sysrick.com

Salon.com Technology | Madison Avenue and your brain [Daypop Top 40]

Wikipedia, the collaborative encylopedia that anyone can edit, now contains over 50,000 articles. The entry on the anti-globalisation movement is a good example of how it works.  [iMakeContent] [jenett.radio: dailywebthing]

Detective sends out Al Qaeda warning based on Onion story [FARK]

The fine art of translation. Via Arts & Letters Daily comes a marvellous essay by Wendy Lesser, titled The Mysteries of Translation, about how different translators mediate the voice of the original author: This is not to say that a Margaret Jull Costa translation of the Portuguese novelist José Saramago sounds like a Margaret Jull... [Jonathon Delacour]

Solving the world's biggest problems is a job too big for governments alone.

I don't know what Sundays mean to you. For me, they are the days to relax, go to a museum, or sit down and think.

And today, here is a story which made me think about our future.

Our guide for today is J.F. Rischard, the World Bank's vice president for Europe.

Two great forces, one demographic and one economic, will bring dramatic change to every corner of the globe over the next 20 years. The demographic force, as we go from 5 billion people on the planet in 1990 to 8 billion by 2025, will produce an array of environmental and social stresses. And an entirely new world economy -- centered on increasingly inexpensive telecommunication and computer technologies, and a shift to market-type policies by virtually all countries -- will bring unprecedented opportunities and challenges.

These two forces are exponential, not linear. The new world economy reflects exponential plenty, while the demographics reflect exponential scarcity -- scarcity of arable land, of potable water, of individual space. And they therefore overwhelm our linear, evolving, snail-paced human institutions. The resulting governance gap has many manifestations: financial crises, voters who no longer trust their politicians to solve problems, and a kind of bad mood in political life all over the world. But the most calamitous result is the failure to address urgent global problems.

These problems can't be solved within any one nation-state; they call for collaborative action. There are about 20 such global problems, and they fall into three categories: how we share our living space, how we share our rule book, and how we share our humanity. From fishery depletion, to E-commerce rules, to communicable diseases, these problems all need solving in the next 20 years, not the next 30, 40, or 50.

The current international systems simply aren't effective enough, or fast-moving enough, to solve these problems.

The best alternative, it seems to me, is to set up a permanent Global Issues Network for each problem. These GINs would include representatives from governments concerned by the issue at hand, knowledgeable representatives from business--whether business is part of the problem or part of the solution--and representatives from international nongovernmental organizations that know the issue well.

For more details, please read the full list of the "20 Global Problems For The Year 2020."

Source: J.F. Rischard, for Optimize, September 2002, Issue 11

[Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

posted by headspace at September 28 10:56 PM. Ahhhh ahhhhhhh! (Flash link) I never knew the lyrics to Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song," but I'm pretty sure I'll never forget them now. Animation! Vikings! And... kittens! However, as much fun as the video is, I'm not convinced it's historically accurate. [MetaFilter]

Complete library of Simpsons information [FARK]

"Operation: Whatever The Fuck Crazy–Ass Name They Come Up With For The Iraq War" [Daypop Top 40]

posted by taz at September 27 1:27 AM. A professor of vision science at MIT understands that life isn't just black and white, even though we often see it that way. This amazing illusion proves it, and these slick, fast-loading, Flash demonstrations of lightness perception show how it's done. (My favorite is the "Koffka Ring".) White paper here, for deeper background. [MetaFilter]

Go for it!.

Tom the Dancing Bug. U.S. to bomb Antarctica! [Salon.com]

» Excellent!  For once U.S. foreign policy makes sense!

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

posted by MintSauce at September 27 9:50 AM. Blondes 'to die out in 200 years' . The last natural blondes will die out within 200 years, scientists believe. A study by experts in Germany suggests people with blonde hair are an endangered species and will become extinct by 2202.

[Insert blonde joke here] [MetaFilter]

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: HEARTBEAT READJUSTMENT
       In his autobiography, the actor James Earl Jones describes his unorthodox method for getting the stress of city life out of his system:
       "City people have a hard time handling the silences when they first come out to the country. After a certain period of solitude, I myself experiencing an aloneness that is sometimes disturbing, but the country eventually cleanses my spirit and purges my body of the sounds, fumes and toxins of urban life. I think cities feed psychological stress and tension in many ways, including an overload of electrical forces and energy. When you go to a country cabin without electricity, you will be surprised at how tensions fall away.
       "Some practitioners advocate that urban dwellers removed from the country find a space in the yard or the garden and dig a hole deep enough to enfold the body. Lie down in the hole. Make sure your body can lie just below the surface of the ground. Stay in this hollow of earth. You will be surprised how rested you will feel simply because you have escaped for a moment the man-made influences. You have retreated for a moment to Mother Earth's very simple electrical systems. For the chemical and electrical balance of the body to be calibrated, you have to stay close to the earth itself, align yourself with its polarity so that your body can find harmony between the interior world and the exterior universe.
       "Once we become detached from nature, we begin to think we can do without it. The lights of the Great White Way overpower the stars. It is very hard to see the brightest constellation when you live in or near a city. The dark solitude of the country reunites you with the universe of the stars. The woods and hills restore in you something primal in yourself. The sea's pulse sets your own heartbeat."

More insults than you can shake a stick at, you freakish homunculus germinated outside of lawful procreation [FARK]

"Hidden tree" the secret of Zen garden [New Scientist]

posted by homunculus at September 25 11:34 AM. Similarities between the United States and the Roman Empire. With the comparrison having become common, it is interesting to consider just how much the two really have in common. What would Cicero think? [MetaFilter]

Jason Mewes is alive and well, just living in that remote American region known as the west coast [FARK]

posted by Marquis at September 24 9:58 PM. August Strindberg & Helium. In 1978, the artist and writer Edward Gorey met the members of Monty Python at a fort in Tunisia. The group was in the process of filming The Life of Brian. Although Gorey contributed little to the finished product, the British troupe's impact on him was sizable. In the twenty years that followed, Gorey slowly retired from civilization. Since 1996, he has been studying Macromedia Flash. Strindberg & Helium is the result. [MetaFilter]

Fallows on Iraq. The Atlantic Monthly has posted a long and throughtful article by James Fallows on Iraq from the November issue (which... [Blogcritics]

Slaves to Our Machines: Welcome to Your Future as a PC Plug-in.

You're typing a story, you push the Publish button, and your story is available worldwide. Or you compose a message, hit the Send key, and your e-mail is going to the other end of the world.

So you think you're mastering your computer? And if it was the other way around? Clive Thompson tells us a strange story in Wired Magazine.

Last year, Yahoo! wanted to block porn spambots from obtaining free email accounts. It created a brilliant but simple reverse Turing test: To get an account, you have to identify a randomly generated word that’s been slightly stretched and distorted. This proves you’re a human, not a robot. Machines are terrible at visual recognition tasks -- sure enough, the "picture test" blocked out the spambots.

Wait, this is not the end yet.

Some purveyors of porn developed a way to fight back. They rewrote the spambot code so that when the bots reach the visual recognition test, a human steps in to help out. The bots route the picture to a person who’s agreed to sit at a computer and identify these images. Often, insiders say, it’s a hormonal teen who’s doing it in exchange for free porn. The kid identifies the picture, the spambot takes the answer, and-- bingo -- it’s able to log in.

Now consider how deeply strange this is. Instead of a machine augmenting human ability, it’s a human augmenting machine ability. In a system like this, humans are valuable for the specific bit of processing power we provide: visual recognition. We are acting as a kind of coprocessor in much the same way a graphics chip works with a main Pentium processor -- it’s a manservant lurking in the background, rendering the pretty pictures onscreen so the Pentium can attend to more pressing tasks.

Clive Thompson also looks at similar situations. For instance, in some call centers, speech recognition systems can handle 95% of the tasks, leaving the last 5% to human operators. And these poor people only deal all day long with the angry or irrational customers that the automated system cannot satisfy.

Here is the conclusion.

Welcome to your future: as a USB plug-in for your computer. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.

Source: Clive Thompson, Wired 10.10, October 2002

[Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

So Many Words, So Little Time For Buzzword Bingo.

The Hellatine Dictionary of Bureaucratese

"hellatine;
n., a person who coins or habitually uses words of inappropriately mixed derivation, often Greek and Latin, and usually in an attempt to impress the listener or reader; Also hellatinism, hellatinize.
(Gr. hellen: a Greek + L. latinus : a Latin) " [via blogdriverswaltz.com]

We're going to have great fun with this list at my office. If nothing else, I wonder if I could implement a script to post random definitions on the intranet....

[The Shifted Librarian]

Groupthink. An excellent page on groupthink and how it affects the decision-making process of groups. Irving Janis describes eight symptoms** of groupthink: 1. Illusion of vulnerability 2. Stereotyping outsiders 3. Bounded rationality and tethered assumptions 4. Belief in inherent morality 5. Self-censorship 6. Direct pressure on dissenters 7. Mindguards 8. Unanimity Groupthink of Irving Janis de... [kottke.org]

Deep-fried Twinkies take America by goo. Carny concessionaires have taken to selling deep-friend Twinkies, doing big business with artery-clogging horripilations:

In what may be the biggest setback for the war on fat since supersize fries, Americans are scarfing down thousands of the gooey, calorie-laden snack cakes at county fairs and restaurants across the country.

"We sold 26,000 Twinkies in 18 days. People drove for hours just to taste our Twinkie," said Rocky Mullen, who sells the deep-fried, cream-filled treats for $3 (U.S.) each at the Payallup Fair, 50 kilometres south of Seattle.

As if Twinkies are not sweet enough already, vendors such as Mr. Mullen add chocolate or berry sauce and sprinkle powdered sugar on top...

Hearing about Mr. Sell's invention, Hostess, the company that makes the 71-year-old snack, started promoting deep-fried Twinkies to state and county fairs, where a captive population of junk-food addicts began gobbling them up between pig races and tractor-pull competitions.

How bad are they for your health? After deep-frying, a Twinkie packs an estimated 400 calories and 28 grams of fat.

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

Librarian Reputation.

Smart Mobs is live!

"Howard Rheingold's new book, "Smart Mobs," is coming out next November. It's a hell of a book, about the ways that technology enable groups of people to spontaneously form and coordinate in response to current events -- from SMS-enabled Filipiino demonstrations over official censorship to ubiquitous Japanese kids who photograph everything with their DoCoMo phones and post them online all the time.

Howard's site, SmartMobs.com, is a blog that talks about technology and events that show smart mobs in action." [Boing Boing Blog]

There's so much about information shifting on the front page alone of Rheingold's blog that I'm automatically adding his book to the Shifted Reading List sight unseen. I really hope Audible can get the audio rights to it. Here's an illustrative excerpt from the book summary:

"The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people's telephones. Dirt-cheap microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighborhoods, products with invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with the Internet, handheld communication media mutate into wearable remote control devices for the physical world."

And that, my friends, is the place from which libraries need to be available - everywhere. The book's introduction is titled How to Recognize the Future When It Lands on You, and the future is certainly hovering inches away from us.

I'll be interested to read the book and see if Rheingold discusses libraries at all, considering how we could play a huge role in the information exchanged between smart mobs. Think of librarians as a force letting authentic and accurate information loose into the wild (one form of reputation).

And in the spirit of smart communication, the book's blog has a RSS feed!

[The Shifted Librarian]

OpenCourseWare (OCW). Learn for free online.  People will soon be given access to knowledge from one of the world's leading technology institutes for free over the internet.  [BBC News | TECHNOLOGY]

"Our hope and aspiration is that by setting an example, other universities will also put their valued materials on the internet and thereby make a truly profound and fundamental impact on learning and education worldwide," said MIT's Professor Dick Yue.

The people behind this say there is no "revenue objective," hoping "it will put the net back on track towards its original goal of sharing information and knowledge around the world, rather than selling CDs and t-shirts."  How refreshing... [jenett.radio]

When poetry doesn't suck, it's called "Spoken Word." This guy is farkin' hilarious [FARK]

Decentralized Defense The Boston Glo .... Decentralized Defense

The Boston Globe's "Ideas" section has an excellent article by Elaine Scarry, who teaches at Harvard, on why a distributed defense makes sense. Here's the way the headline writer put it:

FAILSAFE
On Sept. 11, passengers armed only with cell phones and courage succeeded where a multibillion-dollar military failed. Does their achievement mean that 50 years of American defense policy is all wrong?

After a careful and persuasive analysis of what worked (bottom-up action coordinated via cellphones and loved ones) and what didn't (centralized defense via scrambling jet fighters) on Sept. 11 after the first planes hit, Scarry enlarges the idea to nuclear policy, concluding that the world will not give up these "monarchic weapons" (because they are to be used without any consent by the citizenry) until the U.S. does.

The Ideas section of the Sunday Globe is only two weeks old, an expansion of the intellectual content of the journal after it constracted its book section a few months ago. Scarry's article is exactly the sort of piece that will make this section work: provocative without extremism, broadening in scope as it moves along rather than narrowing to details, and very nicely written.

Note: The Globe locks up its content after a few days because it would rather make a few bucks than be a continuing presence in the world's global conversation.

---

In poking around the Web about Scarry, I immediately found an interview with her (by David Bowman) at Salon about the relationship of beauty and justice. What a remarkable thinker. [JOHO the Blog]

Jason Mewes of Jay and Silent Bob missing for 10 months now. [FARK]

posted by unreason at September 21 4:07 PM. Sand Art: it's everyone's favorite preschool art activity, now on your PC! Go sand art! Still, with this version you can't get into sand throwing fights with your friends... [MetaFilter]

Beer Lovers Raise a Glass to Brighter Oktoberfest. MUNICH, (Reuters) - Beer lovers wearing traditional Bavarian costumes raised their glasses and sang lusty German drinking songs on Saturday to open Munich's Oktoberfest, the world's biggest beer festival. By Reuters. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

What he said:

A Simple Sense of Dread I told someone yesterday that I'd been pushing the notion of Bush as Antichrist (defined by my Webster's as "a personage or power expected to corrupt the world but be conquered by Christ's Second Coming") and he surprised me by saying that the comparison wasn't strong enough. . . which pretty much sums up how I feel these days. No outrage, no excess, no lie is too great to utter or execute. Democracy is dead, courtesy of the Supreme Court and the death of the free press. Every chicken coop has got a fox and the hens are all, well, chicken, with not a rooster to be seen (let alone a decent fighting cock). And now we're to be the Bully of the World, a return to barbarism as national policy. What a total perversion of everything I ever learned about America. I am sick to the depths of my red, white, & blue heart. Whatever happened to the notion of the strength of IDEAS? Bully of the World, as if everyone else will just knuckle under, too. Declaring one's intention to lord it over all will only create more enemies. An otherwise extremely intelligent friend of mine who probably watches too much TV is in favor of invading Iraq. He asked me, what did I want us to do, wait until Saddam detonates an atom bomb in downtown L.A.? I told him, "Well yes, frankly!" Never mind that there is no chance in hell a little country like Iraq would ever risk attacking the United States. We can't go around killing everyone who gives us dirty looks. This is like the Lone Ranger riding into town and shooting all the guys with black hats before they're rustled a single steer. It's like love is dead. Can that really be? I feel like God gave us the Big Exam on 9-11 and we totally flunked. The government's reaction to the events of that day filled me with foreboding that has never gone away. . . Is this really going to happen? It'll be like watching Daddy take the deliver boy out back and crush his skull with a cinder block because he didn't show enough respect. God, I feel awful. Quick, turn this into satire. There must be a way. [FarrFeed]

Fog-guns!. <The Zero Launcher and the Zero Blaster launch 2 to 6 inch diameter non-toxic fog rings that sail up to fourteen feet. Easy to use, they are great stress busters and with practice you'll be able to create bigger and better rings.

Link Discuss (via Wired) >>
From [Boing Boing Blog] [[ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 8:19:08 PM -

Chilling Effects: "Do you know your online rights? Have you received a letter asking you to remove information from a Web site or to stop engaging in an activity? Are you concerned about liability for information that someone else posted to your online forum? If so, this site is for you." [Scripting News]

"SUSANNA CORNETT has the solution to Florida's election problems. Sadly, I think this might actually be the way to go...." [InstaPundit]

This was too good to pass up posting. Go ahead - make your day.

[The Shifted Librarian]

Groucho to Warner Bros: Get Bent. Great note from Groucho Marx to Warner Brothers' lawyers, in response to a dunning notice threating him over the Marx Brothers' film, "A Night in Casablanca," which Warner believed would infringe upon its film, "Casablanca."

It seems that in 1471, Ferdinand Balboa Warner, your great-great-grandfather, while looking for a shortcut to the city of Burbank, had stumbled on the shores of Africa and, raising his alpenstock (which he later turned in for a hundred shares of common), named it Casablanca.

I just don"t understand your attitude. Even if you plan or releasing your picture, I am sure that the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo. I don"t know whether I could, but I certainly would like to try.

You claim that you own Casablanca and that no one else can use that name without permission. What about "Warner Brothers"? Do you own that too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what about the name Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were. We were touring the sticks as the Marx Brothers when Vitaphone was still a gleam in the inventor"s eye, and even before there had been other brothers--the Smith Brothers; the Brothers Karamazov; Dan Brothers, an outfielder with Detroit; and "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" (This was originally "Brothers, Can You Spare a Dime?" but this was spreading a dime pretty thin, so they threw out one brother, gave all the money to the other one, and whittled it down to "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?")

Now Jack, how about you? Do you maintain that yours is an original name? Well it"s not. It was used long before you were born. Offhand, I can think of two Jacks--Jack of "Jack and the Beanstalk," and Jack the Ripper, who cut quite a figure in his day.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jim!) [Boing Boing Blog]

I vote for entertainment!

posted by davidfg at September 16 1:08 PM. What are the ethics of forwarding an e-mail you were not mean to receive? What if it is sure to humiliate the sender? What if it ends up entertaining untold numbers of people around the globe? [MetaFilter]

Understanding the Science of Pleasure.  Pleasure. Hard to say that word without little thrills of almost-guilt. Which is exactly the point. Understanding the Science of Pleasure takes pleasure seriously, as a scientifically good thing. This is great stuff for those of us who need the validation, and those of us who make us need the validation.  [DeepFUN Weblog] [jenett.radio: dailywebthing]

Well said.

posted by crasspastor at September 15 11:15 PM. What's our government doing right now? Nobody cares. (via David Cogswell) "There is this gap, you see, this enormous, gaping separation between what the honest and ardent and yet often shockingly misinformed populace believes drives the heart of this great nation, and what actually drives it." Slap a new adhesive flag over the one bleached by the summer sun and let's get to it. This really has to stop. [MetaFilter]

BIOYIOP, JMHFOOC, and WFHIT.

A friend pointed me to Oliver Clark's Acronym Dictionary.

YMMV

 

posted by entrustNoOne at September 13 8:20 PM. The LSD Blotter Art Gallery? The Moist Towelette Online Museum? The LED Museum? The Japanese Coffee Can Menagerie? Eighties LA Street Flyers? The Galley of Stakepark IDs? And my two favorites The Museum of Air Sickness Bags (check out those donations and swaps) and The Gallery of "Misused" Quotation Marks. What do they all have in common? They all can be found at the Museum of Museums. I've wandered through these galleries for hours. [MetaFilter]

J. A. Spender. "'Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.' Under the influence of this pestilent morality, I am forever letting tomorrow's work slop backwards into today's, and doing painfully and nervously today what I could do quickly and easily tomorrow." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

Why being a liberal really isn't fun .... Why being a liberal really isn't fun

John D. Erickson took issue with my entry on why being a liberal isn't fun, writing in an email:

Someone in "Slate" posed the same question a week or two ago. I would say it should be fairly obvious why it's no fun being a liberal in a nation in which a fascistic, if not a fascist, government is running the show. ..[L]iberals were the most fun during the Kennedy-Johnson eras.

Say, you don't suppose this has anything to do with being somewhere around 20 years old, do you?

Yeah, I suppose, maybe, mumble mumble. I.e., nail on the head, John. [JOHO the Blog]

posted by Ty Webb at September 13 5:08 PM. Hunter S. Thompson's Advice to Bush: Quit! Political commentator, sports enthusiast and all around American treasure lets fly. When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional. [MetaFilter]

Alton Brown Answers, At Last [Slashdot]

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/255/living/Conservatively_sp">Why aren't liberals fun? I confess to b .... Why aren't liberals fun?

I confess to being a knee-jerk, pacifist-leaning, NPR-listening, white-wine-swilling, heart-bleeding, Kennedy-voting, cigarette-banning, tie-dye-wearing, Mondale-mourning, Vineyard-vacationing, West-Wing-Tivo-ing, decade-old-spare-joints-in-a-bottom-draw-stashing, male-distrusting, race-apologizing, criminal-coddling Jewish atheist pointy-headed bleeding-heart middle class middle aged Liberal.

So, http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/255/living/Conservatively_sp">Alex Beam's column in the Boston Globe today was thought-provoking. (I usually find his writing just plain old provoking.) He points out that the Conservatives have much more fun than we do. They get to drive in their SUV's, blow up bad guys, and rant on talk shows about how the media don't give conversatives any air time.

There's something to this. They're the Bad Boys/Girls. We're the scolds. It'd be real good to make Liberalism fun again.

Again? Yes, kiddies, there was a time when being a lefty-liberal meant that you were cool and the conservatives were squares. We got to smoke dope while they watched John Wayne movies. We got free sex while they reproduced via the missionary position. We got to rethink the world while they were pledging their allegiance. If nothing else, the left was the happenin' place to be. Now it's as glamorous as sensible shoes.

We should work on changing this. Maybe a new hairstyle or something. [JOHO the Blog]

Don't even think about trying to get a job in IT without....

eWeek's Lisa Vaas conjured up this list:

Don't even think about trying to get a job in IT without at least several of the following skills. Based on eWeek Labs analysts' experience and feedback from IT veterans, even IT newbies should strive to have:

• The ability to take apart a computer (and put it back together again)
• Basic skills in Windows 2000, Windows NT and Linux administration
• Familiarity with at least one of the significant databases (Oracle, DB2, SQL Server)
• Experience in security hardening and knowledge of security issues
• Strong skill in HTML creation and editing
• At least a working ability to create and edit XML, XML Schema and DTDs
• Knowledge of a scripting language
• Working knowledge of at least one significant modern programming language
• Familiarity with router and switch configuration
• Experience with using an SNMP system to track system faults
• Ability to automate desktop management tasks such as disk cloning for new-system setup
• Familiarity with (and frequent visits to) key knowledge bases, including BugTraq, Slashdot and major vendors' Web sites
• People skills, especially the ability to work as part of a team
• A tough skin

Reminds me of this bit from Robert Heinlein's "The Notebooks of Lazarus Long", 1978, aphorisms from Time Enough for Love.

A human being should be able to:

• change a diaper,
• plan an invasion,
• butcher a hog,
• conn a ship,
• design a building,
• write a sonnet,
• balance accounts,
• build a wall,
• set a bone,
• comfort the dying,
• take orders,
• give orders,
• cooperate,
• act alone,
• solve equations,
• analyze a new problem,
• pitch manure,
• program a computer,
• cook a tasty meal,
• fight efficiently,
• die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects. 

I like that weblogs touch on the fullness of life. If only the hiring process did too. The Notebooks at Amazon.

[a klog apart]

25 friends + boredom = Mexican wave.

It takes about 25 bored fans in a stadium to start a Mexican wave, reports a study in Nature. The title of the paper "Mexican waves in an excitable medium" brings a new meaning to the usually dry scientific definition of  "excitable medium".

More at Science Nature Update

[David Harris' Science News]

posted by talos September 12 5:23 AM | 3 comments. Spectacular atmospheric optics.
Beautiful pictures of atmospheric phenomena, common and rare. You can also run your own halo simulations if you like... (Found in New Scientist's Weblinks, an extensive, annotated collection of all kinds of science links from all over the web.) [MetaFilter]

Thanks to jenett.radio for pointing to the following article--that of all the articles that I have read about the 9-11 anniversary, speaks to me and helps clarify my feelings.

From the Real to the Unreal.

My wife's yoga teacher ends each class with a saying that includes "from the Unreal to the Real", which I believe is a standard Hindu phrase.  Watching and thinking about the anniversary of 9-11, I find we are going from the Real to the Unreal.  The real is the actual event--the crash of the airplanes, the fall of the towers, so many dead.  The ordinary Americans caught up in this tragedy responded in reality--with real pain, support, an outpouring of community and a collective grief.  It was such a powerful event, unscripted, that the media ended up reflecting the emotion outward to the rest of the country.  They did not create it.

With the year anniversary, we have gone from the real outpouring of grief to the unreality of scripted emotions with Peter Jennings and Aaron Brown.  I almost never watch TV-- I would much rather read, talk, or write this blog--but sometimes when I am completely exhausted and wiped out, I will sit in front of the TV in a kind of hypnotic trance.  Tonight, too tired to work, I sat in front of the TV for an hour to see what was being said about Sept. 11th. 

What got to me was the emotion of it all.  ABC interviewed various firemen who had been trapped, and then rescued, and used this as a template to replay the fall of the towers.  These are really ordinary guys-- New Yorkers who look out for their brothers, who defend their jobs, who get caught up in the excitement of being there to fight the biggest high rise fire ever.  The program reopened all the emotion-- but had no place to go with it.   I am sick of looking at pictures of flags and the statue of liberty, and young children running and holding hands and looking up.

I felt I was being manipulated.  We talk about totalitarian brainwashing, about how whole societies are purposefully programmed to feel the emotional tug of a leader like a Hitler, a Kim il Sung, or even a Slobodan Milosevic.  The same thing is happening here -- not for a leader, but for the phantom of a leader.  There is a nexus of collaboration between media companies feeding on our emotion and a political and business leadership who use a fog of emotion to breakup and confuse opposition. Thus comes the sense of going from the real to the unreal. 

What happened last year was real.  What is being replayed today is not.  When you feel your society being manipulated on a grand scale, a first reaction is to opt out, to withdraw.  But if you don't withdraw, you feel you are opposing an almost unbelievable power-- like a storm that you cannot possibly influence or control.

I don't feel strong enough to stop the militarization and loss of freedom in our society.  But by clinging to the real-- to the small scale true relationships, by building trust with one person at a time, by making some changes at the margin, like electing a few more democrats, perhaps we can create some islands in the storm.  Let's not go from the real to the unreal.  Let's go from the unreal to the real.

[Toby's Political Diary - 'Let it Begin Here']

The Tuesday Morning Quarterback goes deep!

TMQ Would Meet Susan Sarandon at the Refrigerator Anytime: The 596-page September issue of InStyle, the magazine's annual "What's Sexy Now" cover, recently arrived at TMQ's home via crane. Just seeing the size of the issue was depressing enough. In magazine publishing, high page length means loads of advertising. A glam magazine with 596 pages! In contrast, the September and current weekly issues of The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Harper's and the New Yorker -- the four publications that are the last, shining hope of American thought and culture -- totaled 464 pages. InStyle bested all of them combined, despite the fact that its content is indistinguishable from advertising. Check that -- maybe because its content is indistinguishable from advertising.