Spitting Image

paper: Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

excerpt

In sociology, Nalini Kotamraju has argued that constructing arguments around "class" is extremely difficult in the United States. Terms like "working class" and "middle class" and "upper class" get all muddled quickly. She argues that class divisions in the United States have more to do with lifestyle and social stratification than with income. In other words, all of my anti-capitalist college friends who work in cafes and read Engels are not working class just because they make $14K a year and have no benefits. Class divisions in the United States have more to do with social networks (the real ones, not FB/MS), social capital, cultural capital, and attitudes than income. Not surprisingly, other demographics typically discussed in class terms are also a part of this lifestyle division. Social networks are strongly connected to geography, race, and religion; these are also huge factors in lifestyle divisions and thus "class."

I'm not doing justice to her arguments but it makes sense. My friends who are making $14K in cafes are not of the same class as the immigrant janitor in Oakland just because the share the same income bracket. Their lives are quite different. Unfortunately, with this framing, there aren't really good labels to demarcate the class divisions that do exist. For this reason, I will attempt to delineate what we see on social network sites in stereotypical, descriptive terms meant to evoke an image.

Citation: boyd, danah. 2007. "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace ." Apophenia Blog Essay. June 24 . http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

comments http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/06/24/viewing_america.html

[photo via google, not above]

~I wonder how many US soldiers use Facebook?
How about estimating the number of ex-GIs heroes who'll be using Facebook in the next few years after they receive Uncle Sam's enlistment money for college?

(Makes me wonder if the Bushies were less party orientated in spreading our tax dollars among military contractors, would there be any Congressional pressure to end Bush's War in Iraq? Maybe the next President Clinton will learn what's the magic number of contracts required (for the Republicans) to keep both parties of lawmakers in favor of the war? Any war? President Hillary Clinton the 'Great Unifier'?)

UNUSUAL DISCOVERY NEAR BERLIN

Europe's soil is blood-soaked from centuries of fighting but rarely yields mass graves from battles that took place before the two world wars. One such grave has now been found near Berlin with over 100 soldiers who died in the 1636 Battle of Wittstock.

...there are only very few mass graves in Europe between 1300 and 1850 that can be attributed to specific battles...

...only four other mass graves in Europe that were associated with specific battles had been discovered:

* on the Baltic island of Gotland, dating from a 1361 battle between Sweden and Denmark

* in the northern English village of Towton. A grave containing 43 soldiers was discovered underneath Towton Hall in 1996. They are believed to have died in the Battle of Towton in 1461 during the English Wars of the Roses

* a grave in northern Germany linked to the Battle of Hemmingstedt in 1500 when peasants defeated an army of knights

* in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, where the remains of 2,000 soldiers from Napoleon's Grand Army were found in 2002. They died during Napoleon's disastrous retreat from Moscow. Many of the skeletons were found curled up and undamaged, suggesting they were killed by cold, not cannonballs or bullets.

story | Speigel

thanks Conscientious

~What's thats saying: "We stand on the shoulders of giants"? It
may be more curious to be reminded that we live and travel on landfills of peasants?

Bell Labs (Alcatel-Lucent) Video

videos

Costume: Sexy Handy Girl

@

from Nov. 1, 2006 http://memepool.com/Author/riotnrrd/

~This morning I woke up lamenting the many things I never (even half-assed) learned to do.

Blog: Make

>Kids safety labels we want to see...

There's an open letter published in the Daily Telegraph calling on the government to help prevent the "death of childhood" - basically, video games and consumer electronics are killing imaginations... maybe, but why wait for the gov - we're all about solutions here at MAKE, we're proposing that these handy safety labels be applied to all packaging, enjoy.

article

~Note the links

Make home http://makezine.com/blog/

Film Techniques of Alfred Hitchcock

How to turn your boring movie into a Hitchcock thriller...

article http://www.borgus.com/think/hitch.htm

by way of Kottke.org

~No video clips but very good.

AntiBush Billboards

With President Bush's popularity at an all-time low, we thought it would be interesting to come up with some examples of just how mainstream Bush-Hating has become. We are not trying in any way to be political, but to observe a growing trend and tie it into advertising.

>for example

more | GetItInWriting: CopyWrite Blog

by way of Dr. Menlo

Bush Aide Blocked Surgeon Generals Report

Richard H. Carmona, who commissioned the "Call to Action on Global Health" while serving as surgeon general from 2002 to 2006...told lawmakers that, as he fought to release the document, he was "called in and again admonished ... via a senior official who said, 'You don't get it.' " He said a senior official told him that "this will be a political document, or it will not be released."

In 65 pages, the report charts trends in infectious and chronic disease; reviews efforts to curb AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria; calls for the careful monitoring of public health to safeguard against bioterrorism; and explains the importance of proper nutrition, childhood immunizations and clean air and water, among other topics. Its underlying message is that disease and suffering do not respect political boundaries in an era of globalization and mass population movements.

A few of the issues it focuses on, such as AIDS treatment and research, have been public health priorities for the Bush administration. But others - including ratifying the international tobacco treaty and making global health an element of U.S. foreign policy - are more politically sensitive. The report calls on the administration to consider spending more money on global health improvement, for instance. And it warns that "the environmental conditions that poison our water and contaminate our air are not contained within national boundaries... . The use of pesticides is also of concern to health officials, scientists and government leaders around the world."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072907Y.shtml

Image: Early Migration Map

link to large image: http://phoenicia.org/imgs/Map-of-human-migrations.jpg

Map of early human migrations according to mitochondrial population genetics (numbers are millennia before present).

>Link to transcript? of Wiki CD Selection: Human Migration

>Google Image Results for "early migration map"(s)

~No consumer interest in "paleolithic migration tours": "Walk in the steps of your paleolithic progenitors. Gaze upon the sites they may have viewed many many millenia ago. Literally trace across the face of the earth your matrilinial line from your motherland."?

When I first saw the thumbnail photo of this image, I didn't see a map. I saw a primitive representation of a woman sitting on the back of a giant flying bird.

The various google cached maps of migrations, linked above, started me thinking about my own migrations: the miles--the space-- I've covered from home to home, job to job, and school to school.

I just got the idea of a map of a hunter or wood gatherer tracing her path through the woods in search of food or fuel and comparing it to a map of a commuter or shopper as they travel to successfully complete their tasks.

The migration of the womb inside the body?
The slow steady migration of flesh and bone towards the ground?

Wiki: List of DNA tested mummies

The following mummies have undergone a mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) test:

article w/links

~With a Wiki reference for "famous DNA". (I can't find any collaboration of an item from a book of fiction that the Cheddar Man was murdered then partially eaten i.e. butched like an animal.)

[photo not from above]

~The famous "Cheddar Man" as a facsimile skeleton relaxing at home?
I believe this is meant to be a depiction of how Cheddar Man may have first appeared to the men who found his remains. From what I've read about his discovery this diorama seems to be missing copies of the artifacts found with him e.g a wool cord tied around his neck, as well as scaping tools used to remove his flesh from his bones. I guess the cannibalistic murder/human sacrifice aspects of this important anthropological discovery don't sit well with the local agencies and politicians promoting this find to tourists and school children.

Exhibition: Forensic Views\ Visible Proofs

>for example from the "19th Century Forensic Imaging Gallery"

Head and hand of a drownee, 1864
In atlases and manuals of legal medicine, 19th-century forensic pathologists used pictures and words to show students and colleagues their methodology—a precise inventorying of the condition of the victim's body. The chromolithograph, which could render coloration, texture and subtle shading, was particularly well suited to the task.
Johann Ludwig Casper, M.D., Atlas zum Handbuch der gerichtlichen Medicin [Atlas for the Manual of Legal Medicine], Berlin; Artist: Hugo Troschel; Lithographer: Winckelmann & Sons

large

more Technologies Galleries

link to all the galleries http://www.nlm.nih.gov/visibleproofs/galleries/

media index (Quicktime or Windows Media Player required)

| US National Library of Medicine

~ Many images and articles: a PG-13 exhibition.

Anne Geddes

large

google image search anne geddes (large)

Anne Geddes' Wiki article

Avatar Slideshow Gallery

>for example

NAME Andreas Fischer BORN 1980 OCCUPATION Designer LOCATION Vienna AVATAR NAME Zero Cold AVATAR CREATED 2005 GAME PLAYED City of Heroes HOURS PER WEEK IN-GAME 17 CHARACTER TYPE Human SPECIAL ABILITIES Controls ice and storms @

more from the NYTimes' slideshow

Blog: Monkeys for Helping

for example "Picture of the day"

http://monkeysforhelping.blogspot.com/

Drunk Astronauts

Google News' search results for drunk astronauts

~Who knew "the right stuff" was 90 proof?

Not nearly as earth-shaking a revelation as "paedophile priests" and it certainly won't be as financially damaging to the responsible institution but unforgettable all the same.
(Fights between astronauts and hecklers will soon be reported?)

The first astronauts were correct when they said they were nothing more than monkeys in a can shot into space?

Perhaps their drinking was just another of the many scientific tests NASA has them do.

Doesn't this news make rumors of a "200 mile-high club" more plausible?

In space no can hear you belch.

[photo not from above]

From Mercenaries to Market:

The Rise and Regulation of Private Military Companies (Introduction)

The book as a whole is organized around four sets of questions, which reflect the four parts of the book. First, why and how is regulation of PMCs now a challenging issue? Secondly, how have problems leading to a call for regulation manifested in different regions and contexts? Third, what regulatory norms and institutions currently exist and how effective are they? And, fourth, what role has the market to play in regulation?

link to pdf intro. through here: http://www.docuticker.com/?p=15045

Army Rule Disguised as "Democracy"

Envisaging the success of the army's experiment in Bangladesh and its emulation in Pakistan, (William B. Milam. former US ambassador to Pakistan and Bangladesh)... exclaims: "What a boost it would be for the Islamic world if the two Muslim homelands of South Asia led that world into sustainable democracy." No harm, he might have added, if an army-sustained democracy wins in non-Muslim Nepal, too."

article By J. Sri Raman | TruthOut

~Question: "When is a democracy not a democracy"?

[photo not with above]

Characteristics of successfully implemented telemedical applications

link to PDF; 242 KB through here: http://www.docuticker.com/?p=15151

Google News Search Results: "beheaded"

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=beheaded&btnG=Search

~Have there been more or fewer beheadings in the world since Muslim terrorists have awakened the west to the threat that 1.6 billion Muslims could pose to our values and our economic hegemony?

Sheikhs educated in the UK or America now have more modern and less public ways of dealing with those who personally displease them.

While according to the world's media radical Muslims are increasingly? using beheadings as a tool & symbol of terrorism? While concurrently Muslim nations allied to the US with new vigor? exercise their tradtional values by using public beheadings as testimonies to state or royal power and their belief in God?

Could one become desensitized to photos & videos of beheadings?

You've been punked!

[photo & caption not from above]

[photo not from above link]

~Imagine being part of a large crowd in a public square, in the stands of a soccer field or baseball park as the authorities bring someone out and kill them for all to see. And the crowd does nothing but watch: maybe gasp, moan or pray.
Sword, gun or rope-- nothing is as shocking as the crowd's passivity?

Ads: One LIfe

"Have you ever stopped to think about the fact that you really only have one life to live? Have you thought about what you are doing now, and how that compares to what you really want to do? I have. I started to think more seriously about it just over a year ago, prompting me to start making some changes. If I only have one life to live, what do I want to spend that life doing?"

Living My One Life: http://www.bastish.net/index_2.html

One Life Japan Bike Tours http://www.onelifejapan.com/

~James: "Our internet host's new business."

~When I think about vacations I can almost hear that song by the Go-Gos or a whirling organ or calliope at an amusement park. When I close my eyes I see the line divider in the middle of the highway rushing out like there's a big fish on the line.

I know there are 'modern gypsies' following the seasons north or south who unlike the homeless travel in often luxurious recreational vehicles. I wonder if there are many less modern gypsies who follow the sun with their bicycles?

I would if I could.

Study: Los Alamos released more plutonium in early days than reported

Los Alamos National Laboratory released far more airborne plutonium just after World War II than what it reported, but a health scientist says it's not clear what that means for public health.

The lab's plutonium processing work released 42.83 curies of plutonium from 1948-1955, although the lab's official report for that period showed a release of 0.724 curies of plutonium.

Some housing at Los Alamos is as close as a quarter-mile from the lab's original plutonium processing area, according to an interim report from (Thomas) Widner's team, a private contractor hired by the CDC. (on the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment project).
Los Alamos lab spokesman James Rickman, who noted the lab's current managers were not in charge during the plutonium releases...

Widner's San Francisco-based company, ChemRisk, heads the effort to review lab documents from 1943 to the present to try to identify releases of radionuclides and chemicals...

story

SEC Suspends Online Listing Of Companies Tied to Terrorism

Several members of Congress, along with the banking industry and other international organizations objected, saying the list wasn't up to date and often included companies that didn't do business in those countries or had already severed ties. In some cases, critics said, the list included firms that simply mentioned the name of a country.

...the list appeared to have been created through a "cursory word search."

story | CorpWatch

~Of course while their stock portfolios might suffer, no one in these listed companies ever go to jail; have their savings accounts frozen; need to hire lawyers for themselves and their familes; face the loss of their homes, possessions and businesses or are required to endure hours of interrogation by the FBI. As opposed to the American Muslims who send money to relatives living in parts of the world in which US State Department designated terrorist organizations 'tax' or control every possible financial transaction.

[photo defenselink\ not with above]

Fencing the Border: Boeing's High-Tech Plan Falters

The minimum cost of setting up the system is estimated at $1 million a mile but that figure does not include the ongoing costs of maintaining the infrastructure and staffing it.

Boeing, as the prime contractor, has selected nearly 100 of the 900 subcontractors that applied to work on the contract. A partial list, compiled from Boeing, DHS, military and local sources, includes Booz Allen Hamilton, Centech, DRS Technologies, Kollsman, Inc., LGS, L-3 Communications Government Services Incorporated, Perot Systems, Pinkerton Government Services, Power Contracting, Inc. Reconnaissance Group, Sandia National Laboratories, the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University in College Station and Unisys.
... Boeing protects its subcontracting plan as an industrial secret. It also operates under a guidance order from DHS not to talk on the record about SBInet, and refers all inquiries back to the federal agency. That agency, for its part, does not provide specific details about the work being performed under the contract, purportedly to keep the information from falling into the wrong hands.

A key component of the fence is a string of tower-mounted cameras that can sweep a 10-mile wide radius. This virtual fence is designed to monitor the border more effectively than human patrols..
[...each almost 100 feet tall, that scan a 360-degree radius...Ground radar sensors will also attempt to detect footsteps, bicycles and vehicles.]

The plan is that when migrants cross the SBInet's virtual fence, a LORROS camera, manufactured by Kollsman, Inc. of Merrimack, New Hampshire, will instantly detect their entry. These cameras will sit on top of specially designed towers (erected by DRS Technologies of Parsippany, New Jersey)...are each surrounded by a six-foot high chain link fence. These towers are equipped with Man-Portable Surveillance and Target Acquisition Radar (MStar) devices, that relay real-time electronic images to a private sector communications center.
When suspected migrants are spotted, a private enforcement contractor can take manual command of the camera, zoom in and identify the number of individuals as well as their means of transport. After classifying the "threat," the contractor electronically transfers the entrants' coordinates to Border Patrol agents via laptop computers mounted inside their vehicles.

Since Boeing won the contract last year, the estimated cost of securing the southwest border has gone from $2.5 billion to an estimated $8 billion just a few months later.

much more: http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14552

Fun with ... Filters

Sloppy Mandala

2X

[~I like pinwheels, alway have: except for those pinwheels on the Teletubbies, those are scary.]

Google Search Results for "cults and the cia"

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cults%20and%20the%20CIA&btnG=Google%20Search

[photo not with above]

~I've a favorite aunt and we can talk about almost anything, even ufos and serial killers, but everytime I try to bring up the topic of cults her eyes glaze over and she stops listening until I change the subject.
I remember one conversation in which we reminisced about the nuns we had as teachers. It naturally devolved into what we learned, the urban legends, about how the nuns lived in their cloisters, and as we exhausted all the rumors and trivia we knew, I started to talk about the similarities between religious or military disciplines and cults. She wouldn't hear it. She said that cults in no way shape or form have anything in common with either traditional religious communities or military training. Case closed..

That was a few years ago. Today I'm pretty sure that America's institutions and organizations are permeated, some more than others, with various cultic techniques, practices and cult members. And it may have always been that way.
Contrary to the above links not all cultists are spawns of the CIA and the degree of zombification required and/or instilled (with knowledge aforethough) by institutions varies. As does the zombie-like qualities cult members assume during their free time.

Cult membership may be as natural a phenomena as hypnosis.

Poem: American Sniper

A Poem By Darryl Mason

"Kill one man, terrorise a thousand"

more http://americansniperpoem.blogspot.com/

Australia's Top Cop Says Prepare To Fight Robot Crime Wave

>plus info on Aus cops trolling for paedos on Second Life & Taser toting robots

Technology such as cloned part-robot humans used by organised crime gangs pose the greatest future challenge to police, along with online scamming, Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Mick Keelty says.
Mr Keelty said the police force would have to use experts from the private sector to fight tech-savvy organised criminals, because it lacked the necessary skills.
Technology-enabled crime was "a new area that's growing exponentially", he warned yesterday.
(Keelty) identified the use of robotics and cloning as future challenges.

http://yournewreality.blogspot.com/2007/07/australias-top-cop-says-prepare-to.html.

New Navy Policy on Biological Select Agents

The U.S. Navy has issued its first security policy* for protection of "biological select agents and toxins" (BSAT) at Navy facilities, a move that may signify heightened Navy interest in research involving these lethal materials.
Select agents are substances designated by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture that "present a high bioterrorism risk to national security and have the greatest potential for adverse public health impact with mass casualties of humans and/or animals or that pose a severe threat to plant health or to plant products." A few dozen particular biological agents and toxins have been so designated (including ebola and smallpox viruses, botulinum, etc.
There are currently two Navy facilities in the United States that have possession of select agents and toxins...
"The Navy may increase the number of facilities in the future, and other Navy facilities may gain access or possession of BSAT due to non-routine events," the document states.

blog entry

*http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/navy/opnavinst/5530_16.pdf | Secrecy News

~It's those 'non-routine events' we have to worry about.

I'm almost certain the US Army has its own stockpile of biological weapons, but I wonder if the US Air Force finds it's necessary to likewise maintain BSAT storage facilities?
I'm guessing that the US Marines rely on the Navy for bioweapon procurement while the US Coast Guard hasn't yet been able to convince the Navy brass of their need for their own BSAT cache.

Princess claims clairvoyant powers, aims to share them

Norway's Princess Märtha Louise, daughter of King Harald and Queen Sonja, has emerged as a clairvoyant, and is launching an alternative school aimed at training students to contact angels.

The 35-year-old princess was educated as a physiotherapist, trained as a Rosen therapist and also has studied at an academy for holistic medicine "where I learned to systematize sensual impressions to read others, and through horses I learned to communicate with animals on a deeper level."
Märtha Louise, who competed in equestrian events for several years, said that she started "taking contact with angels" when she worked with horses. "I have later learned the value of this enormous gift, and want to share it with others," she said.

press release | Aftenposten

~Certainly there are more psychics among royalty then the hoi polloi: with their lives of luxury; servants to perform the mundane tasks which take up so much time; access to unlimited supplies of only the best pharmaceuticals, and their tradition of incest. Perhaps most royals are closeted psychics? Then brava Princess Martha Louise!

Tom DeLay tells College Republicans that abortion, illegal immigration are linked

"If we had those 40 million children that were killed over the last 30 years, we wouldn't need the illegal immigrants to fill the jobs that they are doing today. Think about it."

story | RawStory

by way of Harpers Weekly 7/24/07

~I'm surprise he didn't connect abortion to Al Qaida and US Army's recruitment problems but he and his spreechwriters probably know what works best with what audiences.

Connections another former American leader made Zell Miller: Abortion has shrunk our military, hurt social security, caused illegal immigration earlier this year.

(Inspired people have inspired leaders; great nations have great leaders.)

I wonder if any students came to the conclusion that the answer then to illegal immigration is free abortions for illegal immigrants (i.e. Mexicans)?

The French Connections

As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.
Even more striking is the fact that our “high speed” connections are painfully slow by other countries’ standards. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster.

article by Paul Krugman

thanks Conscientious

~I experience the greedy results of Bush's broadband give-away (or take-over) everyday. I wonder how much total time I spend every week waiting to get online, then waiting for a link to open then waiting for a page to download?

When I'm not feeling ashamed for being a corporate dupe and a pawn for profits, I think of this time waiting for connections as "free market meditation". During which I might for example reflect upon how the freedom of the free market transmutes itself through a myriad mysterious ways into stock dividends for investors to play-with and enjoy while simultaneously increasing prices for goods and services, like health care, education, transportation (the internet!) and food, millions of people without stock portfolios must purchase.

Fun in the Great Outdoors

2X

~I wonder if my town would let me display one of these as a lawn ornament? We have a big backyard. Just the shell and maybe the pilot seat. I've no need for the working parts. I've seen decommissioned cannons and a tank in the our town's parks.
A nearby town has an anti-aircraft missile, pointed straight up like an obelisk.
E-bay probably has a few for sale.

Ringing in change to the mobile phone

...initially designed to power wireless sensors that monitor the condition of industrial plants, the device could spawn a line of self-powered medical and consumer technologies.
That’s because it generates electrical energy from the vibrations and movements within its immediate environment, say experts at Southampton University, which created the device.

It works on the same principles as a kinetic powered watch, which uses the movement of a coil between magnets to produce an electrical current.

press release | Contractor UK

~Could the rumble of highway traffic, trains, bridges, highrises and trees swaying in the wind or earth tremors be used for "vibration energy harvesting"? How about gas or electric running motors?

U.S. Radiation Detector Program Delayed

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced the contracts for monitors with cutting-edge technology a year ago. He said they would improve radiation scans at borders and ports, while sharply reducing the number of false alarms. Congress had allowed the five-year project to move ahead after Homeland Security assured appropriators that the $377,000 machines would detect highly enriched uranium 95 percent of the time.

Auditors from the Government Accountability Office later found that the detection rates of machines tested by the department were as low as 17 percent and no higher than about 50 percent. The auditors said the department's optimistic report to Congress on the cost and benefits of the machines was based on assumptions instead of facts - a finding that prompted lawmakers to put the project on hold...

...as government spending on new technology rose to record levels, the primary technical advisers to federal officials often have been the contractors themselves. Billions of dollars have been wasted on failed, flawed or speculative projects.
A new computer system for tracking imports and exports was delayed by years because of technical problems, and the cost rose by $1 billion, to $3.1 billion. A computer system for the FBI to track criminal cases was abandoned after more than $100 million was spent. A system designed to track the entry and exit of foreign visitors featured a "prototype" network for recording visitor exits that cost $146 million but does not work.
The radiation portal monitors were envisioned as the nation's key bulwark against attacks with radioactive material. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the government spent more than $200 million on detection equipment that could not distinguish nuclear devices from more benign sources of radiation, such as ceramic tiles and cat litter.

more http://freeinternetpress.com/story.php?sid=12770

[photo not with above]

Online Archives of California: Search Images

>for example

St. George Views approaching town
Dorothea Lange @

DIY: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/search.image.html

Media History Project's Timelime

>an example from timeline's 1860 to 1869 entry:

1861: Heliostat message, using sun and a mirror, sent 90 miles at Lake Superior

The Timeline: http://mediahistory.umn.edu/timeline/

Film Literature Index

>from subject headings "Photographs in Films"

index http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/fli/browseIndex.jsp

~Bibliographic.

AllMovie

http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=30:

~Like IMDb but easier to search.

The Estate Project: For Artists With AIDS

>for example from the Visual AIDS Gallery 2007

The Three Muses #3," 1996
Rebecca Guberman
color print, 24" x 20"

The Virtual Collection is a database of high quality images representing the works of artists with HIV/AIDS. It uses advanced technology to bring together and make immediately accessible a large collection of art, which otherwise would require sifting through thousands of slides...

http://www.artistswithaids.org/collection/index.html

The Discovery of Global Warming

A hypertext history of how scientists came to (partly) understand what people are doing to cause climate change.

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html

Farber Gravestone Collection

The Farber Gravestone Collection is an unusual resource containing over 13,500 images documenting the sculpture on more than 9,000 gravestones, most of which were made prior to 1800, in the Northeastern part of the United States.

http://www.davidrumsey.com/farber/

World Wide Panorama

for example the thumbnail index for Borders http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/worldwidepanorama/wwp306/index_thumbnails/index.html

the World Wide Panorama Home:

http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/worldwidepanorama/wwp/index.html

~Excellent.

Celebrities Homes vs. Politicians Home

~Celebrities of a certain age are often more than happy to invite 'news' cameras into their homes. While tours of the mansions of dead and alive celebrities are a lucrative tourist attraction in and around Southern California (Hong Kong and Bollywood also?)
But politicians are not rushing to capitalize on this form of nobless oblige and their constituents exhibit no sense of an experience lost.
Certainly there are many homes of America's leaders that have been designated state or is it federal historic sites. But that's then, how do they live now?

I couldn't find one photo of President Bush's supposed residence on his Crawford, Texas ranch. For reasons that must go beyond security concerns-- photos of the former homes of politicians or of elected officials long dead are also not online--magazines and newspapers have no interest in showing America's citizens poliiticians' homes.

We might all agree that the wealth showcased by these their most expensive consumer choices can only further resentment among the masses--I mean how obvious--but that worldly insight doesn't really explain how so few images of their dwellings continue not to be digitally produced and published.

Maybe since 9/11 distribution of photos of the personal property of all local, state and federal employees, appointed or elected, is a crime punishable under certain provisions of the Patriot Act?
While for the years before 9/11 there was a 'gentlemen's agreement' by print then electronic media to ignore our leaders' material possessions, the gifts from grateful constituents and wooing lobbyists?

Perhaps the bomb-throwing anarchists of the late 19th century labor struggles are still remembered by the families that make-up America's '1000 points of light'?
Perhaps America's citizens are simply not interested in what their leaders' own?

Fun with Photoshop Filters

2X

artifaks 5

Life in the "Red Zone"

It was hard enough to organize my trip from France to Baghdad. But once there, it proved even tougher to get to get into the "green zone," the American military and diplomatic headquarters and construction site of a new American embassy that will be the largest in the world.

Between the first checkpoint and the parking lot of the U.S. Embassy, still based in Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace, a distance of about a mile, I was checked six times. I had come from the "red zone."
The "red zone": that is to say, all of Baghdad outside the fortified American enclave. The "no-go zone." The sprawling capital city that is home to more than 10 million people. That's where I lived for two weeks to get "the other side" of the story.

On the eastern bank of the Tigris River, where I stayed, the government could provide electricity only between 6 and 7 a.m. All the appliances would burst into action, waking up the household. For those who can afford it, a small generator fills in the gaps in power. But a generator consumes up to 20 gallons of gasoline a day, an enormous amount in a time of shortages.
Under Saddam Hussein, 40 gallons of gasoline cost half a dollar. Today, you'd have to pay $75 for the same quantity on the black market - or you could stand in line for four to five days at a gas station and pay about $35.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, a mobile phone has become the top status symbol in Iraq. However, since the intensification of sectarian violence, cell phones have also become the means most used to send threats (by text message) or to demand a ransom (by calling the family of the kidnapped hostage). People often change their numbers before they give up altogether and move to a safer district.

An exceptional curfew is declared for 3 p.m. on only two hours notice, causing general panic. Crying women descend on cars, begging for rides to get home in time. Drivers abandon their vehicles in the congestion to get wherever they were going more quickly on foot. The curfew lasted four days -

more http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?id=6713743 by Anne Nivat

thanks Conscientious

Corrupt Techniques in Evidence Presentations

The emphasis is on consuming presentations, on what alert members of an audience or readers of a report should look for in assessing the credibility of the presenter.

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001et&topic_id=1&topic=
| Ask ET

The Journal of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies (JHDHS)

>from "Cases of Dignity and Humiliation"

Henry Kissinger, on why he had supported the Iraq War
"Henry Kissinger, a confidant of the president, when asked by Bush's speechwriter why he had supported the Iraq war, responded: "Because Afghanistan was not enough." The radical Islamists, he said, want to humiliate us. "And we need to humiliate them." In other words, the presiding image of the "war on terror" - the burning towers collapsing on the television screen - had to be supplanted by another, the image of American tanks rumbling proudly through a vanquished Arab capital."

more cases http://www.humiliationstudies.org/publications/cases.php

http://www.humiliationstudies.org/publications/journal.php

Conference: Sexual histories: bodies and desires

Centre for Medical History University of Exeter

http://www.centres.ex.ac.uk/medhist/conferences/sexualhistories/programme.html

>for example

Juliane Strohschein, Humboldt University Berlin
The construction of race, gender and sexuality as representational practice: colonial photographic propaganda and present-day ad campaigns in dialogue
The history of European colonialism and the history of photography are tightly intertwined in the industrial and imperial expansion of Europe in the 19th century. Photography developed and spread on the tide of colonialism; the colonial movement used the new media to advertised it’s cause in popular as well as scientific fields. Racial stereotypes that circulated in context of the so called “European Discoveries” in the 16th century, during the enslavement of people of African decent and in the works of enlightenment theorist like Kant and Hegel were systematised in the construction and representation of visual difference in ethnography, anthropology and scientific racism in the period of high imperialism.
The ‘scientific’ interest and photography as ‘objective’ means to find truth functioned as alibi for white European (often sexist) voyeurism. Stuart Hall discusses Saartje Baartman – who was stereotyped as “Hottentot Venus” in 19th century Europe: “The Scientists can look at, examine and observe Saatje Baartman naked and in public, classify and dissect every detail of her anatomy, on the perfectly acceptable alibi that ‘it is all being done in the name of Science, of objective knowledge, ethnological evidence, in the pursuit of Truth’.” Here colonial, sexual and visual politics intertwine most intimately and the other, sexually obsessed and violent side of the Victorian (in Germany: Wilhelminian) subject shows, what the image of purity, piety and prudery denies.
Colonised places became "porno-tropics" of the European imagination: "a fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears. By the 19th century, popular lore had firmly established Africa as the quintessential zone of sexual aberration and anomaly". Porno-tropics served as the contrast to construction of white identity und sexuality as pure, civilised and superior. „[T]he Black body and Black sexuality came to represent the antithesis of white normativity and superiority”. ‘Modern’ European history built the foundation of racialised and sexualised believes that still structure the white imagination today.[1] These beliefs are not only part of a collective history but still function today, as the rather undisputed use of racism and sexism and popular media and advertisement exemplifies.
How do popular images today refer to colonial strategies of representation? How are the way of looking, the gaze, the positions assigned/proposed to the signified and the spectators charged with (disavowed) history? Which myths of race and sexuality are within the collective repertoire of visual memory? How are they powerful and how did they become powerful? In discussing pictures of different decades and centuries I want to engage in a dialog between them. By making the inherent construction of meaning and connotation accessible to critical understanding I hope to dismantle part of the impact of (photographic) pictures which is often beyond recognition, or, as Stuart Hall states: “the deeper meaning – lies in what is not being said, but is being fantasized, what is implied but cannot be shown.”

[1] Here I refer to white as a description of a socio-historic position rather than a biological category.

Cathryn Wilson, University of Essex
Before the paedophile: monsters and molesters, sexual assault followed by child murder, 1860-1900
The sexual abuse of children has become one of the most emotive issues to surface in the last thirty years. When this abuse also involves abduction and murder the public reaction is even more explosive. Unlike the current stereotype of the paedophile, whose methods are believed to be increasingly sophisticated and organised, men who raped and then murdered children during the nineteenth-century almost certainly worked alone. The question of how this type of violent death was defined by contemporaries is not one which has received much scholarly attention. Consequently, whist examining this type of child murder in detail, this paper will address several problems. How were instances of child murder that appeared to be connected with ‘outrage’ construed by contemporaries? Were cases of this kind understood as the extreme end of the wider problem of the sexual abuse of children, or were they interpreted as something separate, more sinister and far more dangerous? If, as I will contend, this crime was understood as the part of the problem of child sexual assault but also interpreted as something separate from it, how were the perpetrators defined? What made these men different to other men and what, according to contemporaries, drove them to kill?
Child molestation followed by murder was a rare event. Nevertheless, “what is socially peripheral is frequently symbolically central” and cases of this type provided society with an ultimate ‘Other’; a predator and monster who was the worst sort of sexual offender and one who fed easily into the gothic imagination

Diederik Janssen, Independent Researcher, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Looking Back on Sex: Continuities, Presentisms and Horaiocentrisms
In this paper I discuss the historical interplay between narratives of sexual ontogeny and narratives of political change. Throughout history but aggressively so in the 19th and 20th century West, ontogeny is found to be discursively pivotal in both nosological and intellectual-activist ramifications of ‘the sexual.’ This can be analyzed from a number of angles. First, the emergent pedagogical paradigm of ‘the sexual’ was grounded in an authoritative structure in which possible ‘beginnings’ and ‘origins’ were to be theorized, monitored and extrapolated. This for instance promoted both propaedeutic, and (paradoxically presentist) psychohistorical models of sex. Interestingly, with the growing acceptance of specific developmental theories of sex, their commonsensicality invited a harsh reappraisal of its theoretical progenitors. For instance, Sigmund Freud’s ambivalence about the role of ‘seduction’ in hysteria was rated as both ‘an assault on truth’ and as a ‘personal failure of courage’ in the mid-1980s. We see here the routinization of a sophisticated sexual politics superimposed on an progressively assumed dialectic of the passions, a politics that came to rely on the new centrist projection of mature (‘adult’) sexuality, and on specific paradigms of disqualification and extrapolation of what was to be recognized as its antecedents and precedents (paradoxia sexualis, ‘childhood sex play,’ ‘adolescent experimentation,’ ‘homosexual phase,’ ‘fixation/regression’).
Rarely problematized effectively in queer ontologies, this introduced the anthropological problem of ‘the adult’ (horaios, Gr., the seasoned, ripe, mature) as well as its necessitated centrality. The concept and operationalization of normal sexuality, for instance in Havelock Ellis, was in fact necessitated by the heavy reliance of early Sexualpathologie on abnormal sex histories. Secondly, as ‘sexuality’ came to be conceptualized in terms of both entitled and pathetic identitarianism, ‘inspired mentorship’ (the agenda of a persona that is historical and committed to its ‘decursus’) as well as countercultural pedagogies came to be informed by an essentializing ‘armchair anthropology’ in which lessons —personal and social— were to be distilled from past and ethnic instances of sexual ‘development’ and struggle imagined as ontologically continuous, ethically commensurable and hence, as reclaimable, in any case salient, plots. Interestingly, in post-Stonewall history of homosexuality, metaphorical congruence was being observed in the political imagination of heroic historical struggle on the one hand, and heroic ‘gay adolescence’ on the other. This neo-recapitulationist register is briefly examined, together with selected other observations.

more abstracts

Programme (Word doc)

by way of http://www.growingupsexually.tk/

Homeland Security Humor

http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/homelandsecurity/Homeland_Security.htm

for example

Get Your War On (66)

@

ESA Satellite Images

http://earth.esa.int/earthimages/

North America: http://earth.esa.int/satelliteimages/n-america001.html

ESA space sensor boosts extreme weather forecasting

'Predicting when and where floods are likely to happen is becoming more and more important,' says researcher Geoff Pegram from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.
'Although we cannot prevent floods, we can anticipate them and hopefully get people out of the way...

The ESA-backed project, SHARE (Soil Moisture for Hydrometeorological Applications in the Southern African Development Community Region), is the first to demonstrate that space sensor instruments can deliver soil moisture data, which are accurate to one kilometre and less than a week old.

press release

>link to image showing the monthly average soil moisture percentage values, based on data from Envisat's ASAR instrument: http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM73DHYX3F_index_1.html

from ESA http://www.esa.int/esaCP/index.html

World’s First Atomic Bomb Test Exposed New Mexico Residents to Radiation

On the eve of the 62nd anniversary of the world's first atomic explosion, the Trinity atomic bomb test, a CDC-led study team has reported new insights on the radiation released at the time of the test. ...the CDC team has made preliminary estimates of additional doses that the residents could have ingested in their bodies.

As part of the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment project being led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)...

The highest radiation levels from the Trinity Test were measured in a swath 12 miles long and one mile wide...about 16 miles northeast of “ground zero,”...exposure rates around 15 Roentgen per hour were measured just over three hours after detonation. Fallout was measured as far away as Indiana. As a point of reference, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission currently states that members of the public should receive less than 2 millirem (approximately 0.002 Roentgen) in any one hour from external radiation sources in any public area. Exposure rates measured after the Trinity test exceeded this level by more than a factor of 10,000.

During their presentation at the Health Physics Society meeting on Wednesday morning, July 11, the CDC team reported that ingestion of radioactive materials, primarily from rain water collected in cisterns and that found in goat’s milk, may have been a noteworthy contributor to public radiation dose and largely was not accounted for.

press release | Newswise

~From the files of America's "greatest generation".

Should one ask when did Pentagon officials make the connection between the health risks posed by the ingestion of radioactive poisons from their weapon's tests and rainwater, goat's milk, children's playgrounds, vegetable gardens, etc.?

When did government officials begin warning residents of the dangers? What sort of public health monitoring and treatment programs were introduced?
When did they know, when did they do something about it?

UK Home Office plans national police UAV fleet

Home Office aviation adviser Capt Ollie Dismore, Royal Navy:..said that UAVs are seen as a core element of future police air operations in the UK.

Development of the national capability would be driven centrally by the Home Office, including making available partial funding, to ensure fielding by all 43 police forces in the UK.

Current trials by the Merseyside police and West Midlands emergency services of the Microdrone GmbH MD4-200 quadrotor are providing important guidance to that effort.

press release | FlightGlobal

Art: Willi Kissmer

White Packaging

Original etching. Signed and numbered edition of 250. 23 1/4 x 13 ½ inches

more http://www.avalongallery.com/kissmer/kissmer_new_1.html

~I wish I had the money to own objects like the above and the space in which they might be properly displayed. Along with friends and relatives who would give them (and my interest) the attention and consideration they might deserve.

Dissertation: Sissy warriors:

Perversity, performance, and the unruly child

by Davis, Reid Adam, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2006, 278 pages

(get your fulltext from Proquest)

My dissertation, entitled "Sissy Warriors: Perversity, Performance and the Unruly Child" focuses on a familiar stereotype from 20th century American cinema and theater: the sissy.

This project studies the sissy performing as aberrant child in its relations to maturity and the essentialized subject, rather than as merely a signifier for gender trouble, homophobia, corrupt values, or proto-sexual identity. I argue that a persistent strain of 20th century performance sees the aberrant child as a cultural outlaw, what I call the "Sissy Warrior," whose systematic reincorporation into or excision from social structures reveals a great deal about "American" values and hierarchies of masculinity, family, race, community, individual agency, and class.

more from Boyhood Studies forum: http://www.boyhoodstudies.com/board/viewtopic.php?p=278

[photo defenselink\ not with above]

German Minister in Crises Over "Targeted Killings" Remark

(German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble... in charge of public security) ... said last week in an interview with DER SPIEGEL that Berlin would have to "clarify whether our constitutional state is sufficient for confronting new threats," and mentioned a ban on Internet or mobile phone use for terrorist suspects or even "so-called targeted killings" as potential but legally uncertain measures against a growing threat of terrorism in Germany.

Schäuble sits in a wheelchair because of an attempt on his life in 1990, during his first term in office as Interior Minister. He told the Sonntag Aktuell newspaper over the weekend that a frank and open discussion of security matters was important and said it was "a defamatory insult" for some critics to suggest that his views were extreme and should be discounted just because "I myself have been a victim of an assassination attempt."*

story

thanks Conscientious

~America's media would never blind-side a high-ranking official like this. Also our belt-way insiders with their pr consultants, on-staff writers and lawyers have final approval over everything they say that might get into print or on the tube. Along with the magical ability to limit the coverage of any unforseen unfavorable follow-ups.

More to the point these issues are boring, too rule of law (sic), too wimpy or quaint for America's unique brand of freedom loving, entrepreneurial war-machine spirit.

(*The Edward Teller Syndrome?)

> from H.H. of Unknown News: "Sounds like murder to me. Looks like the terrorists have won, by a wide margin. Civilized nations are in a rush to jettison their Constitutions and allow their governments to kill people in secrecy and without oversight."

Book: Remarkable Luminous Phenomena in Nature:

A Catalog of Geophysical Anomalies

Topics covered include:

Aurora-like phenomena
Ball Lightning
Diffuse Electrical Discharge Phenomena
Lightning Anomalies
Low-Level Meteor-Like Luminous Phenomena
Nocturnal Lights
Marine Phosphorescent Displays

425 pages, hardcover, $24.95, 128 illustrations, Time-of-event index, Source index, First-author index, Subject index, 1660 references. 2001.

scroll down to Geophysics Catalogs for more book blurb info

>see also 92 Science Frontiers search result items for "luminous"

>also from Science Frontiers' "Catalog of Anomalies" its Geophysics Subjects

International Journal of Motorcycle Studies

http://ijms.nova.edu/index.html

thanks Diederik

Photo Caption Non Sequitur

~I'll never understand why women love men. (It's more then enough trying to convince them to?)

[Please don't remind me the woman in this photo's an actress performing in a major film production. Don't be cruel.]

[screen capture from "Battle in Heaven" by way of Obsidian Bear/ check out his comment for a somewhat different take]

DNA Paternity Test Reveals Twins With Different Fathers

>from 12/05

DNA Diagnostics Center (DDC), a leading DNA testing company, reports several cases of twins that DNA paternity testing proved to have different fathers. Such occurrences, although rare, are being more frequently revealed via DNA testing.

press release

~No I don't know who might find this information useful. Maybe I'm trying to satisfy a craving for useless information. I may be bingeing or perhaps percolating.

zNose® selected by USDA for evaluation for use to detect contraband meat products and vegetation

Presently, the USDA randomly inspects incoming packages and mail at ports of entry for contraband food products. The zNose will enable the USDA to be more comprehensive in its inspection as well as improving the efficiency of the process.

press release

~This item doesn't suggest it but ZNose can also be used to chemically identify drug contraband as well as certain explosives. However the United States Department of Agriculture would have no use for those ZNose patented applications? (I don't know.)

There was a rock band named "Bad Meat"? But not "Rotten Vegetables".

>Spitting Image search results for Znose

Every federal bureacracy worthy of its funding must have (its own?) armed security and anti-terrorism response teams at the ready?
Every federal bureaucracy is on the front lines in our President's Wars on Terror, Drugs, Illegal Immigration, etc?
(I missed the memo.)

>maybe related: (Norway) Meat smuggling breaks record

Customs authorities have seized 34 tons of meat smuggled into Norway so far this year. That's three times the amount seized in the same period last year

A study released Tuesday confirmed that meat prices in Norway are high, 82 percent above the European average.

story

~I got some meat here I'ld like to smuggle across your border.

Iraq War Movie Theater Metaphor

Ryan C. Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, pleaded against withdrawal. (i..e. from Iraq) “In the States,” said Crocker, “it's like we're in the last half of the third reel of a three-reel movie, and all we have to do is decide we’re done here, and the credits come up, and the lights come on, and we leave the theater and go on to something else. Whereas out here, you’re just getting into the first reel of five reels, and as ugly as the first reel has been, the other four and a half are going to be way, way worse.” Unpersuaded, the House voted to begin withdrawing from Iraq in four months.

Harpers Weekly 7/17/07

Fun With...Filters

2X

I see what might be a crome tongue in a cavern-like space perhaps reaching for little crome globules as they avoid being tasted.

Bowel-ed over by my search for a partner

Craig Jex, 24, hopes his website - Irritated Being Single - will help people like him find love. The website was set up especially for people with IBS, Crohn's Disease or any other bowel disorders who find it difficult to meet a potential partner because of their condition.

Channel 4 is due to screen a documentary about Craig and the website at the end of August.
He said: "They sent me on a date with a girl from Southampton. It was nice but she lives too far away so I doubt it will progress.

story | This Is Hertfordshire

~Major media discovers the IBS demographic. You know what this means? All sorts of accidental, reluctant 'fetishists' ('sufferers' according to Mr. Jex's website) will be clamoring along with the Kraft-Ebing crowd for public recognition of their particular relational needs to be inevitably followed by legal accomodations for their various inflicted identities.
I might be wrong but I think there are many more people whose physical conditions, ailments, injuries, allergies. etc. prevent them from finding suitable partners then all the people who could be 'diagnosed' as sexual fetishists.

Mr. Jex, the dating site's webmaster, needed Channel 4's producers to find him a date? Maybe Channel 4 should set up a dating website. The promise of a network camera crew following you and your date around and the opportunity to be in a tv documentary is enough to get anyone that first date.

IRS Sued Over Sex-Change Deduction

...a 57-year-old suburban Boston man underwent a sex-change operation. Then she wrote off the $25,000 in medical expenses on her taxes.
But the IRS disallowed the deduction - ruling the procedure was cosmetic, not a medical necessity - in a potentially precedent-setting dispute now before the U.S. Tax Court.

An estimated 1,600 to 2,000 people a year undergo sex-change surgery in the United States, according to the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association.

story | My Way

Robot Air Attack Squadron Bound for Iraq

The airplane is the size of a jet fighter, powered by a turboprop engine, able to fly at 300 mph and reach 50,000 feet. It's outfitted with infrared, laser and radar targeting, and with a ton and a half of guided bombs and missiles.
The Reaper is loaded, but there's no one on board. Its pilot, as it bombs targets in Iraq, will sit at a video console 7,000 miles away in Nevada.

The estimated two dozen or more unmanned MQ-1 Predators now doing surveillance over Iraq, as the 46th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron, have become mainstays of the U.S. war effort, offering round-the-clock airborne "eyes" watching over road convoys, tracking nighttime insurgent movements via infrared sensors, and occasionally unleashing one of their two Hellfire missiles on a target.
From about 36,000 flying hours in 2005, the Predators are expected to log 66,000 hours this year over Iraq and Afghanistan.
The MQ-9 Reaper, when compared with the 1995-vintage Predator, represents a major evolution of the unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV.
At five tons gross weight, the Reaper is four times heavier than the Predator. Its size - 36 feet long, with a 66-foot wingspan - is comparable to the profile of the Air Force's workhorse A-10 attack plane. It can fly twice as fast (~as the) [the 140-mph Predator] and twice as high...
Most significantly, it carries many more weapons.
While the Predator is armed with two Hellfire missiles, the Reaper can carry 14 of the air-to-ground weapons - or four Hellfires and two 500-pound bombs.
"
It's an attack squadron, with a lot more kinetic ability."

The Reaper is expected to be flown as the Predator is - by a two-member team of pilot and sensor operator who work at computer control stations and video screens that display what the UAV "sees." Teams at Balad, housed in a hangar beside the runways, perform the takeoffs and landings, and similar teams at Nevada's Creech Air Force Base, linked to the aircraft via satellite, take over for the long hours of overflying the Iraqi landscape.
American ground troops, equipped with laptops.. can download real-time video from UAVs overhead...

The new robot plane is expected to be able to stay aloft for 14 hours fully armed, watching an area and waiting for targets to emerge.

pres release | My Way

~No mention is made of what or who might constitute the emerging targets the Reapers will be waiting for fully-armed during their 14 hours aloft. Any 46th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron information about targets must be classified or not newsworthy.

8-Year-Old Boy Held From Plane for Appearing on No-Fly List

The soon-to-be third grader was red flagged as a threat to national security because his name popped up on the national watch list.
According to the Transportation Security Administration, no children are on the terrorist watch list. The TSA said if a child's name matches up, it's up the airline to make the necessary changes and let them board the plane.

Great Lake Airlines eventually cleared up the situation, but the plane had already left, making him wait another day to come home.

story | Fox News

~This would make a amusing anecdote for Reader's Digest's "Humor in Homeland Security" feature.

Human Ashes Cause Airport Bomb Scare

MIAMI (AP) - A Miami International Airport terminal was briefly evacuated early Monday after authorities found what appeared to be an explosive device but turned out to be a box containing cremated human remains.
A watch, the ashes and other items were spotted in the box... Transportation Security Administration spokesman Christopher White. The box was in an X-ray machine scanning checked luggage near a United Airlines ticket counter, he said.

Hundreds of passengers milled around on the median outside Terminal F with their luggage from about 5:45 a.m. until police gave the all- clear around 7:30 a.m.

The evacuation delayed six flights, affecting about 2,000 passengers, airport spokesman... said.

story

~No mention is made if the passenger or passengers who attempted to board the airplane with these materials in their luggage also milled about or how long he or they may have been delayed.

"Al Qaeda': They Get Around

They're like Shaolin shadow-boxers, ninjas, the Wu-Tang Clan, and they aint' nuttin ta fuck wit. They can slip into any situation unnoticed and fuck you up, Jack. There's 'Al Qaeda' in Iraq, there's 'Al Qaeda' in Somalia, there's 'Al Qaeda' in Afghanistan, there's 'Al Qaeda' in Europe, there's 'Al Qaeda' in London, there's 'Al Qaeda' in Indonesia, there's 'Al Qaeda' in China, there's 'Al Qaeda' in Palestine..

blog entry

Ancient Greek Curse Tablets

Most of these curses, inscribed on small sheets of lead that range in size between a business card and a playing card, had been edited in the early twentieth century, but their value for social history, gender history, and the history of sexuality had been pretty much ignored.

interview http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/1/777777122300/ by Christopher A. Faraone

from UofCs Fathom Archive

[illus google: "greek curse tablets"]

~While searching for photos of "greek curse tablets" to illustrate this post and living in a large city where gentrification is still big business. I see that little pieces of urban detritus can look like bits of ancient artifacts thousands of years old. Although smellier.
From 50 to 5,000 years old, broken weathered things all look pretty much the same. There're new things and used things and everything else is archaeology.

Mentioned on TV: "War on Wealth"

~I like the phrase "war on wealth". It's threatening while simultaneously inspiring vigilance.
Because when billionaires talk I listen.

Virtual marketers have second thoughts about Second Life

For some advertisers, the problem is that Second Life is a fantasyland, and the representations of the people who play in it don't have human needs. Food and drink aren't necessary, teleporting is the easiest way to get around and clothing is optional. In fact, the human form itself is optional.
Avatars can play games, build beach huts, dress up like furry animals, flirt with strangers — sometimes all at once.
Their interests seem to tend toward the risque. Ian Schafer, chief executive of online marketing firm Deep Focus, which advises clients about entering virtual worlds, said he recently toured Second Life. He started at the Aloft hotel and found it empty. He moved on to casinos, brothels and strip clubs, and they were packed. Schafer said he found in his research that "one of the most frequently purchased items in Second Life is genitalia."

Another problem...is that Second Life doesn't have enough active residents.

story | LATimes

Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb

[excerpt)

Following Bishopsgate...(April 1993), [and (t)he huge payouts by insurance companies...including the near-collapse of the world's leading [re]insurance market]...the financial press clamored for.. protection: "The City should be turned into a medieval-style walled enclave to prevent terrorist attacks."
What was actually implemented in the City and later in the Docklands was a technologically more advanced network of traffic restrictions and cordons, CCTV cameras, including "24-hour Automated Number Plate Recording (ANPR) cameras, linked to police databases," and intensified public and private policing. "In the space of a decade," writes (Jon) Coaffee (in her book), "the City of London was transformed into the most surveilled space in the UK and perhaps the world with over 1500 surveillance cameras operating, many of which are linked to the ANPR system."
Since September 11, 2001, this anti-terrorist surveillance system has been extended throughout London's core in the benign guise of Mayor Ken Livingstone's celebrated "congestion pricing" scheme to liberate the city from gridlock. According to one of Britain's major Sunday papers:
"The Observer has discovered that MI5, Special Branch and the Metropolitan Police began secretly developing the system in the wake of the 11 September attacks. In effect, the controversial charging scheme will create one of the most daunting defence systems protecting a major world city when it goes live a week tomorrow. It is understood that the system also utilizes facial recognition software which automatically identifies suspects or known criminals who enter the eight-square-mile zone. Their precise movements will be tracked by camera from the point of entry… However, civil liberty campaigners yesterday claimed that millions had been misled over the dual function of the scheme, promoted primarily as a means of reducing congestion in central London."
The addition in 2003 of this new panopticon traffic scan to London's already extensive system of video surveillance ensures that the average citizen is "caught on CCTV cameras 300 times a day." It may make it easier for the police to apprehend non-suicidal terrorists, but it does little to protect the city from well-planned and competently disguised vehicle bomb attacks. Blair's "Third Way" has been a fast lane for the adoption of Orwellian surveillance and the usurpation of civil liberties, but until some miracle technology emerges (and none is in sight) that allows authorities from a distance to "sniff" a molecule or two of explosive in a stream of rush-hour traffic, the car bombers will continue to commute to work.

This article -- a preliminary sketch for a book-length study by Mike Davis-- will appear in Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State (Routledge 2007), edited by Michael Sorkin.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/p/davis

also here: http://uruknet.info/?p=m34337&s1=h1

~Excellent.

[photo not with above]

State orders flak jackets in Baghdad's Green Zone

...a State Department official, after initially denying that State had ordered its 1,000 Baghdad personnel to wear protective gear, said that a copy of the order obtained by McClatchy Newspapers was an undiscussable security.

Five contract workers from the Research Triangle Institute (at the) Blue Star Restaurant (inside the Green Zone)

While some 100 British embassy workers and about 55 United Nations personnel living in the Green Zone sleep in hardened housing, State Department personnel sleep unprotected.
Asked how State could require workers to walk around outdoors in body armor while making them sleep in unprotected quarters, the embassy official said: "I wouldn't characterize it as being a mixed message."

story

Second Life Screenshots

>via google

http://secondlife.com/showcase/screenshots.php

http://www.informationweek.com/galleries/showGallery.jhtml?galleryID=1

http://www.2ndlook.org/

~Maybe they look better in context, if one has some use for them?

New breath test detects lung cancer

...with moderate accuracy...

The testing device, which contains 36 spots impregnated with chemically sensitive compounds, works by detecting patterns of volatile organic compounds in exhaled breath. These spots change colors when exposed to particular chemicals.

"Further work may...guide refinement of the sensor array and breath collection system to maximize the diagnostic accuracy of the test."

press release | Reuters

Bibliography: Geek Culture

http://reconstruction.eserver.org/011/GeekCulture.htm

thanks Diederik

[photo not with above]

Book Review: The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900

How uses, not innovations, drive human technology

One historian wrote that “more people died producing it (the Germans V-2 rocket) than died from being hit by it.” (David) Edgerton (~the book's author) estimates that although the Germans spent five hundred million dollars on the project, “the destructive power of all the V-2s produced amounted to less than could be achieved by a single raid on a city by the RAF.” Similarly, considering the cost of the atomic bomb against the conventional weaponry that could have been bought for the same money...

review "What Else Is New?" by Steven Shapin | New Yorker

Virtual reality and participatory exploration

>NASA and Second Life

"The new technology of virtual life and cyberspace means that we can all participate in the Vision for Space Exploration...

... real data from real missions such as the International Space Station can be ported into virtual environments and allow all to accompany these space missions.”

[CoLab and Second Life] ...has...the support of... NASA Headquarters, who...see this as an opportunity to build support for NASA’s overall exploration efforts. “One of our big challenges here is to figure out how to excite the next generation of Americans and people throughout the world'...

...CoLab is proposing to develop a complete model of the International Space Station in Second Life. “This would involve designing all the components of the ISS in a way that could be rendered in Second Life,”

"It won’t be long before the fanciful holodecks of Star Trek will become a real tool for all of us to share in, participate, and contribute to the Vision for Space Exploration,” ...“When the next people step on the surface of the Moon in a little over a decade, your avatar could be with them.”

The use of avatars... can be somewhat liberating. “All the baggage that you bring in terms of rank and hierarchy and who you’re from and who you represent really melts away,”... While that’s a benefit to communication and collaboration, it can pose a problem when the virtual environment is used to collaborate on technical projects that can involve sensitive and regulated technologies, as many space projects do. Just who is the person behind that colorful avatar?

press release | The Space Review

Mentioned on TV: "Antiglobal Warming People'

~Today I heard an 'in-depth news analyst' with a daily show on cable tv use the phrase "antiglobal warming people".
The event has been framed. To help us understand lines are drawn and all information about this complex, evolving, unprecidented world-changing and/or catastrophic event must first be placed on one side or the other.
There're either antiglobal warming facts, figures, theories and ideas or proglobal warming facts, figures, etc.
According to Fox or CNN our choices as saavy media consumers are clear: we're either "antiglobal warming people" or "proglobal warming people".

The person using the phrase I believe was in the proglobal warming camp.

Unlike President Bush's war in Iraq, everybody knows what side the winners are on with this issue. Before the century's over the American taxpayer will be paying for work's projects (e.g. dikes and canals) and population removal that will dwarf anything FDR and Stalin could've ever imagined in their wildest dreams.

[photo google: dried mud]

Nat. Library of Australia Catalogue: Search Pictures

>for example from 1227 results for "entertainers"

Carter, Jeff, 1928- Whip-strip, Sorlie's Travelling Vaudeville Show [picture] 1957-1962. 1 photograph : gelatin silver ; image 25.0 x 26.1 cm., sheet 30.5 x 33.6 cm. Part of Sorlie's Travelling Vaudeville Show, Broken Hill, 1957-1962 @

DIY: http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?PAGE=sbSearch&SEQ=20070711061134&PID=16450

Chinese Movie Database

http://www.dianying.com/en/

Blog: BetaCorpo

http://www.betacorpo.net/

~Of all the South American countries I always thought Chile was where I could most easily live. I could be comfortable there: tucking or not tucking my shirt in my jeans; not needing to wear a hat with a sweaty hat-band; dry socks and not ever feeling compelled to drink anything stronger or more exotic than the local wines. I could quickly find a wife in Chile. My lack of a second language would not be a barrier to love and work like it would in Ecuador or Brazil.

President Bush's Legacy

[illus. google]

The Food Timeline

http://www.foodtimeline.org/index.html

What makes a good author blog?

entry | The Penguin Blog

Roundup: Audio/Video History

This page lists Internet media clips that cover breaking news and feature stories, reviews and interviews about historians and historical topics, and current events in need of an historical perspective -- especially those not found in the mainstream media...

http://hnn.us/roundup/42.html | History News Network

Foot patrols aim to sidestep Iraq mines

The weight of a single soldier is insufficient to trigger such bombs, which may be planted 10 feet underground and packed in makeshift casings such as refrigerators.
Insurgents are hesitant to "waste" a large bomb by triggering it with remote control to kill a single soldier, said U.S. officers involved in an offensive in the capital of Diyala province northeast of Baghdad.
The foot patrols have been credited with preventing heavy U.S. casualties in the battle for Baqouba. U.S. deaths from the bombs — which the military calls improvised explosive devices, or IEDs — dropped in Diyala from at least 16 in May before the 10,000-troop offensive to just two so far this month...

One of Baqouba's main thoroughfares is so packed with IEDs that the U.S. military is considering declaring it "irrevocably mined," said Col. Steve Townsend, commander of the Army's 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division.
U.S. forces would then build their own road — right alongside the mined one — and guard it 24 hours a day, said Townsend, 47, from Griffin, Ga.
"We have yet to clear the roads well enough to penetrate with our vehicles," he said. "We're infantry, and we're comfortable on foot anyway."

Some IEDS were discovered by unmanned drones equipped with temperature sensors that can scan for cold spots under hot asphalt in summer, another U.S. officer said.

story | Houston Chronicle

Gadgets may help merge virtual reality with real life

Researchers at a recent virtual worlds conference at MIT said that special eyewear, display "badges," and speakers worn about the neck will allow us to live more fully through our avatars -- those idealized versions of ourselves that typically boast better proportions than the saggy originals.
Second Lifers wearing the gadgets will be able to attend "in-world" parties and gallery openings... Motion detectors and other sensors in the devices will also show your virtual mates what you are up to in the real world.

Linden Lab vice president Joe Miller described one of the early products that will bridge the two worlds as a wearable box that creates a "3D sound field" that allows the wearer to hear voices from his virtual world without completely shutting out the real people around him.

Blizzard Entertainment, creator of the online multiplayer game World of Warcraft, is hiring developers with experience in Symbian and Adobe Flash Lite for its mobile interface initiative.

press release | Boston Globe

>see also Wiki's Second Life article

>maybe related: Why Second Life Will Never Go Mainstream

Second Life Too Hard for Mainstream

The Rise of Intelligence Fusion Centers

These are state and local offices across the country that are supposed to integrate (or "fuse") multiple information streams from national intelligence sources together with local law enforcement and other data in order to enhance homeland security and increase preparedness against terrorism or natural disasters.

In principle, fusion centers represent a conduit "through which federal intelligence can flow across the country."
But "numerous fusion center officials claim that although their center receives a substantial amount of information from federal agencies, they never seem to get the 'right information' or receive it in an efficient manner," the CRS report stated

http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2007/07/the_rise_of_intelligence_fusio.html

Catastrophic head injury three times greater in high school vs. collegiate football players

"The incidence of injury is higher at the high school level compared to the college level, which may indicate that the younger brain is more susceptible to a brain injury,” explains Dr. Boden. “Many of the players who had a severe head injury were playing with minor neurological symptoms from a previous head injury such as a concussion.”
From the 94 cases studied, 59 contacts and/or medical records revealed information on prior head injuries...

press release | The American Journal of Sports Medicine

~"Walk it off, walk it off."

Private Contractors Outnumber US Troops in Iraq

More than 180,000 civilians - including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis - are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts, according to State and Defense department figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Including the recent troop buildup, 160,000 soldiers and a few thousand civilian government employees are stationed in Iraq.

story | LA Times via TruthOut

~An example of free-market principles at work: showing how private industries can do any job cheaper and more effciently than the goverment, (here the the US Military) and make a profit doing it!?

Isn't having so many private contractors in Iraq the surest sign that Bush's plans for a new Iraq are succeeding?
That one morning in the near future we'll wake up and Iraq will be all fixed-up--with water and electricity to the people and oil to America flowing--better than it was during Saddam's regime?

Perhaps I'm mistaken about the jobs contractors do. If the US Military wasn't in Iraq there would be no private contractors?

>see also CorpWatch's News Articles for War & Disaster Profiteering

[illus. from @\ not above link]

Fun with Photoshop Filters

2X

sloppy mandala

Mourning Jewelry Museum

>for example

Item: Hair work cross
Status: sold
Dimensions: 2 and 1/4 by 2 and 3/4 inches
Condition: near mint/mint
Year: dated in center 1837
Description: Beautiful gold work center on this two color, hair work cross. One side of the center is dated April 12, 1837 and the other side has an inscription which I cannot read. Nice hallmarks on the pendant loop. 18kt. gold @

more jewelry: http://www.thingsgoneby.com/museum/mourningmuseum.html

Cyberbullying & Online Teens

item w/link to pdf report:
http://www.docuticker.com/?p=14520
Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project

Blogs from the U.S. Government

http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/News/blog.shtml

MOMA's Online Photography

>for example

Underwood and Underwood. (American). Above Fifth Avenue, Looking North. 1905. Gelatin silver print, 9 1/2 x 7 5/16" (24.2 x 18.6 cm). The New York Times Collection @

begin: Page 1 of 53

The Ideology of Development

The ideology of Development is not only about having experts design your free market for you; it is about having the experts design a comprehensive, technical plan to solve all the problems of the poor. These experts see poverty as a purely technological problem, to be solved by engineering and the natural sciences, ignoring messy social sciences such as economics, politics, and sociology.

article by William Easterly

A Handwritten Daily Paper in India Faces the Digital Future

...the paper is widely read and appreciated by Muslims in Tripplicane and Chennai where the paper has a circulation of 20,000.

...a team of six puts out this hand-penned paper. Four of them are katibs -- writers dedicated to the ancient art of Urdu calligraphy. It takes three hours using a pen, ink and ruler to transform a sheet of paper into news and art.

For centuries...(c)alligraphers mastered the swooping Urdu script in ivory-tower institutions and penned copies of the Koran for wealthy patrons. The pinnacle of a katib's achievement meant a seat at court and a chance to earn the sultan's ear.

story | Wired

~My interest in hand-made things is similar to my affection for wild animals. It's a sense of wonder unknown to craft-people and animals.

Computer games World Cup kicks off in Paris

...700 players from 51 countries...

The players, selected from 500,000 candidates, will compete for a pool of 180,000 dollars (132,000 euros) in prize money at the Electronic Sports World Cup grand final, put on by the Games-Services company. It was taking place at a convention hall on the southwestern edge of Paris

press release

Dutch customs deploys special bird flu dogs

...at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport to check flights from high-risk countries for poultry.

According to the customs service this year they have already confiscated 1,626 kilos of prepared poultry meat, 203 kilos of raw poultry meat and 245 eggs.

press release

~The press release doesn't say how much of that confiscated poultry was infected with bird flu.
So there's no way to guage how much safer the Dutch are or how great of a threat bird flu might be?

Super Zoom Cameras Monitor Orlando's July 4 Celebrations

Police used powerful long-range zoom cameras to keep tabs on Fourth of July celebrations in Orlando on Wednesday.. The Orlando cops set up seven cameras around Lake Eola, a popular downtown park and monitored "every angle" of the goings-on.

Even from across the lake, the cameras...were able to zoom in tight on suspicious faces, a local news channel reported.

["People are nervous, but that is why we have so many officers out here," Orlando police Capt. Larry Zweig

Orlando police said they recorded every image captured by the cameras. They said the footage will be held for a week in case they must investigate crimes that have not been reported yet.]*

Lake Eola is... less than a 1/2 mile at its widest.

blog entry | 27Stroke6

>also: