Green Building at MIT illuminated, appropriately.
I guess this would also be an appropriate use.
Femen against the isms
Have you heard of Femen? It’s an international women’s movement, working mostly in France and the Ukraine but many other places as well, and their tactics are serious and shirtless. The courage it takes to confront the establishment(s) in this way, especially in the Arab world, is empowering just to consider. The images are supposedly NSFW but this says more about our workplaces than it does about their movement.
It was the movement’s fifth birthday earlier this week, on April 10. Happy, happy.
Image: Reuters photo of Femen leader Inna Shevchenko, Paris, 2012
Star of a new advertising campaign
So… innocently checking the NYT media decoder blog and the top two three of the top four stories are about the advertaiment process unfolding before our eyes. They’re not about this per se, because that would maybe be like a story on the circumscribed movements of the second hand, but
Such sponsorship agreements — known as branded entertainment, content marketing and native advertising — are becoming common on Bravo, part of the NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment division of NBCUniversal. And as the channel plans its programming lineup for 2013-14 during what is called the upfront season, more sponsorships that integrate advertising into shows are planned.
“I am not against ads in general,” said Till Faida, a managing director of the project, “but I am just annoyed by the current state of ads. I have worked in online marketing — I just thought ads could be so much better.”
While still receiving donations from users, the project now also negotiates deals with large Web sites that run unobtrusive ads to be “white-listed” and thus not automatically blocked by the program. (A recent deal, whose financial terms were not disclosed, granted such status to the social news site Reddit.)
add to that the recent stories about buzzfeed and heed: much like people making money simply off of money, the mining of what ‘content providers’ think you want to read or will click on and the re-packaging of that as ‘news’ or ‘headlines’ or ‘things you should know’ or whatever is vastly afoot. Think of this as a PSA and not at all news, but this phenomenon has a slow creep, just like the touting of innovation and such in high production-value TV advertising that we get accustomed to over time but is increasing really about nothing at all.
Just remember, people write books. Be firm about what enters your noggin.
Update: Lou-weeze. Parody, we hardly knew ye.
Today, then
Can’t let the anniversary pass. We live our history, or try to live it down. A country that allowed itself to have such a man as an elder statesman would have indeed been a great country.
Hoaxes and Jokeses
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University informs us on such burning issues (though not burning itself) as:
The case for across-the-board spending cuts
The employments costs of regulation, and relatedly
The failure of risk-based capital regulation, and
The U.S. drops in global competitiveness
… The Mercatus Center at George Mason University: the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas—bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.
And how.
The Bees (on their) Knees
Pesticides killing the one link in the chain that connects the truck to the boat to the dock to the lake to the wind to the water to the sun to the good times, such as they are and while they last. Man, are we stupid.
The problems we face if we don’t have healthy populations of pollinators, particularly honeybees, extend beyond almonds. Three fourths of the top crops grown in the world require animals – mostly insects – for pollination. Odds are that most of your favorite fruits, nuts and melons are pollinated by honeybees.
Across the pond, the European Union has made major strides in shedding light on the role of certain pesticides in honeybee deaths. In fact, the European Commission has proposed a two-year ban on these pesticides. Meanwhile, at home, beekeepers remain frustrated that the U.S. government is not as forward-thinking. And, for another year, the saga of bee deaths continues.
The pesticides in question are called neonicotinoids. It’s a mouthful, but the root word is “nicotine,” because they are chemically similar to the addicting tobacco compound. The most common of these is a pesticide called imidacloprid. Two others are clothianidin and thiamethoxam.
New York beekeeper Jim Doan ended last year with about 700 hives. He began the year with 900. But those numbers hide larger losses. A beekeeper can increase his or her number of hives by splitting them. Doan did so, building up to 2,300 hives by mid-June.
For a beekeeper, splitting your hives means a certain amount of sacrifice, because two smaller hives replace each larger one, and you must let each hive build up its numbers and its honey before you harvest any yourself. “Now this will be the seventh year of extraordinarily high losses. Every year we’re making up bees but at the sacrifice of not making honey. So both ways you’ve taken a beating and a loss,” says Doan.
From mid-June onward, Doan watched his bees die. By October 15, he had only 1,100 hives. More than half of the colonies that were alive only four months before were now dead. What happened?
One can piece together part of the story based on the bees’ locations and their food sources. Although Doan is a New Yorker, his bees take a Florida vacation each winter. They only reside in New York from April to September. While there, they first pollinate apricots, then cherries, pears, apples, and finally, squash, cucumbers, and pumpkins.
Water wars
Between Tennessee and Georgia:
On Monday, senators from the Peach State approved a resolution that suggests shifting a miniscule section of its border with Tennessee, starting at the tristate corner, to include a portion of Nickajack’s shoreline. The move would entitle Georgia to draw water from the Tennessee River, which snakes through both Tennessee and Alabama but leaves their drought-ridden neighbor missing out on its valuable resource by a matter of feet.
This is very much about watering lawns and washing driveways but also, too, mostly all about the absolute lack of regional planning that has fueled the ‘growth’ all around Atlanta. A senseless culture of waste that now falls back on a legal option that isn’t at all likely to provide relief.
But much more to the point, this is preview of similar disputes coming soon to a country near you as a result of climate change.
Running on Air
If you are watching the NAT&TCAA basketball tournament, you’re seeing a lot of swanky car commercials, especially for upper high-end models from Benz and BMW. The one above is for some super duper 2014 model that you can’t buy yet, and probably can’t afford at all, but it makes the case underscored by the ads punctuating breathless timeouts between the basketball action: dramatic innovations in styling for an utterly archaic propulsion system.
Nothing has changed in the way these amazing chariots propel themselves down the asphalt. Exotic wood inlay on the dashboard? check. 19-speaker surround sound? you bet. HD reverse cameras so you don’t have to turn around to back down the magisterial driveway? Available even in the cheap-O models, nowadays.
Do we think about the fact that the fuel they use and that fuel’s effects on the world remains exactly the same, even with all of the fantastic engineering available?
The fact is it’s easy not to think about this, to nod along with incremental MPG stats while we drool over the nice lines and sleek interiors. But this news from Peugeot made me think about it:
In January, Peugeot announced that it had developed a car that ran on air. It officially launched the Hybrid Air vehicle to the world at the Geneva motor show this month, and revealed that it would be in production by 2016. The car did not solely run on air, of course; the new technology was twinned with a petrol engine. But Peugeot believed that it had significant advantages over battery-powered electric hybrids, such as a Toyota Prius. Their cars would be cheaper to buy, for a start, and extra savings would come from a fuel economy of around 81 miles per gallon.
So what has MB and the ultimate driving machinists been doing this whole time? Makes you wonder.
Cyber Blogging
Just go here. Lemieux points the way. Rees on Right-wronging the Iracle:
In that 2005 essay, you’ll recall, Ignatieff said the reason the American public wanted to invade Iraq was to spread “The Ultimate Task of Thomas Jefferson’s Dream.” (I am not making a joke. This is for real.) And, he implied, anyone who opposed the invasion of Iraq did so because they hated Thomas Jefferson– and they didn’t believe in the Ultimate Tasks of Dreams!
So far, so GREAT, right?
Ignatieff’s latest essay is what Latin people call a “mea culpa,” which is Greek for “Attention publishers: I am ready to write a book about the huge colossal mistake I made.” I imagine the book will be about a man struggling to do the right thing– a man who thinks with his heart and dares, with a dream in each fist, to reach for the stars. It’s about a journey: a journey from idealistic, starry-eyed academic to wizened, war-weary politician. (Ignatieff used to work at Harvard’s Kennedy School; now he’s Prime Chancellor of Canada’s Liberal Delegate or whatever kind of wack-ass, kumbaya government they’ve got up there.)
In a way, it’s a story much like Cormac McCarthy’s recent best-selling “The Road.” Both follow a hero’s long march through thankless environments– in Ignatieff’s case, from the theory-throttled, dusty tower of academia to the burned-out hell-hole of representative politics. Danger lurks. Grime abounds. The narrative tension is: Can the hero be wrong about everything, survive, and still convince people he’s smarter than everyone in Moveon.org?
I was excited when I first saw this new essay: At last, Ignatieff was going to come clean about his super-duper-double-dipper errors. I expected a no-holds barred, personal excoriation. In fact, I assumed the first, last, and only sentence of the essay would be: “Please, for the love of God, don’t ever listen to me again.”
HOWEVER. . .
March 20, 2003
Today was the day. There is no greater crime than to make war based on lies and deception. So many are complicit, but I’ll focus here on the gatekeepers – the bored media that became intoxicated with the idea of war, helped to gin up support in the public and then kept blood off the evening news. But there was blood.
Image from Dependable Renegade.