gutierrez got a strange and tantalizing message from Hong Kong. Some McKinsey consultants were putting together a business plan for a big client that wanted to build a small city on the outskirts of Shanghai. But the land, at the marshy eastern tip of a massive, mostly undeveloped island at the mouth of the Yangtze River, was a migratory stop for one of the rarest birds in the world — the black-faced spoonbill, a gangly white creature with a long, flat beak.

Strange story is a way. Taking an island with a few inhabitants and a rare bird and building a green city which is also on one of the world’s most polluted rivers. There will be green buildings, solar power and recycling - all the underpinnings of what we would imagine in a eco-friendly city of the future. China is in many ways a disaster, yet is on course to become the world’s largest economy. This green project is like an old house that has been so badly abused by its residents that building this experimental green city is like putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. I guess you have to take the attitude that they have to start on a better path and undoing the damage somewhere, somehow.

Even now, after three decades of rapid economic growth, more than 160 million Chinese still live on less than a dollar a day. The trouble is, environmental degradation has become a drag on China’s development. The government revealed last year that environmental damage costs the economy $200 billion a year, a full 10 percent of China’s GDP. The cost to public heath and quality of life may be even greater. Overcultivation, overgrazing, and massive timber consumption have turned a quarter of China’s land into desert. Over 400 million Chinese drink contaminated water.

broke down film-noir version 

The outdoor industry is its own worst critic

Few companies have an objective tool for rating how good a shirt or shoe is for the environment. But that may be changing. In May, leaders in the outdoor industry will meet in Boulder to discuss developing a universal system to rate a product’s environmental impact.

“It’s tricky to know if you’re really doing a good thing unless you have an objective way to look at the whole process,” said Betsy Blaisdell, manager of environmental stewardship at the shoe and apparel company Timberland, which recently created a rating called the Green Index. The Green Index looks at everything from materials to shipping and gives shoes a sustainability score from 1 to 10.

“When we looked at products from start to finish, we found some surprises,” she said.

The natural hemp that Timberland used in its Greenscape Mountain sneakers to replace a synthetic fabric turned out to be a bit limp, so designers added a stiff backing. The backing added weight. The weight burned more fossil fuels in shipping. Once a Green Index analysis was run, it showed the synthetic fiber was more sustainable. Out went the hemp.

“I think the designers were a little mad, but it’s been a great tool,” said Blaisdell.

Green Index tags are included with five shoe models, and the company hopes to tag all its shoes and clothing by 2009. Timberland officials will urge other manufacturers at the May meeting to develop a standardized “nutrition label” that tells how green a product is.

I’m glad someone finally got around to looking at the big picture. I used to think I was incidentally doing the environment a favor by buying clothing made of all cotton or some other natural fiber like linen. Then I read something that Patagonia put in one of their cataloque about the fertilizers and fossil fuels used on factory cotton farms and it kind of blew my envoronmental boat out of the water. At least if we start to get tags with ratings on shoes and clothes we can make smarter decisions.

african plains wallpaper

One way of looking at this Reflections on an Aesthetics of Touch, Smell and Taste is to imagine that you go to a museum or gallery where they place a mask over you’re eyes and you experience a dish of bananas and strawberries solely by your sense of smell. Or you’re allowed to examine each sculpture in a gallery, but only by touch. It feels like a bust of David, but whether it looks like David is another matter. So is it art. Not exactly a burning debate, but it does point out how visual the arts are, with the glaring exception of music.

1. Why Are Philosophers Reticent about Touch, Smell and Taste?

The haptic sense encompassing the feeling of touch, temperature, pain, movement and force, the olfactory sense and the sense of taste have traditionally been neglected in the history of aesthetics. When they have been taken into consideration, it was only to deny the existence of art forms that address these senses. Let us begin by having a look at the objections brought against their aesthetic potential.

She does get worked up about the neglect of the tactile senses in art, kind of a surprising attitude in a philosophy paper. While its an interesting observation, its not something that keeps me up at night. You know having deep concerns that some creator of great smelling art is being neglected by the ignorant masses.

In book, ex-CIA chief assails Cheney on Iraq invasion

“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Tenet writes in a devastating judgment that is likely to be debated for many years. Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.

Tenet admits that he made his famous “slam dunk” remark about the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But he argues that the quote was taken out of context and that it had little impact on President Bush’s decision to go to war. He also makes clear his bitter view that the administration made him a scapegoat for the Iraq war.

…. As violence in Iraq spiraled beginning in late 2003, Tenet writes, “rather than acknowledge responsibility, the administration’s message was: Don’t blame us. George Tenet and the CIA got us into this mess.”

Lots of potential here for a new reality show. Every week four teams set off on a search for someone that still likes or respects Dick Cheney. The winner gets a week’s stay at Dick’s Baghdad Country Club where victory is around every corner.

basket and flowers

In May of 1921 a white elevator operator in Tulsa, Oklahoma let out a scream. A black man was seen running from the scene. In the days that followed buildings were burned including churches, 300 people had been killed - some of those tortured to death. The elevator operator never pressed charges. Conspiracies of Silence The Political, Economic and Sociological Correlates of the Tulsa Drama Triangle and Massacre of 1921

Tulsa was not unique among American cities in terms of racial wars during the 1920’s, but what were the causes? As in many other places (11) - Omaha, Nebraska; Kansas City, Kansas; Knoxville, Tennessee - rumors that a black man had harmed a white woman were the catalyst. However, it would seem highly unlikely that a black man would assault a white woman in a busy public building at the height of rush hour. Indeed, Miss Page refused to press charges. Behind this precipitant, however, lay a variety of less obvious psychological, political and economic factors.

In the name of decency and public morality, the Tulsa Tribune had long blamed blacks for all manner of vice, labeling “niggertown” as a “cesspool of inequity and corruption.”( In reality, all of Tulsa at the time had a boom town atmosphere, much criminal activity, selective law enforcement and an active vigilante tradition. This was a period, it should be recalled, when the Ku Klux Klan was gaining strength. They became strong after the collapse of the Oklahoma Socialist Party, previously the strongest political group in the area.(7) Even before 1921, when Oklahoma was to be a Black-Indian state, the Kansas KKK had threatened to kill a black man who had been proposed as governor.

…..The police blotter soon disappeared, as did all copies of the fateful May 31 issue of the Tribune. Later, even microfilm copies of it also disappeared. Reference to the event dropped from most civil conversation, although there were weak, if differing, oral traditions in the black and white communities. By the 1970’s, however, many locals and whites knew nothing of it, but the careful observer could see its aftermath. The author directed a community mental health center whose catchment area included Greenwood, but neither black families nor their therapists would discuss the event in terms of its effect on families in treatment. Real estate agents directed their white clients south and for many years, blacks were rarely seen south of 21st Street after 5 p.m., a phenomenon that changed only when the collapse of the oil boom left many South Tulsa condos vacant.
Why did this event almost disappear from history?

go round and round

The new mania for neuroplasticity

In the 1970s, a researcher named Michael Merzenich discovered that when he severed a nerve ending in the hands of adult monkeys, the monkeys’ brains quickly “rewired” to continue to use the region of the somatosensory cortex that, according to conventional wisdom, should have gone dark; the brain had begun to process signals from other parts of the hand, where the monkey could still feel. As studies accumulated, the certainty in the neuroscientific façade began to crack.

That adults were incapable of expanding their minds was a source of snide pleasure when I was in my teens. Sure those old fogies controlled everything, but our brains were like sponges and capable of mental gymnastics that those over the hill thrity-five year olds were long past performing. That there is scientific evidence to suggest that we’re capable of establishing new brain pathways ” process signals from other parts of the brain” makes youthful arrogance a little embarrassing, but more important makes getting a few grey hairs less depressing. Too bad that the potential for lifelong brain training is also being saddled with inflated expectations and a dash of New Age mumbo jumbo.