Sophianotloren

The Kola Superdeep Borehole is the result of a scientific drilling project of the Soviet Union in the Pechengsky District, on the Kola Peninsula

It has been said that the human race knows more about certain distant galaxies than it does about the ground that lies beneath its very feet. In fact, while it took the famous Voyager 1 satellite twenty-six years to exit our Solar System (relaying measurements to Earth from 16.5 billion km away), it took about the same amount of time for humanity to penetrate a mere 12 km into the Earth’s surface. [x]

Source

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badkidsjokes:

once a boy took an egg and his mother asked what are you doing with that egg he did not answer she thought he will eat it but he cracked it on the floor he took the shell and fill it with water 

I should print this picture out immediately and put it in a fucking frame.

A customer commissioned Glasgow, Scotland vehicle graphics company Clyde Wraps to make a 2014 Volkswagen van look like it had been devoured by rust. The vehicle is actually covered in beautifully designed vinyl stickers of corroded car parts. Read the rest

We hope you aren't curious about Nolan Bushnell's game development history... you may find yourself sucked into a time sink. Microsoft has quietly added an option to play Pong in Bing (Bing Pong, get it?) if you search for the digital table tennis cl...

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dogs

From friends who are digital artists, retouchers, or illustrators, I sometimes hear stories of clients who suggest projects should go faster or simply cost less because the software “does it all for you.” While the tools are indeed more efficient and impressive with each new Photoshop or Illustrator release, the skill required to master those tools is still substantial. Case in point, this new time-lapse from Argentinian photographer and retoucher Joaquin Villaverde who demonstrates his Photoshop abilities by giving new life to a severely damaged black and white portrait of a girl. The clip shows two hours of work condensed into three minutes. (via PetaPixel)

Once upon a time, an author looked out the window of his writing shack.

Yes, this is what we do when we’re supposed to be writing.

The Supreme Court seems poised to rule all public affirmative action programs unconstitutional, although Anthony Kennedy might step in with another one of his “affirmative action might be permissible in theory although it never is in practice” specials. This would be regrettable, as well as revealing the “originalism” of Thomas and Scalia for what it is. Jamelle Bouie reminds us of an instructive fact about this particular plaintiff:

What’s striking about this case—and what makes it frustrating to some observers—is the curious question of Fisher’s academic record. Put simply, as Nikole Hannah-Jones documented for ProPublica, affirmative action wasn’t her problem.

[…]

Neither special circumstances nor grades were determinative. Of the 841 students admitted under these criteria, 47 had worse grades than Fisher, and 42 of them were white. On the other end, UT rejected 168 black and Latino students with scores equal to or better than Fisher’s.

To call this discrimination is to say that Fisher was entitled to a space at the UT Austin, despite grades that didn’t make the cut. It’s worth pointing out that the university gave her the choice of transferring from a satellite school, which she rejected.

Despite the “taking slots from people who deserve them” narrative so beloved by opponents of affirmative action, the “victims” are highly likely to be these kinds of very marginal cases, coming from the part of the applications process where distinctions are essentially arbitrary. Using diversity is a criteria in making these otherwise arbitrary distinctions isn’t bad policy and doesn’t violate the Constitution.

Last night in London, a group of Sotheby’s cleaners and porters protested outside the auction house, demanding that it implement the London Living Wage — a government-calculated hourly payment that’s meant to enable low-income earners to afford living in one of the world’s most expensive cities. The rally was organized by United Voices of the World (UVW), a trade union that advocates for fair working conditions for mostly low-paid, migrant workers, including the demonstrators. UVW has long been in negotiations with Sotheby’s, which had previously agreed to implement the London Living Wage before replacing its contracted cleaning service with a new provider, Servest, as Art F City reported. Under the new partnership, Sotheby’s retracted prior agreements to pay the current Living Wage and to implement contractual (as opposed to statutory) sick pay, leaving employees outraged.

The July 1 protest, which drew nearly 100 people to action on one of the hottest days of the year, occurred during a major auction that witnessed the record sale of a Warhol painting for nearly £21 million (over $32.5 million). That price tag helped lead to Sotheby’s highest total earnings in one night, which has only spurred more anger. The conflict escalated further when UVW posted a furious statement on Facebook this morning, reporting that Sotheby’s had fired all its employees who participated in the protest:

PLEASE READ THIS AND SPREAD THE WORD: all the courageous cleaners and porters that took part in the protest yesterday demanding sick pay and an end to trade union victimisation have been sacked by the scumbag Sotheby’s and their stooge contractor Servest. Some of them have been working for Sotheby’s for over 5 years. We will now fight tirelessly for their reinstatement. Please write to us if you would like to get directly involved in the campaign so we can co-ordinate our actions. We will need all the support we can get. We will not let Sotheby’s get away with us. Protesting is a right, not a crime!

Sotheby’s, however, rejects the accusations: Senior Director of Communications Matthew Weigman told Hyperallergic over the phone that the auction house has not sacked but rather suspended only four cleaners — with full pay — who “had attempted to assault our clients by shooting water pistols and blocking them from entering the building.” UVW is standing its ground and has called the Sotheby’s officials “lying, low life scumbags.” Hyperallergic has reached out to UVW multiple times but has not received a response.

Shiri Shalmy, an independent curator who attended the event with members of Open School East, did not mention any water pistol–related incidents, telling Hyperallergic in an email that the atmosphere was “positive and up-beat, with lots of music, dancing.” The choir Strawberry Thieves led a sing-a-long while protestors waved banners painted with phrases like, “ANGRY ARTIST” and “WE ARE ALL PERCY” — a reference to Percy Yunganina, a Sotheby’s porter who has had a very active role in the union. Meanwhile, security guards stood by the entrance of the auction house to ensure that visitors could attend the sale without trouble.

“It was particularly telling to watch how people attending the auction reacted to the demonstration,” Shalmy wrote in her email. “Most ran past the protesters, ushered in by hired, private security guards assisted by London police, trying to avoid any eye contact that will force them to acknowledge the injustice inflicted by Sotheby’s. It seemed to me that they felt any interaction with the protesters will implicate them.”

In response to the alleged dismissals, which she believes are true, Shalmy echoed what many are condemning on social media: a powerhouse’s exploitation of the people it depends on.

“This is a testament of Sotheby’s contempt for the individuals involved and unionized work in general,” she wrote. “Like in other similar struggles, artists stood in solidarity with cleaners and porters working in private and public art institutions. We are all part of what it takes to make exhibitions, concerts, and performances. We are all cultural workers.”

AR Screen hackathon project

Proof of concept demo of an AR / VR interface by Leap Motion engineer Raffi Bedikian presents a convincing desktop interface of the future:

We had a hackathon at work and this was the project I worked on for a few days.

- C++/OpenGL
- Oculus DK2
- Prototype Leap color sensor (using standard public SDK and image API)
- Window textures and interactions are all legit Win32 calls (you’re actually manipulating your OS)
- Note: the news feed on the left, chat bubbles in the middle, and widgets on the right are just placeholder art

Link

Above is the embed for Rihanna’s new video, Bitch Better Have My Money (a non-YouTube link is here on Vevo if you’re held back by Google’s restrictions). It comes with a sex and violence warning for readers; survivors of sexual assault and trauma will skip hitting the ‘play’ button on this one. Why? It’s a full-on, blood-drenched cult film, a reverently grindhouse-style spectacle of sex, violence and style. So it isn’t for everyone, but is certainly, definitely for me.

I couldn’t decide whether to put this one in erotic art or erotic fashion, because it’s a visual feast, yet the couture is off the hook in every scene (as we’ve come to expect from Rihanna). So much couture/shoe/rubber/everything envy here. But if you’re a cult and horror film addict like me, this little flick is even more of a treat — and I’m enjoying watching the media scramble to call all the cult film references here. There are tons. The closest so far is Dazed, who writes,

For such an overtly cinematic watch, it’s no surprise that the seven-minute Rihanna and Megaforce-directed blockbuster doesn’t shy away from paying homage to cult film. BBHMM relentlessly throws out references across the spectrum, making for a full-blooded visual spectacle and a music video that wears its grindhouse and slash horror influences on its sleeve.

While BBHMM certainly draws on the blood reds of Dario Argento’s work or the comic horror of 70’s B-movies, we’ve aimed for the big screen and decoded RiRi’s reverence for Hollywood. (…read more, dazeddigital.com)

Well, they tried. Also, if you’re a Hannibal fan like me, you’ll love the shots of Mads Mikkelsen at the end, one of which I’ll confess to replaying a few times because… well, let’s just say… it works for me.

The post Cult film spectacle: Rihanna’s ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ video appeared first on Violet Blue ® :: Open Source Sex - Journalist and author Violet Blue's site for sex and tech culture, accurate sex information, erotica and more..

CHICAGO — A flat description of Miami-based artist Jillian Mayer’s work, such as you might find in wall texts or press releases, reads like it’s culled from the syllabus of an Interactive Arts & Media graduate class. Her work is concerned, you see, with how our identities are affected by the internet and technology, which she explores by using (quote) “video, online experiences, photography, telephone numbers, performance, sculpture, and installation.”

Then you see the work in Touchers, at Chicago’s Aspect Ratio Gallery, and something happens.

A single-channel video plays in a small room. In a box in the upper-left of the screen, there appears to be a live stream of a young woman wearing revealing clothing, looking and speaking into the camera while red and blue strobe lights revolve around the cramped, dark space in which she sits. Filling most of the screen is a scrolling stream of comments, in the blue-black colors and barebones fonts of the 1990s-era internet. The five-minute video records a real chat room that the artist created to document the remarks of participants as she talked to them, flirted with them, sang to them. As she sings a song that she herself composed, the comments from the (presumably all male) spectators start to get predictably crude and sexist, particularly when she croons the words “we can come together.” The same revolving red and blue lights in the video are installed in the gallery space, making the gallery visitors feel that they too are participating in the chat room, or even sitting in a peep show booth in some seedy red-light district. The artist’s performance is clearly ironic, and shot with great humor, yet this seems to go unnoticed by participants with usernames like shlonglong321 and doggie808, for whom the merest simulacrum of desire is as powerful as an invitation.

In an adjacent room, two C-prints, proportioned to the same size as the large monitor, document Mayer’s physical interaction with thermochromic material, where she pressed various parts of her body against a sheet of silk coated with a substance that picked up traces of heat. Some of the marks are recognizably handprints, but mostly the result is a ghostly, aquatic swirl of blue and green. We feel the presence of a body pressing itself forward to leave only a vanishing record of its physical existence, a point that is analogous to the situation documented in the video. The guys in the chat room are “touchers” (or self-touchers), as the exhibit’s title implies, while in the prints we sense perhaps even more strongly an urge to touch and be touched that is thwarted by the intervention of a flat, featureless screen. The end result of experiencing this show goes beyond the art school graduate seminar nature of the work and deals with some dark aspects of our online lives with playfulness and intelligence.

Jillian Mayer: Touchers continues at Aspect Ratio Gallery (119 North Peoria Street, Chicago) through July 11.

This is part of a series on how I approach game lighting, from a more general and conceptual perspective. I build most of my examples in Unity, but this is meant to be generally applicable to any 3D game engine, most of which have similar lighting tools.

We started by thinking about light from a cultural and conceptual lens in part one. In part two, we treated light more instrumentally in terms of level design and readability. Then in part three, we surveyed the three-point lighting method for use in games. But none of this theory matters if we can't actually achieve it within the semi-hard constraints of computer graphics.

Lighting is traditionally one of the slower or "expensive" things to calculate and render in a game engine. Consider the science of visible light: countless photons at different wavelengths bouncing around at unimaginable speeds that somehow enter your eye. To do any of this at a reasonable framerate, game engines must strategically simplify light calculations in specific ways, and then hope players don't notice the inconsistencies. It is "fridge logic" -- we want the player to nod along, as long as it "looks right."

Okay, so how do 3D game engines generally do lighting?


The simplest form of lighting is "ambient light", a constant default light level to apply to every model in the world, even the parts in shadow. This isn't realistic at all, so the ambient light usually serves more as a "fill light" (see part 3), especially for outdoor spaces, where it is often a dark navy color to make sure the shadows aren't terminating into pitch-black.

But ambient light applies a flat effect on every object equally, so some might say it doesn't even qualify as lighting because it does not really help us read into the depth or topology of a surface, which is often crucial for basic gameplay or wayfinding. (see part 2) ("Can I walk up this hill, or is it too steep?") ... For light to seem like light, it has to change based on the direction of the surface, and standard ambient lighting doesn't do that.


Ok, this is better. Now we're getting some shape differentiation.

A "directional light" is for sunlight or any other global light source, casting a constant light from a given rotation. It affects the entire world all at once, so it can be placed anywhere, even inside a wall; only its direction matters. Again, a directional light will shine on every surface facing toward it, and distance from this sun / moon does not matter. Because most scenes and game worlds will only have a single directional light, they usually function more like "key lights." (See part 2)


A "spotlight" casts a X degrees-wide cone of light at Y intensity. If you were making a game with lots of stage lighting, recessed ceiling lighting, or street lamps, then you would probably rely heavily on spotlights. The most common use of a spotlight is an elevated spotlight pointing down, de-emphasizing the ceiling and highlighting the floor instead. In this way, spotlights are great for implying specific directions or emphasizing specific places, whatever they're shining on.

Depending on how you angle a spotlight, it's not always clear where the light is actually coming from. Use that to your advantage.


Lastly, a "point light" is an invisible omnidirectional ball of light that casts light in all directions at X intensity. You would commonly use this type for things like table lamps, cage lights, or chandeliers. Point lights are really good at drawing attention to a given light source, because they generally have to be near whatever they're illuminating and all nearby shadow-casting objects will practically be pointing to it. (Versus a spotlight, where it's not really clear where the light is coming from, and we don't really care either.)

Together, these 4 light types are generally found in every 3D game engine or rendering package. They sort of form a complete domain:


But really, this is just the beginning.


Direct lighting only accounts for the first ray of light, which is why it's called "direct lighting", as opposed to "indirect lighting" which attempts to model how light bounces off or interacts with surfaces. In the right-most image above, notice how the red from the triangle bleeds onto the floor, and how the blue from the cube bleeds into the shadow on the wall, and how the background is just generally brighter. Those effects come from light splashing around this space, and traditionally it has been very expensive to try to calculate these effects in real-time while also rendering your favorite face-shooting game at 60 frames per second. (I'll talk a lot more about this in a future installment.)

Try holding your hand up in front of a bright light source -- the red fringe around the silhouette of your hand is called "subsurface scattering", because the light is actually passing below the surface of your skin and bouncing off the blood. We could say that the standard direct lighting model does not account for different material or shading types, so that means we have to engineer a system to account for that... and what about glare, and/or the ways your eyes eventually adjust to darker or brighter spaces? We'll have to engineer those systems too!

So, this is basically the technical history of game lighting: trying to compensate for all the holes within this basic lighting model. Because of this, the 4 basic light source types are just the beginning of game lighting. There's so much more we have to think about and implement:


Let's say you're making a game set in a city at night.

First, start with your global settings. My ambient light is set to a dark blue-ish purple, and I have a directional light casting a surprisingly bright blue light on the whole scene. (see "Hollywood Darkness": We only want it to feel dark, not actually be dark.)

Then start adding in your local lights. In this case, there's a spotlight as well as a faint point light underneath to simulate light bouncing and splashing around.


Now let's start adding things that aren't "lights", but strongly affect how we perceive the light.

The fixture model now has a self-illuminated emissive material to appear bright. The light halo is a separate 2D sprite that fades in and out based on the player camera distance. There's a particle system spraying dust particles in a cone shape beneath the light. I've also applied a bloom, ambient occlusion, and chromatic aberration effect to the camera. And don't forget the skybox, which is the only way "Hollywood darkness" can really work. Lastly, I added some fog in the background to simulate some darkness / atmospheric scattering and push back the scene background a bit more.

Remember that the perceived brightness of a light depends on two things: (1) the actual brightness of the light, and (2) the relative light level / darkness in the areas around that light. In general, try to darken or dim unimportant things so the more important things can get more attention. Context matters!


Specularity and rim-lighting and self-illumination, projected shadows, chromatic aberration, screen-space ambient occlusion, cubemaps and spheric harmonics, high dynamic range tonemapping, glare and light halos... in game engines these technologies operate as separate features that are selectively enabled or disabled to optimize a game to reach a certain framerate or achieve a certain art style, but in real-life these are all part of the unified phenomena of light as we know it.

In the end, the player will only see one light source there. But we'll know better, we'll be able to see the subtle system of effects we've concocted...


Game lighting is not a unified system. Rather, it is a patchwork of all this random shit that will hopefully seem to go together. As designers, it's our job to make all these different effects and hacks seem like a coherent thing.

Sometimes this control is really nice when you can, for example, create invisible floating light sources without any visible light fixtures. (Paraphrasing my lighting design teacher: "I would kill for that kind of power.") But sometimes all this responsibility kind of sucks because you have to go and manually add every part and fine-tune it with all the other parts, and it can take a lot of work. (This is why many triple-A studios have now taken away time-consuming lighting duties from level designers, and given this work to environment artists and/or dedicated lighting artists. For more info on a history of level design, see my GDC 2015 talk.)

Lighting in games is about more than just lights. It's about the overall image and what kind of mood you want to build, while seeming plausible enough within your world that the player doesn't constantly double-take. But this idea of "plausibility" is dependent on notions of "what is realistic" -- which affects what types of new lighting technologies get developed, which affects what is aesthetically possible in our toolsets, which pushes for more "realism"... and so on.

Next time, I'm going to unpack some of these underlying assumptions about what "good game lighting" is, and how we can possibly transcend these assumptions, if at all.

NEXT TIME: part 5, the cult of fidelity.

If I hadn’t had a good orthodontist, I would have such a crooked smile.

Should I have had counselling instead of a set of braces? Should I not have undergone the “mutilation” of healthy tooth tissue pulled out to make room in my overcrowded mouth? Does good dentistry create a standard of beauty, produce a market for a medical procedure designed to perfect us? Why, sure it does – as does birth mark removal, surgery for facial disfigurement, and all manner of processes that have, over the years, made human beings more standardised, more conventionally attractive, but have also eased the suffering and social isolation of the individual people who have had those treatments.

I used to be a bit snooty about people going for cosmetic surgery. I was actually quite puritanical about looks, shying away even from hair dye. I believed in being “natural” despite literally lying through my teeth.

But I encountered stories over the years that lessened my haughtiness – the women who reduce their breast size to save their aching backs, the survivors who increase their breast size so as not to feel like little girls, the dieters who find themselves in skin ten times too big for them. It turns out many people’s reasons for altering their bodies are far from trivial. The surgery vastly improves individual’s psychological wellbeing, and yet we judge those suffering individuals often quite harshly for contributing to an artificial beauty standard (just like my teeth do).

Much as I feel genuine concern about the unrealistic standards of beauty women to a larger extent, and all of us to some extent are held to, I believe passionately in people’s rights to do anything they want with their own bodies. It’s called bodily autonomy, and much as we may not want corporations to advertise or promote unattainable ideals of beauty, we pretty much have to allow people the dignity of knowing what is right for them in this imperfect world, and that means always directing our criticism in general terms at the industry tactics and standards rather than at individuals.

The trans community should be no exception to this – what we choose to do to our bodies should be our own private choice, and if there are significant psychological health benefits to the procedure, they should be available through the NHS and medical insurance, just as in some cases breast augmentation, tummy tucks and other cosmetic surgery for cis people are. Because, in the world as it is now, someone who does not fit standards of appearance that are cis-normative is quite likely to be socially marginalised, subject to violence and harassment, and excluded from employment, especially if they are a trans woman. These issues are not trivial, and have far more to do with safety and emotional wellbeing than they have to do with “frivolous” desires about looks.

At the same time, it’s very important to understand that it is not surgery that makes us who we are, and holding trans people, particularly women, to expectations of how someone should look, or how their body should be configured, is deeply problematic. We need to end the kind of world where trans women need to gain acceptance and safety through cosmetic means, so that their body choices are made freely and without fear and oppression, as are the choices of all women.

But it is not for trans women to risk themselves to challenge  this status quo – it is for society to widen its standard of what is acceptable, for the cis gaze and male gaze to be challenged and dismantled by the people who hold that gaze.

Never again!  No more getting wasted for me! As I slowly come round from the monumental hangover of yet another PR disaster, I swear to shun the intoxicating liquor of publicity for ever ­­­– or at least until the next tempting but illusory opportunity comes along to promote an alternative narrative in the mainstream media.

This time, on Monday, it was an interview for 60 Minutes, the Australian version of the US current affairs TV documentary series.

They said they had been looking into the alleged Westminster VIP paedophilia scandals of the 1970s and 80s, including talk of a wide-ranging conspiracy by leading government and legal figures – the so-called “Establishment” – to sweep misdeeds under the carpet. Having seen my Heretic TOC pieces defending a couple of the putative “paedos in high places”, they wanted to give some balance by airing the sceptical view I had taken. They reckoned the interview would last about 20 minutes “and a large part of it would be used in the broadcast”.

Bearing in mind the specific and narrow nature of this remit, I thought it was well worth having a go. In fact, I strongly felt it was my duty to defend my friends if I could, especially Charles Napier and Peter Righton, who have both been anonymously accused of heinous acts of brutality against kids, acts of which I am certain they would not have been capable.

Neither man is presently well placed to defend himself. Charles recently started a 13-year prison sentence for “historic” sexual involvement with boys; Peter, who died some years ago, was even accused of murder by some squalid, lying, opportunistic, scumbag of a so-called “victim”.

The interview venue, the Travellers Club in Pall Mall, London, could hardly have been better chosen to fit the VIP theme:  the membership has included eight prime ministers, to say nothing of many great explorers and travel writers, as might be expected from the name. I arrived there wearing a tie for the first time in years as the dress code for this Georgian (founded 1819) gentleman’s retreat requires one.

It was almost as though the TV people were setting me up to look like a dodgy VIP myself, part of a posh old boys’ network of “abuse”, although they insisted they often use the club when they happen to be filming in London. So, nothing personal then.

My introduction to interviewer Ross Coulthart was inauspicious, though. He was perfectly civil, but ominously pointed out that scandal and tragic death were not unknown to those who had previously stepped inside these walls.  Among the club’s famous members were two who had committed suicide, he noted. He named one as Capt. Robert Fitzroy, skipper of The Beagle on Charles Darwin’s famous voyage and inventor of the weather forecast; another was prime minister Lord Castlereagh.

As for scandal, he continued, there had been Sir Peter Hayman, holder of many high ranking posts, including High Commissioner to Canada, who was also a spymaster in his capacity as deputy director of MI6. Hayman was eventually exposed in the press and in parliament as someone who used to compose pornographic fantasies about sex with children, sharing them in a correspondence circle of like-minded other writers who would also post their stories to him. It turned out he had joined the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), under the name Henderson.

Long before hearing about his Travellers Club membership from Coulthart, I had of course expected 60 Minutes to ask me what I had known about Hayman, who was always bound to be a key figure in the programme because his case constitutes the one example of an Establishment cover-up for which there is strong – in my view incontrovertible – evidence. He was never prosecuted whereas less privileged people were, including me and several other PIE committee members.

When Coulthart asked, I just told him that I had never known Hayman at any stage of my involvement with PIE. He had just been a name, a false name, on our membership list. Only much later did I discover, to my horror, that “Henderson” had been writing fantasies that were not just pornographic but also sadistic – truly obscene, in my view. No one can prevent having their own dark fantasies if sadistic tendencies provoke them, and it is infinitely better they are written down rather than acted out. But they are deeply disturbing all the same and I had no wish to be associated with them.

Perhaps because the Hayman story has long been in the public domain, Coulthart did not dwell on it once he knew I had nothing to add. Instead, He wanted new stuff from me, about people I definitely had known, especially Napier and Righton. The background is mainly in two Heretic TOC pieces, Hi, this is Charles. I’ve been a naughty boy and Exposé outfit murders its own credibility, so I won’t labour the details of what I told 60 Minutes about them.

What I will point out, though, is the extraordinary lengths this “investigative” journalist went to in order to suppress the results of his own investigation. Instead of simply hearing me out and allowing me to say how I knew neither Charles nor Peter were violent people, I found my own credibility was on trial from the outset. Nothing I could say was given any credence.

Not that he called me a liar. Instead, it seemed I was being set up as a deluded dupe, someone so heavily invested in the ideology of consensual paedophilia that I could not see that a violently abusive gang of VIP paedophiles – including Napier and Righton as well as Hayman and others – were using PIE as a relatively respectable front for their heinous crimes.

The only time I came near to disrupting this politically congenial narrative was when I introduced material Coulthart may not have expected. I reminded him of a BBC Inside Story documentary in 1994 called The Secret Life of a Paedophile, which focused on Peter, including his friendship with Charles. In its day, this programme was itself meant to be an exposé of the pair’s supposedly dreadful deeds. Seen against the present lurid background of murder allegations, though, it turns out to be an excellent piece of evidence for the defence.

Coulthart had played up the idea that Peter had been a “powerful” figure in the Establishment, darkly implying he could have had people killed at the snap of his fingers like some mafia boss, or, better still, a man with the resources of the state at his disposal. It would be truer to say that in his role as director of education at the National Institute for Social Work, Peter was professionally influential rather than powerful: it was not the sort of job that would put cadres of tooled-up heavies wearing shades at his disposal. His influence depended, rather, on his experience and wisdom when it came to improving the lives and prospects of children traumatised in the course of a difficult upbringing, including violent, neglectful, chaotic parenting.

As I pointed out in the interview, Inside Story interviewed a number of Peter’s senior social work colleagues. While they professed themselves shocked to learn he was a boy-lover, following his conviction in 1992 for importing child porn, they admitted he was a man of enormous gifts and “a degree of good intentions”. They conceded that he came across as a kind, avuncular figure and that the “unconditional affection” he was able to show towards difficult adolescent boys made him very effective in “getting through” to those kids so their behaviour improved. It was this rare talent that made him so well respected and liked.

Did this impress Coulthart? Oh, yes, it impressed him with the need to change the subject! But try as I might to add more evidence from Inside Story, he just shouldered me off the ball, insisting we move on. So I never got to mention the home-movies shown by the BBC, seized by the police after raiding Righton’s home. This was not pornography but footage that included a holiday scene with Charles and Peter giving a couple of boys piggybacks. The kids were plainly having fun, without the slightest sign of any fear or brutality by the guys. I could have added, too, the programme’s revelation that Peter became a godfather to some children of the kids he had taught, and that his friends included a number of men he had “abused” when they were boys: plainly, they did not regard themselves as victims.

For me, though, the biggest surprise of the interview was not Coulthart’s reluctance to face the facts, frustrating as that was. Rather, it was his decision to question me at length on the more philosophical side, especially my views on why I thought adult-child sex can ever be acceptable. I would have been delighted to speak about such matters to a reasonable interviewer asking intelligent questions, such as the Guardian’s Jon Henley a couple of years ago, or even, more recently, Corinne Purtill of Global Post. What I got instead, though, was not 20 minutes in which to defend my friends, as had been proposed, but more like an hour and 20 minutes, with a whole hour of bludgeoning by Coulthart mainly on a single very narrow aspect of a child’s ability to consent. It was boring and repetitious.

Whenever I tried to develop an argument by discussing relevant research I was interrupted and diverted. After introducing Susan Clancy’s data from her book The Trauma Myth, for example, which demonstrates that the harm in consensual cases comes not from the sex but from society’s response, often years later, her findings were brushed impatiently aside. He didn’t think people were interested in the musings of “some Harvard academic”, as he disparagingly put it, compared with the more urgent task of listening to the victims. Any “victims” who had not felt traumatised, it transpired, including Clancy’s interviewees, were not to be listened to.

I know I made a number of good points despite the heavy-handed tactics. My suspicion, though, is that these will end up on the cutting room floor – always a danger with a non-live interview – and that I will come across merely as a man in denial that “a child cannot consent”, as Coulthart kept simplistically insisting.

Should I have bothered? Was this really just another PR disaster, as I said at the start? Hard to say. Perhaps only someone with the forceful rhetorical skills of former MP George Galloway should have taken on such a tough mission. My own rather polite style doesn’t work at all without being given room to breathe. I suppose I could have stuck robotically to a few simple points, as media-trained politicians do in order to “stay on message”. This guarantees you won’t make a fool of yourself but intelligent viewers hate it.

One thing they cannot take away, though, is that anyone who turns up to face the cameras will be willingly presenting a “human face of paedophilia” that otherwise finds no place in the media. There must be some value in this, don’t you think? It would be better if the face happened to be younger and more attractive than mine as I near my 70^th birthday, but even so…

 

MOVIE SCRIPT WRITERS WANTED

Well, sort of.

The good news is that a native French speaker was so impressed by David Kennerly’s film A Decent Life (click on the ad below the Blogroll in the right-hand column for YouTube links) that he has offered to translate it into his own tongue.

David and I very much welcome that, but this translator says he would appreciate first being supplied with a transcription into written English of the original words, spoken by me. He will need this to work from when doing his translation into French. The spoken English in question runs to about 68 minutes.

This will be quite a time-consuming task. Both David and I are incredibly busy right now, and we will certainly remain so for at least the next several months. Accordingly, we wondered whether we might be able to find a few volunteers to take on this task. If each volunteer tackles just one or two segments of the 11-segment film, the workload should be manageable. It will probably be best to reply to me at tomocarr66@yahoo.co.uk . Look forward to hearing from you!

For those who missed the background, you can catch up by reading my blog piece last month (beneath the main blog): A DECENT NEW FILM BY DAVID KENNERLY.

If you’ve ever been to a high school or college football game, chances are you’ve seen a color guard. It’s hard to say what genre of visual culture color guard belongs to: is it dance? Theater? Circus act? Military spectacle? David Byrne’s Contemporary Color is even harder to classify: besides flag, rifle, and saber twirling, this strange show — co-presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music at the Barclays Center (our first visit) — featured new music by Byrne and his friends composed specifically for the routines, as well as short films that took us backstage, documented the process of putting the show together, and told us a bit about the history and experience of color guard. However you want to categorize it, it was an experiment, and it was fun.

Byrne’s program notes sketch the event’s backstory: “I got a request in 2008 to use some music I’d written and recorded for a Robert Wilson collaboration I did in 1988 called The Forest (1988 Next Wave Festival). It’s orchestral music, largely instrumental and not that well known, so when what sounded like a dance troupe made up of high school and college-aged kids wanted to use it I said, ‘Yes, no charge.’ All I asked in return was a video of the performance, out of curiosity.”

Turns out the group was a color guard, and Byrne was “gobsmacked (as the English say)” by their performance. “I saw it as a vernacular art and performance form that had evolved outside the influence and pressure of the media gatekeepers in big cities.” The part he liked least was the music — perhaps because, being David Byrne, he’s picky. “The music use was sometimes familiar and sometimes inventive, but to be honest it wasn’t going to set the antennae of my NY friends aquiver. But, I thought to myself, LIVE music by cool contemporary acts would do that! What a tempting concept!”

Was Byrne wise to yield to this concept’s temptation? We’re not sure. Bringing together so many collaborators — 10 different color guards from the US and Canada, plus 10 “cool contemporary acts” — must have been a nightmarishly complex logistical task. Some of the pairings were marvelous. St. Vincent’s “Everyone You Know Will Go Away” helped West Chester, Pennsylvania’s Field of View create some memorably disturbing effects. Canadians Les Eclipses turned Byrne’s gospel-esque “I Was Changed” into a rousing spectacle.

Connecticut-based Alter Ego performed its routine to a soundtrack of interviews conducted by Ira Glass in which its members talk about what it’s like to be in a color guard: the camaraderie, the fear of dropping a rifle, the exhilaration of landing a move spot-on. The haunting effect reminded us of the Wooster Group’s Poor Theater (a play about what it’s like to be a theater group), especially because we had run into Wooster founding members Liz LeCompte and Kate Valk in the lobby before the show.

Like other school-based groups, color guards are fragile organisms, and it was mentioned more than once over the course of the evening that this was the last time many of these groups would perform together. For them, it must have been a singular and unforgettable experience, for which they have Byrne’s brilliantly eccentric sympathies — and of course their own talent and hard work — to thank. For those of us who left wondering what fruit their vernacular art form might bear in the big city, the answer can only be: we’ll see.

Contemporary Color was co-presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music at Barclays Center (620 Atlantic Avenue, Fort Greene, Brooklyn) on June 27–28.

Lilian Min writes for The Toast about the tangled politics of ugly food:

I grew up in a household that was comfortable with farts, burps, intense smells, and food that facilitated all of the above. My dad would eat raw garlic and chase my sister and me around the kitchen, and then the whole family would sit down for dinner rich in not just garlic, but also ginger, hoisin sauce, black vinegar, sesame oil, and a thousand other strong scents and flavors. By virtue of my grandmother’s cooking style, and later my mother’s cooking style, the food I grew up with was spiced, sauced, and sublime. Most of it was also, in hindsight, very ugly.

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In May, an anonymous bidder purchased Pablo Picasso’s “Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’)” (1955) for $160 million, paying an additional $19.35 million to Christie’s in commission fees. The nearly $180 million set a new sales record that prompted much comment on global inequality, and now a new series of maps created by howmuch.net attempts to look at art valuation based on country of origin. The website, which visualizes all types of cost estimates, filled in the areas of various nations with their most expensive paintings, detailing the sale prices below each map. The resulting imagery is quite compelling but should be taken with a grain of salt as the methodology of the researchers is not entirely consistent: it is unclear whether they focused on the birthplace or ancestries of artists or the countries these artists largely worked in. Ivan Aivazovsky, for example, whose painting occupies the place of the Republic of Armenia, is a Russian painter of Armenian descent who never lived in Armenia. While, Canada is represented by Lawren Harris, even though “Scene in the Northwest: Portrait of John Henry Lefroy” by Paul Kane fetch far higher at auction. The data was also taken from public auctions with reported prices, so the study is also incomplete as it does not include unconfirmed amounts. (An online spreadsheet is available to dissect the complete list of paintings, prices, and location.)

Still, aside from being pretty, the maps offer some insightful observations of the art market: as howmuch.net notes, buyers tend to assign the greatest value to Western — and largely European — works: according to its numbers, paintings by Munch, Warhol, Klimt, van Gogh, Monet, Ruben, and Modigliani claim the top ten positions. The most expensive painting from Asia is reportedly Zhang Daqian’s “Lotus and Mandarin Ducks,” which sold for $24,551,210 — or less than 14 percent of Picasso’s price tag. Chilean artist Robert Matta claims the highest value for a South American work for “La révolte des contraires,” which raked in $5,010,500; just $35,000 shy of Matta’s painting is the highest-selling one from Africa: South African artist Irma Stern’s “Arab Priest.” Matta and Stern’s paintings each amount to less than three percent the cost of the Picasso.

Discrepancies aside, the study concludes that the maps illustrate “the accumulation of wealth in rich nations,” showing the increasing value of artworks as investments rather than objects appreciated solely for aesthetic reasons. As the researchers posit:

This might be having profound impacts on the wider economy: some have speculated that bouts of increased art sales actually signal overheated equity markets. Whether or not this is true, it is clear that the market for rare art is alive and well, and showing no signs of slowing.

h/t The Creators Project

Originally posted 2015-07-02 18:34:33. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

aidra fox janice griffith lyla storm source: droolingfemme.

I have to be up and awake and running in about 7 hours. I don’t know how much sleep I’m going to get before then. Have to be somewhere at 10am, because Tuesday at 10 is the only time that this particular housing resource thing is available, and it’s about the only resource available to me at the moment beyond my own feeble attempts at finding a place to live on a sub-poverty-level income, and I need housing.

No. I need a home. I don’t bother thinking about that very often anymore, because it’s such a vague, distant, uncertain concept that I don’t even know how to picture it. I have been wandering fo so long that I don’t know what it is to be still, though I would love to find out. I need stability in ANY aspect of my life, and I lack that. It hurts.

Filed under: General

MILWAUKEE — It’s not unusual for a work of art to cause outrage, especially if it dips into the tender zones of race, gender, or religion. It is no surprise, then, that news of the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) acquiring a seven-foot-tall, double-sided portrait of Pope Benedict XVI woven from 17,000 condoms has caused consternation, 500 comments within the first day of a local newspaper article online, national coverage, and threats from museum members, donors, and docents to withdraw support.

Big deal. This is the art world, and it’s par for the course. Controversy is as much a part of art history as rabbit skin glue.

In a post-Mapplethorpe landscape, we know the routine — although of course it goes back further than that. Caravaggio was considered vulgar for his mixing of real life models into religious scenes in the 17th century. One hardly needs to mention Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” controversy in 1989 and the subsequent Chris Ofili “Holy Virgin Mary” scandal of 1999. More recently, the Hide/Seek exhibition of 2010–11, co-curated by Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward and shown at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, caused an uproar, not because it was a brilliant revisionist history of the role gay artists played in Modernism, but because one video by David Wojnarowicz showed ants crawling on a crucifix. The video was removed from the exhibition.

Religious purists, in efforts to protect their sanctity, rise up in waves of predictable indignation. The arguments are generally reactionary and simple-minded, disregarding the artist’s investment of thought, time, and professionalism in a complex, socially engaged attempt to communicate the way only art can — via a premise rather than polemics. The ‘Condom Pope’ has been quickly dismissed by an internet public as a stunt, an offense and a childish prank to garner public attention.

Archbishop of Milwaukee Jerome E. Listecki wrote:

An artist who claims his or her work is some great social commentary and a museum that accepts it, insults a religious leader of a church, whose charitable outreach through its missionaries and ministers has eased the pain of those who suffer throughout the world, must understand the rejection of this local action by the believers who themselves have been insulted.

William A. Donahue, of the Catholic League, has also chimed in.

“This is yet another diversionary tactic of a right wing increasingly aware it is on the wrong side of history,” said curator Jonathan Katz. “Borrowing a language of discrimination from the left, they try to make it seem as if they are the wounded party. But tell me, who has been the subject — the continuing subject, I might add — of centuries of legal and and physical abuse aided and abetted by religion?”

But it seems as if everyone loses during these flare-ups. At the same time that conservatives defensively misinterpret the meaning and value of the work, the more liberal art world confuses the viral spotlight for empowerment. The valuable message of the work becomes muffled by the sensationalism of the controversy. The ‘Condom Pope’ has not even gone on view at the museum yet. The MAM’s permanent collection is currently closed for remodeling and reinstallation and will open in November with the Pope tucked between Chuck Close’s “Nancy” (1968) and Duane Hanson’s “Janitor” (1973), a rather clinical contextual nod to photorealism and the portrait — a safer positioning than within the more amorphous contemporary collection.

The artist Niki Johnson (b. 1977, Wisconsin) made this double-sided portrait of Pope Benedict XVI, actually titled “Eggs Benedict,” out of 17,000 multicolored condoms. The piece is a response to a statement made by the conservative German former Pope in 2009 that condom use would not stem the spread of AIDS in Africa. In all of her work, Johnson, who earned her MFA in 2012 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is interested in feminist and social issues and how the media disseminates information and shapes opinion.

“Eggs Benedict” was first exhibited in 2013 at my art gallery in Milwaukee, Portrait Society, a space dedicated to reexamining issues related to the genre of portraiture. The novelty of this work and the promotional acumen of the artist caused a viral, international response then, with the ‘Condom Pope’ being written about nearly worldwide. Locally, it received positive print and television media attention; the majority of international attention was positive as well. Visitors to the gallery, both Catholic and not, applauded the technical finesse of the piece as well as its respectful portrayal of the Pope. His image, culled from a newspaper photograph, is representational. Johnson wove the condoms through a mesh, much like a rag rug, to achieve the effect, acknowledging the process of weaving and its relationship to traditional women’s craft. She sometimes doubled two condom colors to achieve a more complex palette. The back of the piece shows the dangling ends of the condoms and appears as an almost abstract composition.

During its debut at the gallery, visitors lingered and wanted to converse about the piece. Strangers spoke to strangers about issues ranging from birth control and the role of church and state in contraception and abortion to the stigma regarding condoms (it’s still hard to talk to your teenagers about them) and HIV prevention. It became a selfie zone. It was within this context that the Milwaukee Art Museum accepted the sculpture into its collection. “We did not think the work would spark this much interest,” MAM Director Dan Keegan told Hyperallergic. “However, we did anticipate that it would stimulate conversation and discussion. That’s what good art does.”

But beyond the yawningly predictable controversy as “Eggs Benedict” enters the public sphere is another story about how it got there and perhaps about why more politically charged, socially engaged work so infrequently makes it into the permanent collections of art museums. As curator Jonathan Katz told Hyperallergic, “The art world has long been party to a significant confusion: it mistakes avant-garde style for avant-garde politics and then claps itself on the back for being so progressive. But the rare art that dares to address politics is almost always denied a place at the table until enough decades have passed to blunt its bite.”

To get a place at the table these days, it doesn’t take a village; it takes a liberal patron. And in Milwaukee, as elsewhere, they are precious few.

Joseph Pabst, descendant of the Pabst Brewing Co. family, has been involved in LGBTQ organizations and supported AIDS research for more than a decade. But his love of art and degrees in art history and design have inspired a different kind of activism too. Pabst understands the role that art plays in culture, absorbing and reflecting the conditions of its time, both directly and indirectly. He knows he can use his financial ability and passion for contemporary issues to ensure that the underrepresented, the victimized, and the oppressed receive a place within the regulated vaults of the public art world. When the Milwaukee Art Museum hosted an exhibition of more than 40 historic American quilts from the Winterthur Collection in 2010, for example, Pabst conceived of and funded a parallel exhibition of nine NAMES Project AIDS Quilts, which was shown around the corner . In 2011, after seeing a Taryn Simon exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Pabst purchased her photograph of a vial of live HIV virus and gifted it to MAM with the stipulation that it be shown every year on World AIDS Day. He also purchased a suite of photographs of gay hate crime murder sites by artist Paul Baker Prindle and gave them to the regional Museum of Wisconsin Art.

It would have been unlikely that the Milwaukee Art Museum would have put forth $25,000 to purchase “Eggs Benedict.” When Pabst heard that the gallery was considering selling the work to a private collector, he stepped in and advocated that because of the potency of the piece’s message, it must be placed in a public institution, to “reach the greatest number of people … to do the most good,” he commented at the time. Pabst offered to buy the work and gift it. After a national search for a museum recipient, the MAM agreed. While both the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art and the Museum of Sex in New York expressed interest, Pabst preferred to see it housed in a museum with a more general audience as well as in the city where he lives.

“I’m interested in many issues, including art, LGBT issues, HIV and AIDS, and issues of violence, including sexual violence,” Pabst said. “It’s ironic that the church and I should share such similar concerns. How could I not buy this piece when it covers a parallel social spectrum?”

Milwaukee, the city of beer, cheese, cream puffs, and bratwurst, has been under a conservative assault for four years with Republican Governor Scott Walker in office. Most of the news coming from here has been bad. Walker has undermined the unions, cut funding for education, advocated for new abortion constraints, and loosened gun laws in a city that is replete with violent crime. It is heartening that a scion of the city’s early brewing pioneers is working to keep earnest conversation, debate, and inquiry an integral part of the local culture.

“I’m thrilled that the artwork is doing what it should do: prompting people into a conversation — one that I hope is productive,” Pabst said. “This is a historic moment that is taking place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for the world to see. A work of art is stirring a global conversation. Hopefully, once the piece is on public view, it will stimulate the conversation that was intended by the artist and the patron. That conversation is about HIV/AIDS.”

This month is the 50th anniversary of the Moynihan Report. Stephen Steinberg:

A few weeks after Moynihan’s report was leaked to the press, the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles exploded in violence, triggered by an incident with police that rapidly escalated into five days of disorder and left thirty-four people dead. Pundits and politicians seized upon the report to cast blame for the “riot” on the deterioration of “the Negro family.” The report warned, “The family structure of lower class Negroes is highly unstable, and in many urban centers is approaching complete breakdown.”

Critics condemned the report for pathologizing female-headed households and black families in particular. The most trenchant criticism, however, was that the preoccupation with black families shifted blame away from institutionalized inequalities and heaped it on the very groups that were victims of those inequalities. As James Farmer, cofounder and national director of the Congress of Racial Equality, wrote with blunt eloquence, “We are sick unto death of being analyzed, mesmerized, bought, sold, and slobbered over while the same evils that are the ingredients of our oppression go unattended.”

Today, in the wake of Ferguson and Baltimore, family dysfunction is again cited by politicians, pundits, and scholars as the root of the problem. Rand Paul publicly twaddles about “the breakdown of the family structure, the lack of fathers, the lack of sort of a moral code in our society.” David Brooks opines in the New York Times, “The real barriers to mobility are matters of social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home and a neighborhood that either encourage or discourage responsibility, future-oriented thinking, and practical ambition.” And sociologist Orlando Patterson asserts that “fundamental change” can come only from “within the black community: a reduction in the number of kids born to single, usually poor, women.”

Steinberg goes on to break down the intellectual sources for the Moynihan Report, particularly Nathan Glazer. Intellectual racism that blames people of color for their own poverty has not diminished in the last half-century. Any number of racist sites refer back to Moynihan today; meanwhile this paragon of institutionalized racism became a respected Democratic senator without ever questioning his blaming of black people for their own poverty and ending his career as a big supporter of slashing welfare. Among other great things in this man’s life was ensuring the UN did nothing to stop the Indonesian slaughter in East Timor when he was UN Ambassador during the Ford administration and opposed the Clinton health care plan.

On July 2, 1980, the Supreme Court ruled in Industrial Union Department AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Institute that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration must take economic considerations into account when issuing regulations. This 5-4 decision severely impacted the ability of the government to take an aggressive and preemptive stand against workplace health problems.

One thing that often gets left behind in discussions of OSHA is the health part of the agency’s mission. We focus on safety. That’s because those issues are easier to take care of. You put proper protection around a saw and it becomes a lot less dangerous. But health is a whole other issue. You have a couple of issues making it so. First is the long term impact of work upon health, which means that occupational illness can take decades to become apparent. Second is that remaking worksites so that workers aren’t exposed is a lot more expensive than the saw guard. Protecting workers from benzene, toxic gases, or dust has real challenges. And those solutions can be expensive.

The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 charged the federal government with protecting workers on the job from industrial hazards. OSHAct stated, “no employee will suffer material impairment of health or functional capacity even if such employee has regular exposure to the hazard dealt with by such standard for the period of his working life.” It built on the “Precautionary Principle” that was in favor during these years for dealing with workplace safety and health issues, addressing environmental uncertainties in the regulatory process before they became problems. That means in the case of workplace health trying to figure out what substances might cause health problems and preemptively eliminating them. That requires action even if scientific data doesn’t exist that suggests there is a problem, but only that there could be in theory. This principle drove the move toward environmental and workplace regulation during the 1970s in both the United States and Europe. But the political implications of this were not worked out in the legislation and Congress gave OSHA a lot of leeway in figuring out how the agency would actually operate.

OSHAct tasked the Secretary of Labor is bound to set out rules for substances like benzene, even if only one worker might become unhealthy due to exposure. It was benzene at play in Industrial Union Department. OSHA sought to regulate benzene, an carcinogen, but without really nailing down how many workers’ lives would be saved in doing so.

The American Petroleum Institute decided to fight this, even though the petroleum industry clearly had the money to protect its workers from benzene exposure (it didn’t even bother arguing otherwise). Industry had engaged in a court campaign to slow down OSHA from its beginning, challenging the agency at every turn. On the other hand, the AFL-CIO led the charge to save the Precautionary Principle, building on its significant progress in fighting for workplace health in the 1970s. OSHA finally was up and running at full capacity by the late 1970s with Jimmy Carter naming Eula Bingham as the agency’s head. Bingham, the first OSHA director who really supported the agency’s mission, sought to remake workplace environments around the nation, often with the active support of those unions who saw the agency as a way to empower workers on the shop floor to protect themselves and express workplace power at the same time. So defending the Precautionary Principle became a top OSHA priority after 1977. Bingham’s OSHA created standards for acrylonitrile, cotton dust, lead, arsenic, and benzene.

Yet for organized labor, this was very slow progress. By 1981, the National Institute on Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) had recommended 250 standards but OSHA had only implemented 21 of those. Only 4 of these standards dealt with cancer-causing agents. In my forthcoming book on timber unions, I discuss in some detail how the International Woodworkers of America (IWA) was frustrated that their concerns on a wood dust standard was not taken seriously enough by OSHA. So for corporations, these standards were outrageous and for workers, they were too little and usually too late. The Precautionary Principle was a great idea but workers in the 1970s were impatient and wanted immediate remediation of the problems of work.

In the case itself, more popularly known as the benzene case, the Court had two primary objections. First was to rule on the benzene standard itself, specifically the reduction of benzene at the workplace from 10 parts per million to 1 ppm. Second was whether OSHA needed to have a “reasonable relationship” between the costs and benefits of new standards. The Court’s majority (John Paul Stevens wrote the opinion with Burger and Stewart in the majority while Rehnquist and Powell wrote concurring opinions) decided to read Congress’ mind in interpreting the Occupational Safety and Health Act, assuming Congress couldn’t have meant to protect all workers from all health risks without cost consideration. Effectively, the Court rejected the Precautionary Principle as an unreasonable standard with which to hold business. A plurality tried to create a standard for workplace health that would activate OSHA action, rather unhelpfully noting that it should lie somewhere between a 1 x 1000 chance of illness and a 1 x 1,000,000 chance. What this did was allow the Reagan administration to effectively avoid health regulations on the job at all after it took power in 1981 by adhering to the 1 in a million standard. Thurgood Marshall wrote a blistering dissent (Brennan, White, and Blackmun making up the rest of the minority) saying the decision placed “the burden of medical uncertainty squarely on the shoulders of the American worker.”

Despite Industrial Union Department, American work is much safer and healthier today than it was decades ago. Unfortunately, a lot of the reason for that is the outsourcing of such work to Latin American and Asian nations where workers labor in health-destroying conditions making products for American consumption.

While researching this case, I ran across a celebratory essay about the decision by one Antonin Scalia in an American Enterprise Institute publication.

The roots of this week’s decision in Michigan v. Environmental Protection Agency can be seen in Industrial Union Department, as Scalia’s opinion relied heavily on the same cost-benefit analysis as that case.

I don’t think there is a single book that really deals with this case effectively, but it is mentioned in Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner’s Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution, which is a very good book on the larger issue of workplace health. I also consulted Albert Matheny and Bruce Williams, “Regulation, Risk Assessment, and the Supreme Court: The Case of OSHA’s Cancer Policy,” in Law and Policy, October 1984.

This is the 149th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

mollyostertag:

zenosanalytic:

ceruleancynic:

mazarinedrake:

lilylilymine:

mollyostertag:

OKAY SO when I watched Fury Road (the first time) I thought it was strange how eloquently the Wives talked, but then when I watched it the second (and third) time I noticed that their prison room was filled with books - they’re the only educated, well read people in the world of Mad Max. So then I…had some feelings and made a little comic!

wow this is amazing and so much better than the Vertigo prequel comic. PERFECTION.

This is EXACTLY the kind of prequel content I most dearly desire! 

YES PLEASE MORE OF THIS

Something I found rather cool about that is how historically accurate it is.

Keep reading

bless

I built a catio, y'all. I don’t care if this is the most Portland thing ever, I did it.

In May, France’s national railroad, the SNCF (or Société nationale des chemins de fer français), put out an open call for artists to propose temporary projects for 16 of its properties that are disused or currently awaiting renovation. At first glance, the request for proposals looked very appealing, the photogenically decrepit spaces scattered all over the country just begging for big murals, dramatic performances, site-specific installations, and other artful interventions. There’s the charming abandoned train station in Marignac in the south, the 18,000-square-foot “train cathedral” in Paris’s Saint-Denis suburb, or the vaguely medieval water tower in Tionville in the northeast. All seem ripe for creative reuse.

But it didn’t take long for artists to notice the crooked terms of the SNCF’s offer: chosen artists will not only receive no payment for their proposals or to help cover the costs of their projects, but they will have to renounce any rights to the works they create, and must accept that they may be forced to stop their projects or destroy them at any time, without receiving any compensation or damages. In sum, the SNCF is asking artists activate and beautify its derelict properties for free, while reserving the right to exploit the resulting cultural cachet without compensating them.

“The SNCF is peddling a completely false image of art and artists,” artist Didier Courbot told Le Monde. “The SNCF is suggesting that art is merely a means to entertain, easily and for free, through ephemeral events.”

Though some 200 artists have already submitted proposals, a petition denouncing the SNCF initiative has garnered over 5,500 signatures. The petition, which calls on artists to boycott the project, is supported by six artist unions and organizations including the Syndicat National des Artistes Plasticiens CGT (the national union for visual artists), the Union Nationale des Peintres Illustrateurs, and the Comité des Artistes Auteurs Plasticiens.

“This arrangement is unreasonably unbalanced, without any real counterparty, and perfectly contestable on legal terms,” Agnès Tricoire, an intellectual properly lawyer, told Le Monde. “It’s urgent that legislators investigate open calls like this that ask for proposals without compensation and on top of this demand that artists waive their rights to royalties.”

The SNCF has not responded to criticisms that its contest is exploitative, and such uncompensated open calls are unfortunately common in France — a request for proposals with similar terms launched by the Opéra Comique a month ago engendered a similar outcry. However, the director general of SNCF Immobilier (the national railroad’s real estate branch), Sophie Boissard, reassured concerned artists that their work “will not be unduly appropriated at the end of the project. But most of the sites will be rehabilitated one day, and we cannot commit, for legal reasons, to conserve the works.” Why they cannot compensate artists for the works, however, remains unknown.

Serbia officially endorsed what might be its most controversial historical figure on Sunday when it inaugurated a statue of Gavrilo Princip, the assassin who fired the shot that started World War I, the AP reported. The unveiling came one year after a similar monument to Princip was installed in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.

“Today, we are not afraid of the truth,” Serbian President Tomislav Nikolić, of the Radical Party, said at the ceremony. “Gavrilo Princip was a hero, a symbol of the idea of freedom, the assassin of tyrants and the carrier of the European idea of liberation from slavery.” Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, also in attendance, said the statue symbolized the continued “fighting for freedom today.”

Princip was a member of Young Bosnia, a militant group that wanted Slavic independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On June 28, 1914, the 19-year-old shot the Hapsburg crown prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie while they were driving in Sarajevo. Austria immediately accused Serbia of orchestrating the murder, and with the help of Germany, it attacked Serbia. Serbian allies Russia and France fought back, and eventually Great Britain and the US were drawn into the fight. By the end of the war, Princip — along with 14 million people — had died.

Today, nearly 100 years after his death, Princip has become a symbol of a history he did not live to see. Many Bosnian Serbs remember him as an idealist who fought back against the Austro-Hungarian invader and so freed Slavic countries from its rule. Speaking to the BBC last year, Sarajevo Mayor Ljubisa Cosic argued that Princip is a hero to all Slavs, whether Serb, Muslim, or Croatian. “Our opinion is that he was not a terrorist. He had revolutionary ideas of liberty, not just for Serbs — he belonged to the Slavic movement,” he said.

But it might be difficult for others to embrace him. After the war, Bosnia was swallowed up by the new pan-Slavic state of Yugoslavia, where Bosnian Muslims and Croats soon became treated as second-class citizens (the former were not even recognized as an ethnic group until 1968). They now view Princip as a nationalistic terrorist who set in motion the events that led to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, when Serbian nationalists committed genocide against them.

“The consequences of [Princip’s] action were very bad for Bosnia,” Sarajevo resident Fedzad Forto told the BBC. “[The Austro-Hungarian emperors] were still much better rulers than the kingdom of Yugoslavia or communist Yugoslavia …. You can look at the historical records and see how Austria-Hungary cared about issues like the rule of law. We lost so much in 1918.”

At the same time that they cast her to the margins of society, Victorian England was obsessed with the “fallen woman,” who had lost her virtue to sex, alcohol, or some other vice. This September, the Foundling Museum in London, an institution originally established for children given up by these women, opens The Fallen Woman to both explore and confront popular myths with real stories. Currently, the museum is raising support for the exhibition on Art Happens, a British crowdfunding platform from Art Fund for museums.

“We have been increasingly aware of the way in which the foundlings’ mothers — whose actions, circumstances, and decisions are so key to the Foundling Hospital story — are sometimes frustratingly absent from that story: there are very few images of the women who left their children with the hospital for example,” Stephanie Chapman, in-house curator at the museum, told Hyperallergic. “We often feel their ‘absent presence’ within the museum, but wanted to bring together an exhibition that seeks to address them and their story, placing it within the social and art historical frameworks of the time.”

Professor Lynda Nead is curating The Fallen Woman in collaboration with the Foundling Museum’s curatorial team, showing in public for the first time some of these women’s petitions to the hospital alongside art and other artifacts. The Foundling Hospital was established in 1739 as “a hospital for the maintenance and education of exposed and deserted young children” by generous sea captain Thomas Coram. Support from William Hogarth in rallying art donations made it London’s first public art gallery, and George Frideric Handel lent a hand with benefit concerts of the Messiah. However by the 19th century rules got stricter, and women who were unable to keep their babies due to the stigma of childbirth out of wedlock or being abandoned by their families had to petition for approval, and were only permitted if it was their first illegitimate child. Even if accepted their names were on the whole not recorded, so they left tokens like small medallions or twists of silk ribbon to identify their children in the hopes of a future reunion.

“Many women tell harrowing stories of seduction, rape, and violence, but others reveal that the relationships they entered into were wholly consensual, although some worked hard to disguise the truth from the Governors, sometimes creating their own myths to try and manipulate the stringent entry requirements for the Foundling Hospital,” Chapman explained.

Similar to Homes of the Homeless, recently at the Geffrye Museum of the Home in London, which unearthed the voices of Victorian homeless to contrast with our perceived history of the time, The Fallen Woman addresses the depiction of these women in art and literature directly with their voices, evoked in the gallery with a sound installation by Steve Lewinson. Both authors and artists (mostly men) used these women’s stories as a moral warning — from Mary Endell in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, whose fall from chastity acts as a foil to the graceful lady Emily, to painter Augustus Egg’s triptych “Past and Present” (1858), where the consequences of a woman’s adultery ravage her middle class family. The Fallen Woman illustrates this side with paintings by Pre-Raphaelites like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and symbolists like George Frederic Watts, along with drawings from newspapers and other artifacts. Sensationalized for their supposed loss of virtue, The Fallen Woman aims to raise up these women’s real voices against this historic victimization for the first time.

The Fallen Woman is September 25, 2015 to January 2, 2016 at the Foundling Museum (40 Brunswick Square, London). The exhibition is crowdfunding on Art Happens through July 30.