Nautilus shells are thought to demonstrate the golden rectangle at work in nature (image via Wikimedia Commons)
Le Corbusier designed glimmering high-rises while Salvador Dali painted implausible landscapes, yet they had one thing in common: both embraced the golden ratio as gospel and used it in their work. But could it be possible that these two 20th century masters had fallen for nothing more than the art world equivalent of an old wive’s tale?
A recent article published in Fast Companyclaims that’s the case, presenting some convincing evidence from Stanford University mathematician Keith Devlin. But before we take a look, let’s back up to consider what the golden ratio is for those who might be new to the concept.
Merriam-Websterdefines the golden ratio as “a proportion … in which the ratio of the whole to the larger part is the same as the ratio of the larger part to the smaller.” That means that if you unevenly split a line in two, the longer line divided by the shorter one equals the whole length divided by the longer one — mathematically expressed with the value of 1.6180. Translating that for the mathematically un-inclined, a rectangle that fits the golden ratio can be cut up into a square and a smaller rectangle with the exact same proportions as the bigger one.
Anyway, mathematicians and philosophers have long claimed this shape — known as the “golden rectangle” — occurs throughout nature in objects like sea shells and pine cones and appears the most harmonious to the human eye. It’s an appealing idea, one that makes beauty neatly definable.
But Devlin told Fast Company that in actuality, you can actually only find approximations of the golden ratio in the real world, because its unending decimal points (1.6180339887…) render it mathematically an irrational number. So there’s that.
The professor has also conducted numerous experiments in Stanford’s psychology department wherein he asks students to pick out which rectangle they like best out of a diverse group. He said the ones they select are always random and frequently change. If the golden rectangle were really the most pleasing, wouldn’t students choose it every time?
“We’re creatures who are genetically programmed to see patterns and to seek meaning,” Devlin told the magazine. “People think they see the golden ratio around them, in the natural world and the objects they love, but they can’t actually substantiate it.”
The article blames the propagation of the golden rectangle idea on an alleged 18th-century misreading of a 16th-century text. It claims that when Franciscan friar Luca Pacioil published his book De Divina Proportione (1509), he misleadingly named it after the Greek mathematician Euclid’s golden ratio even though the text instead embraced the Roman architect Vitruvius’s system of rational proportions. In 1799, mathematicians falsely associated Pacioli with the golden ratio, which helped propagate the rumor that Leonardo da Vinci — who illustrated the book — used the golden ratio to create his masterpieces.
Then came the German mathematician and psychologist Adolf Zeisig, who took things to a whole new level. He claimed to find evidence of the golden ratio everywhere from plant leaves to animal skeletons to the human body. He believed the ratio represented “beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art … which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical.” Ever since then, the golden ratio as a principle of design has been cited everywhere from art history textbooks to advertisements for beauty masks.
Obviously, you can’t question such accepted wisdom without pushback. Angry Fast Company commenters have dubbed the article “silly” and “snarky,” and the website Golden Number — which claims its purpose is to “help you appreciate the incredible beauty and design in the world around you” — has even published a full rebuttal. It points to how the Parthenon demonstrates the golden rectangle at work and cites other scientific studies that support the concept, including one published in 2009 that shows its usefulness in understanding facial attractiveness.
While the Fast Company piece might not be enough on its own to completely refute the time-honored design principle, it does poke some worrisome holes through it — not to mention expose its status as unquestionable dogma.
That sounds way too expensive... Can we actually afford such an idea?
Now, others have responded to this question conceptually, and I've even recently replied to this question on Huffington Post economically, but I want to take a moment to explain this from a slightly different angle.
I want to describe it through South Park.
In one of my favorite episodes, "Pinewood Derby", alien cops visit Earth in pursuit of an alien criminal. This criminal has a ship full of "space bucks", which are taken and divided among Earth's nations. Mexico then immediately builds a bunch of hospitals and water parks while China builds 48 soccer stadiums.
This of course is very funny, but what's not so funny is that we actually do think this way. We think that money is real and that money is wealth. But it's neither.
Money does not actually exist.
I like to describe its true nature in the same way Alan Watts did, as a tool of measurement like inches. Money is purely a means of calculating and distributing access to resources. The resources are what's real. All the water, air, wind, land, trees, sunlight, minerals, metals, and all the amazing technology we make out of it, and every human body and mind that imagines it and creates it... that's what's real. Money is not. Money is like inches. Looking at it this way, thinking we don't have enough inches doesn't make any sense at all, does it?
Because we thought money was real. People went to work one day and were told to go home because even though they had all the wood they needed, and all the metal, and all the tools, and all the labor, they were simply out of inches.
This delusion continues to this day because it's the system we all exist inside of. We are born into it and thus is extremely difficult to question. Money is money and of course it's real because we hold it in our hands, and receive it in exchange for work. But is it really real?
I love the space bucks analogy, because it's the exact opposite of what happened during the Great Depression. Instead of the resources being unchanged and people producing less, in the South Park episode, countries cranked up production and produced more than ever. They did this despite no change whatsoever in their ability to produce. Space bucks didn't make them richer. They just simply felt richer. The Earth itself gained no new resources, no new technology, no new people. The Earth was just as wealthy as before space bucks arrived. But because Earth felt it got more inches, it built more.
If all the money in the world disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn't matter at all. Nothing would change. All of our actual wealth would be exactly the same as it was before. All of the resources would still be there. All of the people would still be there. All of the technology would still be there. And if we wanted, we could actually let the technology do most all of the work for the people using the resources.
This needs to be better understood. Money is how we measure access to resources, but it is not in itself resources. And it's also all entirely relative. If one country has 10 space bucks divided among 10 people in a way that everyone gets 1, then they all have the exact same access to their resources. If another country with the exact same resources has 100 space bucks divided among 10 people such that one person has all 100 and the rest have 0, then there's one person with all the access to their resources and the other 9 have no access at all. Which is the wealthier nation? The one with 10 space bucks or the one with 100 space bucks?
Both nations have the exact same resources so the question is irrelevant.
However, the one with fewer space bucks is arguably a better place to live because each person has 10% access to the total amount of resources, whereas the one with 100 space bucks only gives 1 person 100% access. I don't think that person can be considered lucky either, because he's kind of likely to get a pitchfork to the face.
So when it comes to this question of having enough space bucks for basic income, we should look at it as a pretty silly question. Space bucks? Space bucks are imaginary. The question is "Do we have the resources for basic income?" Do we have the technology for basic income? Do we have the people for basic income?
Our GDP (which does not even measure our entire economic output) is measured in our space bucks as being over $17 trillion and the additional cost of a $1,000 per month basic income requires about 8% of that. Is that really too high a percentage of our total capability here in the "greatest country on Earth?" Especially if we also consider the fact that the aggregate burden of crime is also about 8% of GDP and the economic cost of child poverty alone is about 6% of GDP? If we recognize those costs and all the others, we're actually spending more of our resources not having basic income, than we would be if we already had it.
Meanwhile, the current distribution of our total access to resources via space bucks looks like this, with essentially one person actually having all the space bucks, and therefore all the access.
So the answer is quite simple.
Yes, we have enough space bucks.
But do we have the will to feel like we have enough space bucks, as Mexico and China displayed in a silly episode of South Park? Will we provide ourselves universally a minimum amount of unconditional access to our total resources for the purposes of securing equal opportunity and unleashing human creative freedom in a quickly technologically advancing world?
Having read this, if you'd really like to dive into the idea of money itself, and happen to have an extra four hours or so, I recommend watching, "Understanding Money."
Roy Lichtenstein, “Live Ammo (‘Tzing’)” (1962) (all images courtesy the Grand Palais unless otherwise noted)
PARIS — During springtime in Paris, one frequently meets beaming American newlyweds on their honeymoon. That identifiable “lovers on cloud 9” scenario pretty well sums up American Icons: Masterworks from SFMOMA and the Fisher Collectionat the Grand Palais. No snark intended. Curated by Gary Garrels, it is a tasteful, modestly sized show of postwar painting and sculpture that merely demonstrates what the works will look like in their new home in San Francisco, where its Museum of Modern Art has forged a partnership with the Fisher Collection to house and display its massive collection in a new Snøhetta-designed building in 2016. In 2007 the Fishers announced plans to build a museum of their own in the San Francisco Presidio to house the art collection. However, the plan stirred opposition from historic preservationists and was canceled. American Icons includes a fraction of the 1,100 works by 185 artists from that collection. On view are only a few (14) of these artists, including wonderful well-known paintings and sculptures by Americans.
The Fishers started collecting art in the 1970s with fine art prints from Gemini or Tyler Graphics and hung them in an office building for Gap, the retail company the couple co-founded in 1969. Eventually they added paintings, sculpture, drawings, photographs, and other media by American and European artists that were obtained from the likes of Paula Cooper, Mary Boone, Marian Goodman, André Emmerich, Pace, and Anthony d’Offay. These buying binges brought in key examples of first wave Pop Art, Minimalism, Abstraction, Figurative Art, and Color Field painting.
The Fisher Collection is narrow but deep, with often 40 or more pieces by a single artist, such as Gerhard Richter (47), Ellsworth Kelly (45), Alexander Calder (40), Sol LeWitt (40), and Andy Warhol (20). The artists presented here each get either an entire gallery devoted to their work or share a very large gallery with another artist to mutual benefit. The artists are all blue-chip white males (but one): Calder, Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol, LeWitt, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Richard Diebenkorn, Brice Marden, Cy Twombly, Chuck Close, Philip Guston, and Agnes Martin.
Calder, who first moved to Paris for a time in 1926 and settled in France in 1962 at Indre-et-Loire, opens the show with four delightful Joan Miró-influenced works from the 1940s and ‘50s, including “Tower with Painting” (1951). These early abstract experiments with motion and balance show perfectly his engineering skills mixed with his artistic sensibility for machine-like, playful design.
The following gallery is devoted to Kelly, where I was very impressed with his early painting “Cité” (1951). It is a piece made of movable parts, constructed using chance operations, and is very much influenced by his meeting Jean Arp while living in Paris from 1948 to 1954. “Cité” came from a dream Kelly had and is constructed of twenty joined wood panels whose abutting edges amplify the flickering rhythm of the painted stripes. The work reflects Kelly’s belief that his paintings are objects, while his other earlier work on display, “Spectrum I” (1953), explores the retinal aspects of the color spectrum.
Ellsworth Kelly, “Cité” (1951)
Following a group of typically free-form Cy Twombly paintings, there are a number of very beautiful canvases by Richard Diebenkorn and Philip Guston that have been juxtaposed in a room of sensual painting. Besides the Matisse-influenced “Ocean Park #54″ (1972), there are two sensational gushy paintings by Diebenkorn from 1955, “Berkeley #23” and “Berkeley #47,” that took me by surprise. Guston’s distinctive abstract painting for his wife, “For M.” (1955), a fracas of pink brushtrokes, is intelligently positioned next to his much more unrestrained, “Evidence” (1970), a painting that bridges the abstract and representational — conflicting positions that were much in debate during the early ‘70s, thereby bringing decades of theoretical combatants to their knees.
Philip Guston. “Evidence” (1970)
Then the show cools way down with a big gallery containing three Donald Judd stacks, including the terrific horizontal “To Susan Buckwalter” (1964), some Carl Andre floor sculptures, and two delicate wall drawings by Sol LeWitt, “Wall Drawing 1: Drawing Series II 18 (A & B)” (1968) and “January 2002, Wall Drawing 1A: Drawing Series II 18 (A & B)” (2002).
The show climaxes with an enormous Andy Warhol gallery, particularly with Warhol’s two silver chefs-d’oeuvres, “Silver Marlon” (1963) and “National Velvet” (1963). Of course, it is with Warhol where the term “Icon” in the title of the show is appropriate, as he piggybacks on Hollywood movie stars’ promotional material, rendering stud Marlon Brando and cute Liz Taylor as flickering, glamorous, almost devotional images that appear to fade and deteriorate, suggesting the need to be stoic in the face of death. For all those who see art as message, that room attempts to approximate the misty, complex world of media.
Detail Andy Warhol of Andy Warhol’s “National Velvet” (1963), silkscreen ink, graphite, and silver paint on linen (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
If you follow the path that moves historically through the exhibit, it closes with a hat trick of Brice Marden noodle-like line paintings, a shining pair of classic Dan Flavins, and three large Agnes Martin meditations on tonality. Quality all the way down.
The ‘60s-heavy artwork holdings that span two mega-collections are impeccable and impeccably installed. If there is a fault, it is that the exhibit lacks the punch of doubt. Only Warhol’s work continues to conceptualize doubtful, fragile questions: Is this painting? Is this printmaking? Is this rip-off? Is fame worth it? Everything else in American Icons is a Masterwork that projects one aspect or another of assured American self-confidence. The show has a professional polish, conveying a sense of mastery and assurance that doesn’t quite mesh with dusty, existential Paris. It reminds me of what André Malraux said about culture: that it is not inherited, but won through individual efforts against bureaucratic culture. In that sense, American Icons reminds us that art in context matters.
Trans people should be celebrated, no matter how they look, and especially if they don’t fit a stereotypical standard of beauty. This sentiment inspired Tumblr user Crystal (rambleonamazon) to create a template for trans individuals everywhere to create their own Caitlyn Jenner-esque Vanity Fair covers. Using the hashtag #MyVanityFairCover, they could “show the world the myriad faces of the trans community.” And plenty of people took on the challenge.
“It is outrageous that our democratically elected governments will not tell us the laws they are making. What has our democracy come to when the community must rely on WikiLeaks to find out what our governments are doing on our behalf?”
MoMA employees protesting outside the museum on Tuesday (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
A demonstration on Tuesday by workers at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) did little to advance negotiations between a union representing over 200 employees at the institution and museum administrators, who are maintaining their call for a cut to employee healthcare coverage. MoMA and Local 2110 of the United Auto Workers have until June 20 to negotiate a new contract for the union members employed by the museum. The workers’ five-year contract expired on May 20, but the museum and union agreed to extend it one month in order to resolve the dispute over the proposed healthcare cuts.
Danny Fermon, a longtime MoMA employee and member of Local 2110’s negotiating committee, told Hyperallergic today that no progress was made at Wednesday’s meeting with the museum, in spite of the previous night’s protest — timed to coincide with MoMA’s Party in the Garden, one of its biggest annual fundraising galas. He expects there will need to be more demonstrations like Tuesday’s before the museum hears its workers’ plea. A spokesperson for MoMA, meanwhile, declined to comment on the outcome of Wednesday’s negotiations, but reiterated “that the Museum remains committed to providing fair and equitable compensation and healthcare for its employees, and that we are working toward a positive outcome for all concerned.”
As both sides dig in for more negotiation sessions over the next two weeks, MoMA’s Local 2110 members are making ingenious use of social media to call attention to their plight far beyond 53rd Street. Through the Instagram account @MoMALocal2110, the employees are offering brief profiles of the union members, each accompanied by a portrait and occasionally a pun or joke incorporating an artwork on view at the museum. The account, run jointly by a group of MoMA workers, helps to put faces, names, and stories to the often murky business of organized labor and contract negotiation.
Periodically Hyperallergic delves into the video archives of the internet to present a daylong series we’ve named after the 1983 classic Canadian sci-fi film by David Cronenberg, Videodrome.
Sit back, relax, and let us plumb the depths for the fascinating, colorful, weird, insightful, and beautiful. Long live the new flesh!
Another great thing about bestiaries is they’ve produced some of the least seductive merpeople in western art history. Just merpeople doing normal merpeople things.
[Warning: this post contains nominal breasts. Breast-like objects? They don’t really resemble human anatomy, but they are there.]
Merpeople sensibly dressed:
Merpeople out for leisurely swims, waving at neighbours:
Choosing between two options at the store:
[The expressions here are amazing. Those aren’t worried men in a boat, those are guys going “seriously, again?”]
At band practice:
Bowling:
Getting ripped:
And doing standard 9-5 mermaid work:
Look at those expressions of soul-crushing boredom. No one involved is enjoying this.
In 1895, brothers Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas and Louis Jean Lumière patented their cinematograph — a hand-cranked motion-picture camera inside a wooden box that weighed 16 pounds — and shot their first film on it, of workers leaving the Lumière factory. A century later, Philippe Poulet of the Museum of Cinema in Lyon restored the Lumières’ original cinematograph and gave it, in turn, to 41 directors, each of whom was invited to shoot a short film on it. The conditions: no longer than 52 seconds, no synchronized sound, and no more than three takes.
The resulting films — collected under the title Lumière and Company — are short, poetic riffs on the nature of narrative, often fleeting meditations on the age-old cinematic question of reality versus fiction (Roger Ebert called them “haiku.”) One of them, by French director Alain Corneau, does this particularly gracefully: it is a single, silent take of a female gypsy dancer. As she twirls and turns her wrists and flutters her arms with expert precision, her dress and veil and pants change color, shifting from subtle turquoise to bright yellow and magenta. The color was all done by hand, with Corneau (or an assistant) hand-tinting the film, and it changes at just the right moments, electrifying the dancer when she pauses for just a fraction of a second. This is live, Corneau seems to say, it’s documentary and it’s real — but it’s also mine, and you’ll never know what kinds of artificial details I’ve added.
For a less subtle but equally entertaining take on the same issue, watch David Lynch’s amazingly creepy contribution to the project.
Today I have been single for longer than I was together with MFP. We were together 1 year, 1 month, 11 days. It’s now been 1 year, 1 month, 12 days since I broke up with her (though it was much earlier than that things were falling apart, sadly.)
I’m lonely.
I’m horny.
I’m stressed out and frustrated and homeless, and the last few times that I’ve had a glimmer of hope that things might go somewhere with a girl, it’s ended horribly.
One chick who was crushing madly on me and when we sat down to have a talk about “where do we wanna go with ‘us” from here” she realized that me just being me was going to bring up childhood trauma for her, and she cut things off. Another woman who brought me back to her place and then stopped returning my messages after the sex was mediocre at best, didn’t even have the decency to say “hey, this isn’t going to work.” Another woman recently was totally into me, making a point of how much she wanted to hang out and get closer… and then told me to fuck off and get a sense of humor because I had the gall to say, “actually, that ‘joke’ is kinda mean and it hurts my feelings.” And just before I met her, there was the amazing lady who spent a good chunk of a night out at the club smooshing my face against her tits and both of us enjoying her having me as a service submissive… and then a few days later I got a threatening message from her boyfriend telling me to stop “harassing” her, or else. Still no fucking clue what happened with that situation.
And so when there’s the possibility of a connection, I don’t even really want to put myself out there, because it’s hard to feel like it’ll be any different from all the other times before. I need my heart held, my body connected with another, mutually pleasurable sex and pain and whatever… but I’m scared that I’ll have my heart torn and dropped, my body remembering the touch of someone long gone, lousy sex (if any sex) and the only pain coming from “goodbye.” And there’s a fine, fine line between that and “you’re wonderful” — I just keep finding myself on the wrong side of that line.
Finding good mental health help is already really challenging when you’re in the best possible social position to access it. Poverty, disability, racial and cultural factors, physical access, regional access, gender and sexual prejudice, stigma, language… these are just a few of the roadblocks in the way of accessing effective mental health services.
There are a number of reasons why we should not shame people who do not engage with mental health professionals, the least of which is that a significant portion of people with mental illness are simply unable to access those services.
A core tenant of activism is the idea of autonomy and self determination - this means we must work to remove these barriers to treatment so that those who want to engage with a mental health support system are able to do so. While we should respect those who chose not to access those services, it is most important that everyone get that choice.
Focusing on the actual labor conditions of the nations we are encouraging companies to move American jobs to in this agreement certainly can’t hurt. I rarely agree with Bob Menendez about much of anything concerning American foreign policy, but his recent conversion to including minimal labor standards like not engaging in human trafficking is welcome. The recent discovery of mass graves at human trafficking camps on the Malaysia-Thailand border has convinced him that Malaysia should be dropped from the TPP. Given that it is one of the most important nations in it, evicting Malaysia would be a very big deal and would set precedents for nations to uphold labor standards in trade deals that could be expanded to include more stringent policies on goods that will then be sold in the United States.
It’s a hard fight, but we have to try anything to kill the TPP.
The Obama administration expanded the NSA's ability to collect Americans' internet data in 2012, with absolutely no notice to the public, The New York Times reports. The Justice Department issued two memos, in secret, to the NSA allowing the agency t...
Years ago when I worked at a house of domination in NYC’s Chelsea district, there were a handful of clients who were memorable for breaking up the run-of-the-mill fetish (foot worship, spanking, bondage, role playing, repeat) monotony. One was a dude I never saw, but only heard about whenever one of the few Mistresses capable of handling his fantasy would dip out of the emotionally exhausting session to vent in the dressing room. As far as I know he was our only client who spent his high-priced hour rhapsodizing about killing and eating his relatives.
While this man was certainly unusual, even within the grand unusual scheme of S&M, no one at our dungeon thought to report him to any authorities. No one believed for a minute that he was seriously capable of feasting on his wife. Not even when he brought in a live duck in a cage, requesting to slaughter it during an upcoming session. (Fortunately, an animal-loving dominatrix rescued the poor bird, and later spun a ridiculous tale about how it had somehow escaped when no one was looking.) If anything, the cannibal client was a source of exasperation and amusement, not a perceived threat to society.
I thought of this client while watching the recent HBO documentary Thought Crimes, filmmaker Erin Lee Carr’s portrait of Gil Valle, a NYC police officer better known as “The Cannibal Cop” after Valle’s online life became the subject of a criminal conspiracy investigation. The unassuming Valle, it seems, spent his downtime chatting with like-minded cannibal fantasists on the Dark Fetish Network about abducting, torturing, and cooking his wife and female friends. When his wife ultimately uncovered the horrifying details via the spyware she’d installed on her husband’s computer, she promptly went to the NYPD, terrified for her life. This, in turn, set into motion an arrest and a tabloid free-for-all—and led to more questions than answers. Though Valle never laid a finger (let alone a utensil) on anyone, he faced a life sentence for what he swore was strictly anonymous musings. Yet like with kiddie porn—in which downloading can often get a pedophile more jail time than can actually molesting a child—the Internet has proven fertile ground for both freedom of thought and judicial prosecution.
But also like with child porn—in which real kids in staged photos have been harmed—Valle despicably crossed a line. While I truly believe that Dark Fetish Network served as a “safe” space akin to a BDSM dungeon for Valle—and that the majority of folks who visit fetish sites and houses of domination have no intention of ever acting on their most extreme fantasies in real life—he did do the equivalent of bringing in a duck: involving an actual sentient being in a nonconsensual context. Valle is guilty of unconscionable stupidity—not conspiracy—for researching one of his fantasy victims via the police database. In doing so he infringed on the privacy of a real human being.
In the end, illegal use of a police database is rightly the only charge that stuck in “The Cannibal Cop” case—after a long and arduous, Kafkaesque journey through the legal system for Valle, that even included a judge’s unusual overturning of a jury sentence. Watching Thought Crimes, I couldn’t help but think that if that original jury had been made up of a dozen dominatrices, thousands of taxpayer dollars could have been saved, just like that one lucky duck.
Here's the logo for Senator Ted Cruz's campaign for the Republican nomination for President:
Let's focus in a little on that flame:
It could be sharper, but, you know, for the sake of argument. Now, in that form, the Rude Pundit glanced at it and thought, "Huh. That looks familiar. Like the symbol for natural gas." It was time for a few precious seconds on the Google machine.
Here's one of the flame symbols for natural gas:
And for the sake of comparison, here's Cruz's flame with the color taken down a great deal (and, no, the Rude Pundit is no Photoshop expert):
Huh. That's...interesting
Of course, it could be a coincidence. You know, there are many three-curve symbols for fire. But most are certainly different enough not to be confused.
Perhaps the truth here is that Cruz wants you to associate him with natural gas, a kind of pro-fossil fuel statement. Or maybe it's all unintentional and we should just laugh at gasbag Cruz and this ironic karmic comeuppance.
But it is definitely just on the other side of "curious."
Was I being too negative the other day when I said that the TSA failed security tests 95.7% of the time? I should acknowledge that this was a 4.3% success rate. In other words, over four percent of the time, TSA security works every time.
Even though this was a dramatic improvement over past results, DHS secretary Jeh Johnson said Monday that effective immediately, acting TSA administrator Melvin Carraway was being "reassigned." Some speculate that this had something to do with the agency's spectacular failure to do anything useful more than 4.3% of the time, but the announcement didn't say that. The critics are overlooking the fact that Johnson did not make this decision right after the TSA failed the tests, which were conducted more than a week ago. He made it right after the media reported that the TSA failed the tests. So the timing is probably just coincidence.
Johnson took the position that because the test results are "preliminary" (they're not) and "classified" (though everybody knows them), "it is not appropriate or prudent to publicly describe these results." Okay then. He did, though, also announce a series of actions that appear to be designed to reassure Americans that although airport security has not improved 14 years and $70 billion since 9/11, that is all about to change. Here's what he announced (as paraphrased by me):
TSA will develop procedures to deal with the tactics that just worked (and so won't be used again).
TSA will also train its employees to use the procedures it develops to deal with the tactics that just worked (and so won't be used again).
TSA will make sure all airport security directors know the results of the tests they just failed, in case they don't read any news at all.
TSA will "re-test and re-evaluate" its screening equipment. Again.
Johnson will personally meet with the guys who run the screening-equipment companies to make sure they know that equipment is supposed to work. Granted, they are pretty much all former DHS or TSA officials, but one more meeting should get the point across.
The people who did the random covert testing will keep doing that. (The official ones, not the ones who do it unofficially every day.)
There will be a committee, and it will report to him every other week.
TSA will ensure that screening equipment is "up to the highest possible standards." This is the same as number four, except DHS & TSA will also "examine adopting new technologies" to deal with the tactics that just worked (and so won't be used again). As with the old technologies, these won't help, but they will make those former DHS & TSA officials who now make screening equipment very wealthy.
Here's the thing: this is all a wild overreaction because the bad guys are not nearly as smart as our testers are. At least, that's what the TSA has claimed in the past after similar failures. In fact, the testers are like ... well, they're like super-terrorists:
In a 2013 hearing on Capitol Hill, then-TSA administrator John Pistole described the Red Team as “super terrorists," who know precisely which weaknesses to exploit.
“[Testers] know exactly what our protocols are. They can create and devise and conceal items that … not even the best terrorists would be able to do,” Pistole told lawmakers at a House hearing.
He said this less than a month after a test in which the only fake super-terrorist the TSA was able to catch was a man carrying a doll with "quite obvious" wires sticking out of it. I guess I'd agree with him that the best terrorists would not come up with something like that. I'm just not reassured by it.
Child-tormenting psychopath Stinson Hunter keeps getting away with it.
Months have passed since the estimable Bernie Najarian posted evidence on BoyChat, extensively referenced, of Hunter’s sadistic online “griefing” of kids. But instead of being exposed in the media for the nauseating bully he is, Hunter continues to be feted as a star vigilante who takes down “paedophiles” through online stings leading to successful prosecutions for dubious “crimes”.
In the most recent case, a man with no previous convictions currently awaits sentence for the heinous offence of trying to date “a 14-year-old boy” (actually Hunter) who had been using Grindr. As described in a Daily Mail report of the case, Grindr is a “mobile dating application”. The emphasis is mine, and it is surely worth emphasising that no teenager using this popular app would be unaware of its purpose, which is described upfront on its website as being to find “local gay, bi and curious guys for dating or friends for free”. In other words it would be used by gay boys actively looking for gay people to meet. They would hardly be surprised to encounter adult guys online: this would very likely be an exciting prospect, exactly what they were hoping for.
Hunter’s method is for his vigilante gang to pose online as an underage boy or girl. Once anyone takes the bait, sending explicit messages or images to the minor, the gang lure their mark to a meeting. Their victim is then filmed with handheld cameras and mobile phones and told to explain himself. The messages and footage are handed to police, resulting in some ten convictions so far, following filmed confrontations with dozens of men.
These activities have not gone entirely without criticism, notably after 45-year-old Michael Parkes, filmed by Hunter, hanged himself last year after being questioned by police on suspicion of arranging to meet someone he thought was a 12-year-old girl for sex. This came after Parkes was confronted by Hunter, and footage of the encounter was uploaded to the internet.
Hunter was taxed on ITV’s The James O’Brien Show with causing this suicide. Said host O’Brien:
“A man is dead because of what you did.”
“No,” Hunter shot back, “a man is dead because of what he did.”
It won him a big round of applause from the studio audience.
His quick-fire self-assurance, buoyed by the knowledge that empathy is not exactly a fashionable buzz word when applied to sex offenders (it is urged upon them but not for them), is just one aspect of his striking talents.
These extend to a flair for self-promotion, revealed in two astute decisions. Firstly, he rebranded himself from mild-sounding Keiren Parsons to predatory Stinson Hunter; and then he self-financed what became a roaringly successful vigilante documentary, The Paedophile Hunter, screened on Channel 4 in 2014. It won the 33-year-old Hunter, and director Dan Reed, the Best Single Documentary category at the Royal Television Programme Awards. Hunter now has well over half a million Facebook followers and earlier this year scooped two BAFTAs.
Not bad for a heavily-tattooed former heroin addict with face furniture (a lip ring) who, if his Wikipedia entry is correct, was expelled from three different schools as a kid and ended up burning one of them down; and who, after being jailed for this arson offence, managed to make a mess of a fellow inmate’s face with a plastic knife he had sharpened.
Arguably there is much to admire in the fact that Hunter has managed to “turn his life around”, as the cliché has it, from such an unpromising start. His fans surely think so, at least: where heretics here might see a vicious destroyer of other people, they presumably see an unlikely sort of modern knight, courageously riding to the rescue of kids in danger.
If so, they are right about one thing. It takes balls to confront those who are bound to be angered by the accusations he makes. A couple of years ago Hunter suffered broken bones and was in hospital for a week when one of those he was confronting ran into him with his car. I say this not to sympathise (though I am so shit-soft I find it hard to wish harm on anyone at all) but, rather, to note that the old adage linking bullying to cowardice is just not true. True psychopaths, as I believe Hunter to be, are often as reckless over their own welfare as they are callous towards others.
It is one of several aspects of his behaviour which, when taken together, indicate that far from being admirably brave in the selfless defence of others he is instead a dangerous psycho: far from keeping kids from danger he has shown a taste and a talent – yet another talent of this perversely gifted man – for wilfully and skilfully (using demonically manipulative verbal tactics) causing them emotional distress for his own pleasure.
As noted above, Bernie Najarian has set out the evidence. He tells us that Hunter, last year, “actively pursued a hobby called ‘griefing,’ a kind of publicized internet pranking, where his favorite activity was to invade the digital fantasy worlds of young boys in the online game Minecraft, and set fire to their digital buildings.” After reading Najarian’s account I watched one of the videos to which he linked, which was just as he described, and just as appalling, and I saw plenty of other online evidence to indicate Hunter’s active involvement. It could all be faked but I doubt it. You can do what I did and make your own judgement.
This all began with a video by an acknowledged associate of Hunter, Michael Donald of Dunfermline, Scotland. Donald is a dedicated internet trickster who styles himself KillerKarrit, with a YouTube channel sporting a carrot logo, and Michael the Dug. Why does he do it? In the words of his own candid admission “because I’m a cunt”.
Friendly users of games such as Minecraft invite other members of the player community into their worlds to game with them. They are hosts. It’s like inviting someone into your home: you don’t expect your guests to trash the place after you have painstakingly built it, a task that may have taken a lot of time and thought. Thus the arrival of a gang of virtual thugs bent on destruction is bound to come as a grievous shock, packing an emotional wallop not that different to a street mugging where you get smacked around and robbed of your smart-phone.
But it seems there are no specific laws against the aptly-named “griefing”, so lots of “cunts” have taken to this appalling new hobby like ducks to water. Like other forms of trolling it is just out there, quite openly, an ugly but inevitable aspect of free online expression. The openness, indeed, is part of the “fun”: griefing involves recording the gleeful destruction and the victim’s shocked reactions, then posting the resulting videos online so lots of other “cunts” can have a good laugh and admire the thugs’ style.
So Stinson Hunter, the real life arsonist, has recently been getting his kicks by burning down kids’ virtual buildings online. There’s a striking behavioural echo there, for sure. It’s not the flames that matter though but the pain. As Najarian put it:
“A supposed protector of online children spends his spare time causing pain and suffering to online children by trashing their video game constructions. It’s sickening.”
There has been a development, though. Whereas last year Cunt Carrot and Stinson Cunter were posting evidence of their dastardly deeds with much the same misplaced pride as the Islamist terrorists flaunt their beheading videos, it now seems belatedly to have dawned on Hunter that trashing kids’ games would also trash his image as a child protector if it were to become more widely known. His child-tormenting videos on the KillerKarrit and Stinson Hunter Youtube channels have been withdrawn; and it seems Hunter was behind complaints that resulted in at least one copy being taken down after it was posted elsewhere.
But maybe he need not worry too much. As Bernie Najarian concluded in March, and he hasn’t been proved wrong since:
“In this rolling atmosphere of witch-hunt, it is very unlikely that the news that Stinson Hunter is part of a gang that regularly torments 12-year-old boys for fun will make any impact. The matter has already been ignored for months. The whole tenor of the nation now is to omit such inconveniences from consciousness and to crown the pedophile stalker with laurel wreaths.”
Quite so, Bernie! That’s the way of the world, sadly, and certainly the way of our cowardly, lying national media in the UK!
A DECENT NEW FILM BY DAVID KENNERLY
There’s a fantastic new film out today but I have a bit of a problem if I try to big it up too much. It’s the greatest thing you’ll ever see but I can’t say so on account of an embarrassing personal detail, namely that I have an – ahem, excuse me – starring role! So that’s why I am mentioning it only down-page rather than giving it top billing. On this occasion I am quite happy to play second fiddle even to Stinson Hunter!
The real star of A Decent Life: The Dissenting Narrative of Tom O’Carroll, is the director, David Kennerly, who has miraculously managed to turn the pig’s ear of my discarded interview last year for Testimony Films into the silk purse of a 11-part, all-singing, all-dancing (well, not by me!) epic, which is launched today and can be seen on YouTube. The segments are each just a few minutes long, hence easily viewed at separate sittings, while the complete work is a little over 68 minutes.
He studied at film school and has been involved professionally in film production. I didn’t know this background, but when he was liaising with me to make A Decent Life (his title not mine, in case you’re wondering, and I like it) it became obvious to me he has the relevant skills.
David first went to work on the audio of the Testimony Films interview last year, producing Stitching Up Steve Humphries, Humphries being the guy who conducted an interview on behalf of Testimony, which, in the light of what happened later, appears to have been designed to stitch me up as the interviewee. In making his pitch to me, Humphries had come across as a very sympathetic figure, emphasising his background as a social historian, and his interest in hearing a diverse range of views on sexuality, including mine.
The interview was to be part of a documentary on paedophilia he was making for Channel 4 called The Paedophile New Door. When this was aired, however – without any footage from his interview with me – it became overwhelmingly clear his position had all along been fundamentally hostile to mine. It looks as though he ditched my contribution because he had failed to trick me into saying anything that would discredit me: his would-be stitch-up had unravelled.
What David did was to turn the tables on Humphries, stringing together the audio of all his questions but without giving a word of my responses. This cleverly exposed his stitch-up tactics for what they were.
In A Decent Life, by contrast, he has done the exact opposite. This time we hear not a peep from Humphries. Instead, he has given full rein to my responses without them being butchered to quote me out of context or otherwise discredit my contribution.
I like the result and I hope you will. If you agree A Decent Life is a good film, please Tweet about it or give it a plug wherever you can, online via the social media or elsewhere. Thanks!
I first saw a video of Maya Plisetskaya dancing when she died early last month. Though I grew up going to the ballet with some frequency, and took lessons for eight years, lately I’ve been bored by it. The gestures, generally speaking, do not move me. They feel overdone, maybe even out-of-date. Or it could just be that I haven’t been seeing the right ballets, or that my cheap, back-row seats haven’t allowed me the intimate view that a dance benefits from. So was my thinking when watching Plisetskaya on the screen, dancing The Dying Swan at age 61.
Plisetskaya, born in Moscow in 1925, danced for the Bolshoi Ballet during Stalinist rule, and continued to dance for the company through the 1980s. In light of Wendy Whelan’s recent retirement from the New York City Ballet, unwillingly, it seemed, at age 47, it’s still impressive and hopeful to see Plisetskaya dancing with such spirit in Tokyo in 1986.
The lighting of the Tokyo performance is notably low, drawing modest attention to Plisetskaya’s silvery, slender figure on the impenetrable black stage. Still, her rubbery arms ripple out like waves, as if boneless. Her legs sharply pick up off the floor, her neck gracefully elongating in place, as the light, nimble creature she’s embodied finds its way in the dark. Tchaikovsky’s wavering low notes build gracefully and painfully to a shrill before gradually descending again. As the music’s pace picks up, so do Plisetskaya’s feet. Panicking, she turns in circles, her arms flapping up and down. She gives into the floor, her arms now weakly fluttering and her head bowing to her knees. After being in her presence for only less than four minutes, I have the aching sense that a being so full with life has been lost.
On Saturday, I saw a flyer taped to one of those green lamp post boxes outside of Scratch Bread in Bed-Stuy advertising “Cat Hair Pills.”
The poster’s body copy read:
“Cat hair pills available. Made from the finest hair of organic, free-range cats with only occasional antibiotic usage. Two cat choices available, please specify which cat you prefer.”
That was all there was by way of explanation. The poster raised a lot of questions for me, such as: Why would anyone want a capsule stuffed with cat hair? What does one do with a cat hair pill? Does it cost money? Is this a joke? Why am I having such a hard time understanding something as simple as “Cat Hair Pills?”
Photo: Cat Hair Pills
I tore off a slip of paper with a phone number and email address for ordering. On Monday morning, I emailed inquiring about the pills. A few hours later, I received a reply informing me that since I’m a member of the press, the cat hair dealer, who declined to identify him or herself, would provide me with a sample from both Cat A and Cat B. “Please reply with your preferred pick-up neighborhood and I will consult our distribution database for an ideal location,” the fuzzy pharmacist wrote.
I wrote back with my location. A little while after that, the fur-slinger wrote back with instructions on how to pick up my pills. I was to go to a cafe in Bed-Stuy and tell the barista I had lost my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cup. The cup would be green with “George W.” written on the lid in permanent marker. My samples would be inside. I was instructed not to discuss Cat Hair Pills with the staff of the cafe due to HIPAA regulations.
The retrieval of the pills went as planned. So I am now the owner of two large pills stuffed with cat hair. I asked the pharmacist what I should do with them, and he or she wrote back, “Tell your friends and family! God bless.” I tried a different angle, asking what’s my prescription. “Entirely up to you, fellow Cat Hair Pil-grim,” my new spiritual guide answered.
I don’t know what to do with them. My friends have suggested swallowing them, using them to assassinate an allergic enemy, feeding them to my own cat, or snorting the hair.
Photo: Cat Hair Pills
The creator won’t tell me why the pills exist or who he or she is. I asked “why are you doing this?” and he or she responded “I just knew there had to be a better way.” I suppose this is a situation where it’s better to just embrace the mystery. If you want cat hair pills of your own, email cathairpills@gmail.com or call the Cat Hair Hotline at (724) 426-6691.
The Obama administration expanded the NSA's ability to collect Americans' internet data in 2012, with absolutely no notice to the public, The New York Times reports. The Justice Department issued two memos, in secret, to the NSA allowing the agency t...
