(via Articles | Eviscerati.Org)

My buddy just put out the trade paperback version of the novel that he wrote, and which I helped on.  It’s set in the universe we created for fiction purposes, and is a hell of a good time.

Women's Vigilantism in India: A Case Study of the Pink Sari Gang - Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence:

A paper on the Pink Sari Brigade:

On 18 December 1752, the New York Gazette reported that an ‘odd Sect of People’ had been appearing in New Jersey. Calling themselves the Regulars, they dressed in women’s clothes, painted their faces and then visited the homes of reported wife-beaters. They stripped the abusive husband and flogged him with rods, chanting, ‘Woe to the men that beat their wives’… The following year, the New York Gazette printed a letter by a ‘Prudence Goodwife’ whose husband had incurred the wrath of the Regulars: ‘[T]hey have regulated my dear husband, and the rest of the Bad Ones hereabouts that they are afraid of using such Barbarity; and I must with Pleasure acknowledge, that since my Husband has felt what whipping was, he has entirely left off whipping me, and promises faithfully he will never begin again.’ (Cutler, Lynch-Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States [New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969], quoted in Law 2011: 18)

Banwari Devi (52): ‘C’mon take your clothes off (chal kapde utaar),’ my rapist barked at me. He was a high caste man, he followed me into the field. I shouldn’t have headed to the pastures alone, especially when the crops had already been harvested. But I really wanted to pee. When the crops are reaped, they are sliced off by sharp sickles, not uprooted, the dried ends of chopped stems are like a bed of nails… If I tried to run barefoot it would be like running over a field of spikes, the bottom of my feet would have been lacerated… I tried to run on the mud path and not through the field. But the man caught up with me and slammed my head against a tree… Then he took me. After he was finished, he spat on me. I was only eighteen. I went to the police, the politicians. Everyone said I had asked for it, going into the fields by myself. I wept a lot… didn’t want to go near the pastures again… yet it was our only source of sustenance. My husband finally left me, and he took our boys. I was left with nothing at a young age. Now I am 52. Yes, I do go around beating men who attack village girls. You asked me why I joined the Gulabi Gang… So that women after me can walk through fields with long, fearless strides… (Personal interview with Banwari Devi, a Gulabi gang member, at a public demonstration in Delhi, 17th September 2009)

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David Bowie’s relationship with America has typified the outsider’s view: an ambivalence ranging from fascination to fear that he expressed in a reply to his first letter from a U.S. fan in 1967 (click to read in large format). The fan, intrepid 14-year-old Sandra Dodd, had gotten her hands on an advance copy of Bowie’s first album and written him to praise his work and offer to start a fan club for him stateside. Bowie’s response is very interesting. We’ve written before about his rise from obscure R&B and folk singer to Ziggy Stardust, which required him to shake off a natural shyness to inhabit his breakout persona. In the letter, the 20-year-old Bowie initially comes off as a naïve, slightly self-involved young pop singer. Then, after answering the usual fan queries—what’s his real name, birthday, height—he turns to the subject of the U.S., a country he had yet to visit. Bowie writes:

I hope one day to get to America. My manager tells me lots about it as he has been there many times with other acts he manages. I was watching an old film on TV the other night called “No Down Payment” a great film, but rather depressing if it is a true reflection of The American Way Of Life. However, shortly after that they showed a documentary about Robert Frost the American poet, filmed mainly at his home in Vermont, and that evened the score. I am sure that that is nearer the real America.

Drawing his impressions from movies, Bowie references two views. The first, Martin Ritt’s 1957 No Down Payment, is full of the banality and melodrama we’ve come to expect from Mad Men, making incisive critiques of mid-50s cultural problems simmering under the surface of the suburbs like alcoholism, racism, and infidelity. As one fan writes, the film depicted what “no one wanted to see… a soiled American Dream,” or what Bowie capitalizes as “The American Way Of Life.”

The other view Bowie takes of the States comes from a film on Robert Frost—most likely 1963’s Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel With the World. Little wonder this film “evened the score” for the lyrical young songwriter, who chooses in his letter to believe it represents the “real America,” a sentiment he would not hold for long.

Flash forward to 1984, and Bowie is an international pop star. Most fans would argue his best work was far behind him, but the 80s saw him break out into more mainstream film roles in The Elephant Man and Labyrinth that kept him at the forefront of American pop culture. His soundtrack work was memorable as well, although the track below “This is Not America,” written with Pat Methany for The Falcon and the Snowman doesn’t get much attention these days. Bowie’s impressionistic lyrics–which Methany called “profound and meaningful”–show him in mourning for the country that puzzled his younger self:

A little piece of you
The little peace in me
Will die
For this is not America

Blossom fails to bloom
This season
Promise not to stare
Too long
For this is not a miracle

And again, move forward to 1997, thirty years after Bowie’s letter above, and we find him in a jaundiced mood in “I’m Afraid of Americans” from his album Earthling (the song originally appeared on what may be one of the most cynical films ever made, Showgirls). Bowie explained the genesis of the song in a press release:

I’m Afraid of Americans’ was written by myself and Eno. It’s not as truly hostile about Americans as say “Born in the USA”: it’s merely sardonic. I was traveling in Java when the first McDonalds went up: it was like, “for fuck’s sake.” The invasion by any homogenized culture is so depressing, the erection of another Disney World in, say, Umbria, Italy, more so. It strangles the indigenous culture and narrows expression of life.

The cultural homogenization that so depressed the young Bowie in No Down Payment is now a global phenomenon, and the well-traveled, worldly Bowie seems to harbor few illusions when he sings:

Johnny’s in America
No tricks at the wheel
No one needs anyone
They don’t even just pretend

In the award-winning video, Trent Reznor plays a Travis Bickle-like figure, a menacing creature of alienation and unprovoked, random violence and Bowie a paranoid outsider running from what he perceives as citizens attacking each other on every streetcorner. Stripped of the 50s veneer, it’s a country where people “don’t even pretend”; the violence and misanthropy are now on full display. It’s a view of America that hasn’t dimmed since the mid-nineties. It’s simply moved out of the city and spilled out into the once self-contained suburbs. These three artifacts show Bowie’s evolution in relation to a country that he hoped to find the best in, that nearly always embraced him, and that came to freak him out and piss him off in later years.

via Letters of Note

Josh Jones is a writer and scholar currently completing a dissertation on landscape, literature, and labor.

David Bowie’s First American Fan Letter And His Evolving Views of the U.S. (1967-1997) is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

In 1960, NASA put its first “Earth-observing environmental satellite” into orbit, and, ever since, these satellites have let us observe the dynamics of our planet in a new way.  They can tell us all about changing weather patterns, the impact of climate change, what’s happening in the oceans, the coastlines, rivers and more.

The satellites have also demonstrated again and again the Earth’s aesthetic beauty, revealed in the patterns, shapes, colors, and textures seen from space. That beauty is what gets celebrated in NASA Earth As Art, a new visual publication made available as a Free 160-Page eBook (PDF) and a Free iPad App. Featuring 75 images in total, the app gives you a very aerial look at places like the Himalayas, Arizona’s Painted Desert, the Lena River Delta in Russia (shown above), the Byrd Glacier in Antarctica, and much more. Enjoy the images, from the surreal to the sublime.

You’ll find NASA Earth As Art listed in our collection of Free eBooks. Also see these related NASA materials:

NASA Archive Collects Great Time-Lapse Videos of our Planet

Ray Bradbury Reads Moving Poem on the Eve of NASA’s 1971 Mars Mission

Great Cities at Night: Views from the International Space Station

NASA Presents “The Earth as Art” in a Free eBook and Free iPad App is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

(via Open Source Ecology)

This is serious business, and amazing.  The seeds of modern industrialized society, as open source!

Unfortunately due to a poorly-timed illness, I’ve had to push back the next comic to the end of this week. In the meantime, I thought I’d share an ongoing Tumblr project I’ve been doing on the side, where I’ve been creating illustrations to go along with each chapter of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion! I hope you like them!

1. Ainulindalë - The Music of the Ainur
2. Valaquenta - Account of the Valar and Maiar in according to the lore of the Eldar
3. The Monsters of Middle-Earth
4. The Free Peoples of the First Age
5. Silmarillion Chapter 1 - Of the Beginning of Days
6. Silmarillion Chapter 2 - Of Aulë and Yavanna

A Mountain in Scotland

A Civil Libertarian's Case for Giving Gun Control a Chance - Wendy Kaminer - The Atlantic:

History has rarely seemed less relevant. Of course the Bill of Rights should not be construed in reaction to the news of the day, however horrific, but neither should it be governed by analyses of yesterday’s news, especially when “yesterday” dates back hundreds of years. The Court has rarely seemed so remote.

Read the majority opinion in Heller alongside stories about the children killed in Newtown. It’s like a letter from a judicial twilight zone: “Between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, the Stuart Kings Charles II and James II succeeded in using select militias loyal to them to suppress political dissidents, in part by disarming their opponents,” Justice Scalia explains. “And, of course, what the Stuarts had tried to do to their political enemies, George III had tried to do to the colonists.”

Of course. That’s why the District of Columbia may not ban handgun possession today. After all, “a New York article of April 1769 said that ‘[i]t is a natural right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the Bill of Rights, to keep arms for their own defence.’”

An excellent look at the relationship of certain members of the current court, and gun control laws. 

The Case for More Guns (And More Gun Control) - Jeffrey Goldberg - The Atlantic:

It is an unexamined assumption on the part of gun-control activists that the possession of a firearm by a law-abiding person will almost axiomatically cause that person to fire it at another human being in a moment of stress. Dave Kopel, the research director of the libertarian-leaning Independence Institute, in Denver, posits that opposition to gun ownership is ideological, not rational. “I use gay marriage as an analogue,” he said. “Some people say they are against gay marriage because they think it leads to worse outcomes for kids. Now, let’s say in 2020 all the social-science evidence has it that the kids of gay families turn out fine. Some people will still say they’re against it, not for reasons of social science, but for reasons of faith. That’s what you have here in the gun issue.” There is no proof to support the idea that concealed-carry permit holders create more violence in society than would otherwise occur; they may, in fact, reduce it.

According to Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and the author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, permit holders in the U.S. commit crimes at a rate lower than that of the general population. “We don’t see much bloodshed from concealed-carry permit holders, because they are law-abiding people,” Winkler said. “That’s not to say that permit holders don’t commit crimes, but they do so at a lower rate than the general population. People who seek to obtain permits are likely to be people who respect the law.” According to John Lott, an economist and a gun-rights advocate who maintains that gun ownership by law-abiding citizens helps curtail crime, the crime rate among concealed-carry permit holders is lower than the crime rate among police officers.

Today, the number of concealed-carry permits is the highest it’s ever been, at 8 million, and the homicide rate is the lowest it’s been in four decades—less than half what it was 20 years ago. (The number of people allowed to carry concealed weapons is actually considerably higher than 8 million, because residents of Vermont, Wyoming, Arizona, Alaska, and parts of Montana do not need government permission to carry their personal firearms. These states have what Second Amendment absolutists refer to as “constitutional carry,” meaning, in essence, that the Second Amendment is their permit.)

Shared primarily for the quote there in bold. That right there is some fucked up stuff. Not entirely surprising, really, but still kind of fucked up.

How Wal-Mart Used Payoffs to Get Its Way in Mexico - NYTimes.com:

The Times’s examination reveals that Wal-Mart de Mexico was not the reluctant victim of a corrupt culture that insisted on bribes as the cost of doing business. Nor did it pay bribes merely to speed up routine approvals. Rather, Wal-Mart de Mexico was an aggressive and creative corrupter, offering large payoffs to get what the law otherwise prohibited. It used bribes to subvert democratic governance — public votes, open debates, transparent procedures. It used bribes to circumvent regulatory safeguards that protect Mexican citizens from unsafe construction. It used bribes to outflank rivals.

Through confidential Wal-Mart documents, The Times identified 19 store sites across Mexico that were the target of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s bribes. The Times then matched information about specific bribes against permit records for each site. Clear patterns emerged. Over and over, for example, the dates of bribe payments coincided with dates when critical permits were issued. Again and again, the strictly forbidden became miraculously attainable.

Thanks to eight bribe payments totaling $341,000, for example, Wal-Mart built a Sam’s Club in one of Mexico City’s most densely populated neighborhoods, near the Basílica de Guadalupe, without a construction license, or an environmental permit, or an urban impact assessment, or even a traffic permit. Thanks to nine bribe payments totaling $765,000, Wal-Mart built a vast refrigerated distribution center in an environmentally fragile flood basin north of Mexico City, in an area where electricity was so scarce that many smaller developers were turned away.

But there is no better example of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s methods than its conquest of Mrs. Pineda’s alfalfa field. In Teotihuacán, The Times found that Wal-Mart de Mexico executives approved at least four different bribe payments — more than $200,000 in all — to build just medium-size supermarket. Without those payoffs, records and interviews show, Wal-Mart almost surely would not have been allowed to build in Mrs. Pineda’s field.

I remain pleased to not have been inside a Wal-mart in something like a decade. 

We all knew this anyway !

Sex and alcohol make you happier than kids and religion, study finds

Kids are said to fill our lives with poignancy and inexplicable joy, yet it appears many parents would rather be tossing back some bourbon and rolling around in their skivvies than taking care of their beloved offspring. A new study by Carsten Grimm from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand has found people rate sex as the top activity that brings them happiness, followed by drinking alcohol or "partying." Caring for kids (yawn) fell down the list at number five. God also got the cold shoulder, with people rating meditating and religion at number four. 

(via samadhi in space)

SET  Many religious people have strong convictions about what they believe. What if you don’t want your beliefs subjected to inquiry and observation?

EM  There is a well-known saying: “Don’t confuse me with facts – my mind is made up.” But if we want to get beyond belief systems and arrive at a unified understanding about the existence face and the conscious face of our world, we need to start basing our belief on scientific evidence.

SET  How would you describe God?

EM  Well, my concept of God is probably quite different than the normal. The universe that we are in is an intelligent, self-organizing, learning, participatory, interactive, non-locally interconnected evolutionary system. It’s all of those words. So to me – the universe is the body of God, and God is still learning. The evolutionary mind, the consciousness that exists in the universe, is the mind of God. I do not embody God in a being, but in the collective of all that is.

SET  When you were in space and had that sense of the unity that underlies the universe, what did it feel like to be back on Earth and see how humans can treat each other and how we treat our planet?
 
EM  Part of my epiphany in space was recognizing that beneath the blue and white cover of Earth, we humans were behaving like juveniles. We are a juvenile species. By and large, we are so consumed with greed and self-service that we miss the larger point. This is what the great mystics in all religions have tried to get us to see. No one who has had such an experience could be violent.

It’s a little bit like Baruch Spinoza and Buckminster Fuller had a baby who went to space. 

(Peter Day of Denman & Goddard)

We’re all nearly settled in our new home but it’ll still take a couple of months to get things the way we want it. When our new home’s ready we’ll give you an online guided tour and I’m sure you’ll be delighted as me to see a full traditional tailoring business at work.

When I was in our London office earlier this week I had the chance to have a good chat with a friend who’s been on Savile Row longer than we’d both care to remember. Peter Day of Denman & Goddard was telling me all about this lovely garment that was made around 1895. It’s a junior diplomats uniform, or secretary to the ambassador with the diplomatic corps. This is a rather grand uniform but these were the grand days of the British Empire when dignitaries from around the globe wouldn’t have expected anything less.

The workmanship on this material is incredible. Let me elaborate on a few things. First of all every stitch is by hand, every one, even the the long side seams. Also the doeskin it’s made of is far superior than anything available today. Sadly, you can’t feel the texture but to give you some idea the bottom of the coat is a raw cut edge. As in there’s no turn up or seam. The fabric’s so tightly woven it’s not frayed in the slightest. Of course today we’d never dream of leaving a raw edge like this. However, if we could you couldn’t get anything as clean and elegant.

(back pockets to keep your credentials)

When this was supplied by the military tailors of the day they took care of everything the hat and even the sword. As you can see the tailors name of Meyer & Mortimer can be seen on the sword blade. Obviously it comes as no surprise to find all the gold leaf embroidery is done by hand using 2% gold over silver wire laid on silk velvet.  There was a few people who specialised in gold embroidery at the time such as Hands & Co, Hobosons of Tooley Street. There were more and it’s amazing they employed a lot of people creating the beautiful embroidery that was needed in those grand old days.

I can’t thank Peter enough for such an insight and I must say he always makes time for people. Apart from being a very nice chap there’s no doubt how respected a figure he is in our craft. However, what made me smile most that day was how after all these years he was still so exited when he was looking at such beautiful work. After all that’s why we’re in this business.

 

 

OVERVIEW (by Planetary Collective)

Oh you need to watch this…

fafni-r:

SAY THANK YOU, it was hard work getting this all together!…took me like 1 hour of my life :)

Staves or magical signs
All of the signs and staves seen here can be found in Icelandic grimoires, some from the 17th century, some from later times though all of them seem to be related. The origin of this peculiar Icelandic magic is difficult to ascertain. Some signs seem to be derived from medieval mysticism and renaissance occultism, while others show some relation to runic culture and the old Germanic belief in Thor and Odinn. Much of the magic mentioned in court records can be found in grimoires kept in various manuscript collections. The purpose of the magic involved tells us something of the concerns of the lower classes that used them to lessen the burden of subsidence living in a harsh climate.

…and darkness came. Six+ hours of music put together by Headphone Commute to help deal with the impacts of Sandy. Pay $10 and up.

(via Headphone Commute)

H/T  Radley Balko at Huffington Post.

Please remember this video the next time someone says, “Well if you have not done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.”  The officer admits putting illegal narcotics on cars randomly around town–enough to have a dog “alert” to anyone’s car, whether they have ever used drugs or not.  This isn’t an officer “caught on tape.”  The officer readily admits that this is what he does.

To fully appreciate the video above, you should watch this video first.   This victim of police misconduct filed a lawsuit against town and officer.  A year or two later, his attorney gets his opportunity to question the officer in a deposition.  That’s what the above video is all about.

There is a drug detection dog case pending before the Supreme Court this term.  Read the Cato amicus brief in that case to learn more about the law on the matter.

Drug-sniffing Dogs and their Handlers is a post from PoliceMisconduct.net

I’ve got an article in The Observer about the sad history of how psychologists have misunderstood grief and why it turns out to be much more individual than traditional theories have suggested.

As well as the individual variations, it also riffs on the massive diversity of cultural grief and mourning practices.

At the beginning of Nicole Kidman’s 2008 film Australia, the audience is shown a warning. “Exercise caution when watching this film,” it says, “as it may contain images or voices of deceased persons.” The notice, perplexing for most viewers, was for the benefit of Aboriginal Australians, who may have a taboo against naming or encountering representations of the dead.

The taboo has spiritual roots relating to not disturbing spirits of the departed but anthropologist Katie Glaskin describes how the naming taboo “serves to make people ‘acutely aware’ of the person whose name is being avoided”. As a form of remembering through non-remembrance, it is a psychological mirror image of more familiar traditions where creating and cherishing a representation of the deceased is considered necessary for healthy mourning. This underlines the fact that mourning can take place in a radically different way, based on a thoroughly different understanding of death, highlighting how any claims to a universal “psychology of grief” pale in the face of human diversity.

The article has many more examples and we’re now at a stage where the idea that we go through specific ‘stages’ of grief is untenable scientifically – but lives on due to its powerful grip on society.

This is most worrying because it has been used to pathologise people who don’t seem to be grieving ‘appropriately’, branding them as ‘in denial’ when really they’re just dealing with things in their own way.
 

Link to article in The Observer.

Jefferson’s Presidential Select 18 Year small batch bourbon is perhaps one of the most requested whiskey reviews I get asked about. So this one is a long time coming. The answer to the question of whether or not this is actual Stitzel-Weller bourbon is simple. Yes – this is from the same distillery that started the Van Winkle line. The distillery is known for their wheated bourbon mashbill, which is absent any rye grain. Below are my tasting notes on this old wheater.

Jefferson’s Presidential Select 18 Year Bourbon, Batch 13, 47% abv (94 Proof), $80/bottle
Color: Deep Amber/Copper
Nose: A heady mix of rum soaked dried fruits (raisin, dates), pancake syrup, toasted almonds, caramelized banana, vanilla wafers, old leather, and oak. Air time ramps up the wood influence quite a bit.
Palate: Toffee, fig preserves, vanilla, and heaps of oak and resiny grip.
Finish: Toffee sweetness, rich fruit, and wood make for a marvelous ending.
Overall: Jefferson’s 18 year old bourbon certainly packs a complex and flavorful punch. It’s layered with rich, sweet aromas and flavors. The whiskey drinks its age with a heavy wood influence, but the results can only be described as a superb whiskey. Highly recommended.
Sour Mash Manifesto Rating: 9.2 (Superb/Outstanding)

dansolomon:

This is the sort of thing that I usually find annoying, but I really love how happy DMX is here to be asked to perform “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.” 

“I know the lyrics!” X declares, before doing the preamble that I would have forgotten 100 times out of 100 if someone at gunpoint had insisted I sing this song properly. DMX clearly loves Christmas. 

If the 4.9 million barrels of oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during the 2010 Deep Water Horizon spill was a ecological disaster, the two million gallons of dispersant used to clean it up apparently made it even worse – 52-times more toxic.

Light pollution is often associated with negative effects on wildlife. Now, ecologists have found that by mimicking a perpetual full moon, the gas flares and electrical lighting along Scotland's Forth estuary are helping shorebirds stock up on more food during the winter to fuel their spring migration.

Mr Blobby on The Big Fat Quiz of the 90s (by SC25UK)

This is stupendous, and will make you snortle with joy. (ᔥ The Bloggess)

Dairy farmers protesting in Brussels sprayed thousands of litres of milk on the European Parliament and its police cadre. Shown here, a small thumbnail of a remarkable photo by John Thys for AFP/Getty Images. Click through for the full image, on the Telegraph's site.

Dairy farmers spray milk at the European Parliament in Brussels

One of the most important outstanding problems in astrophysics today concerns the “dark matter problem.” For about forty years now, it has been assumed that the observed dynamical behavior of spiral galaxy disks cannot be explained by canonical Newtonian physics without invoking ‘dark matter’ particles, which make up the majority of a spiral galaxy’s mass, yet are mysteriously invisible. This proves to have been a mistake; a definitive answer to the problem may be found here: < http://GravitySim.net >

An animated film by Max Crow.  I find this kind of visualisation fascinating.  For extra points, the music is by HANDWITHLEGS, who I featured in SPEKTRMODULE 02.

XETROV from Max Crow on Vimeo.

So, I decided to return to this project, and rebuild something new (and hopefully better) out of my solitary Saturn sample. The sample, if you recall, is a recording of the radio noise generated by Saturn’s rotation. This is again based first and foremost on Paulstretch, with some additional manipulation in Adobe Audition. It will loop nicely, if put on repeat. I am hopeful that I have done a better job producing a file that SoundCloud will transcode well, as I was disappointed with the transcoding for “Saturn Rises”.

I’ve designed up some Dr. McNinja related polo shirts that are now on sale!

The raptor bandit.

And the pizza and crossbones, adapted from the Friend Bros’ car.

I know that personally I am going to wear them all the time.

-Christopher

PS: The new book will be on sale in mere weeks.

 

Polos! is a post from: The Adventures of Dr. McNinja

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

Rowland S. Howard: Sleep Alone (by felipe nunez)

This blows my head off just about every time I hear it.