billtron

Paul Jay of the Real News Network interviews Greg Palast, a BBC investigative reporter and author of Vultures’ Picnic.

Listen to it all, but here’s what I think is the key portion; it starts with a question that’s so obvious that nobody’s asking it: Why are we building a pipeline to ship oil to Texas? Texas has oil!

And I wanted to know why we’re taking oil from Canada across the entire United States to Texas. And, again, it’s because the Kochs want it. Now, why do they want it? The answer is, right now they’re getting their oil—the only place they can get lots of heavy crude oil—if you want heavy crude, you’ve got to get it from a heavy dude named Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela. And one thing about Chávez, who I’ve known for many years, is that he doesn’t let go of his nation’s oil on the cheap. He is a cornerstone of OPEC. And Venezuela’s been selling heavy crude at a premium to the price paid in Texas, because it costs more to get heavy oil from Venezuela than it does to get light oil down the road from Texas. But they have no choice, the Koch brothers, but paying Hugo for his gunky oil, [because the Gulf coast refineries, especially those controlled by the Koch brothers in Flint Hills, can really only handle heavy crude oil].

Now, on the other hand, the Canadians not only are selling for less than Texas oil—they’re selling, as of today—if you check out this week’s reports, about $33 a barrel less is the price of West Canada Sands (WCS) oil, as they call it, versus WTI, the West Texas Intermediate. So you’re saving about $35 a barrel—$35 a barrel—if you can get the oil from Canada as opposed to Venezuela. So they’ve got to cut off Chávez and they’ve got to bring the oil in from Canada.

And that’s the reason why we are talking about endangering the most sensitive aquifers and important—that is, water sources in America—to have a pipe with the filthiest oil in the planet, the most polluting oil on the planet, to drag it all the way from Canada all the way down to Texas so that the Koch brothers at Flint Hills can make—their savings would be about $2 billion a year that the Koch brothers will make off our risking the aquifers across the United States.

Because they really need the money!

Now, normally I’m not in favor of demonizing billionaires, not even the Koch Brothers; it has always seemed to me that the problem isn’t individual “bad apples” but the class of billionaires as such. On the other hand, since there are really so few billionaires (by comparison to the world population) perhaps each one should be considered in “a class by themselves.” This member of a singleton class sets out to destroy the acquifers of the Great Plains, that one Amazonia, and so forth.

This hand-drawn and hand-painted bookplate is in a copy of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse that I bought last year. Note the preliminary pencilling, still visible beneath the ink, of both the signature and the flower. Extrapolating from an obituary that I found online, it seems that in 1953, when Helen Costello Chase was nineteen, she was dancing with the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet in London. Later she became a florist and a painter. "Her mode of transportation was not automobile but ballet slipper," her eulogist declares.

No decade in history has experienced such an increase in urban population as the last. From Tokyo-Yokohama, the world's largest urban area (population: 37 million) to Godegård, Sweden, which may be the smallest (population: 200), urban areas added 700 million people between 2000 and 2010.

Nearly one in 10 of the world's new urban residents were in the fastest growing metropolitan regions (see: Definition of Terms used in "The Evolving Urban Form" Series), which added nearly 60 million residents. They ranged from a an estimated increase of more than 8.5 people in Karachi (Note 1) to 3.9 million people in Mumbai (Figure 1). The average population growth in these 10 metropolitan regions was 6 million, approximately the population of Dallas-Fort Worth or Toronto, which were fast-growers on their own in comparison to other high income world cities.

By comparison, the largest growth over any single decade over the past half century in US metropolitan areas has been less than one half of the 6 million average: 2.43 million in New York (1920s) and 2.37 million in Los Angeles (1950s). Only Tokyo-Yokohama (1960s) and Shenzhen (1990s) have added more than 5 million people in a single decade before the last decade.

Growth has been overwhelmingly concentrated outside the urban cores (Note 2) in these 10 fastest growing metropolitan region. Excluding Karachi (for which sufficient data is unavailable), approximately 85 percent of the growth was outside the urban cores (A 42 million increase in the suburbs and 8 million in the urban cores).

Dispersion in World Megacities

This is consistent with the findings of The Evolving Urban Form series, which is now two years old. These analyses have generally demonstrated that urban spatial expansion (pejoratively called "sprawl") is world-wide and contrary to some perceptions, not limited to the United States. Cities expand geographically as they add population, though this organic tendency is sometimes contained by urban planning. Peripheral growth is virtually always at lower densities than in urban cores, which means that as cities grow they tend to become less dense (Note 3).

This process ironically is sometimes accelerated by planning decision-making. London's greenbelt ---which banned the extension of housing into the near periphery of the city --- has result in even greater sprawl to far outside the principal urban area. This trend since World War II, has forced commuters to travel longer times and distances to the urban core (All of metropolitan London's growth has been suburban for 100 years, with a loss of 1.8 million in inner London, while the suburbs and exurbs grew by 10.5 million).

The Evolving Urban Form has now covered 23 of the world's 28 megacities (Note 4). As the Table indicates, population growth has been strongly oriented away from the urban cores and toward more suburban areas

Table
Summary of Megacity Population Trends
URBAN AREA	CORRESPONDING METROPOLITAN REGION
Bangkok	10 Years: 55% of growth outside core municipality
Beijing	10 Years: 99% of growth outside core districts
Buenos Aires	60 Years: 100%+ of growth outside core municipality
Cairo	16 Years: 2/3 of growth outside core governate
Delhi	10 Years: 90% of growth outside core districts
Dhaka	10 Years: 50% of growth outside core municipalities
Guangzhou-Foshan	10 Years: 75%+ of growth outside core districts
Istanbul	25 Years: 100%+ growth outside core districts
Jakarta	20 Years: 85% of growth outside core jurisdiction
Kolkata	20 Years: 95% of growth outside core municipality
Los Angeles	60 Years: 85% growth outside core municipality
Manila	60 Years: 95% growth outside core municipality
Mexico City	60 Years: 100%+ of growth outside core districts
Moscow	8 Years: 95% of growth outside core districts
Mumbai	50 Years: 98% of growth outside core districts
New York	60 Years: 95% growth outside core municipality
Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto	50 Years: 95% of growth outside core municipalities
Rio de Janeiro	10 Years: 95% of growth outside core districts
Sao Paulo	20 Years: 2/3 of growth outside core municipality
Seoul	20 Years: 115%+ of growth outside core municipality
Shanghai	10 Years: 99% of growth outside core districts
Shenzhen	10 Years: 70%+ of growth outside core districts
Tokyo	50 Years: 95% of growth outside core municipalities

 

In US examples, New York and Los Angeles, 95 percent and 85 percent of growth respectively of their corresponding metropolitan region growth has occurred outside the core municipalities since 1950. But these US regions are joined by middle income Buenos Aires and Mexico City where all growth has been outside urban core since 1950. In lower income Manila, 95 percent of the growth has been outside the urban core since 1950.

The world's largest metropolitan region, Tokyo-Yokohama, has experienced a virtual monopoly of suburban growth over the past 50 years, as has Japan's second largest metropolitan region, Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto.

Over the past quarter century, all of Istanbul's growth has been outside the urban core. The urban expansion has been going on for much longer, as is illustrated over the past 60 years (Figure 2). Cairo's urban expansion is similarly substantial (Figure 3). In one of the developing world's poorer megacities, nearly all population growth in the Mumbai region has been outside the urban core for 50 years

For the last 20 years, more than 115 percent of the growth in the Seoul-Incheon metropolitan region has been outside the core city. In the world's second largest urban area, Jakarta (Jabotabek), growth is also strongly suburban, accounting for 85 percent of growth over the past two decades. In Kolkata suburban growth has been 95 percent over the same two decades.

The same tendency is evident in the other megacities. Over the past decade or two, nearly all population growth in China's four megacities (Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou-Foshan and Shenzhen), Delhi and Rio de Janeiro has been outside the urban cores.

Dispersion in Other Large Urban Areas

The Evolving Urban Form has also examined smaller urban areas. The same pattern of dispersal is evident there as well even in traditionally compact cities. Zürich, for example has had all of its growth outside the core city since 1950. All of the growth in Barcelona and Milan has been outside the core cities for 40 years. Even high density Hong Kong has experienced all of its growth outside the urban core for three decades. Low income Addis Abeba indicates a pattern of urban expansion is not unlike that of Istanbul or Cairo (Figure 4). In megacity wannabe Chicago (1.4 million short), 125 percent of growth since 1950 has been outside the core; this number reflects that the central city has been shrinking even as the periphery expands. Even in fast-growing Dallas-Fort Worth, more than 80 percent of population growth over the past 60 years has been outside the city of Dallas (which itself is largely suburban in form, see Suburbanized Core Cities).

The one notable exception to the peripheral growth model is Quanzhou (Fujian, China), which is developing under an even more dispersed pattern, described by Yu Zhu, Xinhua Qi, Huaiyou Shao and Kaijing He at Fujian Normal University. Typically, urban areas expand from an urban core on the periphery. Quanzhou is experiencing "in situ" urbanization, the spontaneous conversion of rural areas into urban development that does not expand from the urban core. The result is a sparsely developed urban area (especially for China), with plenty of land for potential infill development in the future.

The Future of Urbanization

It is likely that urban areas will continue to expand as they grow larger, consistent with what appears to be both economic pressures and market preferences for lower cost, more spacious housing. For example, fast growing Ho Chi Minh City is expected to see virtually all of its population increase over the next 15 years outside the urban core. Not surprisingly Shlomo Angel, Jason Parent, Daniel Civco, Alexander Blei and David Potere at the Lincoln Land Institute project significant expansions of urban land by mid-century. And, Angel, in his Planet of Cities, notes how important it is to allow the expansion, in order to improve the quality of life for the majority of people, who deserve to live as well as people in the West.

----

Note 1: Incomplete results of the 2011 Pakistan census have been reported by media in both Pakistan and India. However, no official announcement of the results has been identified from Pakistan census authorities. The Karachi population increase would be the largest metropolitan region 10 year rate of increase in history.

Note 2: Urban cores are generally the core historical jurisdiction, which often contains substantial non-core areas, even outside the United States. Core district data within these jurisdictions is used where available. Thus, this estimate over-states the urban core population increase.

Note 3: The driving factor in declining densities is principally transportation advances. Substantial urban expansion began with the coming of mass transit in the 19th century. However an even greater expansion began occurring with the availability of the automobile. As automobile orientation replaces transit orientation, densities tend to decline until it nearly all travel is by automobile. Even among automobile oriented urban areas, there can be large differences in urban densities. For example, transit's market share in the Boston urban area is substantially greater than in the Los Angeles urban area. Yet the Los Angeles urban area has a population density of 7000 per square mile (2,700 per square kilometer), more than three times that of the Boston urban area, at 220 per square mile (850 per square kilometer). The difference is that in Los Angeles residential development has largely occurred densities determined by the market, with single-family housing being typically built on 1/4 acre lots. In Boston, suburban lot sizes were forced higher by urban planning requirements for large lot zoning. The result is much greater land consumption than would have occurred if people's preferences (the market) had driven development. If Los Angeles had been developed at the same low density as Boston, its urban land area would equal that of the state of Connecticut.

Note 4: Megacities are urban areas with more than 10 million population. Five megacities remain to be described in The Evolving Urban Form (Karachi, Lagos, Nagoya, Paris and Teheran). Corresponding metropolitan regions are used for this analysis, since historic urban area data (areas of continuous urban development) is not available for most nations.

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

-----

Photo: New detached housing, suburban Tokyo-Yokohama (by author).

This is correct:

The core purpose of a great lecturer is not primarily to transmit information… The real purpose of a lecture is to show the mind and heart of the lecturer at work, and to engage the minds and hearts of learners.

A great lecture is not primarily about information—it’s about aspiration. The mark of a great lecture is that you watch the person up in the front of the hall work her way through a subject and think: I want to be like that someday…

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men begins with thirty-one photos. The most famous one being there, to your left. And the first words are these: "(Serious readers are advised to proceed to the book-proper after finishing the first section of the Preface. A later return will do no harm.)"

Though they are in whispered parentheses, Agee's message is no nonsense: narrative is for dilly-dallyers. Real readers need be active participants in literature. Do not expect for this to be easy. Do not expect sequence. That is for the lazy.

This is fitting in the context of this book, once you realize there is no table of contents, but instead a page titled, "Design of the Book," and that Agee was uncomfortable with the book-form at all. He writes, "This is a book only by necessity. More seriously, it is an effort in human actuality, in which the reader is no less centrally involved than the author and those of whom they tell."

Agee continues to play with his reader, demanding their attention and participation, with such tongue-in-cheek bits as the following "cast-list" he includes in the beginning of Book II:

James Agee: a spy, traveling as a journalist
Walker Evans: a counter-spy traveling as a photographer
Unpaid Agitators: William Blake, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Ring Lardner, Jesus Christ, Sigmund Freud, Lonnie Johnson, Irvine Upham

Jesus as an "unpaid agitator"? Provacateur. Funny man.

To begin the book, there is no title page, no words at all: just a blank page followed in the first edition by 31 photographs arranged in three groups. The photographs have no captions or locating information of any kind. These images were shifted so they appeared before all words--before the title, before the copyright, before the table of contents. And why?

Agee tells us, "The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative." He insisted that the publisher not distribute bound galleys without the photographs because reviewers would be incapable of understanding what the book was about if they received only the words.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is Agee's discontent distilled and given its most convenient form, the book. But convenience is far from perfection. Indeed Agee is tortured by the act of writing—the act of showing, and so enabling, maybe even encouraging, voyeurism. He cannot stand "that you are what you are, and that she is what she is, and that you cannot, for one moment exchange places with her, nor by any such hope make expiation for what she has suffered at your hands, and for what you have gained at hers." Is this all exploitation? He agonized over Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in part to rebel against his fear that, yes, all this is.

1937 Winter Carnival Queen	1938 Winter Carnival Queen
There are included here to demonstrate the gap in privilege that so chafed Agee.

He would never recover from the book's poor reception (it was remaindered after selling only 600 copies), and continued on to a troubled life of alcoholism, dying early at 45, in a taxi en route to a doctor’s appointment. After the posthumous publishing of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Death in the Family, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men exploded in popularity and is now considered a classic, precisely for all the quirks and experimentation that make it so challenging a read.

Let's end with Agee in his own words (taken from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men): "Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?"

To see all this energy given book-form, ask for Rare F 326 .A17. It’s a first edition.

Posted for Maggie Tierney '14

The Gameological Society's Joe Keiser went shopping for video games in Nairobi and found a ton of PlayStation 2 knockoffs. Like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: Kirk Douglas:

Full disclosure: this article exists so I can tell you all about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: Kirk Douglas. Just look at it! It's exquisite. The game itself is as grand as the cover. It is San Andreas, with the load screens replaced by EXTREME closeups of Kirk Douglas-and occasionally his son Michael Douglas, because hey, close enough, right? In the game, the main character appears to be a rough approximation of Kirk Douglas. Oh, and all the missions have been removed, so there's nothing to do.

And RoboCop:

I do not doubt RoboCop's commitment to Sparkle Motion.

Tags: remix   video games

Sip the champagne. Sniff the cocaine.
Roll-on para su viernes chiavos.

Hiem ft. Roots Manuva – Dj Culture (Pete Herbert SFX) Download
Descargar fichero de audio (DJ%20Culture%20%28Pete%20Herbert%20SFX%29.mp3)

Children!
C$H.

Designed by Enota, their just completed Traffic Circle in  Podčetrtek marks the entrance to the dark monolithic volume of the municipal sports hall on one and the thermal spa complex on the other side of the regional road. With a primary intent to slow down the traffic in this consequently very busy area, the main accesses to both complexes also connect to the traffic circle. Its design also suggests a tectonic shift that has caused the road surface to bloat and belched out the massive blocks. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The design of the roundabout’s central island thus references the appearance of both facilities and marks the entrance points to the destinations of the visitors to either of the program centers.  In combination with the water, which sporadically rises to the surface between the clefts, it is somewhat reminiscent of geyser-strewn basalt strata, its appearance thus evoking the presence of both nearby facilities.

The large, dark concrete blocks allude to the design the monolithic volume of the sports hall. The play of light on the irregular arrangement of the elements forms a composition of surfaces, which corresponds to the expression of the hall’s folded volume.

Architects: Enota
Location: Podčetrtek, Slovenia
Project Team: Dean Lah, Milan Tomac, Alja Černe, Tjaž Bauer
Client: Terme Olimia
Type: Commission
Size: 380 m2
Budget: 33.000 EUR
Project Year: Completed 2012

Podčetrtek Traffic Circle / Enota originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 08 Feb 2013.

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Editor's note: Each Saturday morning we bring you a Sunday Brunch recipe. Why on Saturday? So you have time to shop and prepare for tomorrow.

[Photograph: Sydney Oland]

Ham and grits make an ideal morning after brunch when you've spent too much time on a bar stool the night before. This version of the classic takes ham steaks and dices them into cubes in order to maximize flavorful crisp edges on even the leanest grocery store ham steaks.

On a morning when you're feeling fragile I find that brunch is better delivered ASAP, hence the quick cooking grits in this recipe. But if you're a purist, and not feeling as bad as you'd thought, feel free to take the time and make the classic version.

Either way, have this brunch with some strong coffee and you'll be back in shape in no time.

Get the Recipe

Ham and Grits with Red Eye Gravy »

About the author: Sydney Oland lives in Somerville, Mass. Find more information at sydneyoland.com (or read eatingnosetotail.com)

very sha'bi

The head of a Teesside school asked parents to correct children's local accents and grammar; David Almond responds in a lovely Guardian essay:

Now Am a rita and A rite books that teechas reed to bairns in skools and the books is filld with words like spuggy and clarts and aye and nowt. Aav rit won book that's aal misspelt and aal rit in the langwij of the Tyne. It's telt by a lad that cannit spell but he trys to do the best he can and he trys to make the langwij make sum sens, as bairns do, and he trys to make it sing, as evry rita must.

Langwij has to ecko on the air and it has to dyve doon to the hart an sole. The rite langwij can be the rang langwij for sum books. Sum ov the grate books of the world is rit qwite rong. Books by them lyk Billy Forkna, Russil Hoban, Jimmy Joyce. And the rong words is wot the aynshent tales were telt in, and how aal the songs woz sung.

Aye, ye hav to knaa the words the world thinks is rite and ye have to knaa how to spel them rite an speek them rite. Othawize sum misgiyded folk mite think yor just a dope.

But ye neva hav to put the otha words away. Yev got to yoos them and speek them and rite them and keep them in the world. Aav gorra digree in English, Am a rita, and these daze Am even a professa so Aav lernd sumthin abowt how to diy things rite. But thers still nee thrill lyk the thrill of knowing wot the so-caaled rite word is and how to rite it rite, but still to yoos the word the world considas rong. Nee thrill at aal like ritin aye, bairn, clarts, spuggy, hadaway and nowt. Thas nae thrill lyk the thrill of speakin the words, feelin the vybrashon of the sownds they make, feelin them dancin on yor lips and tung and breth.

Thanks, Maureen!

Update. Stan Carey has an excellent discussion, with more links.

Sparks in 1974. Sparks in 2003. Sparks and kittens. Sparks and balls. Sparks and Morrissey. Sparks and the Beatles. Sparks and Ingmar Bergman. Sparks and Faith No More. Sparks covering Sparks.

 

via Cheick 3d:

The post free timbouctou, a science fiction film appeared first on sahelsounds.

Today is a day of baking smells (cinnamon rolls for breakfast, fresh baked rosemary bread for lunch, cupcakes in a pile waiting for afterwards,) TV catching up, and cursing comic book artists for making outfits that are hard to copy.

It is also a day for looking out of the window at the eiderdown of snow that fell on the city overnight.

We walked through the snow, Ana and I, last night on returning from gaming night in Manhattan. It was early for a gaming night – midnight rather than two – because of the incoming storm that we didn’t want to be stranding by. And as he went into MacDonalds to get himself a snack, vegetarian little me stood outside, snug as an aphid in an afghan, in my Hunter wellingtons, winter coat, and big fluffy wolf hat. I buried my feet into the fluffy virgin blanket and looked up, squinting into the swirl of snowflakes that was making the night that special kind of grey you only get from snow and streetlights.

Up to 85% of all snowflakes have grown around a bacteria at their center, and as I watched them swirl around me, I reflected on what it meant to be surrounded by uncountable things that were once living. Of course, bacteria and other microbes float around unseen and unperceived all the time, but when they’re surrounded by delicate fluffy crystals, it’s hard to ignore it.

I’ve been thinking a bit about life recently, and my definition of it, and I don’t know when it happened, but I no longer think of ‘life’ as a discrete quantity. Not for me the concept of “a life,” separate from the others, and by extension, not ‘my life’ or ‘your life’ or ‘his life,” but a continuum, magical in my inability to sufficiently explain life to start with.

It’s easy to count the life withing this sack of skin as one, but even my body is a complex machine of symbiotics, not just the bacteria I play host to, but trillions of identical mitochondria, genetically distinct from he nucleus that dictates most of my proteins, but as vital to the functioning of this body as anything else.

I’ve been accidentally poking my head into that corner of the internet that deals with the politics surrounding the ‘beginning’ of life, and it doesn’t fit with me. Of course a human cell that divides is alive. Of course we can’t count each cell and call them distinct. Of course genetic distinction doesn’t make distinct lives any more than identical twins are one person. The life in this body isn’t a thing my parents created, it’s part of a thing that they shared with me. And while this body is temporary, and I may or may not share with the next generation in quite the same way, when I stand in the snow, enjoying the moment when trillions of living things are for once visible to my eye, I’m happy to share it with all of them.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Ele pode não ser um mutante com poderes regenerativos de cura, sentidos animais, agilidade sobre-humana ou esqueleto e garras de Adamantium. Ele pode até não ser um especialista em artes marciais nem falar japonês fluentemente, mas Ricardo Fuentes, 22, é um herói como o Wolverine. Em vez de fugir em pânico, ele ajudou as pessoas durante a mortífera explosão da semana passada na sede da Pemex, na Cidade do México.

A explosão aconteceu na quinta-feira, 31 de janeiro, no edifício principal da sede da Pemex, conglomerado estatal mexicano de petróleo. Fuentes estava trabalhando em um edifício anexo pouco antes da explosão. Depois que ele saiu para levar alguns documentos até a torre principal, a detonação enorme empurrou-o para o chão.

Mas, em vez de fugir como a maioria das pessoas, o petroleiro correu em direção à torre que desmoronava:

Saí tarde do escritório (…) Eu senti a vibração, caí e vi outros colegas caídos no chão também. Eu acho que, assim como todo mundo, você fica atordoado em uma situação assim. Mas depois, quando as pessoas começam a correr, eu me perguntei: o que eu faço? Corro ou volto para ajudar?

Eu não estava preparado para isso, mas todos os meus colegas são pessoas muito boas, são pessoas de grande valor humano, sempre tivemos a visão de que ninguém pode ser deixado para trás: ou saímos todos ou não sai ninguém. Esta é a maior bênção de um petroleiro.

Infelizmente, 37 pessoas não conseguiram sair. Segundo o advogado-geral do México, Jesús Murillo, a explosão e o subsequente colapso do edifício foram causados pelo acúmulo de metano no subsolo. Murillo disse que não havia explosivos e que a detonação “causou um defeito na estrutura do chão, que primeiro foi empurrada para cima, e em seguida caiu”.

Apesar do perigo, Ricardo correu para o prédio e, usando uma cadeira de escritório, ajudou a resgatar um casal de feridos do local da explosão. Alguém tirou a foto acima e postou online. Ela se tornou viral poucos minutos depois.

Ricardo diz que todos os seus amigos o chamam de Logan – o nome real do personagem da Marvel – desde que ele frequentava a escola. Quando ele viu a foto e os comentários no Facebook e no Twitter, ele não conseguia parar de rir, e dizia que não é herói – é um cara normal.

Bem, Ricardo, qualquer cara que corre para uma explosão a fim de ajudar pessoas é um herói. [El Diario]

Em tempo: Juan Castillo, um comentarista do Gizmodo US no Facebook, postou isso. Muito bom.

São Paulo discovers Afro-Beat, part 1. Céu first recorded this in 2005. This performance is from 2010.

São Paulo discovers afro-beat, part 2 – 2010.

São Paulo discovers afro-beat, part 3 – Criolo first recorded this in 2007, major label release in 2012. He’s probably the biggest thing in Brazil right now. I love this album.

Caso você more em São Paulo ou outra grande cidade, deve estar acostumado a imaginar as grandes metrópoles como um enorme aglomerado com milhões de pessoas. Mas não foi sempre assim. Por volta do ano 3100 a.C. (isso mesmo, antes de Cristo), Mênfis, cidade localizada perto do Rio Nilo, no Antigo Egito, era a mais populosa do mundo, com população estimada de 20 mil habitantes. A cidade permaneceu no topo até 2240 a.C., quando Acádia, cidade da Mesopotâmia (hoje parte do território iraquiano), passou a ocupar o primeiro lugar, com seus cerca de 30 mil habitantes.

Estes números são resultado do trabalho minucioso de historiadores como o estadunidense Tertius Chander, que reuniu no livro Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth (“Quatro mil anos de crescimento urbano”, lançado em 1974) dados relativos à população desde o início da civilização. Como eram poucos os censos realizados antes do século XVII, para estimar o tamanho das maiores cidades estes pesquisadores precisaram fazer um minucioso estudo de dados como registros de viagens, número de famílias nas cidades, o número de vagões de alimentos que chegavam aos territórios, quantidade de igrejas, distribuição de alimentos e até vidas perdidas em desastres.

De milhares a milhões, conheça as 10 das maiores cidades do mundo (dos últimos 2000 anos):

1. Roma

Quando liderou o ranking: 25 d.C
População estimada: 450 mil

Hoje, a capital italiana não figura nem mesmo entre as 30 cidades mais populosas do mundo, mas no ano 25 era a mais importante do planeta. Embora haja divergências de dados, acredita-se que a população de Roma tenha chegado à marca de 1 milhão na época.
2. Constantinopla

Quando liderou o ranking: 340
População estimada: 400 mil

A maior e mais rica cidade da Europa durante a Idade Média, Constantinopla (atual Istambul), já foi chamada de “Cidade dos Imperadores”. E não era para menos: a cidade foi a capital do Império Bizantino, do Império Latino e do Império Otomano. Em 1650 voltou ao topo do ranking ao contabilizar 700 mil habitantes.

 

3.  Bagdá

Quando liderou o ranking: 775
População estimada: 1 milhão

Capital do Iraque e ainda hoje a mais populosa cidade do país, contabilizando mais de 7 milhões de habitantes, Bagdá conquistou seu primeiro milhão no ano 775. No entanto, a diminuição subsequente de sua população fez com que ela perdesse o posto anos depois.

 

4. Merv

Quando liderou o ranking: 1145
População estimada: 200 mil

A cidade-oásis, que estava localizada perto do território hoje conhecido como Mary, no Turcomenistão, foi a maior cidade do mundo por um breve período. Desde 1999, suas ruínas são consideradas Patrimônio Cultural da Humanidade.

 

5. Kaifeng

Quando liderou o ranking: 1013
População estimada: 400 mil

Foi durante a Disnatia Song que a cidade chinesa, localizada às margens do Rio Amarelo, atingiu o seu marco populacional. Foi a segunda cidade do mais populoso país do mundo (a China contabiliza hoje mais de 1,3 bilhão de habitantes) a liderar o ranking: em 637, Changan, capital de mais de dez dinastias na China, tinha número equivalente de habitantes.

 

6. Hangzhou

Quando liderou o ranking: 1348
População estimada: 432 mil
A cidade de Hangzhou é hoje um dos principais centros ferroviários, industriais e turísticos da China. Líder em 1348 do ranking de cidades mais populosas do mundo, já havia alcançado o primeiro lugar em 1180. Atualmente, a cidade possui mais de 6 milhões de habitantes.

 

7. Pequim

Quando liderou o ranking: 1710
População estimada: 1,1 milhão

Pequim atualmente é a cidade com a segunda maior população da China, perdendo apenas para Xangai. Mas em 1425 ela foi, pela primeira vez, a cidade mais populosa do mundo com estimadas 600 mil pessoas. Ela retomou a liderança em 1710, alcançando a marca de 1,1 milhão de habitantes em 1800. Um número até pequeno, se comparado com os seus mais de 10 milhões de habitantes atuais.

 

8. Londres

Quando liderou o ranking: 1825
População estimada: > 5 milhões

Será por isso que em Londres os ônibus têm dois andares? A cidade inglesa foi a mais populosa do mundo durante quase um século. Assumindo o posto em 1825, quando a população já superava 5 milhões, ela se manteve no topo até meados de 1900, quando já contava com quase 6,5 milhões de habitantes.

 

9. Nova York

Quando liderou o ranking: 1925
População estimada: > 10 milhões

Muito antes de Frank Sinatra imortalizar os versos de New York, New York, na década de 1970, a cidade que não dorme tinha ares de capital do mundo. Em 1950, a população de Nova York já ultrapassava a marca dos 12 milhões de habitantes. Mesmo tendo perdido o posto no ranking, a Grande Maçã continua sendo bem grande: ainda é a cidade mais populosa dos Estados Unidos, com mais de 8 milhões de habitantes.

 

10. Tóquio

Quando liderou o ranking: 1965-2013
População estimada: 15 milhões

A capital do Japão, que chegou ao topo do ranking em 1965, continua sendo a cidade mais populosa do mundo. Além disso, a Região Metropolitana de Tóquio contabiliza cerca de 37 milhões de habitantes – o que a torna também, por uma grande margem, a região metropolitana mais populosa do planeta.

 

Fontes: Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth, About Geography

“If, like me, you stopped eating brunch when you turned 30, you should know a frittata is like an omelette leached of its charms. Basically if you were wearing snow boots and stepped in a moist omelette and then scraped it off your soles, that’d be a frittata.”

- Top Chef Seattle Recap: David Rees on Sourdough Starters and Tom’s Mean Girl Tendencies — Grub Street New York

victory-candescence:

nevver:

Once upon a time, Mobstr

“Al Roker, prepare for your sharting incident to be forgotten. I wish I spoke Finnish right now so that I could understand this story in it’s entirety because it is bonkers. From what I can ascertain from the wonky Google translation, two female journalist purposefully pooped in their pants on a bus traveling from Helsinki to Turku and wrote about the experience. May Day Vappu Kaarenoja and Aurora Rämö of Ylioppilaslehti, Finland’s largest student newspaper, planned the act of public defecation for the newspaper’s 100th anniversary issue. They detailed the the pooping process, riding the bus with poop in their pants, how their pants felt and smelled and I can only imagine what else.”

- Two Finnish Journalists Poop Their Pants On A Bus, Write About The Experience

On the advice of the Horde, I took up George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." This passage seems especially appropriate today:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

I thought of that passage while reading through this white paper (brought to us by the dutiful reporting of Mike Isikoff), which lays out when, precisely, the administration believes it is entitled to order a drone strike against an American citizen. (Read the full memo at the bottom of this post.) The answer falls short of "whenever we want," but it skirts damn close:

A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be "senior operational leaders" of al-Qaida or "an associated force" -- even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S. 
The 16-page memo, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News, provides new details about the legal reasoning behind one of the Obama administration's most secretive and controversial polices: its dramatically increased use of drone strikes against al-Qaida suspects abroad, including those aimed at American citizens, such as the September 2011 strike in Yemen that killed alleged al-Qaida operatives Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. Both were U.S. citizens who had never been indicted by the U.S. government nor charged with any crimes.

All of this is done in secret, a prospect which Adam Serwer rightly finds chilling:

The Obama administration claims that the secret judgment of a single "well-informed high level administration official" meets the demands of due process and is sufficient justification to kill an American citizen suspected of working with terrorists. That procedure is entirely secret. Thus it's impossible to know which rules the administration has established to protect due process and to determine how closely those rules are followed. The government needs the approval of a judge to detain a suspected terrorist. To kill one, it need only give itself permission.

I highly advise you to read the memo. The powers it claims are broad and, as Isikoff pointed out on Rachel Maddow's show, actually contradict some of the administration's public statements and enter into Orwell's world of false language rendered to conceal an arguments "too brutal for most people to take." 
Consider the notion of "imminence." Last year Eric Holder claimed that a lethal strike against an American citizen can only be made if to protect against "an imminent threat of violent attack." But the white paper states that imminence "does not require that the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons or interests will take place in the significant future." Effectively, the word "imminence" has no meaning beyond "we think you're a bad guy."
The white paper further claims that it can carry out operations "with the consent of the host nation's government," and then moves on to declare that such operations would still be lawful "after a determination that the host nation is unwilling or unable to suppress the threat posed by the individual targeted." In other words, we will ask your consent, but we don't really need it.
This kind of language -- imminence that isn't, consent at gun-point -- runs throughout the white paper. It authorizes, for instance, not just the killing of Al Qaeda leaders, but of any "an associated force." Who determines what constitutes "an associated force?" The same people ordering the killing. 
I don't want to be thick-witted here. I understand that on some level a democracy generally elects human leaders who will not abuse the spirit of the law. I think Barack Obama is such a leader. That is for the historians to determine. But practically, much of our foreign policy now depends on the hope of benevolent dictators and philosopher kings. The law can't help. The law is what the kings say it is.

Justice Department Memo on Legal Case for Drone Strikes on Americans by Becki Jayne Equality Harrelson