dinosaurs on a bridge, iraq occupation increases energy costs
May 27, 2008 at 2:48 pm | In news, photography, photoshop, progressive | No Comments
dinosaurs on a bridge. according to archaeologists they could turn the lights built into their eyes on and off.
Iraq War May Have Increased Energy Costs Worldwide by a Staggering $6 Trillion
The invasion of Iraq by Britain and the US has trebled the price of oil, according to a leading expert, costing the world a staggering $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone.
[ ]…Goldman Sachs predicted last week that the price could rise to an unprecedented $200 a barrel over the next year, and the world is coming to terms with the idea that the age of cheap oil has ended, with far-reaching repercussions on their activities.
While the middle-class of North America and Europe will be paying for some falsehoods told about WMD and connection between 9-11 and Iraq for the next generation or two the world’s poor will be the hardest hit,
Poor countries and their peoples will be hit by a devastating double whammy as both their fuel and food prices increase. Last year, when oil cost only about half as much, countries from Nepal to Nicaragua were hit by fuel shortages. At least 25 of the 44 sub-Saharan nations are facing crippling electricity shortages.
As oil is used in agriculture, its increased cost will also drive up the price of food, making more and more people go hungry. Worse, expensive petrol is bound to increase the drive towards biofuels made from maize and other crops, which then brings the world’s poorest people into competition with affluent motorists for grain — a contest they cannot win. Just one fill-up of a 4×4’s tank with ethanol uses enough grain to feed one person for a year.
There has been a trend over the last six years, one that seems to have peaks and valleys to claim that Iraq is some how connected to whether the United States survives as a democracy. Usually peppered with bumper sticker sentiments about freedom not being free. Bizarre assertions like this never explain how a nation with the world’s second largest economy and a defense budget in the billions could be conquered by a nation of 25 million people that has no navy and a few old planes for an air force. Who knows if the people that see Iraq as some front in some greater existential threat are interested in serious discussions about national security and real threats to U.S. life and property, but continuing to make such absurd assertions and unfounded connections makes it look like they’re not serious about events and policies that have caused so much loss of life. Not to mention tax dollars better spent else where. Members of cults frequently repeat memorized answers to all objections using some variation of circular logic. Those that see Iraq as a vital lynch pin against some nebulous force that will some how get here and then subdue the entire population (approx 310 million) and force us all to buy prayer mats base their arguments on a similar foundation. Bush’s Lost Year
Because of that shift, the United States succeeded in removing Saddam Hussein, but at this cost: The first front in the war on terror, Afghanistan, was left to fester, as attention and money were drained toward Iraq. This in turn left more havens in Afghanistan in which terrorist groups could reconstitute themselves; a resurgent opium-poppy economy to finance them; and more of the disorder and brutality the United States had hoped to eliminate. Whether or not the strong international alliance that began the assault on the Taliban might have brought real order to Afghanistan is impossible to say. It never had the chance, because America’s premature withdrawal soon fractured the alliance and curtailed postwar reconstruction. Indeed, the campaign in Afghanistan was warped and limited from the start, by a pre-existing desire to save troops for Iraq. ( emphasis mine - a polite way of saying that Bush let the head of al-Qaeda and the people responsible for planning 9-11 get away because he was in such a hurry to get rid of Dick Cheney’s former business buddy)
Freedom isn’t free of course. It requires among other things vigilance against those who would manipulate the fears of the nation solely for political ends, for money and most of all for the high they get from wielding power.
You can have my sword when you pry it from my cold dead hand, Man arrested at Macy’s in NYC for carrying sword
bare back outrage, british reveal ufo secrets, the bare bench
May 26, 2008 at 12:10 pm | In culture, literature, media, news, photography, photoshop | No CommentsShould we ban “back pornography?”
I feel like the whole Miley Cyrus scandal was a just a tad bit, I don’t know, overblown no? But on the tail end of that whole moment comes another controversial “back porn” image featuring some ladies that are actually over 18. Still, the Star Ledger reports that the naked backs in a new KRock radio station ad campaign appearing on billboards all over New York and New Jersey have stirred up…..
This story has over a hundred and forty comments and counting. The word porn is becoming attached to almost as many things as the word like to unintended similes. Everything is now porn or similar to, but not exactly like something else. Whoever is in charge of this please stop.
balloon or ufo
British U.F.O. Shocker! Government Officials Were Telling the Truth
“The government has been telling us the truth,” declared David Clarke, a senior lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, who has a side interest in U.F.O.’s. “There are a lot of weird things in the sky, and some of them we can’t explain, but there’s not a shred of evidence for a single alien visitation.”
Which is, frankly, a letdown, as is the government’s prosaic explanation of why, for decades, it has meticulously documented reports of U.F.O. sightings. “We only check the sightings from the perspective of making sure that our military airspace has not been breached, and we pretty much never have airspace breaches,” a Defense Ministry spokeswoman said.
If someone called in and said they saw a huge neon cigar flying about someone would write it down in a report. The British criteria for what constituted an unidentified flying object that might be a visitor from another planet was incredibly low.
the bare bench. technically wearing a coat of paint, but still shocking.
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
After Apple-Picking (1914) by Robert Frost
In articles reporting the White House’s threat to veto a supplemental war funding bill, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times uncritically quoted Dana Perino saying, “This is the wrong way to consider domestic spending, and Congress should not go down this path.” But neither the Times nor the Post pointed out that President Bush signed supplemental war funding bills that included domestic spending in June 2006 and December 2005.
Do these people have some kind of lie quota that they think they have to fill before they leave office.
tasting words, moss passage, wi-fi tribe
May 25, 2008 at 3:03 pm | In art, photography, photoshop, tech culture | No Comments“Waterised Words” - Exhibition exploring self-knowledge through art practice, as part of PhD research.
I have created bowls of drinking water with different words printed on bottom of each bowl. The water was drinking water and nothing was added to the water. Words, such as love, fear, calmness seem to affect us not only mentally but physically as well. Their ‘energy’ could be argued to continue to reverberate long after the words were spoken into the space around us. Visitors were invited to drink from the water with the ‘embedded’ words, and suggest if they feel any differences in the tastes. By tasting the water with words and comparing the tastes I hoped visitors could sense for themselves the trace that every word leaves in us. Visitors’ responses were varied and surprising, and were filmed on video for use in a future film (visitor responses will be available as a transcript on poeticmind.co.uk).
Besides the element of self knowledge also applicable as an element of Thing Theory. Bowels and water depending on some added quality, the words, affects the value of the objects even though the water’s innate physical characteristics haven’t changed at all.
Global Dreams for a Wireless Web
Three years ago, aiming to create a global wireless network, he founded FON, a company based in Madrid that wants to unlock the potential power of the social Internet. FON’s gamble is that Internet users will share a portion of their wireless connection with strangers in exchange for access to wireless hotspots controlled by others.
Martin Varsavsky sounds like an interesting gentleman, has had a remarkable business career and I appreciate the egalitarian ideals that drive his vision of FON. Still, while there is plenty of evidence that human beings can be altruistic I kept thinking as I was reading that his conception of the way FON should work, won’t. Its one thing to make an extra sandwich everyday for the homeless guy at the corner, its another to let him come live with you. When you let other people access your router they’re doing the cyber equivalent of at least letting people invite themselves over for lunch. I hope I’m wrong and Martin and his business partners ( like Google) figure out another network sharing/business model.
can a narcissistic exhibitionist be today’s wolfe, surf is zen, what roger williams learned
May 24, 2008 at 1:07 pm | In culture, history, literature, photography, photoshop | No CommentsSarah Hepola writes at Salon a certain guilty pleasure she had in reading former Gawker blogger/editor Emily Gould’s article for The New York Times Magazine.
Dammit, I loved Emily Gould’s story. Is it “self-indulgent melodrama,” as one of the (nearly 1,000, as of this writing) commenters on the NYT site sneered? Absolutely. (By the way, I adore self-indulgent melodrama. My favorite movie is “Magnolia.”) Should it have been cut, by at least a thousand words? Yup. Is she annoying, an exhibitionist, a narcissist? She is. But I still found the story compulsively readable, an absorbing sketch of a certain female confessionalist — the brazen, foolish insistence that everything in her life is fair game, the craving for the spotlight and the withering in its glare. Gould captures the weird love-hate relationship that develops between online writers and their commenters (”They were enemies, articulating my worst fears about my limitations,” she writes. “They were the voices in my head”)
emily gould
I wouldn’t say that I hate Gawker. I used to stop by Gawker occasionally a few years ago. I stopped because they used up so much cruel and not half as clever as they think vitriol on people that weren’t deserving of it. After I had read a certain number of posts I sensed a level of the quasi-intellectual nihilism that Andy Warhol thought was cool. That Sarah liked the piece and that Gould wrote something that would generate over a thousand comments and counting pegged my curiosity, Exposed By Emily Gould
* As Henry and I fought, I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted. I don’t think I understood then that I could be right about being free to express myself but wrong about my right to make that self-expression public in a permanent way. I described my feelings in the language of empowerment: I was being creative, and Henry wanted to shut me up.
* “I tried not to read the comments,” Jessica told me when we met for a drink just before I started work at Gawker. “Well, I went back and forth. But, you know, you really shouldn’t read the comments.” An hour into my first day on the job, I disobeyed her. I needed to know what people were saying about me.
* Julia wore skimpy, Halloween-style costumes to parties and dated high-profile men in high-profile ways — her tech-millionaire boyfriend collaborated with her on a blog where they took turns chronicling their relationship’s ups and downs. I was initially put off by Julia’s naked attention-whoring — “Attention is my drug,” she often confessed.
I can’t understand the strong reaction to Gould one way or the other ( OK I do love the flower tattoo on her arm, but that has nothing to do with her writing). She isn’t as deep or literate as Marcel Proust (1871-1922), but her blogging in its attempts at capturing her take on her life and society is the modern day equivalent of Remembrance of Things Past. She is no less a gossip then Thomas Wolfe( not the second rate Tom Wolfe, though Tom was/is a narcissist and gossip) was in Look Homeward Angel where he spilled a lot of hometown and family secrets. I can understand the strong reactions to bloggers because its nothing particularly new. While he’s considered by most to be a source of pride by his hometown of Ashville, North Carolina, Wolfe wasn’t universally admired in Ashville in his lifetime. I’m not a fan of Gould or that style, but some of the criticism of her has an undertone, if not some explicit disgust directed her way because she is a she. Gould speaks in a modern persona using modern idioms, but she isn’t doing anything that the great pantheon of western and mostly male writers haven’t done in content.
surf is zen. i’ve used the term zen in a couple photos lately. i’m not using it in the religious sense. more as adjective to describe a special place or activity that is relaxing.
Beyond Belief By Jeff Sharlet
“I feel safer down here among the Christian savages along Narragansett Bay than I do among the savage Christians of Massachusetts Bay Colony,” wrote Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, shortly after his exile from polite society in 1635. Williams was one of the great heretics of what Europeans deemed a new world, not least because he bothered to learn the languages and customs of those he found already living there. He knew the Native Americans he admired were not Christians in any doctrinal sense, but he believed they lived according to a spirit of brotherly love more fully than the Puritans of Massachusetts from whom he’d fled. Martha Nussbaum argues that Williams’s friendships with Narragansett leaders in Rhode Island left him with the kind of nuanced understanding of tolerance that would become the bedrock of American religious freedom–and, what’s more, liberty of conscience.
I like it when I click over to an article and find some obscure bit of history as an introduction.
Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.
