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Vidal

A man after our own hearts, and Suddenly, this summer is getting a little too sad to bear.. See the obits everywhere but I thought this was nice little nugget embedded in one.

But he was widely admired as an independent thinker — in the tradition of Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken — about literature, culture, politics and, as he liked to call it, “the birds and the bees.” He picked apart politicians, living and dead; mocked religion and prudery; opposed wars from Vietnam to Iraq and insulted his peers like no other, once observing that the three saddest words in the English language were “Joyce Carol Oates.” (The happiest words: “I told you so”).

Love it. The Search for the King continues.

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Funny, that

In tribute to Romney’s Doofus Abroad act, I wanted to post an excerpt from Graham Greene’s The Comedians, a comic reference to something decidedly not funny.

Of course there’s nothing online that I can find, but you should still take this as a recommendation for Greene’s famous novel about Haiti, wherein friends of Romney could find new and better ways to conduct themselves abroad. See also, The Quiet American.

So instead, we turn to John Ruskin who, in true enlightening nineteenth century fashion, has some choice words for Willard about taxes. This is from Fors Clavigera, Letter VII, 1871:

Do you see, in The Times of yesterday and the day before, 22nd and 23rd June, that the Minister of France dares not, even in this her utmost need, put on an income tax; and do you see why he dares not?

Observe, such a tax is the only honest and just one; because it tells on the rich in true proportion to the poor, and because it meets necessity in the shortest and bravest way, and without interfering with any commercial operation.

All rich people object to income tax, of course;— they like to pay as much as a poor man pays on their tea, sugar, and tobacco — nothing on their incomes.

Whereas, in true justice, the only honest and wholly right tax is one not merely on income, but property; increasing in percentage as the property is greater. And the main virtue of such a tax is that it makes publicly known what every man has, and how he gets it.

For every kind of Vagabonds, high and low, agree in their dislike to give an account of the way they get their living, still less, of how much they have got sewn up in their breeches. It does not, however, matter much to a country that it should know how its poor Vagabonds live, but it is of vital moment that it should know how its rich Vagabonds live; and that much of knowledge, it seems to me, in the present state of our education, is quite attainable.

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Lying to get to the Truth

It’s something we are not nearly smart enough to do, but some do believe they are sufficiently clever.

So apparently Greenpeace devised a fake website, twitter stream, video and accompanying ad campaign to bring to light everything Shell isn’t yet doing (but is prepared to do) in the Arctic. There are several problems with this, laid out here:

The first one is that I don’t think portraying Shell as inept is a very wise choice. If they wanted to influence public opinion, I suspect they’d pay decent money and get someone who knows what they’re doing to manage a new ad campaign and run a Twitter account. If they’re not doing that, it’s because the general public is not currently the target audience for their PR budget. But when we are, trust me: it will be a competent effort. If we’re only braced for buffoons and clowns, they’ll succeed at whatever spin they’re trying to convey.

The second, larger problem, is that Greenpeace lied to us. This wasn’t a nod-and-a-wink parody; this was a dedicated effort to deceive. They played the public for patsies and herded them like sheep. That kind of contempt for the people whose support (financial and otherwise) they need is inexcusable. For me, it puts them in a box with people like Bush and Blair, who were also flexible with the truth for the greater good.

Yes, people are very amused by the Yes Men. But adding to the general inventory of cynicism with your own disinformation campaign only lowers the value of accurate information that much further, which makes the work of Shell et al all the easier.

The boring and uncomfortable reality is that we have to be more truthful than ever about the effects of climate change and stop trying to filter it through ideas gauged to simultaneously make us feel better. Fossil fuel extraction companies are apathetic enough as it is – and attempting to shame or embarrass them through elaborate ruses only discredits the opposition and muddies the rising tides. They have no shame and cannot be embarrassed, only impacted by lower profit margins.

People already don’t know what to think because of the years of sophisticated, high gloss disinformation propelled at blinding speeds. Allowing any more vestiges of credibility to slip away intentionally is stupid and unforgivable.

And fortunately for the fossil fuel industry, sincerity already has the least currency imaginable. Think of everything it takes to keep this system in place. If you consider how difficult it would be to get millions of people to buy monster trucks that get <10 mpg and commute 50 miles to work each way each day, we’re talking at least a concerted effort, if not the addition of some magic potion. Don’t make it easier to go down.

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A Dish best served cold

Well, once you take the lead out, I guess you could use it for serving, or at least a kind of revenge, instead of taking it to the landfill:

“Unless you take apart the dish — which no one ever does — you’re throwing away the circuit board, which means you’re throwing away lead, and that is very bad for the environment,” said Brent Bolton, owner of Dish Disposal in Los Angeles, which removes and recycles satellite dishes.

Lead and other toxic heavy metals from electronic waste like computers and cellphones can pollute the environment, which has prompted 17 states to ban the disposal of e-waste in the household trash.

Yet when a reporter asked customer service representatives at the major providers in Massachusetts, Dish TV and Direct TV, how to properly dispose of an unwanted satellite dish, their advice was to throw it in the garbage. When pressed, a representative for Dish TV did come up with a list of service centers that he said would recycle old dishes, however.

Of course no one ever takes apart the dish, much less recycles them, but I see a potential growth industry. This could be tackling the problem of all the garbage on TV head-on. Talk about your double entendres. Go ahead. Talk about them.

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People Staring at Computers

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Interesting confluence of media, technology and art in this Wired article:

In “Thoughts on total openness of information,” Dan Paluska brainstorms about the possibility of posting all your “personal” information online, asking what the repercussions would be. What if people could see every bank transaction you made? Or read every email you wrote? I started answering these questions for myself with “keytweeter,” a yearlong performance starting in June 2009. Keytweeter was a custom keylogger that tweeted every 140 characters I typed. Over that year, I learned a lot about myself and what “privacy” means. I learned that every conversation belongs to all the parties involved, so I put disclaimers in my emails. I learned that I was more honest, with myself and with others, when I knew everyone could see what I was saying.

After keytweeter, I started working on a project with Wafaa Bilal called “3rdi.” He told me he wanted to implant a camera on the back of his head that would upload a geotagged image to the internet every minute, as an exploration of “photography without a photographer.” So I worked with Wafaa to create a system that made this possible. As a professor at NYU, he had some trouble while at school due to privacy concerns. They came to a compromise where he would keep the camera on, but covered. This performance also lasted a year, over the course of 2011.

After working with text for “keytweeter,” I started exploring visual equivalents. One experiment, “scrapscreen,” made a scrapbook from your screen over the course of a day: every mouse movement “tore away” that part of the screen and saved it to a continually overlapping image. Another experiment, called “Important Things,” captures every click as a 32×32 pixel icon in a massive grid.

Later that year I worked with interactive artist Theo Watson on an extension of “Important Things,” called “Happy Things,” which took a screenshot every time you smiled, and uploaded it to the web. We got pictures from all around the world, with people smiling at everything, from cat memes to the Wikipedia article for Nicholas Cage.

Sometimes this kind of work is associated with “human-computer interaction,” but this term makes it sound like we’re interacting with computers, when in fact, most of the time, we’re interacting with each other. I like to think of it as “computer-mediated interaction.”

In mid-May, 2011, I took a timelapse using my laptop’s webcam to get a feeling for how I looked at the computer. After a few days of recording, I watched the video.

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Standard Future

An aside concerning the Away of the last week.

The green family spent last week in Northern California, a beautiful respite from the devilish heat that has HQ surrounded on all sides, now and especially then. We spent the American Independence Day in a certain city among many, many thousands of observant fellow Americans and I will report without irony that it was perhaps the most patriotically American-feeling Independence Day directly observed in some time. The context of that particular city, noted over the preceding days, perfectly foreshadowed this Independence Day sensation, and for one simple reason: it is the future of America. Allow me to explain.

The often-fraught, always divisive and currently repellant political culture of this country is predicated on the future being poor, uneducated, overweight, uninsured and underemployed like much of the South currently finds itself. But that’s not what the future looks like, and I don’t mean this as some kind of self-styled optimist, because, while occasionally hopeful, I’m not quite that. The future, I was reminded, is made up of a multi-generational diversity of people from all corners, educated and bottle-fed the same American go-getterism but rid, somehow, of the hate, fear and disdain that we seem to think naturally comes with it. Those things are an add-ons – they actually don’t come standard, as it turns out. Of course, this is the reason certain parties attach so much fear to the future. Without the add-ons, things are different, people care, congregate and relate as they get on with the business of the country, which is business, of course. But they vote in favor of things like health care and fast trains, know they might, just might, be able to affect the amount of energy people use with a few more options and some incentives.

The folks in the tricornes fetishize the past and we should take them at their word. It is the past. And the faster it turns into the future, and it is (I saw it), the louder the screaming will be.

We pedaled rented, two-wheel crafts hand-forged in the heartland through acres of Americans of all ethnicities, setting up their grills, beer coolers, card tables, FLAGS and volleyball nets in public spaces meant for viewing the fireworks over the Bay later that evening. Did I say flags? Not a surprise, of course, it was American Independence Day. But it was a good reminder and perhaps most other places than the American South you don’t need one, but people coming here want to be here for more reasons than to take your crappy stuff and whatever motivated their grandparents, three generations in, they are Americans, if not the country itself. It was inspiring and reassuring.

And of course, that city is also filled with the requisite amount of crazy people, many of them homeless. Why so, other than delightful weather? Upon closer investigation it seems that the city in question funds adequate services for all of its citizens, include the least among them, mainly because the people in it believe them all to be part of humanity and not some garbage island off of it.

So enjoy some independence from the idea of a threatening future for a while. It could be bad enough without being fully-equipped with all the racist fear-mongering that has traveled so well up to now. And keep in mind, in some places within our own borders, people are already finding ways to put it aside. Plus, all the new kids are coming with the standard model features anyway. So hold the add-ons.

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Lines on the map

Actually, little pairs of lines, close together, with cars on them, all fastened together to move a lot of people from here to there:

The state Senate vote authorizing initial funding for California’s high-speed rail project was hailed by backers Friday as a pivotal step in building the controversial project.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who had made repeated trips and telephone calls to California to push for the project, called the vote a “big win” for the state.

“No economy can grow faster than its transportation network allows,” LaHood said in a statement. “With highways between California cities congested and airspace at a premium, Californians desperately need an alternative.”

It is unclear when construction on the largest infrastructure project in the country can begin. The state still needs a series of regulatory approvals to start the first 130 miles of track in the Central Valley. The plan also faces lawsuits by agriculture interests and potential opposition by major freight railroads.

Passing this funding was really hard to do, and not only because the money will go toward building the route in a very rural area, where not many people are. But the whole point of the line is to connect S.F. and L.A. via high-speed rail, and it’s going to go through some rural areas as these two cities are very far apart. Have a look at a map. But it’s easy to demagogue hsr, as it is health care, as it is education, but these are long-term needs that require attention, commitment – and fortitude to stand up to all the whiners that would prefer to give the money directly to already rich people.

Not to mention all the people who will be working to build this route. People need jobs for the whole thing to work. Come on. Better conservatives, please.

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Material Deprivation

Have we written about this before? Are we reading about anything else? Chait at NY Mag sets the context for the healthcare debate – you know, the one we’re going to have, again.

Opponents of the law have endlessly invoked “socialism.” Nothing in the Affordable Care Act or any part of President Obama’s challenges the basic dynamics of market capitalism. All sides accept that some of us should continue to enjoy vastly greater comforts and pleasures than others. If you don’t work as hard as Mitt Romney has, or were born less smart, or to worse parents, or enjoyed worse schools, or invested your skills in an industry that collapsed, or suffered any other misfortune, then you will be punished for this. Your television may be low-definition, or you might not be able to heat or cool your home as comfortably as you would like; you may clothe your children in discarded garments from the Salvation Army.

This is not in dispute. What is being disputed is whether the punishments to the losers in the market system should include, in addition to these other things, a denial of access to non-emergency medical treatment. The Republican position is that it should. They may not want a woman to have to suffer an untreated broken ankle for lack of affordable treatment. Likewise, I don’t want people to be denied nice televisions or other luxuries. I just don’t think high-definition television or nice clothing are goods that society owes to one and all. That is how Republicans think about health care.

This is why it’s vital to bring yourself face-to face with the implications of mass uninsurance — not as emotional manipulation, but to force you to decide what forms of material deprivation ought to be morally acceptable.

Can this Supreme Court case be about anything else? No, it can’t. These are the terms. This is the reason there was an Affordable Care Act, and an individual mandate. And the reason there will have to be another debate and another law if this one is indeed struck down. Republicans will try to elide this debate, but there isn’t any other debate. The other aspects of the situation are beyond question. This is what they’re holding out on. Damn, green makes some people really mean.

Via.