Sophianotloren

Make no mistake, child sex and the trafficking of children in Cambodia is a business.

But not in the way we are lead to believe. Here are the components of this business, that are brought together in Cambodia;

Children
It is widely accepted that Asian children follow the instructions of adults, and especially authorities.
If a child is pressured to make a false statement by a NGO or a room full of police – you will get a false statement.
There are no controls in place.

Foreign men
Foreign men are targeted by NGOs because we are lead to believe that any single, man in an Asian country is a sex tourist.
The worlds press feed off and sensationalise any allegation of child sexual abuse and as a result, the conviction is by media – not by the courts.
The benefit for NGOs such as APLE is a wave of donations.
So, in violation of local laws, stories are pushed out to the media at every opportunity, and the presumption of innocence is lost.

Corruption
Cambodia is ranked, by Transparency, as one of the most corrupt countries on the planet at 160th of 177.

It is this corruption that enables some 30 child sex NGOs and hundreds of orphanages to exist, yet there are fewer than 5 child sex convictions here during an average year.

Khmer Rouge
We are lead to believe that Cambodia is a war torn country, suffering from the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge atrocities some 35 years ago.
This perception is exploited by corrupt NGOs who wish to live off donor funding.
The truth is that Cambodia is one of the fastest growing countries in Asia, with only the issue of corruption preventing faster growth.
The majority of the thousands of children held captive in NGO orphanages, are not orphans. They are just a commodity, prisoners. Trafficked by NGOs for foreign donations.

No NGO laws
There are no laws to regulate NGOs in Cambodia. They can operate without regulation, accountability, inspection or reporting.
These NGOs hold thousands of children in protective custody. But protection from who?
To illustrate the NGO regulation issue, there are around 3,000 NGOs in Cambodia for a population of 15 million.
This is far higher than the number of NGOs in regulated India, with a population of 1.25 billion.
This is around 1 NGO for every 10,000 Khmers.

A heaven for. ..NGOs
A quote from a speech by Prime Minister, Hun Sen.
“Cambodia has been heaven for NGOs for too long,” he said in a speech broadcast on national radio on September 26, adding that he had given up hope of reading any positive reports written by international or local NGOs. “The NGOs are out of control … they insult the government just to ensure their financial survival.”

Source : Asia Times – http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/JK14Ae02.html

Corrupt courts
The courts, like the majority of authorities in Cambodia are under funded and corrupt.
Money is used by NGOs to influence the outcome of verdicts. This is clear by the number of highly unsafe convictions.
To a corrupt NGOs such as APLE, these court payments are seen as a cost of business, to secure further donations.

The public
The immediate reaction of the average person is that child protection NGOs must be a good cause.
Few would believe that donations could be misused for bribing authorities.
But the main issue is that most members of the public are unwilling to look beneath the headlines.
Fear and social compliance means that it is incredibly rare for anyone to look into an individual case – even close friends.
Is this justice?

Social media
During a recent book launch, the renowned law author, John Grisham made a comment regarding the possibility that some men, who have been branded pedophiles, may have in fact come across underage pornography by accident.
Mr Grisham would be as qualified as anyone to have an opinion on a controversial legal topic, especially as many of his books have involved social taboos.
But despite our claims of freedom of speech, Mr Grisham faced a torrent of abuse and criticism on social media.
He was forced to take back his comments and to issue an alternative statement, that was on message.

The business model
The complete business model can claim to protect children from sexual abuse.

This does result in false convictions.

This does result in imprisoned children.

This is extortion and human trafficking.

So in a country so endemic with corruption, where police and courts openly demand corrupt payments and where thousands of “orphans” are held for profit.

Do you really beleive that NGOs such as APLE are using donor funds for child protection?

Government conspiracy
The governments of the West are complicit in the unlawful activities of these NGOs in Cambodia.
We are lead to believe that every single man is a paedophile and an immediate danger to children.
The British government is aware of the endemic corruption by NGOs such as APLE in Cambodia.
They are also aware of the failures of the criminal justice system, having recently donated GBP 500,000 to the Khmer Rouge tribunal, in order for a few Khmer nationals to receive a fair trial.

The United Nations Childrens Emergency Fund (UNICEF), is an established, well regarded organisation, which operates in a large number of countries worldwide.

To get a balanced view of the current emergencies in Cambodia, visit the UNICEF website;

http://www.unicef.org/cambodia/activities.html

The UNICEF priorities include;

– child protection
– education
– health and nutrition
– HIV and aids
– local governance
– social protection
– water and sanitation

While it comes under a general heading of child protection, sexual exploitation, does not headline above.

So what about child protection?

The UNICEF website details the following situation in Cambodia;

– poverty resulting in abuse, violence, exploitation and neglect

– the absence of social services

– lack of family support

– drug abuse, gang violence, criminal activity

– the inadequate justice system

There is no specific mention of child sexual abuse amongst the UNICEF priorities and while this could be included in the above, the sexual abuse of children in Cambodia doesn’t warrant a separate heading.

Local partners

Taken from the UNICEF website.

No mention of APLE Cambodia?

What about National Multi-Sectoral Orphans and Vulnerable Children Task Force?

Well. No. No mention of APLE.

Debunking the myth

Taken from the UNICEF website;

Myth – Foreigners and/or homosexuals are primarily responsible for sexual violence: “People in society hear from the media that it is mostly foreigners abusing boys but by talking to children it becomes clear that it is also locals” explains Socheat. Fact: abusers often include neighbours, friends and family members (including women). It is important that sexual abuse is primarily about abuse of power and a desire to control, humiliate and subjugate the victim and not sexuality — research reveals that the vast majority of those who abuse boys are not homosexual at all. Perpetuating these myths can result in us not protecting boys from many of those likely to abuse them.

Conclusion

It is quite difficult to draw a conclusion from the available information online.
Sexual exploitation may be an issue, but it is certainly not highlighted as an emergency or one of the main priorities for UNICEF.

In contrast, the APLE website seems to indicate rampant child sexual abuse, by foreigners, in Cambodia.
However, the statistics do not support APLE’s claims – and mathematics never lie.

blazepress:

Fireworks designed for daytime.

Look. I don’t know what you’re over there thinking about. It could be simple or sophisticated, mundane or whimsical, practical or creepy.

But I’m over here thinking about numbers. Again.

I’ve never been especially impressed by words. They’re mushy and sometimes pleasant and sometimes annoying. They’re subtle and subjective and rambly and flowy. Words are okay. Whatever.

But numbers. Numbers are fascinating and precise and satisfying and delicious and whatever it is you’re thinking about at any given time, there’s at least a 60% chance that I’m over here thinking about numbers.

So I’ve decided to do not one, but two consecutive posts on numbers, during which we’ll start at 1 and end up in a very scary place. Today, we’ll keep things in the realm of the ordinary and the conceivable, capping ourselves at a million.

The numbers between 1 and 1,000,000 are everywhere in daily life. 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, and 100,000 are our friends—we get them, they get us, and in this post, we’re basically gonna just hang out with them and catch up, since you probably haven’t been good at keeping in touch.

Let’s start at the beginning—

One-Digit Numbers

We’ll lead off with the extraordinarily dull 1.

1 likes to masquerade as this poetic and profound thing, getting used in sentences I don’t really understand, like “the oneness of all” or something annoying like that. But then anytime you actually spend time with 1, you end up bored.

1 is also no fun to play with. Multiplying or dividing things by it is an incredibly underwhelming experience, and it manages to be such a dud that somehow, it’s not a prime number even though it only has one factor.

As for the rest of the one-digit numbers, I enjoy 2, 4, and 8 because when I was seven I became obsessed with saying “2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024, 2,048, 4,096″ before hitting a wall,1 and I have an affinity for prime numbers, naturally, so 3, 5, and 7 fall into my favor. Not thrilled with 9, but at least it’s a perfect square. The only thing 6 offers my life is annoying the shit out of me every time I have to tell someone my phone number—(xxx)-666-xxxx—and they can’t help but have some reaction to that and then we end up in this little song-and-dance interaction about it.2

Let’s move on.

Two-Digit Numbers

Getting to the two-digit numbers, interesting things finally start happening. 10 itself is a big one, because our entire base ten existence stems from it. Why did we end up in base ten (instead of something like base 8, which would go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, etc.)? Because we have 10 fingers. It seems intuitive that only with base 10 could you multiply and divide so easily and simply add zeros or move a decimal point when shifting by multiples of 10, but that would be the case with any number system.3 Let’s look at some bigger numbers—

12 has the dozen thing going which is something, as well as factors up the dick. It’s also the number of people who have been on the moon.

Let’s pause for a second to acknowledge how ridiculously impressive it is that humans got humans onto the moon and safely back. And how lucky are those 12 guys? Could any life experience be more desirable than getting to bounce around the moon while looking at the Earth hovering out there in space?

Continuing along, I don’t know whose sister 13 slept with, but somewhere along the way it pissed off the wrong person and managed to become the only number with a legitimately bad reputation.

20’s worth mentioning just because I read during my research that only about 1 in 20 men in the US is 6’2″ or taller. So if you’re 6’2″ or taller, you’re the tallest of this average sampling of 20 American men—4

33 is relevant because of Larry Bird and because that’s what I turned on Wednesday thanks for wishing me a happy birthday none of you.

You might be surprised to know that only 1/43 Americans openly identifies as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, but that when asked in an anonymous and veiled survey, that number jumps to 8/43:

There are 41 Disney princesses and 48 real-life princesses, none of whom is Kate Middleton.

Not much else happening with the two-digit numbers until we arrive at sleazy 99, the price tag whore who’s made its whole living being the guy next to 100.

Three-Digit Numbers

100 is a big deal and clearly knows it, but that’s fair. It’s the first three-digit number, but in our world, 100’s main role is being the overlord of the one and two-digit groups—it’s a century of years, the official “okay you win” age to reach, and the whole concept of percent is just comparing a part of 100 to all of 100. 100 is also a perfect square of another one of these fundamental numbers (i.e. 10, 100, 1,000, etc.), which is satisfying.

Being in the top 100th of a group in some way is also a thing. It looks like this:

If you’re in the red dot when it comes to wealth, you’re the notorious 1 percent and a lot of people will make signs that are mean to you. To be in the red dot among Americans, you need to make almost $400,000/year, but only about a tenth of that ($39,000 in 2011) to be in the red dot worldwide.

On the SAT, you’d be the red dot if you scored a 1480 out of 1600 or a 2200 out of 2400, and on the ACT, you’d need a 33. A Stanford-Binet IQ of 137 will make you the red dot too and would mean 99% of people are stupider than you.5

After 100, we’re about to get into superbly random number territory, but first we hit 101, a C-list number celebrity for a handful of small claims to fame, like 101 Dalmations and beginner courses and the West Coast US highway.

Continuing along, while about exactly 1 out of every 100 dots speaks sign language (70 million people worldwide),6 1 of every 179 living humans (39 million) is blind:

There are 444 Apple retail stores in the world:

If you deal five cards 508 times, you’ll average one flush:

And there are 12 million US dollar millionaires in the world, or 1 out of every 583 people. If your total assets (in excess of your total liabilities) add up to over $1,000,000, you’re the red dot in this diagram:

Four Digit Numbers

1,000 is also a huge deal in our world and has a bunch of nicknames, like a grand, a G, a kilo, and k. It’s also part of the elite chain of numbers in the “order-of-magnitude” chain, which we know as million, billion, trillion, etc. Million is actually the third number in that chain, with the dud 1 as the first number and 1,000 as the second number. And 1,000 is the key multiplier that defines the whole chain.

That said, 1,000’s dirty secret is that it’s a fraud like 10 and can’t be made into a square. The square root of 1,000 is an embarrassing 31.62277660168 etcetera without even a vinculum.7

Anyway, let’s look at some four-digit numbers and odds:

Here’s how many times a neutron star spins around every second:

And here’s how many minutes there are in each day:

A genius-level IQ of 150 will earn you red dot status on the thousand-dot intelligence diagram, but that doesn’t mean you got a perfect 1600 on the SAT—only the red dot in a 1,489-dot sample aces the SAT:

There are 1,811 large US corporations (over 10,000 employees), and astronomers have identified 1,849 planets outside our solar system:

On a perfectly clear night, we can see about 2,500 stars in the night sky:

And there may be only 2,800 living people over 7 feet tall (213cm), but they each have a 17% chance of making the NBA.

Here are all the seconds in an hour:

And here’s the number of religions in the world:

So there are more religions than the stars we see in the night sky, and you could name a religion every second and it would take you over an hour to name them all.

We’ve identified over 400,000 species of beetle in the world, but only 5,416 mammal species.

And here’s how many living languages there are in the world:

Finally, this is how many medium-sized (.5mm in diameter) grains of sand you could fit in a cubic centimeter box:

Five-Digit Numbers

If 1,000 is a little overrated, 10,000 is underrated. No one talks about 10,000, but unlike the square rootless 1,000, 10,000 a perfect square of 100 100s, and 1% of a million.

Stephen Hawking’s IQ is supposedly 160, which would just qualify him to be the red dot in a 10,000 dot average sample of human intelligence. And just so you know, in an average group of 17,000 people, one will be an albino.

This is how many people fit in a sold-out Fenway Park:

Larger than the number of people in Fenway are both the 41,821 airports in the world and the number of buildings in manhattan:

The 55,030 Google employees would fill up a large stadium, as would Apple’s 50,250. Facebook is considerably smaller, with a staff of 8,348, while Wikipedia is running with only 208 people. You could fit the Craigslist team in a small bus:

And here’s how many seconds tick by every day:

Six-Digit Numbers

100,000 is the most random main category number of this post. In life, it mostly comes up as a salary most people would really like to be making. It’s also getting very close to the largest number of people I can actually picture all together in one place. Michigan Stadium (The Big House) is just under 110,000, and the largest stadium in the world is India’s Salt Lake Stadium, with a capacity of 120,000. North Korea claims that its Rungnado May First Stadium holds 150,000 people, but North Korea also says that Kim Jong Il shot 11 holes-in-one on his first time trying golf so we’ll be sticking with Salt Lake Stadium as the world’s largest.8

Equal to the capacity of the world’s largest stadium is the number of abortions that happen in the world every day, on average:

That’s about 1/3 the amount of worldwide births per day, meaning a quarter of all pregnancies that don’t end in miscarriage end in abortion. That’s about the same as the rate in the US, but in New York City, 41 of every 100 non-miscarried pregnancies are aborted. And no, this isn’t meant to be a political statement of any kind, just an interesting (and to me, surprising) statistic, so just settle down.

One Million

Good luck. See you at the bottom—

Sorry. A million dots is a lot of dots.

And how small are one-in-a-million odds? How much of a long shot is one-in-a-million? Just try to find the red dot in the million dots above.

This image is the only way I can think of to visualize what a million or what one-in-a million actually means.

A million is interesting because it’s huge—but it’s also the smallest of the big boys, just small enough that you can still picture it or depict it on a diagram. It’s right on the border between the world we can wrap our heads around and the world of the totally inconceivable.

That red dot, if you found it, is a good thing to keep in mind next time you buy a 1-in-146 million Powerball ticket, or anytime you hear facts like one out of every 11 million airplane flights crashes. A one-in-a-million long shot is the same as rolling three 100-sided dice and trying to hit the number 63 with all three of them in one roll.

If you want to play around with taking a one-in-a-million shot at something, pick a number between 1 and 1,000,000, say it out loud, and then click Generate below and try to hit it (or two other ways to do it: 1) Change the max number to 1,000 and try to hit the number you say with the next two clicks; 2) Change the max number to 100 and try to hit a chosen number three times in a row):

The numbers generated by this widget come from RANDOM.ORG’s true random number generator.

The Million-Dot Poster

I like both the number 1,000,000 and the number 1/1,000,000, and I love any chance to visualize them. A blog post that can only fit 200 dots horizontally isn’t an ideal way to visualize a million because it makes a 1 x 25 rectangle you have to scroll down for an hour to see all of. So we’ve made a million-dot poster.

The poster is, satisfyingly, a square. A 24″ x 24″ (61cm x 61cm) poster with a 1,000 dot x 1,000 dot square of a million total dots. This allows you to most effectively visualize the number one million (it also helps to visualize 5 or 10 or 100 million, or even a billion, by picturing multiple posters next to each other).

And, of course, one of the dots is red. It takes a hunt to find it,9 but once you do, you can understand exactly what 1/1,000,000 means. So one poster, two extreme numbers to visualize. You can check it out here.

Here’s what the plain one looks like:

Full poster:

A closer shot, showing the red dot in the middle:

And a close up shot, showing the red dot:

 

And here’s numbers post #2: From 1,000,000 to Graham’s Number

Related Wait But Why Posts

Putting Time In Perspective
What Could You Buy With $241 Trillion?
What Does a Quadrillion Sour Patch Kids Look Like?

The post From 1 to 1,000,000 appeared first on Wait But Why.

66 million years ago, a large asteroid about six miles in diameter smashed into what is present-day Mexico. It was the most unpleasant thing you can imagine for everyone here at the time, and it ended up causing the extinction of over 75% of species, including all the dinosaurs.

Right?

It killed off all the dinosaurs—that’s how the story goes. Right?

The thing is, when we picture dinosaurs, we picture large, reptile-looking guys tramping about on land being dicks. And yes, those guys you’re picturing went extinct.

But there were also a lot of other kinds of dinosaurs, including some with feathers who could fly. While no non-flying dinosaurs survived the mass extinction, some of their avian cousins did survive, and they’re still surviving today. Which leaves us with the surprising fact:

Birds aren’t just the descendants of dinosaurs, they are dinosaurs.

Birds are close relatives of the notorious Velociraptor1—they share a common ancestor with it from the Jurassic period.2

So there dinosaurs were, ruling the Earth, when a big rock changed everything, setting mammals on a new course to dominate the world and sending the mighty dinosaur off to the periphery to watch from the sidelines. And today, most of our attention is on the mammals of the world—ourselves in particular, but also on our dogs and cats and elephants and bears and whales and cows and monkeys and sheep.

But what about our planet’s flying dinosaurs over on the sideline? Have any of us thought to see what’s going on with them?

Sometimes, when a big, popular circus loses its appeal and another, new form of entertainment takes over, and then a bunch of time passes, it’s better not to see what those old, forgotten circus performers are doing these days. Sometimes, you don’t want to know. Because sometimes, it turns out that what’s going on behind the doors of the old, broken down circus caravan is a bunch of weird, dark shit.

This week, I decided to pull back the curtain on the bird world and see what was happening there. Here’s a report on what I found:

Identity Fraud: Ordinary Birds Pretending to Be Exotic

There’s no less glamorous animal than the pigeon, so it’s understandable why so many pigeons are trying to pass off as other, less stigmatized types of birds—but come on:

It’s just not working:

Growing a mustache and calling yourself the Inca Tern is clearly not fooling anyone:

The best pigeon-hiding effort I’ve seen is by a group of white pigeons who spent millions of dollars on PR and rebranded itself as “the dove,” locking down a partnership with the Catholic church and plastering the internet with images and drawings like this:

It gets worse. Here’s a vulture that grew a beard to try to escape all the baggage of being a vulture, which might have worked had it come up with a cleverer name for itself than the bearded vulture:

Here are two skinny-headed anhingas who are pretending not to be birds by posing as the hind legs of a deer or a dog:

Then again, we shouldn’t be surprised when the anhinga is unimpressive, given that this is how it plays hide and seek.

An even more ridiculous move is some normal yellow and black bird gluing a clearly-fake plastic beak onto its face and calling itself the toucan:

Then there’s the harpy eagle trying to pose as a fucking panda bear of all things:

But the most blatant identity fraud cases are happening throughout the chicken world. I get that no one wants to be a chicken.3 A chicken is a tweaky, paranoid joke of an animal. A chicken doesn’t fly, it spazzes into a brief flutter—and it can’t chirp, settling instead for the absurd “bawk.” And while we have the courtesy to call cow and pig meat euphemisms like “beef” and “pork,” we just call chicken meat “chicken,” because nobody respects the chicken. I understand why you’d wish you were a different type of bird. But that’s no excuse for doing psychotic things like painting yourself black:

Or getting a transparent makeover:

Or getting a ridiculous haircut:

Or fluffing out your feathers and calling yourself the silkie hen:

I also discovered a new fad that’s gotten hot—impersonating humans.

Here’s a bird pretending to be a makeup-y 53-year-old woman:

And here’s a bird trying to be a human grandmother:

Here are birds posing as human old men:

And it’s apparently become trendy to grow stylish human hair:

The irony of all these ordinary birds going to insane lengths to try to be more exotic is that what’s going on in the world of exotic birds is far worse:

Sadistic Psychological Abuse of Male Birds By Females

What humans don’t realize is that exotic birds are only exotic for one reason—women abusing their power of sexual selection to force horny men to go through tremendous shame and indignity at their whim. The females in a species of birds can get together and decide to evolutionarily turn the men of their species into literally whatever absurd creatures they want just by agreeing to all “select” for it. Like female peacocks getting together and colluding to only sleep with the men who turn themselves into the biggest, prettiest fans—which leaves the men with no choice but to spend the next hundred million years evolving into big, pretty fans:

And you’d think it would be bad enough that the female mallard thought it would be fun to turn the male mallard’s head bright green, but the much more twisted female mandarin duck has made her man into a piece of full-blown abstract art:

And this is nothing compared to the sick practice by some species of female birds to turn their males into “birds of paradise”—like the tanager females, who got together and decided to have sex with only the fuzziest, most neon men, resulting in this tragedy:

And just look at the shame on the face of the male Wilson’s bird of paradise:

One set of females forced their males to change species altogether into an orange fuzz ball and renamed them “the cock of the rock” because they found it fucking hilarious:

You’d think turning men into clowns would be enough, but the women aren’t done. They make their clowns put on mortifying dance performances:

Meanwhile, many birds have bigger things to worry about than whether they’re exotic or not:

Birds With Proportional Difficulties

There are birds out there going through physical hell and no one has any idea. Like this bird who has the head of a duck but the body of a sparrow:

Or this bird who has a miniature pair of human legs instead of normal bird legs:

This bird has no head:

And this bird is only a head:

These birds didn’t realize you were supposed to be a body with feathers on it, not just feathers and nothing else:4

And this bird forgot to not be just a fuzzy sphere:

Widespread Facial Rotting

One of the more disturbing findings of my investigation was the large number of birds out there who are actively decaying even though they’re not dead yet. The most well-known example is the gruesome turkey, whose facial gummies—which are delicious-looking on other birds—have horribly rotted:

And it gets worse. The wood stork’s head is fully decomposing:

Some have tumor or mold-ridden beaks:

And others have replaced their head entirely with that of a tiny bludgeoned-to-death llama:

Creatures Out in the Open Who Are Clearly Supposed to Still Be in The Egg

The elephant in the room whenever you’re in the presence of a newborn human baby is that it very obviously belongs in the womb for another month. But in the bird world, this phenomenon is far more extreme. Some upsetting examples:

Most alarmingly, many of these fetuses are in a constant state of agony, with every passing moment being the new worst moment of their life:

Birds Who Forgot to Go Extinct When They Were Supposed To

There are a number of birds currently living who were obviously supposed to go extinct a long time ago and just forgot. Most notably, the shoebill:

And the helmeted hornbill:

Rampant Narcissism

The golden pheasant is a prime offender:

As is this strapping eagle, who needs to rein it in a notch and remember that he’s still a bird:

As is this chicken, who doesn’t even have clothes on, let alone a fashion runway and an audience:

But for Americans, we don’t have to look very hard to find avian narcissism at its worst. This is what the bald eagle looked like before 1776:

Just an ordinary, low-confidence bird. But ever since signing a deal with the US to serve as its national emblem, the bald eagle has let the whole thing go to his head, strutting around with this absurd look on his face:

Little does he know how close he was to being ousted in favor of the turkey of all animals.5

Rank Racism

Outrage at Nothing in Particular

There’s an odd fetish in the bird world with being outraged about what seems like nothing in particular.

The Biggest Asshole in the Animal Kingdom

If you know the animal kingdom, you know that’s saying a lot. And no, I’m not talking about the ostrich, nature’s terrible personality on a stick:

I’m talking about the goose.

Outside of the heinous world of insects, I can’t think of a creature that has literally no redeeming qualities. Except for the goose.

You know when you have some bread and you decide to feed some birds, and there’s one piece of shit who’s bigger than everyone else and shoves the other birds out of the way, taking literally every piece of bread, and you have to cleverly strategize in order to throw bread to the rest of the birds, and even then it’s hard? Well the goose is the quintessential feed-the-birds-bully.

The goose is perpetually unpleasant to be around, and the second something happens that doesn’t go his way, he has a fit and makes this appalling face:

That’s about plenty of the goose.

Delusion

The bald eagle isn’t the only bird with a hero’s complex. Steller’s sea-eagle seems to be convinced that he’s that Disney character who’s all hardened and low-voiced and gruff and doesn’t want to talk about his past but then ends up having a heart of gold and agrees to mentor the protagonist and ends up sacrificing himself to save the day:

On the other side of things, it appears that the vulture has taken his reputation to heart and become a caricature of himself, overexaggerating his sinister, menacing stereotype in a bad-guy-in-a-kids-movie way:

And just when you thought we had our hands full with these real birds thinking they’re fictional, the puffin, who is fictional, is out there living his life in the three-dimensional real world as if he’s an actual creature:

Odd so far, and a bit grim. But as my investigation grew deeper and I asked more questions, I began to uncover more disturbing things going on in the darkest corners of the bird world:

Legitimately Psychotic Behavior in the Pigeon World

The identity fraud pigeon cases mentioned above were just the tip of the iceberg of the strange things going on with pigeons. On the streets of your city, you’d have no idea, but as I explored, I was shocked by what I found. It started with certain pigeons looking kind of abnormal:

Something wasn’t right. I dug deeper, and an entire perverted world began to reveal itself:

After that last one, I decided I had dug deep enough. I still don’t know what the fuck is going on with those pigeons.

And my darkest findings were still yet to come—

The Rapey White Parrot That’s Terrorizing the Planet

I’m not talking about normal parrots, or even this overly-segmented fuck:

I’m talking very specifically about the white parrot:

Here’s what I want you to do. Look at the above photo and form an opinion about his motive at the moment the picture was taken.

Now watch this video:

Now look at this picture again:

Not okay, right?

A Ghostly Sociopath Who Watches You at Night

Owls are creepy. Everyone knows that. But when most people think of an owl, they picture this handsome, potentially-wise, only-scary-in-a-cartoonish-way owl:

Or maybe they picture the low self-esteem owl:

They might even picture the genuinely eerie round-headed owl:

What they probably don’t picture is the ghostly sociopath owl who watches you at night:

Let’s just discuss the situation here. First of all, he doesn’t have a face, he has an anti-face, which is unsettling as fuck. Secondly, he’s a predator who makes his living silently murdering unsuspecting living things. Thirdly, he’s nocturnal. Of course. Fourthly, most of the time, he’s just standing there by himself, perfectly still, with wide eyes. Fifthly, he says “hoo.” All the normal birds “chirp,” and this creepy fuck says “hoo.” And finally, add on to all of that that his head swivels around and even flips completely upside down:

Then—then—I come across this GIF:

And this GIF:

Nothing about this GIF is okay. The guy on the left is manically devouring some kind of rat alive, the two guys on the right are slinking around like the grudge lady coming down the stairs, and those three manage to be the three least disturbing owls in the GIF.

Moving on—

Complete Mental Breakdowns

We all know that the flamingo lost his mind a long time ago:

And the potoo’s snap is well-documented:

But as I reached the farthest fringes of society, I saw more and more cases that seemed beyond hope.

Like the arctic tern and its inexplicable migration habits. In general, I’ve always wondered what birds’ issue is and why they need to migrate such absurd distances, and then I read about the arctic tern and found this:

Arctic terns are true champions in the bird world. They fly about 11,000 miles from their breeding grounds in the Arctic to their winter home in Antarctica.

Champions? Champions of what—horrible decision-making? The North Pole is 6,000 miles away from the equator. Every climate possible exists in between. Whatever climate difference they’re finding on the other pole could be achieved by flying 1,000 miles of latitude away from the pole. There’s no explanation for going farther than 6,000 miles. And if the arctic tern claims there’s some key subtle factor that makes the far pole better than somewhere on their current hemisphere, that’s like commuting every day from your home in Boston to an office in San Francisco because you found a slightly better deal on office rent there.

Then there’s the California condor, who at some point began shaving his whole head and face for no apparent reason:

And there’s this lunatic:

And this chicken, whose family hasn’t heard from him in over a year:

And these chickens, who look like walking food:

And these birds, who are non-ironically and permanently impersonating Big Bird:

And this parakeet, for whom we need no comment:

Birds Who Apparently Think This is All a Big Joke

If there’s one takeaway from all this, it’s that the state of the bird world should not be taken lightly, especially by birds. And yet, in the midst of everything I found, there were a bunch of birds who couldn’t give a fuck either way. Like the dimwitted spoonbill:

Or this incredibly immature pelican:

Or the blue-footed booby—

—who seemed more intent on dancing than doing anything to help:

I’ll wrap up with a bird who should be concerned about both the wider bird world and his own bizarre situation and seems apparently worried about neither:

So there you go. Next time you’re outside and you see your neighborhood crow or sparrow or pigeon, just remember: A) it’s a dinosaur, B) it may have secrets, and C) leave it at that—some things are better left unexplored.

____________

More Wait But Why investigative journalism into the animal world:
The Bunny Manifesto
The Primate Awards
Why Bugs Ruin Everything

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The post The Dark Secrets of the Bird World appeared first on Wait But Why.

The cover art for Eula Biss’s new book, On Immunity: An Inoculation, surprised me at first. I’d expected something stark and edgy—maybe a shiny hypodermic needle against a blank background—to illustrate an exploration of modern vaccine phobia by a young writer known for her understated style.

Instead, the jacket of On Immunity features a detail from an early seventeenth century painting, Achilles Dipped in the River Styx by Peter Paul Rubens. The image is lush and nuanced and drenched in allusion to myth and history and the body and motherhood and love and fear—like Biss’s argument, as it turns out.

Today’s anti-vaccine movement, whose most visible leader is talk show host Jenny McCarthy, has deep roots and broad ramifications. Fear of inoculation has existed for centuries, beginning with the earliest versions of the practice. Over time, fear of vaccines themselves have become inseparable from larger fears, both real and metaphorical: of contamination by the “other,” of having one’s personal integrity compromised, of being forced surrender to one’s individuality for the common good.

In 2009, Biss began delving into these fears as she grappled with her own discomfort about having her infant son vaccinated. Using her personal experience as a narrative thread, Biss draws in subjects as diverse as Voltaire, vampire lit, and the BP oil spill. The openness of her inquiry makes On Immunity an important contribution to a dialogue about vaccination currently dominated by those certain that vaccines are toxic and those equally certain that those who hold this belief are morons.

Biss lives in Chicago and teaches at Northwestern. She is the author of two previous books, The Balloonists, a prose poem about divorce, and Notes From No Man’s Land, a collection of essays about race, for which she won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

I spoke with her recently about On Immunity, about her literary influences, and about whether we really are, as the New York Times suggested recently, in “a golden age for women essayists.”

***

The Rumpus: In all of your books you’ve come at big subjects from very personal points of entry. With On Immunity, how far was the leap from the personal decision about whether to vaccinate your son to writing a book about vaccination?

Eula Biss: Most of my essays begin with a question that I want to work out for myself, primarily. And often in the course of working that question out I produce a document that feels like it could be made available to other readers. Sometimes that’s not the case, though. Sometimes I embark on a draft and I do clarify something for myself, but I don’t produce something that I think is readable or necessary for other people.

Rumpus: So it’s possible that you could have worked through your decision on paper but not necessarily have moved beyond that?

Biss: Yes, definitely. Especially if I hadn’t run into anything that I thought was interesting or surprising. Actually, when I began doing research I did not intend to write a book or even an essay. I really was just trying to solve my own problem, which was that I was encouraged to vaccinate my son, and I knew I should, but that I’d also heard that many mothers had hesitations, and I didn’t know a lot about those hesitations. So I had to find out more before I moved forward with my decision. And, really, in the grand scope of this project, it didn’t take me very long to answer the biggest one of my personal questions, which was: should I vaccinate this kid on schedule or not? By the time my son was two months old I had read enough to feel comfortable vaccinating him and vaccinating him on schedule.

I had made the decision to follow the schedule, but I also wondered what does this say about my relationship with the government? Does this mean that I’m following government recommendations blindly? What does this mean about my relationship with pharmaceutical companies and the medical system? Does this mean that I accept everything that happens in those realms?

So I was just struggling with what my decision meant, and that’s when the essay began to emerge. And at first it was just going to be an essay, but it got bigger and bigger, and then for a while I thought it would be a very long essay. Then it became clear that it was going to be a book.

Rumpus: Do you remember the moment when you were researching this to sort out your own discomfort and you said: “Whoa! This is about more than me. This is a topic”?

Biss: There were a few moments like that. The research really escalated for me in that I read a number of books that made me think differently.

The first was Bodily Matters by Nadja Durbach, who’s a historian. I read her history of the anti-vaccine movement in Victorian England. The moment I said, “Whoa!” was when I was reading this history of an anti-vaccine movement over a hundred years ago. The fears and anxieties that propelled that movement forward were so similar to my own fears and anxieties that I had to step back and look at my own concerns in a historical context. That was really interesting to me. The actual technology has changed considerably, but the fears have remained, in many ways, static over a very long period of time and in fairly different political contexts. So that’s the moment when I thought, Okay, there’s a lot more going on here than I ever saw or realized and I’m going to have to dig quite a bit deeper into this subject.

Rumpus: Is there something specific about vaccines—about having your body punctured and having foreign material injected into you—that causes more fear and suspicion than other medical treatments? I have patients who have fewer hesitations about heart surgery than about flu shots.

Biss: I can believe that. I do think there is something emblematic about it—and this goes back to before we used needles, right? The smallpox vaccine that was given in the 1800s was not given with a needle but was an incision.

It’s this breaking of the skin paired with the introduction of foreign matter into the body that sets off something that is almost archetypical. It’s part of why I reached back into mythology to begin my discussion of this because I felt that just the act of vaccination was triggering a fear that wasn’t necessarily about that act so much as it was about what it represented to the mind; the metaphors behind it.

The skin is a really powerful metaphor for our protection against all that is outside, a division between external and internal. So to have that protection penetrated becomes metaphorically meaningful. That’s why I picked up I Is An Other by James Geary. His book is all about metaphor, but he has a really illuminating chapter about metaphors that are sourced from the body, about how many of our most basic metaphors, our most often repeated metaphors, are sourced from our bodies.

You can tell from the metaphors that we use that the body is our primary locus of understanding. In some ways we understand everything around us in terms of our own bodies. That made me look at this act as an act that was opening up a metaphorical space for people—to a greater degree than heart surgery, right? When you approach people saying, “You’re going to need heart surgery,” in many cases they’re going to interact with that information literally. There probably is some metaphoric stuff going on there, around the heart. But when I examined my own reservations about vaccination I found that they were almost all based in metaphor. And the more I learned about the actual act and the actual technology, the more comfortable I felt, because almost all my fears and hesitations were about what vaccination symbolized to me, not what it actually was.

Rumpus: Metaphors are important in On Immunity—the vampire motif, for example—but so are concepts that are very real: race and class and feminism and motherhood. What is the relationship between the conceptual and the metaphorical when you’re drilling deeper and deeper into a subject?

Biss: I think part of how this book became so interested in metaphor is that I began to discover that some of the metaphors were masking either really important realities or really important concepts. Issues of race and class, for instance, I felt were getting completely erased or masked by the metaphors that were in use around vaccination.

There are a lot of metaphors around vaccination that involve power, but very few of them acknowledge what I think is one of the more interesting and disturbing power relationships in the situation, which is the relationship between a healthy, middle-class, white person with very good access to medical care who’s chosen not to vaccinate and a poor, lower-class person of color who doesn’t have excellent access to medical care and may not be fully vaccinated because of issues of access rather than philosophical issues.

Rumpus: To clarify, the power differential exists because poor people who are not vaccinating due to access are vulnerable to outbreaks caused by people who choose not to vaccinate.

Biss: Yes. That’s a power relationship that’s, to my eye, very problematic. But when I began writing this book, when people talked about power and corruption around vaccination they were always talking about the power that pharmaceutical companies have or the power that the government has or the power that pediatricians and health care workers have. They weren’t necessarily looking at the power of the unvaccinated body, that kind of social power.

I got into the metaphors in part because I wanted to expose them as flawed or problematic metaphors. And this goes back to Susan Sontag who made the point that if we’re thinking about something through a metaphor that’s flawed, our thinking is going to be flawed. And so I wanted to expose some of these metaphors as inaccurate and bad tools.

Rumpus: The anti-vaccine movement has created some strange bedfellows on the left and on the right, aligning so-called “Whole Foods parents” and Tea Partiers. Why do you think that is? Is this simply about suspicion of authority, of experts?

Biss: I think it’s partly that, but I also think it exposes something about liberal politics. It exposes the libertarian vein that can run through liberal politics. This is an issue where you see people who call themselves liberal and say that they’re concerned with social justice joining the same movement as people who are actually libertarians and more on the far right side of things or part of the Christian right.

I think it has less to do with the suspicion of experts than it has to do with this thing that we treasure and nurture in America, individualism, which can actually be quite damaging if it’s taken to political extremes. And we can see it both on the right and the left.

Rumpus: Have you gotten any feedback that you changed minds of people who were anti-vaccine?

Biss: I got feedback from a friend who read a draft. She mentioned after she read it—and she pushed back on a lot of things and had quite a hearty critique of the book—that she vaccinated her son against hepatitis B. I’ve had a couple of interactions like that, where I’ve learned that it has changed the mind of someone who was vaccine-hesitant or delaying vaccines.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the more extreme position, people who are dedicated to not vaccinating at all. There have been some studies recently that have shown that it’s very, very hard to get someone in that position to change their mind, and that has been my experience in conversations.

Rumpus: As you read the news these last few weeks about Ebola, do you see themes emerge that came up in your research about vaccines?

Biss: Quite a bit. Both of my last two books have been interested in fear, in our tendency to fear things that don’t pose us a threat and interested in where fear intersects with other attitudes, like racism—where fear is a product of racism or an extension of racism or a complement to racism. Just the other evening I was having a conversation with my husband and he said: “I really don’t think people would be reacting the way they’re reacting to Ebola if it had originated in Sweden.” If most of the victims were blond and light-skinned—I think in some ways the fear is about disease, but the fear is also giving people an opportunity to exercise their fear of otherness.

Rumpus: I have no doubt.

Biss: I have no doubt, either. There might still be a reaction, but the reaction would look really different.

Another thing that it’s brought up for me is thinking about quarantine. How awkward and difficult and problematic it is to have quarantine be one of your primary preventative health measures. Recently I was on a radio program, and a listener called in, and she said, “I think that you’re over-emphasizing the role of vaccination in disease prevention.” But Ebola is actually a reminder of how messy and awkward and difficult it is to deal with a disease without vaccination. Quarantine is a pre-modern method for controlling the spread of disease, and we have to go back to this pre-modern strategy when we don’t have vaccination. Which doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t use it. It can be a be a useful and necessary complement to vaccination.

I’ll say just one last thing about quarantine: People make civil rights arguments around vaccination, like, “Oh, my right to my body is being violated,” but I think that many people would find that quarantine feels much more like a violation of civil rights than vaccination. Given the choice, we might actually prefer vaccination.

Rumpus: I’d like to talk a little about your beginnings as a writer. In On Immunity you mention the influence of your dad, a doctor.

Biss: Yes. I wanted him to be the voice of the best of medicine, a reminder to everyone that doctors aren’t all evil arbiters of the establishment

Rumpus: And you also mention your mom, an artist,

Biss: She’s a visual artist, a poet, and a nonfiction writer.

Rumpus: Reading about them I found myself thinking of the surgeon-writer Richard Selzer, who described how his father practiced medicine in an office on the first floor of

his childhood home while his mother, an amateur opera singer, belted out arias upstairs, about how these were the two poles of his young imagination: science and art. Was it like that for you?

Biss: I think that’s true, though at this point in my life and development I’m no longer inclined to think of them as two poles. I think of them much more as two different modes. The driving interests and concerns of both are quite similar. And I do think medicine practiced well is an art. That’s obvious, especially when you read the words of one of these really masterful doctor-writers.

Rumpus: You’ve written many medically-themed essays: “The Pain Scale” and “Relations” (in part about in-vitro fertilization), and, of course, the essays that became On Immunity. Did having this particular combination of parents set the stage for you to think about medical issues in a literary way?

Biss: I do think it gave me access. I remember when I turned twenty-one I went to a fortune teller with my sister, and the fortune teller looked at my palm, and she said: “Ah! You’re interested in medicine! You’re going to be a doctor or a nurse!” and my sister and I fell over laughing. It was so absurd, so out of the range of my interests. Really, though, the way my trajectory of interests has progressed, maybe the palm reader was seeing farther into my future than I knew.

I think that having my father be a doctor, I’m not afraid of medical terminology. A lot of it is familiar to me. My father talked in that terminology. I think that’s a barrier for some people, the language of medicine. The language of medicine doesn’t intimidate me.

Rumpus: I read that in researching On Immunity you slogged through an immunology textbook. I was impressed.

Biss: It took, like, six months. I had to look almost everything up.

Rumpus: You earned an MFA in nonfiction at Iowa. How did your understanding of what nonfiction could be evolve there?

Biss: It helped that I entered nonfiction through poetry. My first book, The Balloonists, which can absolutely be read as an essay, I was thinking of at the time as poetry, just because I didn’t know enough yet about the tradition of the personal essay. I didn’t know that you were allowed to do that in nonfiction. So even though it doesn’t look like poetry in a number of ways, I was calling it poetry because poetry was the only genre I knew of where I’d seen anything like that happening.

I had studied prose poetry quite extensively as an undergraduate. I was lucky to be exposed to Anne Carson early in my career. Anne Carson is so great in terms of giving permission. That sense of “I didn’t know you were allowed to do this”—I had that with every book I read by Anne Carson. I started reading her as an undergraduate, and she just blew a lot of doors open. I loved what she was doing with ideas, but I also loved what she was doing with form. She has a number of pieces which have “essay” in the title but are in fact written in lines like most poems are. And she has work that has the word “poem” in the title and looks a lot like an essay. She’s moving very freely between these genres, making them collide and collapse into each other. I think she’s done a lot for all of us who write, in terms of blowing apart the boxes that genre can become.

Rumpus: You’ve said that your own work straddles poetry and nonfiction, is a hybrid of the two. The usual connotation of “hybrid” is mixing memoir with researched information, perhaps what might have once been called “New Journalism.” How would you characterize your nonfiction? Do you simply think of yourself as an essayist—or is yours a new genre?

Biss: The quick answer is that yes, I usually do think of myself as an essayist. But that category is so broad. Contemporaneously and historically it contains things that are aesthetically incredibly different. And I think that’s part of why I’m comfortable thinking of myself a an essayist. There’s a lot of room within that category to go in a lot of aesthetic directions.

But to get into the more pointed part of your question, the New Journalists have been really important to me, especially Joan Didion, but the other group of writers that have been important to me have been the confessional poets, people like Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath. The assertion in their work—and which was truly radical at the time—is that the personal is political, that one can write from one’s life, about one’s life, about one’s body, as a way of way of addressing a political situation or a political idea or problem. That’s an old idea now, but it’s an idea that is still challenging to people, surprisingly. It still can be kind of disorienting for someone to see highly personal material on the page with highly political material. We still like to think of these things as belonging in different spheres.

I think my hybridity has a lot of sources of inspiration. I don’t think it’s brand new. I’m drawing heavily on Didion. I’m drawing heavily on Rich and Plath and other writers. In this latest book I was thinking about and engaging with Sontag. So I’m definitely not striking out alone.

Rumpus: I can’t help but notice that all of the literary influences you’ve mentioned are women: Carson, Plath, Rich, Sontag, Didion. This leads me to ask your reaction to the piece a few weeks ago in the New York Times Book Review, in which Cheryl Strayed and Benjamin Moser were asked whether we are in “a golden age of women essayists.” Both objected to the qualifier “women.” You are being compared with Didion and Sontag and being grouped with other young female essayists like Leslie Jamison, Lia Purpura, Maggie Nelson, and Sarah Manguso. Would it be just as accurate to say that you come out of the tradition of, say, Orwell and to group you with today’s young male essayists? Is there anything particularly female about the modern essay, or is this something we’ve invented as a way of marginalizing young women who write essays?

Biss: That’s a really interesting question. For me it depends on the moment you catch me. I could’ve just as easily have given you a list of writers who have influenced me that would be heavier on the men. And every once in a while people ask me for a list and I provide one, and I realize it’s all authors who are men, and I feel a little chagrined about it. There are men in there for sure. James Baldwin is probably the biggest one. Orwell is, for me, less important. Hemingway was really important to me as a young writer.

Speaking of a “golden age,” I’d be reluctant to say there’s something fundamentally different about a woman essayist than a man essayist. But there have been times, historically, when it certainly wasn’t a golden age for women essayists. For example, I admire the work of Sei Shonagon, a tenth-century Japanese writer. But that wasn’t a great time or place to be a woman writer. There were a lot of barriers.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t barriers now. One of the things that I’ve been surprised by, actually, in the weeks since my book has come out, is how many of even the positive reviews are laced with sexism. That’s been a reminder to me that this world of writing is, in some ways, different for us women.

Rumpus: Is that on the record, what you just said?

Biss: Yes. I’m happy to say it because most of the reviews have been positive, so this isn’t sour grapes. It’s an observation. A number of the positive reviews have been quite sexist. I wrote about mothers, and I think we reserve a special kind of sexism for women who are mothers. I definitely saw that appearing in much of the coverage of the book.

The “hysterical mom” was the stereotype that was showing up in the reviews. I’m talking about fear and anxiety in my book, and talking about it through myself, so I necessarily showcase some of my own anxiety. But in certain reviews that showcasing of my anxiety is referred to in such a way that it makes me look very much like a hysterical woman.

Rumpus: Some of the emotions you express—your fears for your son’s well-being—are very moving. But it should be remembered, you did explore those emotions with years of research—and a book!

Biss: I’m focusing on my anxiety as part of a cultural critique, but all of that gets lost if a reader is so excited by the fact that a mother has fulfilled their sexist expectations of a mother that they can’t see any further into that moment in the text.

In trying to talk about fear and anxiety I’m coming close to a prejudice that people have about women, and once you get close to that, people cease to be able to see clearly, and the prejudice consumes whatever is happening on the page.

Related Posts:

• Slouching Toward Didion
• A Golden Age for Women Essayist?
• The Pie Lady’s Manifesto
• The Big Idea #8: Rebecca Mead
• The Big Idea #4: Eve Ensler

Originally posted 2014-11-16 15:59:24. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

allie haze sloppy head 05 source: droolingfemme.

thebobblehat:

hello-missmayhem:

cptprocrastination:

doomhamster:

belcanta:

nikkidubs:

attentiondeficitaptitude:

belcanta:

Guaranteed basic income to every citizen, whether or not they are employed to ensure their survival and that they live in a dignified, humane way, preventing poverty, illness, homelessness, reducing crime, encouraging higher education and learning vocations as well as helping society become more prosperous as a whole. 

Wow. Forget raising the minimum wage. This is much much better idea.

The minimum wage could actually drop if we had basic income.

But Americans would never go for it. Miserably slogging through 12 hour days and having businesses open 24/7 is too engrained in our culture.

"BUT WHERE WILL THE GOVERNMENT GET THE MONEY?" screamed Joe Schmoe, slamming a meaty fist onto the table and getting mouth-froth all over the front of his greying tank top. "You libt*rds all think money grows on TREES!! HAHA!"

"But where will people get the incentive to work?!" Mindy Bindy cried, flapping her hands in front of her face. She’d had a fear of the unemployed lollygagging about ever since she was a child and her mother told her to be afraid of the unemployed lollygagging about. "You think people should get paid for nothing? I work hard for my money!”

"But who will serve me?" grumbled Marty McMoneybags. "Who will make me feel important? Who will do my laundry and cook my food and stand in front of me wearing a plastic smile while I take out all my stress—because I do have a lot of stress, you know, being this rich is stressful—on them?” He paused and straightened out the piles of hundred dollar bills on the desk in front of him, then raised his two watery, outraged eyes up to the Heavens. “Lord, if there are no poor people, how will I know that I’m rich??”

I laughed. This is perfect! Well said!

The thing is, while I’m sure you could scrape up a few people who’d be willing to just float by on a guaranteed minimum income? For most people the choice to work would be a no-brainer. “Hmmm. I can get by on 33k a year, or I can take that part time job and make 48k… enough to move to a better apartment, maybe take the family on vacation. Sold.” Hell, most people would want to work simply because it gives one a sense of dignity and something to do with one’s time. (Speaking as someone who’s been unemployed, on extended sick leave, etc. in her time, the boredom and sense of isolation that comes with not having a job is almost as bad as the humiliation of having to depend on other people for one’s survival.)

And with this system, part-time jobs and “non-skilled” jobs would be much more readily available because nobody would need to work two or three jobs just to stay afloat!

Which would ALSO mean that employers and customers couldn’t shamelessly exploit employees the way they can today, because if losing a job weren’t necessarily a financial disaster, more people would be willing to walk out on jobs where they weren’t being treated with dignity.

And if this also applies to students (and it should) then student loans would become much less of a problem, and fewer people would flunk out of school because of having to juggle studies and work.

Far fewer people would be forced to stay with abusive partners, parents or roommates because they couldn’t afford to move out.

And the thing is, all those people who suddenly had money? They’d be spending it. They’d be getting all the stuff they can’t afford now - new clothes, books, toys, locally-produced food, car repairs - and with each purchase money would flow BACK to the government, because VAT, also income tax.

The unemployed and/or disabled wouldn’t need special support any more - which would also mean the government could fire however many admins who are currently engaged in humiliating - *cough* making sure those people aren’t getting money they don’t deserve. Same for medical benefits and pensions. And I’m no legal scholar, but I somehow imagine less financial desperation would lead to less petty crime, and hence less need for police and security everywhere?

TL;DR Doomie thinks this is a good idea, laughs at those who protest.

reblogging for more top commentary

They tried something like this out in Canada as a sort of social experiment, called Mincome. What they found was that, on the whole, people continued to work about as much as they did before. Only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less hours. 

But wait, there’s more. Because parents were spending just a little more time at home and involved with their families, test scores increased. Because teens didn’t have to work to support their families, drop-out rates decreased. Crime rates, hospital visits, psychiatric hospitalizations and domestic abuse rates all dropped, as well. More adults pursued higher education. Those who continued to work reported more job flexibility and more opportunity to choose employment they preferred.

Basically, now you can go prove to your asshole family members that society won’t collapse without poor people for you to feel better than.

PLEASE, AMERICA

“

There are no Jack Kerouacs or Holden Caulfields for girls. Literary girls don’t take road-trips to find themselves; they take trips to find men.

"Great" books, as defined by the Western canon, didn’t contain female protagonists I could admire. In fact, they barely contained female protagonists at all.

”

-

It’s Frustratingly Rare to Find a Novel About Women That’s Not About Love - Kelsey McKinney - The Atlantic (via okaywork)

MY FAVOURITE QUOTE I’ve been looking for it! I identify with this so much.

(via thevervaingirls)

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On Monday night, as a guest of the Secret Science Club, I attended a preview of the upcoming film about Alan Turing's efforts to crack the Nazi Enigma crytographic machine- The Imitation Game:





The movie is not a straight biopic, as it takes certain liberties to heighten the dramatic tension (notably, it turns Commander Alexander Denniston into an unimaginative, antagonistic martinet). The movie really is a mid-20th century techno-thriller, a boffins-versus-bombers espionage film. It is structured as a narrative within a narrative, with Turing, brought into a police station for interrogation, recounts his wartime service to a detective who is convinced that he is a Soviet spy. The film jumps back in forth in time, weaving together several story arcs concerning different times in Turing's life.

One of the arcs in the film involves Turing's days at the Sherborne School, where he is tormented by the majority of his classmates, with the exception of fellow mathematics whiz Christopher Morcom. In these scenes, Morcom is portrayed as a gallant savior, rescuing Turing from repellent hazing, and an inspiration, introducing Turing to cryptography, eventually leading to the two students passing encoded notes to each other during their overly simple mathematics classes. These scenes establish Turing's perennial outsider status, and lend an emotional depth to Benedict Cumberbatch's portrayal as the adult Turing, who is emotionally "tone-deaf".

The second story arc, the main one of the film, involves the cracking of the Enigma code, starting with the assembly of a team of cryptographers including Conel Hugh Donel Alexander (the married Alexander is played as a single cad in the film) and Joan Elisabeth Lowther Clarke, who was briefly engaged to be married to Turing. This particular arc not only portrays the race against time to crack the Enigma code, but the harrowing decisions that had to be made regarding reactions to Nazi attacks after the code had been broken- how many attacks could be thwarted without revealing to the Nazis that their encryption had been rendered useless?

The third story arc is set after the war, in the course of a police investigation after Turing's home had been ransacked. In the course of the investigation, a detective suspecting that Turing is a Soviet spy runs into obstacles such as sealed military records. The film is presented as Turing revealing the truth of his wartime service to the detective, with the horrific maltreatment of Turing by the government of the country he had helped to save.

Benedict Cumberbatch does a credible job portraying Turing. There is some humor to be found in his performance as literal-minded individual with no skill deciphering verbal or social ambiguity. He is a riveting screen presence, by turns intense, obtuse, and vulnerable. In a film in which the "action scenes" typically involve clacking wheels, the tension has to come from interpersonal relationships, and Cumberbatch's interpretation of Turing beautifully conveys a personality of a man who can be admired and pitied simultaneously from a distance, but who would undoubtedly be infuriating to associate with up close.

Keira Knightly, portraying Joan Clarke, lends the film some warmth to counteract Cumberbatch's icy matter-of-factness. The film conveys some of the patriarchal flaws of the contemporary culture- assurances have to be made to Clarke's parents that the environment at Bletchley Park is wholesome, and Turing's marriage proposal to Clarke is portrayed as an attempt to mollify Clarke's parents regarding their daughter's unmarried status. Ms. Knightley is not just a luminous presence in the film, she conveys a spirited intelligence and an empathy as well.

On the whole, the film is not without its flaws, but it is important nonetheless. The post title here was totally stolen from a comment made at Alicublog by Shakezula... Turing's role in WW2 and his role in the nascent field of computer science make him a central figure in mid-20th century history, albeit an unsung one. Besides bringing Alan Turing more centrally into the public awareness, the film does a wonderful job of publicizing the work of Joan Clarke. I would have preferred if the film had actually portrayed Turing's death (probably a suicide, possibly an accident involving cyanide), as it is, his cyanide poisoning is mentioned in a coda to the film which also mentions the persecution of tens of thousands of other gay men by the government of the U.K. As it is, Benedict Cumberbatch's performance as a weak, shaking shell of a man ravaged by chemical castration is pretty devastating, albeit too brief. Perhaps the production team didn't want to have such a jarring shift in tone... it's hard to have the "good guys" in the film become the "bad guys" in such short order.

I predict that the film is going to do extremely well come Oscar time. It's a WW2 film. It's about a man with a mental condition who is brilliant. It has a gorgeous young star playing a brainiac. That's all catnip for the Academy. I don't know if it will sweep, but I think it'll have a Best Picture nod, with a Best Leading Actor nomination for Benedict Cumberbatch and a Best Leading Actress nod for Keira Knightley.

When was the last time you thought about Totino’s frozen pizza? When you were 16 and hated good food? Me too. That’s some nasty “pizza.” And other frozen pizza-like products. But I have to give them credit–their tumblr is seriously amazeballs. Like there’s some great drugs floating around Totino’s corporate headquarters amazeballs. Whoever is running this thing is pretty good at their job. I mean, it’s sure as hell not going to make me buy their product. But I’ll probably keep checking the tumblr.

We've known for years that the FBI spied on Martin Luther King's personal life and sent him an anonymous letter in 1964 threatening to out him for his sexual indiscretions unless he killed himself in 34 days. Now we have an unredacted version of the notorious letter. Read the rest

A couple of weeks ago I took myself off to the cinema to see “The Equalizer”. It is an old-fashioned morality tale, very loosely based on the TV series which made Edward Woodward a very rich man, before his sad departure. I can still remember “Callan” – a chilling and excellent series.

The premise is very simple. A mysterious middle-aged man, Robert McCall, (played with due understatement by Denzel Washington) works at the US version of Home Base. He is a teetotal insomniac. He frequents a night café in New York, where he has become familiar with a very young woman called Teri (the beautiful Chloe Grace Moretz) who has fallen into the clutches of a Russian Mafia vice ring, and these are very, very bad people. When he pleads with them to free her from their clutches, they refuse. Sadly, those Russians are very, very bad people indeed. So he goes to war with the Russian Mafia, exhibiting what Liam Neeson’s character in another recent film called “a very particular set of skills.” Mayhem ensues.

It is quite a violent film, which builds to a crescendo of ultra-violence which is so insane I actually started laughing. I won’t say more. Washington is an excellent actor, beautifully measured before he starts killing people, and I do love Chloe Grace Moretz, even though I now expect Operation Yewtree to be on my tail (they probably are anyway, because I am male and over 50). But there is a standout performance by a chap called Marton Csokas, who plays the psychopath from hell who, as the film critics say, chews up the scenery. If there was an Oscar for “Best Supporting Role as a Psychopath” he would be nailed on to win.

Which brings me to Suzi. That is, of course, not her real name. About a year or more ago my lovely friend Dominique who ran the bric-a-brac shop and read Tarot Cards (I know, I know, but she was really just a psychologist) asked me to help this young woman. She was 24 and had come from a difficult background on a council estate in Leeds. She was, as people of my age say, a bonnie lassie, and sometimes that can be a curse. She had been the subject of certain abuse a child, and although she had some decent relatives and loved her mum and granddad, she had left home and made her own way in the world as soon as she could. With a violent, erratic, drug-abusing brother I don’t blame her. She made the right call, and she has looked after herself since maybe 18. She’s a grafter. She started as an office “Go For” and worked her way up to be a general office manager – on not a lot of money, but OK.

Dominique asked me to help because the company’s HR department got leaky due to a drunk, and the personal details of her past had become common knowledge; she felt ashamed and unable to stay. It was a reasonably clear case of constructive dismissal. By the way, I’m not a softie or a bleeding heart liberal when it comes to such matters. I met her at the local coffee shop and she passed all the necessary tests for honesty and genuine distress. I’m not sure I passed her tests, being dressed as is my “habit” (pun intended) in my most comfortable ragged sweater, a standard British Army combat jacket and tatty trainers.

They sent a little delegation from the company to do a deal and pay her off. They expected to meet a vulnerable and upset young woman, and had come with a nice letter for her to sign and a cheque for £1,000 to give her in settlement. The delegation was ushered by her landlady into the dining room, where they did meet a vulnerable and upset young woman. And also yours truly, suited and booted. I can also promise that a suited and booted Gildas is a far cry from a cuddly fellow in a ragged sweater. I suit suits, so to speak – charcoal grey on this occasion, well cut, with a nice crisp white double cuff shirt and silk tie (red – a power colour, with matching cufflinks). Shiny Oxford brogues completed the outfit. I introduced myself very politely as a practicing lawyer and her friend, and they got the very best “smile”. Not every one can do “the smile”. It’s when there is a deliberate mis-match between the lower facial expression, which is polite, and the stare, which is not. It is cold, piercing and cruel, and a perfectly deliberate act of psychological intimidation.

I won’t go through all the details. She got a better settlement. Not massive, but OK, and enough to tide her over and give her a holiday before she started a new job. As I say, she’s a grafter.

We stayed in touch. Having realised that I was not, in fact, a tramp but quite possibly a card-carrying psycho of the “I know where you live” attitude to bad guys, she was very grateful, and I liked her. There was, by the way, nothing untoward or inappropriate in my interest. As I say, she is a bonnie lass, perhaps too much for her own good as will become apparent below, but whether she is just not my type or my avuncular responsibility had pressed an “off” switch, it doesn’t matter. I am quite sure she has no interest in me in that way and I don’t think about her other than as a good young woman who has not had the advantages I had starting out in life. And besides, it does me good to be “down with the kids” sometimes. What middle-aged man wouldn’t enjoy the company of a pretty and nice young woman, just, well, just because? Ask me about a mutual acquaintance with flaming red hair and I will give you a very different answer.

Anyway, we hadn’t been in contact for a little while when I met her for a coffee in the pleasant café in a Pennines’ village on Tuesday. It turned out things hadn’t been so great for her. She had resigned her new job because her boss’s husband had been persistently “hitting” on her. As I say, it can be a problem being good-looking, and you can see that she might have handled it differently and kicked up a fuss, but that’s how she felt. She was OK for rent but looked a bit tired and underfed and was a bit short. More worryingly it turned out that she had had a minor operation, and she was in some pain.

This clearly needed addressing.

The immediate issue was addressed by buying tea and the most immense slice of cream cake that I have seen for quite a while, which disappeared in no time at all. I offered her some money to tide her over for the week, but she refused, and good for her. I can see that it may have been inappropriate for a middle-aged man to be giving a young woman money, although it was meant well. I drove her home and slipped a block of very good chocolate which I had bought at the café and “forgotten” to eat into her bag. However, plainly this situation needed more attention. Coping on your own, with family far away after an operation can’t be fun, and I could tell she had been going without. I had a moment of inspiration.

On the Wednesday I drove back to her house, bearings gifts in the form of home-made soup and a Tesco “Meal Deal”, with which you get a “Finest” range starter, main course and side order, dessert and a bottle of wine for £10. Thank you Tesco. Some easy-to-cook luxury food for her at little cost. The home-made soup was important too. Although I will never win Masterchef, I make really good soups and casserole – an inheritance from my parents’ war time make-do attitudes. Also, I recognised the home-made nature of the delivery was important. Not money – a personal thing. She was totally delighted. As I guessed, she had nothing much in, there was only a poor convenience store nearby, and it was cold and gloomy for going out. She would be fine for a while.

Why did I do this? Was it vanity? Was it self-indulgent and for my own ego? I don’t reject these thoughts, but on the whole, I don’t think so. Because I can. Because it was simply the right thing to do.

She got a telephone interview for a job the next day, and she starts on Monday. I will keep an eye out for her.

I have found in my middle-age, after all my troubles and suffering which I recounted on this site a couple of weeks ago, that I like giving rather than receiving. But, curiously, what I give, I get back, and more. Not in the same way, but still more.

The next project is the home for stray and homeless dogs. They take them into care and re-home them when they can. This week they asked for volunteers on Facebook, and so I have put myself at their disposal. The Monk Mobile is a stately old Volvo Estate with 150,000 miles on the clock, with the nick name “Tilly”. Perfect reliable transport for a dog in need of a lift.

I suppose one doesn’t need to take out swathes of Russian Mafiosi to be an Equalizer. One can do it in small, quiet un-dramatic ways, but none the worse for that.

Here is some music. Have a Blessed Day.

Gildas the Monk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLbEZkuIRBk&index=3&list=PL80D18478A58833C1

© Gildas the Monk

A number of things have conspired in any number of attempts to conjure up a Sadly worthy jeremiad over about the last four or five months. and there were many things that came like a flood of fodder during that time, starting near-abouts with Ferguson and the dead kid left in the street for four hours.

Some shit just knocks the wind out of you and being hit by a fusillade of hatred, naked racism and bullshit can on the right days get to even the most tightly girded of us.

Personally, there was the job I had to get out of lest I appear before a judge on assault charges, some rather uncomfortable issues with my health which stole time, vim and vigor. The laptop went down (more accurately the power supply went down and with a battery life measured in minutes…we are in brick territory.) Thank the FSM that I know how to use a soldering iron.

So the good news is that Lappie™ is back in business after a six week hiatus. My body seems to be gaining strength after a month of pain. While I am not sure where next months rent is going to come I figure I can manage a patron. The return of JP is of great solace as well.

Yesterday, I was cleaning/straightening up my room and ran across my beloved Nexus 7 which I had given up for a brick over a year ago. For shits and grins I thought I might plug it in and attempt to charge the beast. I honestly had no hope whatsoever given previous attempts, but 20 minutes later I caught the google bootup screen out of the corner of my eye and was like “You’re fucking kidding me.” I had to make sure that I left it alone for at least an hour as I went about my business (this was hard).

Happy to say that after 5 software updates the Nexus is humming along with the latest version of Android and I am a happy camper. I am going to take this as a sign that things are beginning to turn in this holler. If the Opinel and Swedish fire steel make an appearance all the better.

Sometimes it is the little things…

In the midst of laments that the shared culture of television is dwindling – that charming picture of a nuclear family gathered around the TV set outshone by the glow of individual screens — “Send Blank Tape,” an installation at Pioneer Works, is providing an alternative communal viewing experience. With carpets on the floor and a sofa, eight CRT monitors propped atop milk crates play works produced in connection with Radical Software, the earliest publication to cover all aspects of the then-unexplored medium of video. Between 1970 and 1974 the Raindance Corporation published eleven issues of the journal, which are now compiled in an online archive.

It was a DIY venture aiming to disseminate discoveries of any and all possibilities video had to offer, not just for art, but also for activism, documentary, science, psychology, and play. Its distribution forged the consciousness and communication of disparate collectives across the country. The title of this exhibition refers to a system set up at Antioch College in Ohio by which people could send in their own videos to be included in an ever-expanding archive, along with a blank tape to be filled with other programs from the collection, creating a kind of grass-roots library that embodied the ideology of a movement.

Fueled by the teachings of Marshall McLuhan, Radical Software railed against the deeper message of that 1950s family portrait: that the television at its center was broadcasting the same corporate media message into every American living room, a fixed perspective consumed by the masses as truth. One video at Pioneer Works, “Some Short Scenes in the Life of Radical Software,” shows the printing and distribution of the journal. Beryl Korot, one of the journal’s founders, explains to the camera that they believe television can be much “more than a radio with a screen,” or the “feedback of feedback of information.” The journal’s agenda was to promote independent, pirate television, and gave down-to-earth information about equipment and how-to’s in all levels of production. In the videos we see mechanics laid bare – microphones poke into many shots and you hear directions and the voices of people behind the camera. Emphasis is always on the medium and its practicality.

The magnetic tape of video degrades far faster than film, and these screens show a low-contrast image, a mesh of grey vibrating with artifacts and banding. The content is similarly imprecise, crossing from documentary to trippy video feedback experiment to free love sex tape to a camera being passed around at a loft party. One highlight is John Reilly’s “The Ballad of AJ Weberman,” a profile of the self-proclaimed Dylanologist rummaging through Bob Dylan’s trash cans outside his Bleecker Street apartment like a stoned archaeologist making important historical discoveries: “Dylan uses Clorox!”

The works on view here offer a time capsule of early seventies counterculture, but the silent majority peeks through. In the middle of “Whole Earth Demise Party,” a video from 1972 documenting a public forum held at the Exploratorium in San Francisco on how to spend the profits of a counterculture magazine, the camera turns to the monolith of national broadcast itself: a news program showing Richard Nixon as he walks his daughter Trisha down the aisle and Dan Rather duly commentating. A reel of shorts by the collective Videofreex features an interview with Yippie Abbie Hoffman in Chicago for a Weathermen protest. Hoffman’s manic comments on the “establishment” and curly mass of hair find stark juxtaposition with the nervous laughter of two short-haired, buttoned-up boys and their hairsprayed mother insisting that it’s “the government’s job to make the decisions” about whether to end the war.

As if in direct response to that sentiment, a particularly tragic video shows a worried 21-year-old Fred Hampton, deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of The Black Panther Party, discussing the leaders who have been “wiped out,” just three months before he was assassinated in his sleep by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.

Most of these early experiments were made in New York City, though the Videofreex collective moved their equipment to the Catskills to become “the most neighborly television around.” The installation features work by other collectives such as Ant Farm, Raindance, Community Video, and Media Access Center, along with a series of works by female students at Antioch College.

In fact, most striking about the installation and the early video movement it covers is the prominence of women. Two women founded Radical Software and published its first issue, and in these videos women are clearly involved both in front of and behind the camera. Even Shirley Clarke, the goddess of independent film and video, makes a cameo in “Laser Games,” confounding pedestrians on 23rd Street with a laser pointer aimed from her Chelsea Hotel penthouse.

In my day job I’m a video editor, and when I mention this to someone (usually a man) in the same field the response is always some variation of, “Gear. Gear? Gear!” This pissing match goes on until my eyes have satisfactorily glazed over. It’s the kind of technical machismo that seems ironic in an age when equipment, education, and information are more accessible to a wider range of people than ever before. And yet this competitive attitude has dire effects on who makes it in the industry.

That’s why the sharing philosophy and instincts of openness Radical Software promoted feel so refreshing. Sitting cross-legged on the carpet, I felt nostalgic not for the American living rooms of the past, but for a time when the medium and its message were more generous.

“Send Blank Tape” is on view at Pioneer Works (159 Pioneer Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn) through November 16.

Well, this is hell of a thing.

“I read it with mounting uneasiness,” Asimov wrote the next year. “I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did. All three volumes, all the nearly quarter of a million words, consisted of thoughts and of conversation. No action. No physical suspense.”

Asimov’s self-deprecating description of his own series sounds as inviting as a synopsis of Season 1 of The Leftovers. And soon, it might be available for the same subscription price: According to a report at The Wrap earlier this week, Jonathan Nolan (brother of Christopher, and cowriter ofInterstellar) is writing and producing an HBO/Warner Bros. TV series based on The Foundation Trilogy.¹

I wonder if we can avoid Ben Kingsley as Hari Seldon? And let me be the first to put in a vote for Robin Lord Taylor as the Mule.

There’s nothing I’d like better than a well-executed television version of the Foundation trilogy (we’ll set aside, for the moment, the prequels and sequels).  And there’s no one more capable of doing this well than HBO.  But having read the entire trilogy a dozen times, I struggle to come up with the names of more than a handful of characters, most of whom don’t appear until the Mule cycle of stories.  It’s going to be tough.

What does Republican control of both houses of Congress mean? Many things of course. But one of them might be yet another push to open the Yucca Mountain nuclear storage facility in Nevada. And really, what could go wrong?

The key design element in question is something the Energy Department calls a “drip shield.” This is a kind of massive, corrosion-resistant titanium alloy mailbox that is supposed to sit over each of the thousands of waste canisters in Yucca Mountain’s underground tunnels. In NRC’s definition, it is designed “to prevent seepage water from directly dripping onto the waste package outer surface.”

The name drip shield itself is a giveaway that there is a water problem at Yucca Mountain. There is indeed a lot more water, and it is flowing faster, than the Energy Department imagined when it picked the site, which is why it added the drip shield to the original design. Without the titanium shields, dripping water would corrode the waste canisters placed in the repository and release radioactive waste, and the moving underground water would carry it to the nearby environment. Using the corrosion data in the Energy Department’s license application, one can calculate that this corrosion would take not the “million years” cited by Mr. Shimkus, but about 1,000 years.

Although the Energy Department has included the drip shields as part of the repository design, and NRC has accepted them for license-review purposes, the Energy Department doesn’t actually plan to install the shields until at least 100 years after the waste goes in. Presumably, this delay is based on financial considerations; installing the shields early in the project would add hugely to the repository’s cost and thus threaten its funding prospects in Congress. If you look more closely into the situation, you can’t escape the conclusion that it is highly implausible that the drip shields will ever be installed. In fact, as a practical matter, it may not even be physically possible to install them.

A 100 year delay? Well, what harm is there in that? Surely on top of everything else, the geopolitical situation will be precisely as stable as today, if not more so! Still…

According to Energy Department’s plan, after the radioactive waste canisters are placed in the repository tunnels, the site would receive minimal attention for many decades. After a hundred years or so, before the repository was permanently closed, the Energy Department would install the protective drip shields. So it says. Because of the radioactive underground environment, it would take highly specialized robotic equipment to install the shields with the required precision. None of this equipment has been designed, or even thought through.

Realistically, a century into the project, the underground tunnels would have deteriorated considerably and collapsed in part. Dust would sharply limit visibility. The tunnels would have to be cleared of rubble for a remotely operated underground rail system to transport robotic equipment and the five-ton drip shields to the waste canisters. The shields would then have to be installed end-to-end, so as to form a continuous metal cover inside the tunnels, obviously a delicate, complex, and extremely expensive operation. Is it reasonable to believe that after 100 years, with the nuclear waste in the repository long out of the public mind, that Congress would appropriate enormous sums of money for the Energy Department to go back into the tunnels to install the shields? Can we really rely on an agency that hasn’t yet cleaned up a nationwide radioactive mess that dates from World War II to keep a promise that it will do something a century into the future? Will there even be an Energy Department in 100 years?

This is one of many reasons why there is no room for nuclear energy in our future. As Alan Weisman discusses, building nuclear power plants assumes a forever of continued electrical production because if that power goes out long enough for the backup generators to run out, every single nuclear power plant in the world turns into a situation worse than Chernobyl. Then there is the storage issue that the U.S. certainly has never dealt with, as we see with the Yucca Mountain problems. Nuclear power is a bad idea.

What do you do if you sell a product on terms that legally bind your customers not to complain and they complain anyway? Pretend that the DMCA gives you the right to censor search results. Read the rest

Darth Vader is showing less mercy than usual here. [via]

Fuck you, George W. Bush. Go suck on some hairy rhino balls so that your mouth is so full of sack that you can't breathe, let alone talk. And fuck you to all the media outlets treating Bush like a long-lost beloved uncle who has finally come back from exploring the Congo with his Hottentot manservants. Any interview with the former president should begin with "Shut the fuck up, you fucking America-wrecking imbecile" and end with "Why won't you shut the fuck up, you fucking torturing, murdering, war criminal motherfucker?"

Bush has been just about everywhere promoting his book on his fucking asshole father who everyone loves now because he's old and jumps out of planes and shit, but who was a shitty president who bobbed on Reagan's knob until he lost his own personality. Here's W. on NPR when asked if his mission in Iraq was as clear as his father's during the Persian Gulf War: "Yes. I think in many ways it was. It was more complex because this decision was made in a post-9/11 world. In other words, the removal of Saddam from Kuwait was definitely in our national interest. But it didn't necessarily mean that the United States's homeland would be threatened or not threatened depending upon his actions. In our case, the 9/11 attacks changed the strategic equation for the United States, and we had to deal with threats before they fully materialized."

Wait. Yes, it was as clear as Dad's but it wasn't because it was more "complex"? Ah, there's that old logic. And, motherfucker, you are the fucking godfather of the post-9/11 world. And, motherfucker, are you still tying Saddam Hussein to 9/11? In less than 5 minutes, Bush mentions 9/11 four times. It's all he's got. So shut the fuck up already.

And then there's the softballs, like on Face Bob Schieffer's Face, Nation, when Schieffer's face asked Bush if politics has gotten "meaner." Bush actually said, "People were held to account for what they said. In other words, there was a pushback. Now there's just so much stuff out there--flotsam out there that people say what they feel like saying without any consequences." And Schieffer did not arthritically rise out of his chair and bitch slap Bush, screaming, "Motherfucker, that cocksucker Karl Rove ran your campaigns. You fucking made it meaner. Rove was never held accountable, even for outing a fucking CIA agent whose husband pissed him off. He should be skull fucked by bears. Shut the fuck up."

Let's not even talk about his Today show appearance, which should cause the set to be burned and the ground salted.

Why are we doing this? Why is Bush allowed to go anywhere without crowds pelting his car with shit and rotten tomatoes and eggs? Why aren't there riots at his book signings, demanding his arrest for crimes against humanity? Why hasn't he been run so far out of any town that he has to live in an underground bunker so that the angry masses don't tear him limb from limb? Are we that brain-damaged a nation that we've forgotten? Are we that delusional that we can't just say, endlessly, "Shut the fuck up," and mean that we never want to hear from him again until we all jubilantly join hands and do a crazy jig on his grave?

Oh, and, fuck you, W., you didn't write a fuckin' book.

On Tuesday, I took my beloved number 4 subway down to the Nevins St stop so I could visit the brilliant BRIC House to see math whiz, funnyman, Public Engagement in Mathematics Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, and all-around good guy Matt Parker perform his entertaining blend of mathematics and comedy in a joint presentation of the Secret Science Club and the BRIC Stoop Series. Matt has just released a book, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension: A Mathematician's Journey Through Narcissistic Numbers, Optimal Dating Algorithms, at Least Two Kinds of Infinity, and More.

One of Mr Parker's first displays of acumen involved asking the audience if anyone had a calculator (practically everybody did, because we had phones- one lady in the audience actually had a straight-up calculator, which impressed Matt), then asking everyone to pick a double-digit number and to cube that number- he then quickly solved the cube root problems that he solicited from the audience, perhaps by using this method. He then moved on to perform his barcode bit, and digressed about the difference between European and North American barcodes, which led to a bit about the need to encode information in such a way that the inaccurate lasers can be compensated for, which led to a bit about using a 3mm drill bit to make a hole in a Blu-Ray disc (preferably someone else's, he quipped) and ascertaining that there was enough data coded on the disc to compensate for damage to said disc.

One of the tours de force of Matt's presentation was his spreadsheet trick (which you can duplicate at the linked site, by which he illustrated that digital images can be likened to spreadsheets, each pixel being a "spreadsheet cell". He capped this by noting that anyone who relaxed after work by watching television was basically going over multiple spreadsheets per second.

A lot of Matt's presentation involved props, such as interlocked rolling discs and a plethora of Möbius strips. Mr Parker told us that the Möbius strip is his second favorite shape, and in the Q&A admitted that his favorite shape is the Klein bottle. He also proudly displayed a self-correcting binary scarf knitted by his mum, who is now working on a Klein bottle hat.

It was an entertaining night of mathematics, but enough of my yapping... how about some of Matt's mathematical musings? Here is a long bit about a computer constructed out of dominoes:





Here's a funny bit about the imperial measurement system:





Here is a nifty "Fractal Pterodactyl" pattern (hint: the pterosaurs depicted are Pteranodon longiceps:





Here's a review of Matt's book, which promises to be a fun series of activities. He'll be appearing in Seattle next week, so if you're in the area, he's a fun lecturer and a great person, so check out his event. If you're really serious (but not overly serious) about math(s), check out one of the mathsjam events in your area, and while you're engaging in mathematical activities, drink to Mr Parker's health.

View

micdotcom:

Women’s products cost more than men’s — and the French have had enough

It costs more to be a woman than a man.

It’s an infuriating and relatively unnoticed fact: Not only do women earn less than men, all around the world, they are essentially being “taxed” for their purchases. 

Sometimes called the “invisible,” “pink” or “woman” tax, this capitalism-induced phenomenon reflects the price difference between otherwise functionally identical products marketed to women as opposed to men.

Unlike in the United States, however, France has decided to do something about it. | Follow micdotcom

clementinemorrigan:

hiddenjumprope:

thecatsmeow90:

My lovely friends and I did a thing.

I love that this is happening.

I was fighting dress codes when I was thirteen / fourteen. That was back in 1999 and 2000. The fact that this shit is still going on is so gross. Grateful that the resistance is still happening.

The sons of our sons will marvel,
Paging the textbook:
“1914 … 1917 … 1919 …
How did they live? The poor devils!”
Children of a new age will read of battles,
Will learn the names of orators and generals,
The numbers of the killed,
And the dates.

They will not know how sweetly roses smelled above the trenches,
How martins chirped blithely between the cannon salvos,
How beautiful in those years was Life.

Never, never did the sun laugh so brightly
As above a sacked town,
When people, crawling out of their cellars,
Wondered: is there still a sun?
Violent speeches thundered,
Strong armies perished,

But the soldiers learned what the scent of snowdrops is like
An hour before the attack.
People were led at dawn to be shot …
But they alone learned what an April morning can be.
The cupolas gleamed in the slanting rays,
And the wind pleaded: Wait! A minute! Another minute!
Kissing, they could not tear themselves from the mournful mouth,
And they could not unclasp the hands so tightly joined.
Love meant: I shall die! I shall die!
Love meant: Burn, fire, in the wind!
Love meant: O where are you, where?

They love as people can love only here, upon this rebellious and
tender star.

In those years there were no orchards golden with fruit,
But only fleeting bloom, only a doomed May.
In those years there was no calling: “So long!”
But only a brief, reverberant “Farewell!”
Read about us and marvel!
You did not live in our time — be sorry!
We were guests of the earth for one evening only.
We loved, we destroyed, we lived in the hour of our death.
But overhead stood the eternal stars,
And under them we begot you.

In your eyes our longing still burns,
In your words our revolt reverberates yet
Far into the night, and into the ages, the ages, we have scattered
The sparks of our extinguished life.

©Ilya Ehrenburg 1919.

carnivaloftherandom:

curlykytta:

comedium:

news flash: bbc finally does something right

Listen up college kiddies that think your drunken escapades don’t matter!

Ooh, and bonus Colin Salmon.