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Archives
Roald Dahl meets Photoshop thanks to consumptive.org
Team picks white man mascot to make point “The message is, let’s do something that will let people see the other side of what it’s like to be a mascot,” Little Owl said. “I am really offended by this mascot issue, and I hope the people that support the Eaton mascot will get offended by this.” The players, made up of a mixture of American Indian, Hispanic and caucasian students, wear white jerseys with the picture of a white man in a suit on the front and the slogan “Every thang’s gonna be all white!” printed beneath.
 [read more] thanks to random walks
Propaganda R Us Propaganda: Nobody Does It Better Than America.
Over the years, I have had the privilege of meeting and having discussions with people who came to America from countries known for their adherence to totalitarianism: China, Russia, and former east European satellites of the Soviet Union. When we discussed how the state managed to control public opinion under totalitarianism, these people would usually produce a weary, knowledgeable, cynical smile and point out that propaganda in those countries was really done quite incompetently. If you really want to know propaganda, they said, you need to study American propaganda technique. According to them, it is, undeniably, the best in the world.
thanks to The Liberal Arts Mafia
"Younger women who drink two or three alcoholic beverages a week have a lower risk of developing high blood pressure than women who do not consume alcohol." -- Reuters, March 10, 2002
STUDY FINDS WOMEN WHO DRINK WAY MORE FUN TO STUDY According to a new study on female alcohol use and blood pressure, young women who consume two or three alcoholic drinks a week are much more fun to do research on than women who do not consume alcohol. Oh, and the report also found that women who have a few drinks each week are less likely to develop high blood pressure. Whatever. The report, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, studied drinking patterns and blood pressure among 70,000 nurses between the ages of 25 and 42.
Dr. Eric Shinauer, who headed the study for Harvard's School of Public Health, put the findings in perspective. "Alcohol, 70,000 nurses, and us," he said. "Is that cool or what?"
Wars R Us Vice Guide to American Foreign Policy
One of the quickest ways to end a get dirty looks in America these days, I've found, is to point out certain historical truths. The other night, for instance, I made the mistake of pointing out to a group of fellow New Yorkers engulfed in a rehash of 9-11 experiences the irony that the number of WTC victims is almost exactly the same number of Panamanian civilians human rights experts estimate where killed by American forces in our 1989 "arrest" of Manual Noriega. "Huh?" The conversation screeched to a halt. People still don't like to hear that kind of relativism. Six months after the worst attack on American soil, we are still wearing blinders to our own legacy of death and destruction. thanks to Mark Woods at American Samizdat
Higgy noted this one and said it well: "This is an excellent, detailed, complex essay -- highly recommended." Confessions of a Black Mr. Mom
By Rock's definition, I know exactly where I belong among African Americans today. For I am sure that even for this meager deed of fatherhood I am performing, I deserve a lot more than credit. My mission sounds simple enough: carting my young son through West Manhattan to visit another friend, working in Chelsea. I have logged enough baby hours to earn the title "stay-at-home dad," so I'm not exactly new to this. But our trek into the city elicits terror because of three converging factors: 1.) I am a hefty 6'4" black male--- anything can happen. 2.) It's Manhattan---everything might happen. 3.) My son is 7 months old---something always happens.
Shit, the time is still going! Work, work, work, work, work! What blogging energy there was went into stirring things up over at American Samizdat. Not my intention but the Israel/Palestine situation is a touchy one. I've been printing, printing, printing—family stuff from 35mm transparency scans. I love this scanner more and more. Tomorrow we are going over to the other side (off island) for a niece and nephew birthday party. We will also be loading up the van with Zoe's mom's stuff to move back to the island. Work, work, work, work, work!
Where does the time go? Yesterday afternoon was an unplanned run off-island to go over to Redmond to see Zoe's mom. She hasn't been feeling well so we dragged her out to dinner and she was feeling much better when we left. Nothing like good food and company to cheer one up. Caught a late boat back to the island. Zoe's mom is moving over to Whidbey Island to be closer to us. Her new place is being built and is in the final finishing stages. All the interior doors were delivered yesterday. This weekend we start moving stuff over into the garage. She has to be out of her old place April 16. My Epson C80 printer arrived Monday and I have been doing some tests with it. It's a pigment printer and likes non-coated papers. I'm starting to move away from the standard Epson papers to archival papers for printing my photographs. It get's a bit trickier to print on non-standard papers. I will be trying out some Cone papers and printer profiles at Injet Mall. It's a whole new world. Eventually I will be getting a couple of Epson 1200s for black and white and color Piezography. My order for archival negative handling and storage supplies from Light Impressions arrived yesterday so I can get on with storing and scanning 40+ years worth of negatives and transparencies. That should keep me off the streets for a while. I have a meeting this afternoon and I should be back with new links this evening. And I need to squeeze some paying work in somehow.
My son, the Barrista
My son, Robby, works afternoons at Langley's used book store and coffee emporium Golden Otter Used Books as a Mr. Coffee. He stopped by tonight and doodled this little sketch while he was on the phone. After he left (I couldn't resist) I scanned it and colored it in.
Extreme Sports
Extreme Ironing
Extreme Ironing thanks to kelegraph {beta}
God Is On Our Side
Slaughter in the Name of God The defining image of the week, for me, is of a small child's burned and blackened arm, its tiny fingers curled into a fist, protruding from the remains of a human bonfire in Ahmadabad, Gujarat, in India. The murder of children is something of an Indian specialty. The routine daily killings of unwanted girl babies . . . the massacre of innocents in Nellie, Assam, in the 1980s when village turned against neighboring village . . . the massacre of Sikh children in Delhi during the horrifying reprisal murders that followed Indira Gandhi's assassination: They bear witness to our particular gift, always most dazzlingly in evidence at times of religious unrest, for dousing our children in kerosene and setting them alight, or cutting their throats, or smothering them or just clubbing them to death with a good strong length of wood.(...) The political discourse matters, and explains a good deal. But there's something beneath it, something we don't want to look in the face: namely, that in India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of "respect." What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! And when we've done it often enough, the deadening of affect that results makes it easier to do it again.
So India's problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened in India has happened in God's name. The problem's name is God. thanks to follow me here... ---------
With God On Our Side
So now as I'm leavin'
Israel/Palestine
In Arafat's bunker, the mood is defiant as Israel unleashes ever deadlier force It was a pledge no sooner made than broken. Less than a day elapsed after Ariel Sharon, Israel's Prime Minister, declared his arch-enemy Yasser Arafat was free to move again in the occupied territories before Israel's tanks penetrated the Palestinian leader's shattered fiefdom again, with even more armour and deadly force. Israel's tanks rolled deep into the Gaza Strip, killing more than two dozen Palestinians. The toll at the end of a bloody day was six Israelis and two gunmen killed in a Galilee ambush, and an Israeli shot in the West Bank, taking the total to 39 on both sides in 24 hours.
The tanks rumbled through Ramallah by the score, backed by 20,000 Israeli troops, raiding yet another refugee camp and drawing up within a stone's throw of the compound in which Mr Arafat is confined. ---------- Arafat Accuses Israel of Tattooing Numbers on Prisoners' Arms
Sources from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) The Israeli army claims it was just a colored pen but it has disturbed some Jews who remember the Holocaust. It should. The site of 20,000 armed solidiers invading the refugee camps should also bring back visions of the Warsaw Ghetto. --------- It is impossible to ignore the nature of the operation, which was a significant departure from the declared policy until now, in which a distinction was made between those who deal in terror, who must be vanquished, and the wider population, whom Israel did not want to engage in conflict. This time, the IDF caused deliberate suffering and humiliation to the broader Palestinian population. This cannot be interpreted any other way: The government of Israel, through the IDF, sought to use humiliation as a means of pressure or punishment. There is no other way to understand those photographed scenes of hundreds of people, bound and blindfolded, on their way to interrogations.
Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz was very tardy with his reservations about marking the prisoners with writing on their arms. Brig. Gen. Gershon Yitzhak, commander of IDF forces in the West Bank, said yesterday that the blindfolds and cuffing of the prisoners, was insensitive. The belated reservations from the high command about the operation raise questions. Didn't the commanders instruct the soldiers in advance how to deal with the civilians? It is worrisome to discover that the chief of staff and the commander of the forces were unaware from the start of the profound significance of wide-scale friction with the population. ---------- More Israeli Jews favor transfer of Palestinians, Israeli Arabs - poll finds
Some 46 percent of Israel's Jewish citizens favor transferring Palestinians out of the territories, while 31 percent favor transferring Israeli Arabs out of the country, according to the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies' annual national security public opinion poll. Transfer is a polite word for ethnic cleansing. Others call it genocide. Transfer has been on the Israeli Right's agenda all along. Now it is sliding into the mainstream.
Music
Conversations: Bizarre vs. Bazaar In a bizarre move that requires a bazaar response, the U.S. Copyright Office plans to price Webcasters off the Net and replace the creative commons with a content pumping system for Big Media.
Are you ready to lose Internet Radio? Well, get ready, because that's exactly what will happen if the Copyright Office carries out its current interpretation of the DMCA. This hits home for me. I do an Internet webcast, from my living room, called TestingTesting. This would shut me down. This is serious shit. RIAA, ASCAP, and all the rest are nothing more that legalized thugs. We have a 230 seat performing arts center here on Whidbey Island. They have to pay a monthly fee to ASCAP in case someone performing there sings a song that ASCAP owns. It's a shakedown, pure and simple. Do the artists get anything? My good friend Derek Parrott, of TestingTesting House Band fame, had a song in rotation a while back at a local station. They had his song in the station logs and he should have been paid accordingly. He never saw a cent. The music industry doesn't give a shit about the customer or the artist. What purpose is there for their existence?
Eye Candy
Revolution by Design:
 thanks to MetaFilter ----------
 thanks to consumptive.org
War Against Some Terrorists War 'playing into al- Qaeda's hands' Two British scholars say the US strategy for defeating al-Qaeda is in fact having the opposite effect. They describe the military response to the terrorism of 11 September as "deeply counter- productive". Broadening the war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, they believe, could provoke Baghdad into first use of chemical or biological weapons.
Endless conflict, they argue, will be the consequence of meeting terror with violence. --------- Read their briefing paper... Briefing paper on 'A Never-Ending War? Consequences of September 11'. both thanks to Cursor ---------- Army is considering shutting down the military's only office devoted entirely to peacekeeping
"My concern is, what message does this send to the world?" Col. George Oliver, director of the institute, said in a telephone interview Monday. "It's going to say that the U.S. military doesn't really care about peacekeeping." thanks to BookNotes Duh!
TestingTesting Last night's show with The Basics is archived. A good time was had by all. Now back to work.
TestingTesting Every other Monday evening I, and a few friends, get together and webcast a live music show (that means with real live musicians) from my living room. We call it TestingTesting. The web site is ready for the show and now it is time to clean up my living room. Light blogging today as I get ready for the show and then archive it later. Tonight we have The Basics. Vern Olsen on accordion, Karl Olsen with vocals, guitar and maybe keyboard (he hasn't made up his mind yet), and Deb Lund with vocals. Vern is one of those amazing musicians that can play all night. This should be a lot of fun.
Globalization I make the occasional post to American Samizdat. I usually don't duplicate those posts here but this one is a worthy exception. It's a must read.
Alex Jones Show Appearance Transcript
GP: Right. First you open up the capital markets. That is, you sell off your local banks to foreign banks. Then you go to what's called market-based pricing. That's the stuff like in California where everything is free market and you end up with water bills - we can't even imagine selling off water companies in the United States of America. But imagine if a private company like Enron owned your water. So then the prices go through the roof. Then open up your borders to trade - complete free marketeering. And Stiglitz who was the chief economist, remember he was running this system, he was their numbers man and he was saying it was like the opium wars. He said this isn't free trade; this is coercion trade. This is war. They are taking apart economies through this. Thanks to Ralph and Barbara Mundell
AWOL
Mamiya Universal Getting the new Epson 2450 scanner has opened up new possibilities. Now that I can scan negatives and transparencies, I have been looking at film cameras again. Not 35mm, but large format. I was considering a Super Graphic. While they can be had for a reasonable price, I don't have that kind of reasonable money. So—I've been thinking. There is a camera I have that I haven't used in about six or seven years.
 It's a Mamiya Universal press camera with a 6x9 (as in cm) back. That's a 2 1/4 x 3 1/4 inch negative. Not a 4x5 but maybe close enough. I took a lot of pictures with it between 1991 and 1995 (roughly.) At the time, I could hardly afford film and processing, much less enlarging. None of the pictures taken then have been enlarged. I spent this evening going through the pile of negatives and contact sheets. I scanned 3 images. One each of my three kids taken in 1992 on a trip to an island in the San Juans. The Epson 2450 scanner scanned them beautifully. The film was Fuji NHG.
 This is my son Robby. I scanned it at 2400dpi. The picture below is Robby's left eye from the original scan.
 I have a page with a 1178x792 pixel image. Another page with links for large pictures of my other two kids. I think all I need to do is get the lens repaired. Until then, I have a pile-o-stuff to scan and get ready for printing.
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