Culture Bore

History Needs Software Piracy (Link Round-Up 1/28/12)

2012-01-28T10:23:00.000-08:00

"First came the belief that the tide of history was with the Soviet Union. Soviet leaders themselves believed the “correlation of forces” favored communism; the American defeat and withdrawal from Vietnam led Soviet officials, for the first time, to believe they might actually “win” in the long Cold War struggle. A decade later, in 1987, Paul Kennedy depicted both superpowers as suffering from “imperial overstretch,” but suggested that it was entirely possible that the United States would be the first to collapse, following a long historical tradition of exhausted and bankrupt empires. It had crippled itself by spending too much on defense and taking on too many far-flung global responsibilities. But within two years the Berlin Wall fell, and two years after that the Soviet Union collapsed. The decline turned out to be taking place elsewhere."

Why historians need software piracy

It may seem counterintuitive, but piracy has actually saved more software than it has destroyed. Already, pirates have spared tens of thousands of programs from extinction, proving themselves the unintentional stewards of our digital culture.

Software pirates promote data survival through ubiquity and media independence. Like an ant that works as part of a larger system it doesn’t understand, the selfish action of each digital pirate, when taken in aggregate, has created a vast web of redundant data that ensures many digital works will live on.

Banning Salman Rushdie from speaking in India

Outdated colonial laws need to be repealed, violent fringe groups must be stopped from holding the nation to ransom and we need a movement to stop politicians abusing religious sentiment for political gain. Only when freedom of expression can be taken for granted can India really call itself the democracy it claims so proudly to be.

The cultural gap between Western and Chinese research methods

Many of the students “haven't been trained so much in using their knowledge to generate new ideas and find new solutions”, says Danielsen. “They work extremely hard and very long hours, but I am not sure whether they are able to step back a bit and reflect on the results.” Wickham says that the science is often highly managed by professors, and researchers are not encouraged to take risks or learn from their mistakes.

Katy Perry Immigration Control (Link Round-Up 1/22/12)

2012-01-22T13:51:00.000-08:00

How to make money like Katy Perry

Take "California Gurls." It features Snoop Dogg. He's pricey. And the producers on the song — Dr. Luke and Max Martin (among others), who charge around $100,000 per song. And there are 12 tracks on the album.Then there's Katy Perry's advance. "That advance could have been perhaps a million dollars net, maybe $2 million — I can't say for certain," Tavel says.So the record company has shelled out millions of dollars before anyone has even heard the album.

The future of publishing: digital books with extras like songs and pictures

Enhanced e-books—which have multimedia features such as audio, video, pop-up graphics, 3-D images and animation—are being touted as the next frontier in the digital-books landscape. The explosive growth of e-book sales, coupled with the rapid adoption of iPads, Nook Tablets and Kindle Fires, has prompted publishers to experiment with new types of interactive books. Many in the industry will be watching closely to see whether "Chopsticks" becomes a literary trailblazer that ushers in a new species of e-book, or a cautionary tale of an elaborate flop.

Film industry warns that digital recordings are far less durable than film

In short, digital storage, be it on hard drives, DVDs or solid-state memory, simply isn't on a par for anything close to the 100-plus-year lifespan of film. The life of digital media is measured in years, not decades, and file formats can go obsolete in months, not years. As the report explains, that affects movies still looking for distribution, not merely library titles. "In general," the report says, "independent films that beat the odds and secure some form of distribution do so after a much longer time period than movies produced by the major studios. This time period quite likely exceeds the 'shelf life' of any digital work; that is, by the time distribution is secured, the digital data may become inaccessible.

Japan's allegedly brutal immigration control

Still the case of Christopher Johnson beggars belief. Returning to Tokyo after a short trip on December 23rd he was ushered into an examination room, where his nightmare began. Over the next 24 hours he was imprisoned and harassed. Most of his requests to call a lawyer, the embassy or friends were denied, he says.

The secret document that transformed China

So, in the winter of 1978, after another terrible harvest, they came up with an idea: Rather than farm as a collective, each family would get to farm its own plot of land. If a family grew a lot of food, that family could keep some of the harvest.This is an old idea, of course. But in communist China of 1978, it was so dangerous that the farmers had to gather in secret to discuss it.

Half-Plants, Navajo, and Copyrights (Link Round-Up 1/19/12)

2012-01-19T22:25:00.000-08:00

Supreme Court rules 6-2 that Congress can re-patent/copyright works in public domain

Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University and a plaintiff’s lawyer in the case, called the decision “unfortunate” and said it “suggests Congress is not required to pay particularly close attention to the interests of the public when it passes copyright laws.”

The majority, however, rebuffed charges that a decision in favor of Congress’ move would amount to affording lawmakers the right to legislate perpetual copyright terms.

Half-plant, half-animal?

These hybrids play merry hell with our attempts to classify organisms into neat groups. "The division between plants and animals is collapsing completely," Moestrup says. Instead, many microorganisms may be animal and plant at once, or switch between the two, like M. rubrum.

Native Americans angry over fashion world's appropriation of "traditional" imagery

“There’s the whole economic stratification issue of it,” she writes. “These designs are expensive. The new Portland Collection ranges from $48 for a tie to over $700 for a coat. The Opening Ceremony collection was equally, if not more, costly. It almost feels like rubbing salt in the wound, when poverty is rampant in many Native communities, to say ‘Oh, we designed this collection based on your culture, but you can’t even afford it!’”

How China is courting the Islamic world with construction projects

China's push to provide its international business partners with Islamic infrastructure, Tarin said, is part of a larger strategy to win over the Muslim world. Although many foreign Muslim individuals continue to do business with the United States, America has lost much of its soft power and economic discourse with the governments of many Muslim-majority nations over the past decade, leaving China an opening.

The hidden geoglyphs under the Amazon rainforest

“If one wants to recreate pre-Columbian Amazonia, most of the forest needs to be removed, with many people and a managed, highly productive landscape replacing it,” said William Woods, a geographer at the University of Kansas who is part of a team studying the Acre geoglyphs.

“I know that this will not sit well with ardent environmentalists,” Mr. Woods said, “but what else can one say?”

Lana Del Rey and Hezbollah (Link Round-Up 1/17/12)

2012-01-17T20:04:00.000-08:00

Warning labels for bad journalism

It seems a bit strange to me that the media carefully warn about and label any content that involves sex, violence or strong language — but there's no similar labelling system for, say, sloppy journalism and other questionable content.

I figured it was time to fix that, so I made some stickers. I've been putting them on copies of the free papers that I find on the London Underground. You might want to as well.

Lana Del Rey, indie blogging, and content farms

As I struggle to deal with my own periodic content farm existential crises, I wish I could have just invented Gawker. We could’ve had it all. Rolling in the deep pool of unique visitors.

Lebanese banks: the home of Hezbollah funds and drug money

As the data show, miraculously, Lebanese banks exploded in growth in the wake of Hezbollah's war with Israel in 2006 - with dollar-denominated deposits making up nearly 2/3 of the Lebanese banking system and over 50% of its growth. Until recently -- when DEA and Treasury began to crack down -- bank dollar and euro deposit growth has kept up a dramatic pace, despite Lebanon having large sovereign currency, economic, political, and security risk. This explosive growth makes no sense, unless Lebanon has become a major financial safe haven for drug trafficking organizations worldwide (and where the risk of moving so much foreign bulk cash and wire transfers is effectively offset by a highly complicit Lebanese government). As the risk of further U.S. actions has become clearer to bank depositors (bad guys included) and the Syria/Iran crisis expands, capital has started to flee Beirut en masse (see the balance of payments slide). Indeed, Lebanon is in the midst of a balance of payments crisis presently as a result.

Romney, France, and Strait of Hormuz Oil (Link Round-Up 1/15/12)

2012-01-15T14:26:00.000-08:00

[via]

France and Turkey revive imperial rivalry over Mediterranean dominance

In the last decade, Turkey has witnessed record-breaking economic growth. It is no longer a poor country desperately seeking accession to the European Union. It has a $1.1 trillion economy, a powerful army and aspirations to shape the region in its image. As political turmoil paralyzes North Africa, Syria and Iraq, and economic meltdown devastates much of Mediterranean Europe, Turkey and France have largely been spared. And their growing rivalry is one reason France has objected to Turkey’s bid for European Union membership.

Taken together with France’s efforts to create a European-Mediterranean Union, which Nicolas Sarkozy conceived in 2008 as a way to place France at the helm of the Mediterranean world, one thing has become obvious to the Turks: Paris won’t allow Turkey into the European Union or let it become a powerful player in a French-led Mediterranean region.

Medieval Jewish manuscripts found in Afghanistan

The documents describe a Jewish community that lived, permanently or temporarily, in a trading station between the Muslim conquest and the Mongol invasion. “We had some idea there were Jewish communities in Afghanistan, but this is the first time we have original documents written by them,” say Shaked, an expert in Judeo-Persian.

It was a turbulent period, he says, when a sect known as the Karaite — which rejected the Talmudic or rabbinic tradition and accepted only the Torah as holy scripture — was active.

How important is the Strait of Hormuz, really?

Despite Iran's tough talk, it seems unlikely that the country would cut off what amounts to its own lifeline. Iran also relies on an open and fully operational Hormuz. As reported in the New York Times, Iran exports almost "2 million barrels of oil a day" through the Strait to countries like China. And the Iranian government, according to researchers at the U.S. Institute of Peace, receives 65% of its revenues through its oil industry; would Iran's shaky economy be able to take such a hit? Probably not.

The capitalist revolutions in Mitt Romney's lifetime

The debate will be driven by emotions, not facts. The former are easy to inflame; the latter tricky to pin down. Did Mr Romney create 100,000 jobs while at Bain Capital, as he claims, or destroy more? Without knowing what would have happened in the absence of Bain’s intervention, one can only guess. Mr Romney says he made firms more productive, thus enriching America. His rivals—even Newt Gingrich, an unlikely sans-culottes—gripe that he enriched himself.

Mossad, Massacre, and Tuberculosis (Link Round-Up 1/14/12)

2012-01-14T13:26:00.000-08:00

[via Reddit via NASA]

Mossad agents posed as CIA to recruit terrorists to attack Iran

"Our bodies are wired to love salt, fat and sugar. ... Our minds are really wired to be affirmed and be told that we're right. ... Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they're right? Who wants to be informed when they can be affirmed? What we do is we tell our media that that's what we want to hear, and our media responds to that by telling us what it is that we want, and sometimes that isn't what's best for us."

South Sudan's post-independence ethnic massacres

The United States and other Western countries have invested billions of dollars in South Sudan, hoping it will overcome its deeply etched history of poverty, violence and ethnic fault lines to emerge as a stable, Western-friendly nation in a volatile region. Instead, heavily armed militias the size of small armies are now marching on villages and towns with impunity, sometimes with blatantly genocidal intent.

Treatment-resistant tuberculosis cases found in Indian hospitals

Why this is bad news: TB is already one of the world’s worst killers, up there with malaria and HIV/AIDS, accounting for 9.4 million cases and 1.7 million deaths in 2009, according to the WHO. At the best of times, TB treatment is difficult, requiring at least 6 months of pill combinations that have unpleasant side effects and must be taken long after the patient begins to feel well.Because of the mismatch between treatment and symptoms, people often don’t take their full course of drugs — and from that (and some other factors I’ll talk about in a minute) we get multi-drug resistant and extensively drug-resistant, MDR and XDR, TB.

Chicago SketchFest 2012 Reviews

2012-01-10T17:51:00.000-08:00

I reviewed the first three days of the Chicago SketchFest 2012 for Gapers Block.

If you're in Chicago, you can still check out the second half this Thursday, January 12th-Sunday, January 15th.

Antarctic SOPA Freelancer Riots (Link Round-Up 1/5/12)

2012-01-05T17:02:00.000-08:00

[via University of Oxford]

MPAA's own research shows that SOPA won't save any jobs

SOPA, recall, does not actually shut down foreign sites. It only requires (ineffective) blocking of foreign “rogue sites” for U.S. Internet users. It doesn’t do anything to prevent users in (say) China from downloading illicit content on a Chinese site. If we’re interested in the magnitude of the piracy harm that SOPA is aimed at addressing, then, the only relevant number is the loss attributable specifically to Internet piracy by U.S. users.

The Freelancers' Union, and the state of American "employment"

“I always thought of the FU as more entrepreneurial…than political” says Horowitz. “Today’s Left is not the Left we’re going to see in ten years. [Right now] new ideas aren’t allowed to flourish accordingly. The Left is very constrained intellectually.” “We’re progressive, but not part of the Left,” she adds, referring to partisan political membership.

Social media riots: coming to a city near you

Unlike in the US, where BlackBerrys are seen as strictly a white-collar accessory, teens and twentysomethings in the UK have embraced the platform wholeheartedly, with 37 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds using the devices nationwide; the percentage is probably much higher in urban areas like London. From early on in the rioting, BBM messages were pinging around among the participants and their friends, who were using the service for everything from sharing photos to coordinating locations. Contemplating the corporate-grade security and mass communication of the platform, Mike Butcher, a prominent British blogger who serves as a digital adviser to the London mayor, wryly remarked that BBM had become the “thug’s Gutenberg press.”

*Also, moonandback.com kindly republished my article about orbital space junk. Go check it out.

Orbital Space Junk Will Make Private Space Travel From Firms Like SpaceX Impossible

2012-01-04T19:24:00.000-08:00

Don't believe me? Read my new article over at PolicyMic and see for yourself.

Here's an instructional video to demonstrate my point:

And here's another one:

Auto-Tune Taliban Ringtones and Venezuelan Breast Implant Removal (link round-up 12/29/11)

2011-12-29T18:17:00.000-08:00

Why the "Golden Age" of tech blogging is over

Even Taliban-approved ringtones about suicide bombing use Auto-Tune

The quest for the perfect conservative President

Venezuela offers free breast implant removal services

China launches five-year plan for space exploration

Recycling Broken Christmas Lights: From Illinois to China

2011-12-27T20:49:00.000-08:00

A new law passed in Illinois will require people to recycle their old electronic gear.

Not only are consumers required to recycle TVs, computers, video games and much more, but so are manufacturers.

Proponents hail it as an “amazing job creator” and a “boon to economic development,” not to overlook the obvious benefit of keeping toxic chemicals out of landfills and groundwater.

According to the Environmental Law and Policy Center, the increasingly short life span of electronic items makes them the fastest-growing waste. They contain a lot of toxic materials — lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium — but also a lot of reusable materials — copper, gold, plastic, glass, circuit chips.

Much of this broken technology can't be refurbished or broken-down in the United States, so ends up in places like China.

There are some U.S. companies and organizations that take Christmas tree lights for free and promise to recycle them in the United States. And some of those lights may, in fact, end up being chopped in U.S. recycling plants. But most, invariably, will be sold for about 60 cents a pound, stuffed into a shipping container, and shipped to China -- to the benefit of the environment, and pocketbooks, in both countries. Indeed, if there's a weak environmental link in the chain, it's the American consumers who start it by buying tens of millions of pounds of Christmas tree lights every year, only to throw them into the recycle bin, guilt free, when a bulb breaks. But Li, for one, doesn't mind: that waste is the raw material for his green business.

Sudanese Street Gangs In Omaha?

2011-12-27T19:36:00.000-08:00

Why they are on the rise:

One critical problem for the Sudanese community was a lack of preparation by the city's public schools for the complex needs of refugee families, said Susan Mayberger, coordinator for migrant and refugee programming for Omaha Public Schools. The school district has taken steps to address the problem by adding programs that encourage parental involvement, she said.

"I am afraid that with the Sudanese community, with a lot of the parents, we weren't supporting them to the same level that we are now," Mayberger said.

University of Chicago Deal Shows How City Government Really Works

2011-12-22T21:50:00.000-08:00

In essence, whoever has the cash in Chicago plays by their own rules.

The fundamental shift towards neoliberalization of the economy and government at federal and state levels has changed how Mayors and Councils "govern" cities if they really govern them, in the classical civics-class sense, at all. Of course Emanuel, as one of the political architects of one of neoliberalization's most important structural supports, NAFTA, is not a victim of neoliberalization but an important figure in its rise. That fact is one of the reasons national elites rushed to fund his campaigns for Congress and the Fifth Floor.

In the Neoliberal City, laws, regulations, and rules are less important than relationships between political leaders and wealth, or capital. Mayor Emanuel explicitly ran for office touting his ability to "leverage" his relationships with wealthy elites. He even comically justified his immense fundraising from out-of-state and global financial elites by pointing out that because the rich like him, he'll be able to beg goodies out of them for the public.

Which I guess is how it usually works.

Chinese Villagers In Open Revolt

2011-12-21T19:13:00.000-08:00

Over 21,000 Chinese villagers in Wukan have completely driven out the police and Chinese Communist Party officials, after months of protests against corrupt officials and the death of a villager in police custody.

China can censor the internet protest keywords all it wants. But if people are getting angry enough to completely overwhelm local security forces in a small village, imagine what might happen in the future in a city like Shanghai.

Half of America Is Low-Income (Link Round-Up 12/20/11)

2011-12-20T19:32:00.000-08:00

[via Wood Sugars]

Census results show 48% of Americans are now "low-income" status

146.4 million U.S. citizens are now defined by their government as "low-income" -- with 49.1 million falling below the poverty line of $22,350 -- and it's a pretty troubling thought to think that you have about a one-in-two shot of meeting someone struggling to get by at random on the street.

Scientists develop model of a deep-sea, microbe battery

“The amount of power produced by these microbes is rather modest,” said Harvard biologist and engineer Peter Girguis, who presented his research December 5 at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. “But you could technically produce power in perpetuity.”Girguis hopes to tap this power to run seafloor sensors. He and his colleagues measured the current by implanting an electrode in the side of an underwater chimney 2,200 meters below the surface at the Juan de Fuca Ridge off the Pacific Northwest coast.

Rethinking the idea of a "Christian Europe"

To argue all this is not to deny the distinctive character of the Christian tradition (or traditions), nor the important role that Christianity has played in incubating what we now call ‘Western’ thought, nor yet the significant philosophical advances made within that tradition. But the Christian tradition, and Christian Europe, is far more a chimera than a pure-bred beast. The history of Christianity, its relationship to other ethical traditions, and the relationship between Christian values and those of modern, liberal, secular societies is far more complex than the trite ‘Western civilization is collapsing’ arguments allow. The irony is that the defenders of Christendom are riffing on the same politics of identity as Islamists, multiculturalists and many of the other ‘ists’ that such defenders so loathe.

Skyrim, Microblogging, Food, and Sinking Ships (Link Round-Up 12/18/11)

2011-12-18T18:48:00.000-08:00

[via Daily Mail story below]

China makes microbloggers write under real names

Quoting China's state-run Xinhua news agency, The Wall Street Journal reported that state secrets, material that threatens national security, posts that inspire ethnic resentment or discrimination, and posts involving rallies that "disrupt social order" were also being banned from microblogging sites.

Migrant boat to Indonesia sinks, 300 missing and feared dead

He said the passengers were mainly believed to be illegal migrants from countries including Iran and Afghanistan. Many boat people from the Middle East and Asia use Indonesia as a transit point en route to Australia.

Local TV showed images of more than a dozen shocked-looking survivors huddled in a clinic in Trenggalek, a town on Java island's southern coast.

Many economic migrants from the Middle East attempt to cross the Indian Ocean in boats in search of a better life in Australia.

Why Western and Asian foods taste different: food pairings

The more flavours two ingredients share, the less likely they are to be used together in east Asian cuisine - whereas 13 key ingredients, including butter, milk and egg, appear in 74.4 per cent of dishes in north America.

There are flavours that 'define' a cuisine - for instance basil in south European food, or soy sauce in east Asian - but the classic pairings of each cuisine, such as parmesan cheese and tomato (which share lots of flavours), and garlic and sesame oil (which share very few) show that 'food pairing' is a distinctly western idea.

Venezuela hit with food shortages

Jorge Roig, vice president of Fedecamaras, a Venezuelan association that pulls together businesses, including many producers of basic goods, blames the new government price caps and regulations for the shortages.

"People are doing panic buying. With these price caps, people are buying more than they need because they know many factories are not going to be able to produce their products. Production has gone down because there are price caps, production is not cost-effective and we have these conditions that discourage investment," Roig said.

Interview with author Ned Vizzini

I think this is the decision teenagers make when they get into fashion or poker or Skyrim. They want to shut out the complicated world in favor of a world they can control.

The Chicago Gang-Influenced City Council's "Doomsday" Plan

2011-12-18T13:42:00.000-08:00

[Via Chicagoist]

Chicago has a sobering look at the influence street gang members and affiliates have in electing Chicago City Council members.

The Chicago staff blog, 312, contrasts this story with a recent piece in the Chicago Reader about the influence of big business in the Rahm Emmanuel administration and his ability to throw cash towards the politicians he supports.

It's not as simple as a transition from ward heeler to gangbanger; as the piece notes, gangs and politicians go back to the Lords of the Levee days. But as Bernstein and Isackson tell it, without the mediating influence of the patronage system—also a mediating influence between business and politics—it's a bit more like the olden times.

That's where Bogira's piece completes the circle: a sense of what could come next, and Emanuel's role in it. Bogira focuses on Emanuel's New Chicago Committee, a PAC that supports "candidates for public office who share the goals of the political committee." It went seven-for-nine in its first local election cycle.

In the wake of the 2010 census results showing Latinos gaining over the black and white populations, various coalitions have bickered over what new map of Chicago's 50 Wards will balance racial representation and political incumbency to everyone's satisfaction.

If none can be agreed on, there's one more relatively fair map known as the "doomsday map".

It simply divides the city into squares. Ward boundaries don't meander all over the place to sort voters into predictable majorities. We hear it achieves near-perfect division of the city population, so each ward has the same number of people. And we hear it is likely to produce a City Council that closely mirrors the racial demographics of the city.

What it doesn't do: Protect incumbents.

Now you know why aldermen call it the doomsday map.

I wonder how all the proposed future ward maps line-up with Chicago gang boundaries?

Dead Russian Journalists and How To Stop SOPA

2011-12-17T13:39:00.000-08:00

Here's a Reddit thread on how to get the media to talk about SOPA.

[very similar advice to my piece on OWS]

Plus, SOPA could also kill things that have nothing to do with online piracy, like free online education.

In other censorship news, the founder of a Russian anti-corruption newspaper has been killed.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said journalists at Chernovik, known for reporting on corruption in the provincial administration, had been "routinely persecuted for their work."

"Today's murder of Gadzhimurat Kamalov ... is a lethal blow to press freedom," the CPJ said in a statement.

His killing was "a massive loss for independent journalism in the North Caucasus, Russia's most dangerous place for reporters," it quoted regional coordinator Nina Ognianova as saying.

Not a great week for public discourse.

Christopher Hitchens Just Died

2011-12-15T22:14:00.000-08:00

RIP

The influential writer and cultural critic Christopher Hitchens died on Thursday at the age of 62 from complications of cancer of the esophagus. Hitchens confronted his disease in part by writing, bringing the same unsparing insight to his mortality that he had directed at so many other subjects.

I didn't agree with everything he wrote. But I'd be thrilled to write even half as well as he did.

Bonnie "Prince" Billy Kills Turkey, Sells New Record

2011-12-14T16:57:00.000-08:00

[via John from Gonzo Chicago]

In a clip that is sure to disgust, offend, and spark more ethical questions than I care to mention, here's a promo for Bonnie "Prince" Billy's new record, "wolfroy goes to town" in which:

A guy in a wolf costume cuts off the head of a turkey at a local butcher.
The bleeding turkey flails in pain.
The wolf takes the packaged turkey home.
We get a plug for the new record and a nice-looking family's local Chicago butcher shop.

We'll see how this one works out for Drag City.

Occupy Freakonomics (Link Round-Up 12/13/11)

2011-12-13T17:50:00.000-08:00

[via]

The methodology problems with Freakonomics

One of the delights of the books and the blog is the authors’ willingness to play with ideas and consider alternative explanations. But unquestioning trust in friends and colleagues combined with the desire to be counterintuitive appear in several cases to have undermined their work. They—and anyone who wishes to convey economics and statistics to a popular audience—just need to take the next step and avoid, in any given example, privileging one story over all other possibilities. This may require Levitt to be more skeptical of the research of his friends and colleagues, and Dubner to be more skeptical of Levitt. “Easy read” should not mean “easy write.”

Oman: the future U.S.-Iranian intermediary?

Oman, a sultanate located just across the Gulf from Iran and straddling the other side of the Strait of Hormuz, is positioned to be the perfect go-between for the West when it comes to engagement with Iran. Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said, who overthrew his isolationist father in 1970, has been far friendlier with Western rulers than some of the other players in the region and remains on good terms with the Iranians as well.

Chicago traders call for "Occupying trading pits" to protest new electronic trading rules

“Are we going to sit here and be kicked in the teeth? Or are we going to fight back?” shouted Alan Young, a cattle broker who helped organize a raucous “Occupy the Pits” meeting of about 100 brokers and traders around the cavernous Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), birthplace of the modern futures markets.

“There will be a snowball effect if this thing goes electronic, and there won't be any more jobs left.”

Putin, Tax Rates, and Salafis (Link Round-Up 12/12/11)

2011-12-12T20:56:00.000-08:00

[via XKCD]

A Post-Putin Russia is less likely to be democratic

But if Putin does fall, there may well be a period of chaos, as foreign investors pull their money out of the country (some are already considering that step, I’m told by a reliable source in the Moscow financial community) and the economic and political power decks get reshuffled. The political winner could turn out to be someone as unknown now to the public as Putin was when tapped by the Yeltsin circle to take the reins of power. Indeed, it could be almost anyone—except a liberal.

What you'd pay in taxes in several dozen countries

Herbert Hoover presided over the largest tax increase in peace time history of the United States. For top earners the rate went up from 25 percent to 63 percent. But not everyone in top 1 percent was paying 63 percent. In fact after the Hoover tax increase, there was a very wide range in rates between people who just barely made the top 1 percent and people who were like Andrew Mellon, like really, really the richest Americans. The range was from 8 to 63 percent. So people who just made it into the top 1 percent were facing the 8 percent rate -- that was not particularly high. The wealthiest of the wealthy of the wealthy were facing 63 percent. And this is 1931!

Interview with a Salafi member of the Egyptian Parliament

Indeed, El-Kordi continued preaching and, in 1998, he became the Giza leader for al-Dawa al-Salfiyya, a national Salafist organization that was founded in Alexandria during the 1970s, but was closely monitored during the the Mubarak era. It was through this leadership position that he got to know the individuals who established the Nour Party earlier this year. To some extent, the Nour Party is an outgrowth of al-Dawa al-Salfiyya, and an essential component of the social networks that underlie the party’s quick formation. In this vein, all ten of the candidates on the Nour Party’s electoral list in Giza are active members in al-Dawa al-Salfiyya, which enabled them to claim meaningful supporters when the Nour Party was searching for candidates. El-Kordi describes al-Dawa al-Salfiyya as an indomitable force. “If we organized elsewhere like it was organized in Alexandria, nobody would be able to stand against us,” he says. “Because it represents the real Islam—the way Muhammad lived with his companions. You would just accept it naturally.”

The Whale Graveyard in Chile's Atacama Desert

2011-12-11T11:11:00.001-08:00

Scientists just found fossils of several 5,000,000-year-old ancient whales, buried within a half-mile of each other in Chile's Atacama Desert.

Here's a picture of the Atacama Desert that I took a few years ago:

Considering the area is almost all sand, rock, mountain and salt flats, with scant vegetation and small towns, the fact that fossils of ANY kind were found there blows my mind.

Asian Space Race and NASA Privatization Will Help Us Reach Kepler-22b

2011-12-11T10:50:00.001-08:00

Another article by me, courtesy of PolicyMic.

While space travel has become less of a national priority for the U.S. and Russia in subsequent decades, a new wave of corporate and governmental competition for space travel has emerged in recent years. Between the growing space race in Asia and trends towards privatized space travel in the U.S., the world is on the verge of new age of space exploration and technological advancement that will get us closer to travelling to Earth-like planets like Kepler-22b.

HiView, The Google Earth For Mars

2011-12-10T17:42:00.001-08:00

We can all now explore Mars from the comfort of our own homes, courtesy of the University of Arizona.

HiView is the best way to explore HiRISE images of the Martian surface at the full resolution of the imagery. Tracks of boulders that have fallen down crater walls, delicate rays of ejecta from fresh impact craters, and the unearthly formations created by carbon dioxide ice on the Martian south pole are just a few of the things that are waiting to be discovered by anyone using a tool like HiView with HiRISE imagery.

Once the application has been downloaded to your computer, all that is needed to get started after launching the application, is a quick drag and drop of any of the links to the JP2 files on the HiRISE website to the HiView application window, and HiView will take care of the rest. No downloading of multigigabyte files required!

The program hopes to get more people interested in space exploration.

"The pictures are beautiful, but there's real science in there," said Castalia. "That's part of what HiView allows people to do is to explore the science that's there in the imagery. People can really experience what it means to be involved in a Mars mission. All you have to do is get in there and explore."

Definitely cheaper than space travel. But not nearly as cool.

Detroit, Plastic Oceans, and Civil War (Link Round-Up 12/8/11)

2011-12-08T21:00:00.001-08:00

Detroit "blotting" - residents developing empty property that the city won't sell

In Detroit, Cleveland, New Orleans and many other cities, residents already get first dibs on adjacent empty lots. The idea is to stabilize neighborhoods and bring land back on the tax rolls. So for instance, some Cleveland homeowners can buy an empty side lot for as little as a dollar. In Detroit, it's as little as 200 dollars. But the city owns 60,000 parcels of land, most of it vacant."We haven't really promoted the program," says Rob Anderson, Detroit's new planning director. "I think that's why we have such small numbers."

Microplastics from fabrics leak into the oceans

Ecologist Mark Browne, University College Dublin, and several colleagues gathered sand samples from 18 beaches on six continents for analysis. It turns out that every beach tested contained microplastics (particles about the size of a piece of long grain of rice or smaller). Of the samples collected, nearly 80 percent were polyester or acrylic, though without further research, it's impossible to know exactly which type of clothing -- whether it's your stretchy yoga pants or that super-soft fleece blanket -- is causing the most problems. Currently, textile manufacturers are not required to test their fabrics for shedding.

Five Truths About Our Energy Future

IEA numbers have shown that globally over the past couple of years, we're emitting more carbon per unit of economic output. That's mean we're traveling in the exact opposite direction from where we need to be going, recarbonizing instead of decarbonizing, thanks chiefly to increases in dirtier energy such as coal and inefficient manufacturing in rapidly growing countries like China and India. It's a sign of just how difficult the clean-energy transition will be.

Why so few blacks study the Civil War

For that particular community, for my community, the message has long been clear: the Civil War is a story for white people—acted out by white people, on white people’s terms—in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props. We are invited to listen, but never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would, to say that we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the Revolutionary War, is to rupture the narrative. Having been tendered such a conditional invitation, we have elected—as most sane people would—to decline.

Los Angeles, Water on Mars, and Chinese Naval Warfare (Link Round-Up 12/7/11)

2011-12-07T21:25:00.001-08:00

Los Angeles votes to end corporate personhood

“Move to Amend’s proposed amendment would provide the basis for overturning the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission,” stated Mary Beth Fielder, Co-Coordinator of LA Move to Amend. “The Supreme Court has no legitimate right to grant people’s rights to corporations. We must clearly establish that it is we, The People, who are meant to rule.”

NASA Mars Rover finds minerals deposited by water

"This tells a slam-dunk story that water flowed through underground fractures in the rock," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for Opportunity. "This stuff is a fairly pure chemical deposit that formed in place right where we see it. That can't be said for other gypsum seen on Mars or for other water-related minerals Opportunity has found. It's not uncommon on Earth, but on Mars, it's the kind of thing that makes geologists jump out of their chairs."

Chinese president tells navy to prepare for war

China has recently acquired its first aircraft carrier and has been vocal about its naval ambitions.

But its military remains primarily a land-based force, and its naval capabilities are still dwarfed by the US.

Mr Hu told a meeting of military officials that the navy should "accelerate its transformation and modernisation in a sturdy way, and make extended preparations for warfare in order to make greater contributions to safeguard national security".

Tebow, Potatoes, Islamists, and Gandhi (Link Round-Up 12/6/11)

2011-12-06T19:11:00.001-08:00

Chuck Klosterman on Tim Tebow

Right now, whenever Broncos vice president of football operations John Elway gets asked about Tebow, he effectively says, "We have no choice but to play him. He wins games." It's not really a compliment. It's almost a criticism. But if Tebow did all this with a prison record, Elway would say the same thing in reverse order: "He wins games. We have no choice but to play him." Which is similar, but not the same.

Why analysts are overreacting to Islamist gains in elections

There are a couple of additional reasons for the alarmism. One is sloppy thinking in failing to distinguish radical Islamists (who of course have represented the most salient and worrisome form of transnational extremist violence in recent years) from all other political Islamists. A final reason is simple Islamophobia.

The surprising rise of the Egyptian Salafis

When I asked these bushy-bearded politicos how they had emerged from obscurity to omnipresence in a matter of months, they insisted that the Nour Party had organically grown from the bottom-up. “As Salafists, we are part of the Muslim community and we connect with Muslims as brothers, and there is a private connection as Salafists,” Mohamed Abdel Tawaq, the Nour Party’s 31-year-old Fayoum coordinator, told me. “We met each other through mosques and universities. We live in a Muslim society.”

But the mass organization that they’d pulled off so quickly clearly requires money. Where is it coming from? “We pay zakat to an organization that belongs to the party,” said Abdel Tawaq. Rumor has it, I replied, that most of their funds come from Saudi Arabia, which—I didn’t say this part aloud—has a history of exporting its own Islamic radicalism elsewhere. “You see all the [Nour Party] branches around Egypt, and you think we have so much money,” said Ali Sharaf, a Nour party coordinator who was sitting nearby. “But we’re really struggling to pay the rent here. Our money comes from dues.” He said that dues were only 10 Egyptian pounds—roughly $1.75—each month, and that they had registered thousands of new members. (Given the ubiquity of the Nour Party’s banners and the scale of their operation, this is scarcely believable.)

How the potato changed the world

Many researchers believe that the potato’s arrival in northern Europe spelled an end to famine there. (Corn, another American crop, played a similar but smaller role in southern Europe.) More than that, as the historian William H. McNeill has argued, the potato led to empire: “By feeding rapidly growing populations, [it] permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950.” The potato, in other words, fueled the rise of the West.

Anna Hazare, the Gandhi-like figurehead of the Indian anti-corruption protests

Two earlier Hazare fasts have already forced the government to act in ways it otherwise would not have. In April, it agreed to negotiate with Hazare's civil society supporters on terms for the anti-corruption agency, the Lokpal. In August, after the breakdown of those negotiations led to the brief imprisonment of Hazare and then a second fast, it agreed to pass a strong version of the Lokpal in the current parliamentary session. But the law has so far not passed. Now the clock is ticking again, with the government working to reduce the Lokpal's power and Hazare threatening to fast again.

Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood Already Signaling Rivalry With Salafis

2011-12-05T17:59:00.001-08:00

I'd like to follow-up on my article on PolicyMic about why the Muslim Brotherhood wouldn't dominate Egypt's Parliamentary election.

The secular/liberal factions didn't eat into the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party's gains, but the Salafis' sudden rise has already pushed the FJP towards a publicly moderate position.

Despite the rivalry, Saad el-Katatni, the secretary general of the Brotherhood's political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, said he didn't expect election competition to spill over into parliament.

He said his party will work to form a broad coalition that includes liberal trends, and "absorbs" the Islamist parties who are new to the political scene.

"Some of the new parties wanted to be alone, to get as many seats as possible and to be seen as powerful in the parliament," he told the AP. "They will need to be part of the group (once in parliament). If they work alone, it will be a big loss for them."

He said it was too early to speak of specific parliamentary alliances, but so far, the major Salafi party has signaled it won't join, and has already walked out on a pre-election coalition with the Brotherhood.

Hot Air notes that Salafis may gain an even higher proportion of seats in the coming rounds of voting, and speculates that whoever the FJP forms a coalition government with will get dragged down with them when the economy tanks, benefiting the opposition.

However, there's still the liberal coalitions, the young protesters still at Tahrir Square, the ex-Mubarak party members, and the ruling military council to all factor in.

So far, it looks like my thesis about the Brotherhood has proven correct. But what that means for the future of Egyptian politics remains to be seen.

I'll wait to comment further on my OWS and Gingrich/Groupon articles to see how they play out.

Putting Life Into Perspective (Link Round-Up 12/5/11)

2011-12-05T17:07:00.001-08:00

[via GONZO CHICAGO]

Earth-like planet found 600 light years away

"I think there are two things that are really exciting about Kepler-22b," said Natalie Batalha, the deputy science team lead at Ames. "One is that it's right in the middle of this habitable zone.

"The second thing that's really exciting is it's orbiting a star very, very similar to our own sun. This is a solar analogue, almost a solar twin, very similar to our own sun and you've got a planet 2.4 times the size of the Earth right smack in the habitable zone."

Largest black holes ever found

One of these newly surveyed monsters, which weighs as much as 21 billion Suns, is in an egg-shaped swirl of stars known as NGC 4889, the brightest galaxy in a sprawling cloud of thousands of galaxies about 336 million light-years away in the Coma constellation.

The other black hole, a graveyard for the equivalent of 9.7 billion Suns, more or less, lurks in the center of NGC 3842, a galaxy that anchors another cluster known as Abell 1367, about 331 million light-years away in Leo.

Man fatally shot in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood

The shooting is related to gang activity in the area, according to Ald. James Cappleman (46th), who issued an alert to constituents after the shooting.

Cappleman said that compared to last year, there is a decrease in shootings in Uptown, “but one shooting is still too many.”

Why Newt Gingrich Is The Groupon Of The GOP Race

2011-12-05T06:00:00.001-08:00

[via Gage Skidmore]

Another article I wrote for PolicyMic:

While these seem like unrelated events, there are several parallels between Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign and Groupon's initial public offering campaign that demonstrate the difficulties of gaining and keeping popularity in today's news media environment. The viability of both elected politicians and publicly-traded companies is driven by outflanking competitors and delivering benefits to supporters, and the role of the media is to continually assess their ability to do these things. A comparison between Gingrich and Groupon shows that high-profile organizations can recover from early media scrutiny, but must continually battle to stay viable in the eyes of the media and public.

The deal is on.

J.R.R. Tolkien and Vladimir Putin (Link Round-Up 12/4/11)

2011-12-04T14:59:00.001-08:00

Egypt's Facebook revolutionaries failed to inspire voters

"We were camping in Tahrir up until two days before election day," said Khaled Sayed, a prominent activist who lost his race in a Cairo suburb. "The second reason we didn't do well was the sectarian nature of the voting instigated by the Islamists. This made many liberals vote for Egyptian Bloc as a balance to the Islamists."

Parliamentary voting exit polls show Vladimir Putin losing Russian support

The vote was widely seen as a test of Putin's personal authority after signs that Russians have started to tire of his tough-guy image, built up by his crushing of a rebellion in revel Chehnya and antics such as bare-chested horse riding.

"Russia has a new political reality even if they rewrite everything," said Sergei Obukhov, a parliamentary deputy of the Communist Party, which made considerable gains, its vote almost doubling to around 20 percent, according to the exit poll.

Why Iranians hate the British

Britain staged a joint invasion of Iran with Soviet forces when the Shah’s predecessor got a bit too close to the Nazis in World War Two and then helped the Americans overthrow the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 after he nationalised Britain’s oil possessions in the country.

A WSJ writer retracts his attack on liberals' understanding of economics

Buturovic began putting all 17 questions to a new group of respondents last December. I eagerly awaited the results, hoping that the conservatives and especially the libertarians (my side!) would exhibit less myside bias. Buturovic was more detached. She e-mailed me the results, and commented that conservatives and libertarians did not do well on the new questions. After a hard look, I realized that they had bombed on the questions that challenged their position. A full tabulation of all 17 questions showed that no group clearly out-stupids the others. They appear about equally stupid when faced with proper challenges to their position.

J.R.R. Tolkien and the modern fantasy formula

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist, fights that never happened, all set against the sort of medieval background that Mark Twain thought he had discredited with “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”

Latin American and Caribbean countries exclude U.S. and Canada from political/economic bloc

"China is always looking to approach its ties with Latin America and the Caribbean from a strategic perspective and is willing to deepen dialogue, exchanges and cooperation." Chile will assume the presidency of the group during its first year and the next summit will be held in Santiago at the end of 2012.

Naked Psychology and The War on Nuclear Iran (Link Round-Up 12/3/11)

2011-12-03T17:51:00.001-08:00

[via racialicious]

The war against Iran's nuclear program has already begun

Even if the Mossad or the CIA are not involved in these incidents, the speculation that they are serves Western intelligence bodies by enhancing their image as "omnipotent," and heightening the Iranian leadership's fear. This is known as psychological warfare.

Still, with all due respect for Western intelligence's great efforts - including what is probably unprecedented operational coordination - it is unlikely these operations could have succeeded without inside support, meaning from individuals or groups ready to help sabotage the ayatollahs' regime. It should be remembered that Iran is a mosaic of ethnic minorities, and almost all have reasons for disliking the regime; some have their own underground armed militias.

Naked people assumed to have less self-control than those wearing clothes

The idea that a body focus can lead to both decreased and increased mind stands in contrast to the term “objectification,” because it suggests that people seen as bodies are not seen as mindless objects but, instead, as experiencers: someone more capable of pain, pleasure, desire, sensation, and emotion but lacking in agency. In other words, focusing on the body does not lead to de-mentalization but to a redistribution of mind.

Myanmar's new, nearly-empty capital city

Myanmar has been so secretive that it's not clear precisely when work began on the city, nor how much it cost. It is lavish by any standards, but almost obscenely so against the backdrop of the enormous poverty elsewhere in the country.

It's hard to say where the money came from – but the military had its finger in many business pies, of various degrees of legitimacy. China has also been a big benefactor.

Clay Shirky on the future of news reporting

Saying newspapers will provide a stable home for reporters, just as soon as we figure out how to make newspapers stable, is like saying that if we had some ham, we could have a ham sandwich, if we had some bread. We need to support the people who cover hard news, but when you see a metro daily for a town of 100,000 that employs only six such reporters (just 10% of the masthead, much less total staff), saving the entire edifice just to support that handful looks a lot harder than just finding new ways to support them directly.

One black author's mixed feelings about white Occupy Wall Streeter's complaints about police brutality

By Thursday, as I returned to New York City, I continued to see tweets and blogs about the brutality of the NYPD. Although I absolutely agreed with the sentiments, I had a nagging feeling in my stomach. I couldn't let it go. My inner militant Negro (whom I keep sedated with brunch and Modern Warfare 3) wanted to write in all caps:

"OH, SO THE WHITE MAN GETS HIT AND NOW IT'S AN ISSUE! THE BLACK MAN HAS BEEN BEATEN FOR YEARS! WE DIDN'T LAND ON PLYMOUTH ROCK, PLYMOUTH ROCK LANDED ON US!!"

New Belgium Beer and Biodiesel Made of Poop (Link Round-Up 12/1/11)

2011-12-01T20:10:00.001-08:00

[via FT blog]

A Map of Homeless Shelters vs. Cupcake Shops in Chicago

In addition to rising numbers of homeless people, homeless program funding is on the chopping block. According to The Atlantic Cities, homelessness programs are facing a 50 percent funding cut. In addition, according to the Chicago News Cooperative, youth homelessness over 10,000, a 16 percent increase from last year.

Chinese economic collapse fears are in this season

Now China's housing bubble is deflating. Home prices reversed in October for the second consecutive month as cash-strapped developers became desperate to unload homes. An index of 35 major cities showed 29 had experienced a decline in sales from a year ago; sales plunged more than 50% in six of them, including Beijing.

The Chinese government says it's all part of the plan. After loosening the credit spigot during the financial crisis to keep the economy humming, it's now tightening lending and clamping down on speculators.

But critics said the damage has been done. Behind China's gleaming new high-rises, freeways and bullet trains, the bears see ghost towns, empty roads and superfluous rail lines. Public debt has exploded, raising fears of an overload that could weigh on China's economy.

Iran interferes in Iraqi Kurdistan

Iran is looking for auxiliaries to its considerable and menacing influence over the Iraqi central government, perhaps out of mere desire for aggrandizement. But Tehran may also fear that Arab Shias in Baghdad will prove a troublesome partner in its anticipated alliance of Shia-ruled Middle East states, once the U.S. leaves. Iraq's Shias, a majority of the country’s population, do not accept the political model of the Iranian clerical state, or “vilayet-e faqih” (governance by religious jurists). Hostility between Iranian and Iraqi Arab Shias, as described by Nathaniel Rabkin writing for THE WEEKLY STANDARD in 2007, is reflected in religious literature produced by Iraq’s Shia religious authorities, or marjae. And of course the Iraq-Iran war of 1980-88 has not been forgotten.

New Belgium and the rise of craft beer

Some craft brewers are stoic about the rise of these macrobrewed craft brands. “My outlook is, well, you’ve taught a lot of Americans that cloudy beer with spicy flavors is kind of cool,” says Garrett Oliver, brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery. “So who is that really good for? Is that good for MillerCoors? Maybe somewhat. Is it good for me? Absolutely.” Others are more concerned. Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Milton, Del., says, “They go into a Joe’s Bar and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got a craft beer. Instead of a keg of Dogfish Head at $140, we’ll sell you this quasi-craft beer for $90 and you can charge the same price per pint.’ They use these quasi-craft beers as pawns to clear the real craft beers off the chessboard.”

Nearly 50% of young people in Greece and Spain are unemployed

This isn't quite the picture that explains the euro debt crisis in one graph, but it tells a story. The euro was created partly to let poorer countries borrow more cheaply and help net exporters like Germany sell to richer neighbors. This has given Germany an amazing trade advantage, allowing it to sell its stuff to richer neighbors without seeing its currency appreciate or its goods get more expensive for Greeks and Irish to buy. Look how nicely that's worked out for Germany!

Bill Gates grant turning poop to productivity in Ghana

And Waste Enterprisers already has a small revenue stream from its third business: fish farms. The company is taking poorly performing waste stabilization ponds, and creating incentives to maintain them by making money off of the ponds through raising and selling catfish. By the time the water gets to the last pond, where the fish live, the water is treated enough to raise fish, Wade says.

But are people willing to eat fish that have been raised on human feces, even if the waste has been semi-treated? And when you get down to it, will consumers be receptive to any product made out of human feces?

"Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?" (Link Round-Up 11/30/11)

2011-11-30T19:17:00.001-08:00

[via Jason Kottke]

"Ro ck" is no longer a catch-all term for pop music.

But if not rock, what? Is it time to start talking about emerging rock bands plugging into “the heart of hip-hop”? Should rappers be claiming non-rap artists as their own, forming a new lake that all other musical tributaries lead to? It might only be a matter of time before music historians remember Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith for contributing drum parts to so many classic rap songs; The Beatles for inspiring parts of the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique; and King Crimson for supplying an awesome hook to “Power” from West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Because Run-DMC won’t be barging into the music museums of the future; it will be running them.

Gene therapy blocks HIV in lab mice

But both Burton and Koff caution that gene therapy comes with its own set of problems. Because the antibody DNA is permanently inserted into the genome, there’s no way to turn it off if someone has an immune reaction against the antibodies. But it won't be known whether such side effects exist until the method is tested in people, something that Baltimore aims to do in the next few years. The researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, meanwhile, hope to get the first round of human trials of their technique started before the end of 2012.

Why energy journalism is so bad

If the article only talks about resources or reserves, and doesn’t mention production rates, you can safely ignore it. Yes, America may have 1.5 trillion barrels of oil shale (not shale oil, which again is an entirely different thing), but right now we’re producing exactly zero barrels of it, and for good reason: it’s a highly marginal source of hydrocarbons, and too expensive to produce with today’s technology. Remember this: Only flow rates matter, not how much is in the ground.

100,000 Year-Old-Artifacts in Arabia Rewrite "Out of Africa" Theory

Instead of hugging the coast, early modern humans might therefore have spread from Africa into Arabia along river networks that would've acted like today's highways, researchers suggested. There would have been plenty of large game present, such as gazelles, antelopes and ibexes, which would have been appealing to early modern humans used to hunting on the savannas of Africa.

Henry Morgan Stanley's Willpower Secrets

You might think the energy spent shaving in the jungle would be better devoted to looking for food. But Stanley’s belief in the link between external order and inner self-discipline has been confirmed recently in studies. In one experiment, a group of participants answered questions sitting in a nice neat laboratory, while others sat in the kind of place that inspires parents to shout, “Clean up your room!” The people in the messy room scored lower self-control, such as being unwilling to wait a week for a larger sum of money as opposed to taking a smaller sum right away. When offered snacks and drinks, people in the neat lab room more often chose apples and milk instead of the candy and sugary colas preferred by their peers in the pigsty.

The Muslim Brotherhood Will Not Dominate Egypt's Election

2011-11-29T20:03:00.001-08:00

[via Wikimedia Commons]

Another PolicyMic article I wrote:

Incumbent ex-members of Mubarak's dissolved National Democratic Party are expected to compete with the FJP for several seats. The Islamist vote will be split between the FJP, the Salafi fundamentalist al-Nour Party, Al-Gama'a al-Islamiya, and various smaller Islamist groups. Although many opposition groups joined the protests in Tahrir Square to condemning the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces holding an "illegitimate" early election, the square has mostly emptied out since Monday, and this may give an unexpected boost to secular liberals, independents, and other parties of all ideologies and sizes. The FJP gains will be sizable, but the resulting lower Parliament is likely to be fragmented and will force the party to focus on Egypt's vast economic problems instead of enforcing Islamic social codes.

As of the time of this posting, the Brotherhood is already calling for the Parliamentarian majority to appoint a Prime Minister, instead of the ruling SCAF.

Once the votes are counted, we shall see who gets to call the shots in Egypt.

Egyptian Election, Fed's Secret Bank Bailouts, and Stem Cell Windpipes (Link Round-Up 11/29/11)

2011-11-28T22:07:00.001-08:00

[via Reddit]

Whoever wins the Egyptian elections faces economic disaster

In a trenchant posting last week, financial analyst David P. Goldman (Spengler) reported that Egypt’s stock exchange fell 11 percent in the first three days of the week and that the Egyptian pound was on the verge of collapse. Residents and foreigners were dumping the Egyptian pound and buying dollars and Euros -- yes, even Euros. It was becoming impossible to transport bank notes across the country, he noted, quoting Al Ahram, Egypt’s largest state-owned Arabic newspaper, as mobs of Egyptians were attacking the armed cars that try to transport them to branches of Cairo banks.

First artificial windpipe made with stem cells

The artificial trachea was custom-made using three-dimensional imaging. First, a glass model was built to help shape an artificial scaffold. Stem cells were then inserted into the scaffold to create a functioning airway, the authors explained in a journal news release.

The scientists said their technique is an improvement over other methods because they used the patient's own cells to create the airway so there is no risk of rejection and the patient does not have to take immunosuppressive drugs.

Record numbers of Japanese young people are single

The latest found that 61% of unmarried men aged 18 to 34 have no girlfriend, and half of women the same age have no boyfriend - a record high.

More than a quarter of the men and 23% of the women said they were not even looking.

Some cited a shortage of money, others a belief that it is impossible to find a good partner once they had passed the age of 25.

Fed secretly loaned $13 billion to banks in bailout money

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

From "Made In China" to "Brands From China"

The Chinese, he points out, are an innovative, with strong salesman-like instincts. Switching from assembling to a creating, from an engineering mindset to inventing, will inspire Chinese brands to export. Chinese aesthetics travel well, and cultural values, if not the political, are becoming universal.

UN Says Libyan ex-rebels are still detaining 7,000 prisoners

The detainees are being held without access to legal process because the police and courts are not functioning, and some may have been tortured.

Many are sub-Saharan Africans suspected of being mercenaries hired by the Gaddafi regime.

More food, more child malnutrition in India?

To address malnutrition, he called for greater coordination in areas ranging from health and sanitation, to agriculture, to women’s status.

Egypt's Gas Problems

2011-11-28T20:39:00.001-08:00

I've been working on a PolicyMic piece on the Egyptian election for the past couple of days.

So far, the elections have been peaceful, if not rife with campaign law violations.

At the same time, someone blew up a gas pipeline to Israel and Jordan in the Sinai Peninsula.

Meanwhile, the first third of a shipment of 21 tons of tear gas from the U.S. to the Interior Ministry was intercepted by customs officials the Suez Canal. Tear gas has previously been used as recently as last week in Tahrir Square against protesters.

So much for America winning hearts and minds in post-Mubarak Egypt.

Big Brother's Tolkien Fandom, OWS Protester's Alan Moore Fandom (Link Round-Up 11/26/11)

2011-11-26T17:37:00.001-08:00

[via MetaFilter]

Alan Moore on protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks

"I suppose when I was writing V for Vendetta I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn't it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world… It's peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction."

Reddit users looking to create an alternate, censorship-free internet

Mesh networks are designed to allow users to connect to one another directly instead of to a centralized Internet service provider. Universities like John Hopkins and Purdue have experimented with building mesh network technologies, and the State Department and the One Laptop Per Child program have both developed their own versions of mesh networks to either circumvent censorship in foreign regimes or, in OLPC’s case, connect users who don’t have access to Internet service providers.

Pakistan closes NATO supply routes after accidental friendly fire

"This will have a catastrophic effect on Pakistan-U.S. relations. The public in Pakistan are going to go berserk on this," said Charles Heyman, senior defense analyst at British military website Armedforces.co.uk.

Other analysts, including Rustam Shah Mohmand, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, predicted Pakistan would protest and close the supply lines for some time, but that ultimately "things will get back to normal."

Banned neuro-toxic nerve gas used in Tahrir Square

Rashes, epileptic-type convulsions, temporary blindness and coughing up blood are among the symptoms being reported by Egyptian protesters who have fallen victim to a potentially lethal form of neuro-toxic nerve gas reportedly being deployed by security forces.

After almost a week of protests against the ruling military junta left some 41 people dead, several sources claim scores have died from gas asphyxiation, while thousands more have received medical treatment after possibly being exposed to an agent known as CR gas.

Bankers arrested after siphoning millions of euros from Latvia, Lithuania

Vladimir Antonov, 36, and a Lithuanian partner, Raimondas Baranauskas, 53, were detained Thursday on an arrest warrant issued by investigators probing alleged fraud and money laundering at his banks in the Baltic states, Lithuanian prosecutor Tomas Krusna told reporters.

The Bank of Lithuania said late Thursday that his bank there, Snoras Bank, will be liquidated, calling it the best solution for country's financial system and economy, which were jolted after the bank was nationalized and its operations halted.

Palantir, the Tolkien-inspired War on Terror search engine for U.S. Intelligence groups

An organization like the CIA or FBI can have thousands of different databases, each with its own quirks: financial records, DNA samples, sound samples, video clips, maps, floor plans, human intelligence reports from all over the world. Gluing all that into a coherent whole can take years. Even if that system comes together, it will struggle to handle different types of data—sales records on a spreadsheet, say, plus video surveillance images. What Palantir (pronounced Pal-an-TEER) does, says Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner (IT), is “make it really easy to mine these big data sets.” The company’s software pulls off one of the great computer science feats of the era: It combs through all available databases, identifying related pieces of information, and puts everything together in one place.

...

“We were watching the government spend tens of billions on information systems that were just horrible,” Lonsdale says.“Silicon Valley had gotten to be a lot more advanced than government contractors, because the government doesn’t have access to the best engineers.”

Chinese Nude Photo Protests and Occupy Wall Street (Link Round-Up 11/25/11)

2011-11-25T17:05:00.001-08:00

[via Boing Boing]

Bye, bye, Eurozone

A euro break-up would cause a global bust worse even than the one in 2008-09. The world’s most financially integrated region would be ripped apart by defaults, bank failures and the imposition of capital controls (see article). The euro zone could shatter into different pieces, or a large block in the north and a fragmented south. Amid the recriminations and broken treaties after the failure of the European Union’s biggest economic project, wild currency swings between those in the core and those in the periphery would almost certainly bring the single market to a shuddering halt. The survival of the EU itself would be in doubt.

The men behind Adbusters and Occupy Wall Street

Early on, Lasn and White said that the Wall Street occupiers needed a clear message. The revolutionaries in Cairo, they wrote, presented “a straight-forward ultimatum”: they wouldn’t leave the square until President Hosni Mubarak left office. Adbusters invited readers to “zero in on what our one demand will be.” The suggested ideas included a Presidential commission charged with ending the influence of money in politics, and a one-per-cent “Robin Hood tax” on all financial transactions.

Chinese Ai Weiwei supporters post naked self-photos to protest "pornography" charges

The daring move came after the Beijing authorities opened an inquiry last Friday into whether photographs taken by one of artist Ai Weiwei’s assistants are “pornographic”. Online protesters immediately launched their nude self-portrait campaign to condemn this move, which they see as yet another attack on Ai Weiwei, the artist who rose to international notoriety for speaking out on human rights violations in China.

The internet ruined film criticism (and so much more)

The rigorous division of websites into narrow interests, the attempts of Amazon and Netflix to steer your next purchase based on what you’ve already bought, the ability of Web users to never encounter anything outside of their established political or cultural preferences, and the way technology enables advertisers to identify each potential market and direct advertising to it, all represent the triumph of cultural segregation that is the negation of democracy. It’s the reassurance of never having to face anyone different from ourselves.

Chicago woman who got a drug raid sooner than an investigation of her attacker

A year and a half ago she was beaten by a neighborhood thug outside of a city bar. It took months of do-it-yourself sleuthing, a meeting with a city alderman and a public shaming in a community newspaper before the Chicago Police Department would pay any attention to her. About a year later, Shaver got more attention from cops than she ever could have wanted: A team of Chicago cops took down her door with a battering ram and raided her apartment, searching for drugs.

India creating powerful "regulatory" body just for genetically-modified crops

And yet, India’s Agriculture Minister has stated that the Ministry is "very supportive of GM crop research" and that the government is the process of designing a large number of transgenic crops. He also happens to own a stake in the Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company (Mayhco) that develops these very seeds, and is partially owned by Monsanto.

Stop Occupying Wall Street, and Start Doing The Real Work

2011-11-24T11:26:00.001-08:00

Some Occupy Wall Street debate fodder for your Thanksgiving dinner, courtesy of yours truly:

As Marshall McLuhan famously stated, the medium is the message. With so much of the news media driven by television and the internet, OWS protesters should ask themselves which image they honestly believe that journalists, politicians, and the general public are more likely to have the credible message to rally behind: The image of a mass of black hoodies, Guy Fawkes masks, and banners with vague, handwritten slogans? Or the image of a business suit-wearing representative of a political organization with an "official"-sounding name and digestible sound bites?

If you're American, be thankful today that you live in a society where you can debate nearly anything you want.

Chevron's Brazilian Oil Spill and Drug War Mercenaries (Link Round-Up 11/22/11)

2011-11-22T18:54:00.001-08:00

[via Jason Kottke]

"Conventional wisdom" about why the Egyptian revolution happened is wrong

Egypt’s was no cartoon dictatorship that indiscriminately banned protests. For at least a decade before Mubarak’s ouster, Egyptians were doing their politics outdoors. Citizens assembled daily on highways, in factory courtyards, and in public squares to rally against their unrepresentative government. Mubarak’s regime responded with a million-man police force that alternately cajoled and crushed the demonstrators. The goal was not to ban protests, but to obstruct any attempt to unify different groups and prevent sympathetic bystanders joining them.

Egypt’s uprising happened when three distinct currents of protest—labor, professional, and popular—finally converged. That convergence transformed a routine political demonstration calling for reforms into a nationwide cry for regime change. Together, the protesters defeated a formidable police force and brought down a tenacious president. Now they are shaping the politics of post-revolutionary Egypt, resisting the military rulers’ efforts to take them off the streets.

Chevron's Brazilian oil spill leaves more questions than answers

On Wednesday, November 23, Chevron is expected to give further explanations about the disaster in a public hearing of the Environmental Committee of the Senate, along with Minister of Environment Izabella Teixeira, Minister of Mines and Energy Edison Lobao and representatives of the National Petroleum Agency (ANP) and IBAMA.

Anti-Islam is the new Antisemitism for European nationalists

Data in the study was mainly collected in July and August, before the worsening of the eurozone crisis. The report highlights the prevalence of anti-immigrant feeling, especially suspicion of Muslims. "As antisemitism was a unifying factor for far-right parties in the 1910s, 20s and 30s, Islamophobia has become the unifying factor in the early decades of the 21st century," said Thomas Klau from the European Council on Foreign Relations, who will speak at Monday's conference.

The obscure Pentagon office paying mercenaries to fight the U.S. War on Drugs

In 2009, a bureaucratic shift plucked the responsibility for training Afghanistan’s police out of the State Department’s hands. Suddenly, the contract — worth about $1 billion — landed with CNTPO. CNTPO quietly chose Blackwater for the contract, even though Blackwater guards in Afghanistan on a different contract stole hundreds of guns intended for those very Afghan cops.

The incumbent holder of the contract, Blackwater competitor DynCorp, protested. It didn’t help that a powerful Senate committee discovered Blackwater’s gun-stealing antics. In December, DynCorp finally received the contract — administered by an Army office, not CNTPO.

The Illinois water pump that may have been hacked

It’s misleading to say that they’re connected to the Web. It makes it sound like the SCADA system has its own website or that the control engineers are playing online games from their desktops. That’s not the case. The reality is that in order to save money, the control servers are connected to the same local area network (LAN) as the front office computers, which do have Internet access. Therefore, if a bad guy can take over a desktop belonging to the receptionist, for example, he’ll very quickly figure out how to connect with the control servers that are part of the same LAN. In order to avoid this from happening, control servers are supposed to be on an entirely separate network. (This is called being “air-gapped.”) However, setting up two completely separate networks can be a very costly exercise, and a lot of small utilities just don’t bother to do it.

The problems with defining a "Greater Iran"

But if “Greater Iran” usually has secular-nationalist roots, the concept has also been taken up by some members of Iran’s clerical leadership. LiveLeak reported in 2010 that Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer Kharrazi, Secretary-General of Hezbollah-Iran, forwarded a plan for “reestablishing” a “Greater Iran,” encompassing all territories of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Kharrazi’s scheme is grounded both in a conviction of Persian cultural supremacy, especially over the Arabs, and in Shia eschatology. According to the memo, his plan was designed to anticipate the “establishment of global government led by the Mahdi,” the messiah-like “hidden Imam” of Shiite end-of-days doctrine.

Study shows insects swap bacteria by drinking from the same plant

In this study, Caspi-Fluger only worked with whiteflies, but it’s likely that plants could also transmit bacteria to other arthropod groups. After all, the same strains of Rickettsia are also found in aphids, leafhoppers and mites. It will be interesting to see if the bacteria can form a stable relationship with insects that suck it up from plants, and whether it gets passed down from mother to daughters. If so, plants could act as unwitting match-makers that create new lasting alliances between insects and bacteria.

When Web Comics Have Clearer Perspectives Than Super Committees

2011-11-21T19:21:00.001-08:00

xkcd had the only timely and spot-on response to today's news that the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction failed to agree on $1.2 trillion of savings.

Saturn Storms, Boy and Girl Brains, and Iranian Drug Use (Link Round-Up 11/20/11)

2011-11-20T11:49:00.001-08:00

Saturn's beautiful, 9,000 mile wide thunderstorm

The monster tempest, which extended north-south approximately 9,000 miles (15,000 kilometers), is the largest seen on Saturn in the past two decades and is the largest by far ever observed on the planet from an interplanetary spacecraft.

...

"The Saturn storm is more like a volcano than a terrestrial weather system," said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "The pressure builds up for many years before the storm erupts. The mystery is that there's no rock to resist the pressure - to delay the eruption for so many years."

Iran's serious drug epidemic

There are opiates, such as opium, morphine, and "crack" (which in Iran describes not the most addictive form of cocaine, but the most impure form of heroin) -- and synthetics, which includes ecstasy, psychedelics, and "shisha" -- crystal meth. Shisha and crack habits, Ali told me, are the most common forms of addiction.

Rumors of the medicinal power of rhino horns are driving them extinct

In fact, rhino horn is largely composed of keratin, the substance of which our fingernails and hair are made, and has no medicinal properties whatsoever. But the burgeoning Asian middle classes – those for whom traditional medicine is a way of life – have now gone from an ancient belief that the horn cures fevers, to believing that horn cures cancer, and are bidding the price up to spectacular and disastrous levels.

How do you measure the difference between boy and girl brains?

Sex differences don’t show up as separate clusters. They show up, in Cahill’s words, as “overlapping distributions.” Hyde explained that to compute the “effect size” of sex, you have to factor in the variability of scores among males and among females. Otherwise, you have no perspective on how meaningful the gap is between the male and female averages, relative to being Jane rather than Sally, or being Mike rather than Bill. You certainly can’t infer from a person’s sex how well he or she will do on a test.

A growing Indonesia will the be geopolitical battleground between China and US over the Pacific

There is no question that China is losing its export edge in low-grade industrial products. One of the reasons Western investors liked China was that a single country and a single set of relationships allowed them to develop production facilities that could supply them with products. All the other options aside from India, which has its own problems, can handle only a small fraction of China’s output. Indonesia, with nearly a quarter-billion people still in a low-wage state, can handle more.

The political risk has substantially declined in the last few years. If it continues to drop, Indonesia will become an attractive alternative to China at a time when Western companies are looking for alternatives. That would energize Indonesia’s economy and further stabilize the regime. A more stable Indonesian regime would remove any attraction for an alignment with China and any opportunities for Chinese or Islamist subversion — even if, in the latter case, prosperity is not enough to eliminate it.

How did the world export $331 billion more than it imported?

The good news is that international concerns about global imbalances may be much less pressing than many think. The bad news is that conventional balance-of-payments measures are clearly less reliable in a world of rising intra-firm trade and complex supply chains. That matters because dodgy statistics lead to policy mistakes. Governments should clean the figures up.

The Post-Arab Spring Politics of Fashion: Niqab vs. Nudity?

2011-11-18T18:02:00.001-08:00

[via albawaba]

Fully veiled or fully naked?

SOON after the liberation of Tripoli, the Libyan capital, this correspondent met a woman sporting a niqab, or face veil, along with a floor-length black dress and black gloves. Her eyes, all that could be seen, gleamed as she revelled in a new-found freedom. For 40 years under what she disdainfully termed the “liberalism” of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the niqab had been forbidden. “But now we can wear what we like!”

Aliaa el-Mahdi, a 20-year-old university student in Cairo, has found a very different way to celebrate the Arab spring. She recently posted an alluring photograph on Facebook, Twitter and her personal blog. It showed herself standing unclothed, bar thigh-length stockings and a pair of bright-red shoes.

Orbiting Solar Power Plants Vs. Money and Space Junk

2011-11-17T15:30:00.001-08:00

What if we could have satellites gather solar energy then beam it down to Earth?

The plan would be to release first one satellite, followed by a series of solar powered sattelites over the equator. Each would be several miles wide and would be built to collect sunlight 24 hours a day. The energy would then be converted to electricity aboard the craft and sent down to earth via giant antennas or lasers that would feed into power grids all over the world.

The main obstacle scientists face with this project is funding. It is estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars just to fund the earth to space vehicles that would install the satellites over the equator. Scientist believe the project to be so internationally relevant that they recommend a number of governments, agencies, organizations, universities, and private donors to fund the solar satellites.

For now, Artemis Innovation Management Solutions LLC, a Californian consultant company, has received a $100,000 contract from NASA for a pilot project that will explore and test the technology on a much smaller scale.

I love that instead of applying some of our government-funded R&D to this incredibly innovative idea, NASA outsourced the pilot program for a fraction of a cost of launching a space shuttle.

Still, with the amount of space junk orbiting Earth, I'm not sure how foolproof an orbiting power plant would be. Hopefully, the future test programs will be keeping their eyes on the skies.

Even Turkish Kids Can't Find Jobs Right Now

2011-11-16T15:09:00.001-08:00

While I've been scrapping by the past few months with temp work and odd jobs, I'll gladly take my employment prospects here over the situation in Turkey.

Setting the stage for the unemployment conundrum is the demographic fact that more than half of Turkey's estimated population of 75 million people is under the age of 30. And not only are there more youngsters seeking employment, they tend to be better educated than their elders.

Over the past decade, many 20-somethings in Turkey have become the first members of their respective families to attend university or other institutions of higher learning. Over the same period, the country has experienced robust economic growth -- 8.2 percent in 2010, and averaging 6 percent annually from 2002-2008. But the growing economy hasn't been able to create jobs fast enough to handle the increasing number of youths entering the labor force. That has left many newly minted graduates unable to find a job to match their skills.

Interestingly, Occupy Istanbul hasn't really taken off.

So far, the issue of youth unemployment has not resonated politically. Among Turkey's mainstream opposition parties, interest tends to gravitate more toward issues with regular news coverage, such as constitutional reform. Young people, meanwhile, haven't been very politically active of late. For example, youth turnout was low at a scantily attended Occupy Istanbul event staged in early November.

Like members of their generation elsewhere, it may not be long before an event or person galvanizes the young, frustrated, overeducated and underemployed masses into rising up to do...something.

How Tourism, The World Cup, and The Olympics Could Reshape Rio's Favelas

2011-11-13T16:22:00.000-08:00

Police have taken over Rio de Janeiro's largest favela (legal slum), Rocinha, as part of a program to rid drug traffickers from several favelas ahead of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics.

Rocinha's location has made it one of the most lucrative and largest drug distribution points in the city.

"Rocinha is one of the most strategically important points for police to control in Rio de Janeiro," said Paulo Storani, a security consultant and former captain in the elite BOPE police unit leading the invasion. "The pacification of Rocinha means that authorities have closed a security loop around the areas that will host most of the Olympic and World Cup activities."

Some estimates say the Friends of Friends gang brings in more than $50 million in drug sales annually in Rocinha and Vidigal alone. Much of the drugs are sold to tourists staying in the posh beach neighborhoods of Leblon, Ipanema and Copacabana and to middle- and upper-class Brazilians who live there.

I had the opportunity to take a tour through Rocinha when I was in Rio almost 3 years ago.

The favela I saw was bustling, functional city-within-a-city. Although the stench of piled garbage (handled by bulldozers instead of garbage trucks) stuck to the hot air, it was hard not to be impressed by the dizzying streets and buildings, complete with vendors, restaurants, wi-fi cafes, and even a bank and a fast-food chain.

Although my tour guide avoided mentioning the drug cartel presence in Rocinha, he introduced me to family members, friends, and NGO workers in the neighborhood. This all helped to highlight the surprisingly robust community that has endured despite economic and social hardships.

Now it appears that backpackers, tourists, and even citizens of Rio have taken personal (and economic) interest in other poor Rio communities.

For the past five months, Abreu has led tours of favelas for clients of the advertising agency at which she works, NBS. They have included the Oi telecom company, the fast-food restaurant chain Bob's, and Coca-Cola. NBS' goal has been to show off the potential in favelas such as Providencia, which is to be revamped along with the nearby port.

"The regular citizen that's living his life in this town needs to know and see with his own eyes what's happening here," she said, stopping to chat during a recent tour.

Providencia, with its sweeping views of downtown Rio, was a fast sell for visitors such as Mariane Maciel, another NBS employee, who predicted that favela residents would soon enter the lower middle class. Raoni Lotar, 30, who works at Coca-Cola, said it was clear from what he had seen that the favelas were being "integrated into our city."

However, I do wonder how smooth the integration of the favelas into the rest of Rio de Janeiro will be.

"It's a huge experimental stage. Everything is new," said Daniela Tavares, a city economist overseeing new programs in the favelas. "It's a new environment for all of us, for the community, the government, all of us."

Despite the recent growth of the Brazilian economy, how many current favela residents will actually be able to enter the lower middle class? How many people working informal jobs will be "formalized"? How many buildings will be razed for the sake of "zoning deficiencies" and replaced with highrise condos located near some of the most valuable real estate in all of Latin America?

Artists and backpackers have taken up residencies in some of these safer favelas. Will it continue to be "cool" and "edgy" to move into these micro-communities, to the point where waves of artists all over Brazil and the world flock to the neighborhood for cheap rents and favorable exchange rates, and create a bohemian bubble indifferent to the local communities (see also Istanbul, Turkey)?

Regardless, removing organized crime from the favelas closest to future Olympic tourist areas is a wise idea that will legitimately improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

I just wouldn't be surprised if the favelas themselves are removed over time.

Go West, Young Chinese

2011-11-09T21:34:00.000-08:00

While Chinese migrants helped build the U.S. railroads in the late 1800's, many Chinese are still looking westward for economic opportunity.

Some are sending their kids to cash-starved American universities...and the kids are coming back with bad impressions of America.

(Meanwhile, China is already trying to bribe major universities into ignoring the whole Tibet issue.)

Still, other entrepreneurial Chinese are making their way into Italy.

And much like the Italians, many Africans are unhappy with Chinese workers moving in, working hard, and taking over the local market share.

A sluggish global economy + 7 billion people worldwide = plenty more tension to come.

As Bangkok Drowns

2011-10-27T10:57:00.000-07:00

These pictures from The Atlantic will say more about the flooding in Bangkok, Thailand than this blog possibly could, so check out that gallery right now.

And there's still more havoc to come.

"In the worst-case scenario, if all the dykes break, all parts of Bangkok would be more or less flooded," Seri said.

Yet the government is surprisingly lackadaisical about the country's worst disaster in nearly half a century.

Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, who said two weeks ago that Bangkok was likely to escape the floodwaters, said on Wednesday that it could be flooded for as long as a month."But we shouldn't face water as high as two or three meters or staying for two or three months as we've seen in other provinces," she told reporters.

They say Nero fiddled as Rome burned. Now, the Thai people are accusing the Prime Minister of squabbling as Bangkok drowns.

A Popular Indian Actor Thought "Hero Hitler In Love" Was A Great Idea For A Movie

2011-10-22T13:40:00.000-07:00

(thanks, MetaFilter)

An economic advisor to the Indian Prime Minister recently highlighted why the failing Indian educational system needs to improve.

"I think it's of critical importance. For a long time we have focused on higher education, but in the last decade we have shifted our focus to primary and secondary education. We need every child in school," said Rajan.

Exhibit A: An upcoming independently-financed Punjabi film called Hero Hitler In Love.

First, just take a moment to listen to the theme song by actor/producer/director/musician Babbu Maan:

Quite literally, the majority of the words to the song are "Hitler in love oh baby, Hitler in love."

Then take a look at the synopsis:

"Hero Hitler in love revolves around Hitler (Babbu Maan) who lives in his village Ishqpura. Hitler is a man with unique and different thoughts who loves his fellow villagers and helps them unite with their soul mates. Hitler falls in love with Sahiban (Mouni Roy) who lives in Pakistan and decides to bring her to his village. Hitler believes in solving the problems by talking about them but when something crosses the line he decides to become real Adolf Hitler. Hitler loves car racing but when he is set up to fail in the Asian car racing competition he decides to take revenge. The story shapes how Hitler takes his revenge and fights to win his girl and reunite both the nations."

Turns out the solution to decades-old bitter hatred between India and Pakistan is simply to win a girl's heart...by transforming into a quirky, love-sick Adolf Hitler.

As if that weren't bad enough, take a look at the movie's Facebook page. Look at the number of "likes" and comments on the fairly regular status updates.

Greeting all the movie's Facebook fans with "Good Morning, Hitlers ;)" is bad enough.

But this one left me speechless.

‎19,000 loving fans for Hero Hitler In Love thank you for your love and support ♥ , we promise we will give you full fun , a family entertainer film this year this November , thank you once again ♥ good night and sweet dreams take care . !
-@ HHIL team .

I don't think they had good nights or sweet dreams in Auschwitz. And as far as being taken care of goes...

Occupy Wall Street, Chicago, and Beyond

2011-10-11T10:20:00.000-07:00

It's been interesting watching the Occupy Wall Street meme spread across America over the past few weeks.

Some are dismissing the entire Occupy ____ movement as a bunch of hypocritical hippies:

And some wealthy capitalists who make money off songs about becoming wealthy capitalists have also jumped aboard the buzz.

Overall, I can't speak for the actual motivations of most people in attendance.

But at least here in Chicago, protesters have targeted the Mortgage Bankers Association's conference with a creative bit of symbolism.

And the MBA press release, in turn:

"America is about freedom of speech. We worry, however, that the focus of the protesters is about what isn't working in this country, while inside this conference we are working on building a safe and sound system to support the dream of homeownership. We have more than 3000 mortgage bankers coming here this week to look for solutions to the continuing troubles of the housing market.

We all recognize that our industry faces a trust deficit with policymakers and the public and that people in our industry contributed to the events that led to the financial crisis. The mortgage professionals who have gathered in Chicago this week are about sustainable homeownership and ensuring access to affordable mortgage credit for qualified borrowers."

As it turns out, the Robin Hood stunt is part of Take Back Chicago as one of several targeted protests planned for this week.

In other news, there is at least one place hiring right now - the Federal Reserve in Chicago.

Al-Qaeda vs. Iran: The 9/11 Propaganda Wars

2011-09-29T11:55:00.000-07:00

At a recent UN speech, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad implied that the 9/11 attacks were caused by the United States, echoing a popular and enduring conspiracy theory.

In a veiled reference to the U.S., he charged that the "mysterious" Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were a pretext to invade Iraq and Afghanistan.

In response, Al-Qaeda's English-language "Inspire" magazine attacked Ahmadinejad for spreading falsehoods, and claimed it was due to jealously over the Sunni terrorist network's influence in the Islamic world and geopolitics.

For them, Al Qaeda was a competitor for the hearts and minds of the disenfranchised Muslims around the world. Al Qaeda, an organization under fire, with no state, succeeded in what Iran couldn’t. Therefore it was necessary for the Iranians to discredit 9/11 and what better way to do so? Conspiracy theories.

Iran and the Shi’a in general do not want to give Al Qaeda credit for the greatest and biggest operation ever committed against America because this would expose their lip-service jihad against the Great Satan.

And, of course, plenty of comments below the NYT article are accusing Al-Qaeda of being a CIA front. But what if those commenters are Iranian plants?

...See how this conspiracy theory rabbit hole could go on and on?

A Seemingly Legitimate Documentary About Mayan-Alien Contact?

2011-09-27T13:30:00.000-07:00

Given the popularity of History Channel's "Ancient Aliens" and 2012 conspiracy silliness, I'm shocked this isn't all over the news and Twitter.

A new documentary about Mayan civilization will provide evidence of extraterrestrial contact with the ancient culture, according to a Mexican government official and the film's producer.

"Revelations of the Mayans 2012 and Beyond," currently in production, will claim the Mayans had contact with extraterrestrials, producer Raul Julia-Levy revealed to TheWrap.

"Mexico will release codices, artifacts and significant documents with evidence of Mayan and extraterrestrial contact, and all of their information will be corroborated by archaeologists," said Julia-Levy, son of actor Raul Julia.

Applied Sexual Economics 101

2011-09-27T11:47:00.000-07:00

On one hand, I think the concept of "sexual economics" that this New York Post story covers is a huge oversimplification.

“The price of sex is about how much one party has to do in order to entice the other into being sexual,” said Kathleen Vohs, of the University of Minnesota, who has authored several papers on “sexual economics.” “It might mean buying her a drink or an engagement ring. These behaviors vary in how costly they are to the man, and that is how we quantify the price of sex.”

On the other hand, women withholding sex worked wonders in the Philippines.

The sex strike was an effort to end a separatist rebellion that's been under way on the Filipino island of Mindanao since the 1970s.

The women are part of a sewing cooperative. They were fed up with not being able to deliver their products due to the violence that closed down a main road between two villages. So they withheld sex from their husbands until they promised to quit fighting.

"If our husbands wanted to fight, we'd tell them not to. If they still went, we'd say OK, it's up to you. But you will not be accepted at home.

Within weeks of the strike starting, the main village road re-opened and the fighting stopped.

Explaining The Pakistani Terrorist Problem

2011-09-26T11:19:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Zahid Hussain's The Scorpion's Tail: The Relentless Rise of Islamic Militants in Pakistan-And How It Threatens America, and I'll post a review once I finish the book (got several other ones on the docket).

In the meantime, I recently came across two articles that trace why Pakistan has such a huge terrorist problem to begin with.

The American Interest explains how an incompetent, near-feudal civilian government and a powerful military in Pakistan led to the funding of various militant groups that the government can no longer control.

It is truly sobering to realize that even if things go relatively well in Afghanistan, the Pakistanis are certain to have their hands full with their own radical Islamists for years, probably decades, to come. Also sobering is the realization, after years of needless confusion, that radical Islamists in Pakistan are vastly more dangerous for the United States, its allies and the world at large than anyone or anything in Afghanistan.

And Foreign Policy clarifies that despite popular belief, the United States did not cause Pakistan's recent problems with terrorism, because they've existed long before 9/11.

Most pertinent of all, the Pakistani military must abandon the analytical distinction between "good" and "bad" militant groups, as well as abandoning the hope that "good" militant groups can fulfill regional strategic objectives, such as bringing India to the negotiating table on Kashmir or attaining "strategic depth" in Afghanistan. If nothing else, the last decade should have put paid to that theory of national interest. Notwithstanding the security establishment's desire to play favorites, the array of militant groups in Pakistan have a lot more that unites them than divides them. Indeed, LeJ -- to take one relevant example -- has deep connections with the Pakistani Taliban as well as al-Qaeda, both of whom have used extraordinary levels of violence against Pakistani targets. The idea that the state can take on one set of elements and leave others untouched is, in the medium- and long-term, completely fanciful.

Given the political currents in Pakistan, its hard to imagine these groups losing power any time soon.

The Road To Fake Think Tank-dom

2011-09-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

BBC's Adam Curtis delves into the somewhat improbable history of the early think tanks created to promote pre-determined conclusions.

The Think Tank that Antony Fisher set up was very different. It had no interest in thinking up new ideas because it already knew the "truth". It already had all the ideas it needed laid out in Professor Hayek's books. Its aim instead was to influence public opinion - through promoting those ideas.

It was a big shift away from the RAND model - you gave up being the manufacturing dept for ideas and instead became the sales and promotion dept for what Hayek had bluntly called "second-hand ideas".

To do this Fisher and Smedley knew they had to disguise what they were really up to. In 1955 Smedley wrote to Fisher - telling him bluntly that the new Institute had to be "cagey" about what its real function was. It should pretend to be non-political and neutral, but in reality they both knew that would be a front.

Curtis' ultimate (and debatable) point is that think tanks don't come up with new or different ways to organize society and solve its problems. Instead, they act as PR institutions to reinforce some variation of Friederich Hayek's managed, technocratic free market theories.

...My point is that starting a pirate radio station dedicated to Hayek's views is a really weird PR strategy.

Snapshots of Globalization: Katy Perry at Rock In Rio 2011

2011-09-23T21:56:00.000-07:00

I happened to catch a banner ad on YouTube asking me to tune into a live stream of "Rock In Rio 2011" just now.

Having been to Rio and having been aware of the long-time success of the extremely large Rock In Rio concert series, I jumped in as Katy Perry launched into a medley of songs including "I Want Candy" and "Tootsie Roll", before launching into her own hit singles.

Looking at the lineup for the festival, there are a number of Brazilian acts, as well as hard rock bands like Guns 'N' Roses, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica and Brazil's own Sepultura. Later on in the concert, Elton John and Rihanna will cap off first night of the festival.

But as I write this, the American pop singer and her Candy Land-themed backing band and dancers are gleefully performing "Hot 'N' Cold".

As a huge fan of bossa nova and 60's Brazilian rock, it's interesting to watch an entire crowd of Portuguese-speaking Brazilians singing along to "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" word-for-word. Although there are plenty of beautiful Brazilian vocal tracks, I'm sure the local equivalent of "Thank God It's Friday" isn't nearly as catchy as "T! G! I! F!" in perfectly accented American English. Watching Katy follow-up with a song about the merits of girls from California in a city renowned for exotic beaches and plastic surgeons was pretty funny, too.

But after several decades of English popular music's global dominance, maybe no one else cares that no artist from Rio de Janeiro is headlining the first night of its namesake festival.

What The Chilean Student Protests Actually Look Like

2011-09-20T20:38:00.000-07:00

While college students in the United States are mostly resigned to being saddled with unpayable debt and dismal job prospects, students in Chile have been protesting en masse for several months for a more affordable public education system.

The protests in action have looked a little something like this.

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And this.

And even this.

Having been to Santiago, Chile before, what's weird to me is imagining all the tear gas and riot police in a city I found to be pleasant, but relatively calm. The sight of 15-year-olds making out in public, however, is totally normal (unfortunately).

American tourist observations aside, let's hope the Chilean students get what they're asking for.

Who "Won" The American Civil War?

2011-09-18T20:55:00.000-07:00

This piece in The American Interest asks a very interesting question - who "really" won the Civil War?

Whatever else the Civil War failed to accomplish, and whatever questions it left unanswered, we can at least be reasonably certain about the answers to two questions: What America would we live in, and what world would others live in, if the American republic had fragmented into two or more pieces after April 1861? Or if the institution of slavery had survived, either in an independent Southern Confederacy or as the foundation of the new Western states whose future had been Abraham Lincoln’s greatest concern?

Everyone knows about the Gettysburg, Lincoln, the end of slavery, Reconstruction, and the Western expansion. However, you don't usually hear about the post-War rise of corporations and fluctuating commodities markets, which were just as vital to the development of this country.

But I guess it's kinda hard to dress up and re-enact those.

Religion's Awkward Collision With 2011 (Link Round-Up 9/17/11)

2011-09-17T11:38:00.000-07:00

Paris has banned praying in the streets, a move seen to target the Muslim population.

The phenomenon of street prayers, which see Muslims spreading mats on footpaths, became a political issue after far right protests.

France is home to the biggest Muslim minority in Western Europe.

By some estimates, as many as six million French people, or just under 10% of the population, are Muslims, with origins in France's former North African colonies.

Turkish PM Tayyip Erdogan, making an appearance in Egypt, was rebuked by senior members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood for advocating secular democracy.

“Now, in this transitional phase in Egypt, as well as in what comes after it, I believe that the Egyptians will establish democracy very well, and they will see that a “secular state” does not mean “an irreligious state.” Rather it means respect for all the religions and giving all individuals the freedom to practice religion as they please.”

Erdogan’s remarks drew an immediate rebuke from Essam al-Arian, the number two man in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s sponsored political party. He said that Egyptians did not need to be taught about democracy by Turkey.

Buddhists demolished a Muslim shrine in Sri Lanka over rumors of plans to build a mosque on the site.

Most of Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese are Buddhist, and Muslims are regarded as a separate ethnic group.

In a recent newspaper column, a veteran Muslim journalist said there was a growing fear among his community that some people were running a campaign to incite the Sinhalese against them, including through Sinhalese websites and print media.

Millenia-old Hindu funeral pyres have come under fire for the emissions they release.

Fifty to 60 million trees are burned during cremations every year in India, according to Mokshda, a Delhi-based NGO working to reduce the environmental impact of funeral pyres.

"When you are burning those trees, you are emitting about eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide or greenhouse gas emissions," said Mokshda director Anshul Garg.

US Ambassador claims Afghan-based Haqqani network has links to the Pakistani government.

Pakistani authorities have consistently denied links with militant groups.

The Haqqani network, which is closely allied to the Taliban, has been blamed for several high-profile attacks against Western, Indian and government targets in Afghanistan.

It is often described by Pakistani officials as a predominantly Afghan group, but correspondents say its roots reach deep inside Pakistani territory, and speculation over its links to Pakistan's security establishment refuse to die down.

As we can see, religion is still a pretty touchy subject worldwide.

Two Ways To Write About The Pakistani Taliban

2011-09-13T21:56:00.000-07:00

1. Tap all your sources in the insurgency, offend the powerful intelligence agencies, and ignore death threats until you are found dead.

Two days after Shahzad’s body was found, an I.S.I. official made a statement denying that its agents had played any role in the killing. Shahzad’s death, he said, was “unfortunate and tragic,” adding, “Baseless accusations against the country’s sensitive agencies for their alleged involvement in Shahzad’s murder are totally unfounded.” Forty-six journalists have been killed in Pakistan since 2001, and the I.S.I. had never before issued such a stark denial.

2. Let other journalists talk to the insurgents, and talk to the regular Pakistani people instead.

Yes, I realize a video isn't a written piece...but I'm still going to count the post-editing narration.

UPDATE: Terrorism is a big problem in Pakistan, but the major flooding in southern Pakistan is way more significant right now.

"The authorities are known to sleep at the time of urgency. These rains have been going on for several weeks now, which the government saw coming, but they've been caught napping, and any action is seen as too little too late," he said.

Even factoring out the groups who are sure to add fuel to the anti-government bandwagon, this is a disaster for Pakistani stability (and the Pakistani people) all-around.

Ghosts With Shit Jobs (and Concepts With Shit Premises)

2011-09-13T00:07:00.000-07:00

The casual science fiction nerd in me loves the idea of Ghosts With Shit Jobs.

Good sci-fi is all about exploring plausible hypothetical situations and how they would affect everyday lives accordingly.

The only problem, however, is that the "Ghosts With Shit Jobs" concept is geopolitically implausible.

The main reason is that China can bypass the United States and simply outsource low-skilled labor to its own hundreds of millions of lower income citizens (and the entire Asian continent, for that matter).

An "American economic collapse" could result in a variety of ugly scenarios, but my guess is that all the Americans employable in a Chinese economy would immediately immigrate to cities like Beijing or Shanghai. If not China itself, Singapore would quickly become a destination of choice for skilled Americans needed in the new economic order.

...but this all assumes that China, or any other country in our globalized, heavily inter-linked marketplace, would survive a major hiccup in the world's largest economy. After all, just look at how the markets have been moving in reaction to what's happening in Greece.

While I do think this video explores some interesting ideas, the growing "what happens when China dominates the United States" fear is totally off-base, because the reality of that scenario would be much more complicated.

Despite what pundits may tell you, the world is much bigger than the United States and China.

Regardless, the rise of baby robot makers and "digital janitors" could still happen to a future near you.

Fighting Popular Terrorism With Comic Book Propaganda (Part 1)

2011-09-11T14:55:00.000-07:00

[via Okezone]

I don't have to remind any American of what happened ten years ago.

But ever since, trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives have been spent fighting loosely-organized groups ranging from political Islamists to drug cartels to Maoists. While the defense industry has made a killing off all of the killing, most of these conflicts are nowhere near resolution and more and more kids are recruited to fight every day.

But can comic books win hearts and minds where guns and bombs have failed?

Nasir Abas, an Indonesian former Al-Qaeda trainer-turned-informant has recently published a comic book about his life.

He went from helping train Muslim extremists who carried out some of Southeast Asia's deadliest attacks, including the 2002 Bali bombings, to informing police about the inner-workings of the Jemaah Islamiyah network.

He's also joined a government program to convince convicted terrorists that killing unarmed civilians in the name of their faith is wrong.

"I want children to learn from my experience," Abas said of the colorful 137-page comic "I Found the Meaning of Jihad," which appeared in bookstores Friday and will be handed out at some schools and libraries.

"I don't want them to make the same mistakes."

Of course, as any junior high school nerd knows, comics only have so much appeal, and are only one small part of the media people consume every day.

"We know young people are often targeted for recruitment by jihadist groups," said Kumar Ramakrishna, a terrorism expert in Singapore.

"So reaching out in innovative ways, such as through pop music and comics ... is certainly a very good idea in my view."

Since most kids today use the internet (and YouTube) for their main source of entertainment, the Mexican government has released an anti-narco trafficking webcomic on on its YouTube channel.

The 10-episode comic series, posted over the summer in two- to three-minute episodes to the blog of President Felipe Calderon, is the latest weapon in a “cultural struggle” against drug cartels. The comics are said to be “a new space for communication” that will “help us better understand the phenomenon of organized crime,” said federal security spokesman Alejandro Poire. That is, government propaganda with a pop art twist.

“We cannot allow, as a government and society, impunity for criminals to invade cultural spheres to normalize their crimes, weaken our values and impede the construction of a culture of legality that we all need to achieve genuine security,” Poire said. He added, “We should not be indifferent to these ‘narco-corridos.’ We already were for too long.”

What Poire means by narcocorridos, of course, are popular country songs that celebrate the exploits of drug lords while promoting a luxurious drug-fueled lifestyle.

Of course, this video currently has barely over 5,000 views. Looking through gobiernofederal's 3,208 uploaded videos, it looks like the Mexican federal government isn't quite as popular as auto-tuned news memes or sports clips.

In a future post, I'll look at what's actually popular in Indonesian and Mexican popular youth culture to see what kind of relevance these anti-insurgent comics are likely to have.

DNA Evidence of Kinky Homo Sapien Sex Lives

2011-09-07T18:22:00.000-07:00

I've written in the past about how DNA evidence shows homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals in Europe.

Now scientists have found evidence of interbreeding between humans and another extinct hominoid group in Africa.

"The populations that interbred in Africa were on a similar scale of divergence as the expanding modern population and Neanderthals were outside of Africa," Hammer said. "They were similar enough biologically so that they were able to produce fertile offspring, thus allowing genes to flow from one population to the other."

The length of the exotic haplotypes from this extinct lineage suggests interbreeding might still have occurred until as recently as 35,000 years ago.

"We think there were probably thousands of interbreeding events," Hammer said. "It happened relatively extensively and regularly."

Your family tree just got a whole lot weirder.

Can You Keep A Secret? Hollywood Leaks, WikiLeaks, and Libyan Intelligence Leaks

2011-08-31T18:37:00.001-07:00

[via Al-Jazeera story below]

It's been a leak-heavy evening so far.

Celebrity-focused Anonymous spin-off, Hollywood Leaks, just posted the alleged phone numbers of some famous individuals, including comedian Adam Carolla, a guy from Entourage, and "Marc Cuban."

(Though, if I were the owner of the Dallas Mavericks himself, I'd be more pissed that they couldn't spell my first name right.)

...

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks announced in a statement that a Guardian journalist leaked the unencrypted passwords to their archive of unredacted cables.

The WikiLeaks method involves a sophisticated procedure of packaging leaked US diplomatic cables up into country groups or themes, such as ’resources corruption’, and providing it to those organizations that agreed to do the most research in exchange for time-limited exclusivity. As part of the WikiLeaks agreement, these groups, using their local knowledge, remove the names of persons reporting unjust acts to US embassies, and feed the results back to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks then publishes, simultaneously with its partners, the underlying cables together with the politically explosive revelations. This way publications that are too frightened to publish the cables have the proof they need, and the public can check to make sure the claims are accurate.

WikiLeak's goal was to release revelations in batches to provoke the widest possible impact on the news cycle. Thus, WikiLeaks required partner publications to agree to several conditions in order to participate.

Apparently, the Guardian hasn't been meeting these for at least nine months.

David Leigh and the Guardian have subsequently and repeatedly violated WikiLeaks security conditions, including our requirements that the unpublished cables be kept safe from state intelligence services by keeping them only on computers not connected to the internet. Ian Katz, Deputy Editor of the Guardian admitted in December 2010 meeting that this condition was not being followed by the Guardian.

Which, in turn, renders the entire gradual leaking process useless.

PJ Crowley, State Department spokesman on the cables issue earlier this year, told AP on the 30th of August, 2011 that “any autocratic security service worth its salt” would probably already have the complete unredacted archive.

WikiLeaks is now taking a Twitter hashtag vote to see if they should drop their original controlled release plan and let all the remaining cables loose at once.

The password, by the way, was "ACollectionOfHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#"

And Max Read at Gawker makes a valid point about this particular password.

Why is there only one, unchanging password for the database? This seems like an unbelievably stupid policy for something as confidential and important as the database. And, even then, why use the password for the public Torrent file as the password for the file given to Guardian editor David Leigh, whom Assange allegedly greatly mistrusted? Why not a temporary, unique password? Maybe the Guardian is full of "snaky" (as Assange called them) liars—but that just makes Assange look like a moron.

...

In the immortal lexicon of Donald Rumsfeld, there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. We know Hollywood Leaks and WikiLeaks are going to release embarrassing, headline-grabbing data about a variety of powerful people.

But we have no idea what bombshells will be released when journalists sweep through the recently-captured Libyan intelligence archives.

If they're able to.

I'm taken to the office of Abdullah Alsinnousi, head of Libya's intelligence service and one of the Gaddafi regime's most notorious and feared strong men.

Scattered on his desk are dozens of documents branded "top secret", but the rebels accompanying me aren't keen on me taking anything away. I find a folder titled "Moussa Al Sadr", who was the founder of the Amal movement, a Shia party in Lebanon, who went missing in Libya over 30 years ago. Within seconds, the folder is taken by my minder who said none of these documents can leave the compound.

But for now, we know from smuggled documents that former Bush Asst. Secretary of State David Welch has been in touch with Gaddafi regime officials (as recently as August 2nd).

Minutes of this meeting record his advice on how to undermine Libya's rebel movement, with the potential assistance of foreign intelligence agencies, including Israel.

The documents read: "Any information related to al-Qaeda or other terrorist extremist organisations should be found and given to the American administration but only via the intelligence agencies of either Israel, Egypt, Morroco, or Jordan… America will listen to them… It's better to receive this information as if it originated from those countries...".

And so has anti-war Congressman Dennis Kucinich.

On the floor of the intelligence chief's office lay an envelope addressed to Gaddafi's son Saif Al-Islam. Inside, I found what appears to be a summary of a conversation between US congressman Denis Kucinich, who publicly opposed US policy on Libya, and an intermediary for the Libyan leader's son.

It details a request by the congressman for information he needed to lobby US lawmakers to suspend their support for the Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC) and to put an end to NATO airstrikes.

According to the document, Kucinich wanted evidence of corruption within the NTC and, like Welch, any possible links within rebel ranks to al-Qaeda.

But, of course, why pay attention to all this secret, controversial information when you can talk about all those Tweets about Beyonce's baby bump instead?

Culture Bore Will Be On Hiatus For August

2011-07-31T09:48:00.000-07:00

Hey all,

I'm taking a hiatus on posting here for the month of August.

Aside from things going on in my personal life, I want to take time to write out longer, more thought-out original posts to complement the link round-ups (along with the YouTube show I plan on reviving again soon). I'm going to have even less time to do that in the coming weeks, so I'd rather just take a blogging break to focus on everything else.

I'll still post interesting links on the Facebook/Twitter feed, so go subscribe to those if you don't already.

-Management

Growing Brains, Gardens, and Vines (Link Round-Up 7/28/11)

2011-07-28T17:19:00.001-07:00

[via Big Map Blog]

Thinking Cap

Scientists turn skin into brain cells

In a paper being published online July 28 in the scientific journal Cell Stem Cell, Sheng Ding, PhD, reveals efficient and robust methods for transforming adult skin cells into neurons that are capable of transmitting brain signals, marking one of the first documented experiments for transforming an adult human's skin cells into functioning brain cells.

Free(falling) Market

How hiccups the globalized marketplace could cause America to collapse

US corporate leaders now see the idea of making things as a cost of doing business, one best left to others. What has happened as a result is that much of the production for critical products and services that make our economy run is constructed by a patchwork global network of suppliers all over the world in unstable regions, over which we have very little control. An accident or political problem in any number of countries may deny us not just iPhones but food, medicine or critical machinery.

Perma-what now?

The New York Times on Permaculture gardening

"I just trained the Oklahoma National Guard," Mr. Pittman said. "If that's any kind of benchmark." The troops, he said, plan to apply permaculture to farming and infrastructure projects in rural Afghanistan.

It's a system, permaculturists contend, that can work anywhere. In Park Slope, Brooklyn, Claudia Joseph, 53, has used the precepts of permaculture to develop new food gardens at the Old Stone House. (Its original 1699 Dutch edifice was a locus of the Battle of Brooklyn in the Revolutionary War.) "It's a huge breakthrough," she said. "To go from a swatch of grass to 1,000 blueberry bushes."

Global Lukewarming
New NASA analysis shows planet warming slower than computer model predictions*

The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by alarmist computer models. The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA's ERBS satellite showing far more longwave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.

*Update: this is not a NASA study - it's a study using NASA data by this professor. Also note the number of times the word "alarmist" is used in this Forbes article.

Deleted Scenes From Avatar

The rainforest vine that evolved to pollinate with bat echo-location

The Cuban rainforest vine Marcgravia evenia has developed a distinctively shaped concave leaf next to its flowers which, the researchers noticed, is reminiscent of a dish reflector. By analyzing the leaf's acoustic reflection properties, they found that it acts as an ideal echo beacon, sending back strong, multidirectional echoes with an easily recognizable, and unvarying acoustic signature – perfect for making the flower obvious to echolocating bats.

They then trained nectar-feeding bats (Glossophaga soricina) to search for a single small feeder hidden within an artificial foliage background, varying the feeder's position and measuring the time the bats took to find it. The feeder was presented on its own or with a replica of either a foliage leaf or the distinctive dish-shaped leaf. Each feeder type was randomly tested once at each of the 64 positions within the artificial foliage background.

Sophisticated Detective Work
FBI training PowerPoint describes Muslims and their "7th-cenutry Arabian ways"

All this is revealed in a PowerPoint presentation by the FBI's Law Enforcement Communications Unit (.pdf), which trains new Bureau recruits. Among the 62 slides in the presentation, designed to teach techniques for "successful interviews/interrogations with individuals from the M.E. [Middle East]," is an instruction that the "Arabic mind" is "swayed more by words than ideas and more by ideas than facts."

Stimulus Plans

Ideas for creating jobs for people who don't want to make much

We need to stimulate the prospects for employment, but we also need to make it easier for people to just work in ways that may not show up in the official unemployment stats. You can think of this as tearing down barriers to "self-employment", if you must. Clearly, decoupling health benefits from employment would help a lot. Less obviously, but at least as importantly, we need to eliminate the insane patchwork of regulations that keep folks from legally cutting hair for money in a kitchen, or legally making a few bucks every now and then taxiing people around town in a 1988 Ford Escort.

Paradigm Shifts

Roger Ebert and the Rear-View Mirror understanding of reality

"Most people...still cling to what I call the rearview-mirror view of their world. By this I mean to say that because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world."

Indian Lesbians, Gay Pakistanis (Link Round-Up 7/27/11)

2011-07-27T14:07:00.000-07:00

[via Boing Boing]

Damn Tourists

How much longer will the ruins of Angkor Wat last?

One is hard-pressed to blame the Cambodian people and their government for this. Tourism, and the major role that Siem Reap and its showcase attraction of Angkor Wat play in this, is a major source of foreign revenue for a country that is considered to be among the poorest and least-developed countries in the world. The tourism industry is critical to its economy. Concerned conservationists and officials, however, are warning that, unless long-term, concerted efforts are made to strengthen its sustainability, the gem of its tourism industry will eventually collapse as Cambodia's "ace in the hole" for tourism and its developing economy."

"Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life"

Deported Somali terrorist continues to recruit via Facebook

Cabdulaahi Faarah (Faarax), a naturalized U.S. citizen, has proven to be one of al-Shabaab’s most effective Western recruiters. Now residing in Mogadishu, he uses his Facebook page to continue his recruiting efforts. In just the past week he has added more than 50 new friends — most of them in the U.S. — bringing the total number of his friends on Facebook to more than 500. His Facebook page was linked in a story by the Minneapolis Mirror following the June suicide bombing.

Mutually Assured Construction

India and South Korea sign nuclear pact

India’s neighbor, Pakistan, however, is seriously concerned over the agreement. It suspects India will make “peaceful use” an excuse to expand its nuclear weapons.

“It is surprising that South Korea which claims to be the victim of North Korea’s nuclear program is itself becoming a party to the expansion of nuclear dual purpose technology,” a senior Pakistani official said.

A Man For All Seasons

Eulogy for a gay Pakistani Chicago media personality

"According to every convention, my friend Ifti was all wrong," blogged Azra Raza, a prominent oncologist. "He was born in the wrong country. He should have been born in Hollywood. ... He was born in the wrong body. He should have been Marilyn Monroe."

What The F___?

FARC rebels make bloody comeback in Colombia

Shifts in the drug trade have led to parallel shifts by the FARC, which is deeply involved in narcotics trafficking. "Brazil is the second largest consumer of drugs in the world after the United States, and so the cartels are no longer just looking north," he said. "Now they are looking to the south for Brazil -- and also for Africa, [a new cocaine route to Europe]." Accordingly, FARC operations are now centered on the country's southwest. Valencia argues that the center of their operations is now Cali, the country's third-largest city and one quite close to the Pacific coast.

Most People Wouldn't

Russia does not want Iran to have nuclear capabilities (any more)

The Iranian daily Siyasat-e Rouz estimated that the operation of the Bushehr reactor depends on agreements between Russia and the West.

Alternative Pinhead-ergy

New ultra tiny solar panel cell size of pinhead

Solar start-up comany Semprius just unveiled an ultra-tiny solar cell that is half the size of a pinhead and (when combined with powerful but inexpensive lenses) can concentrate sunlight more than 11,000 times and convert it to electricity! The minuscule solar cells are created through a low-cost production system that utilizes standard manufacturing processes and micro-transfer printing. This system enables the creation of CPV modules with high performance, high reliability, and low cost – not to mention scalability and high-volume production.

Law of the Land

India's first lesbian couple under police protection

Haryana has been the centre of widespread protests by villagers who believe their village councils, or khaps should be allowed to impose their own punishments on those who disobey their rulings or break local traditions – mainly honour killings of those who marry within their own gotra or sub-caste, regarded in the state as akin to incest.

Belated Link Round-Up For 7/22/11

2011-07-22T16:27:00.000-07:00

*this is being posted on 7/26/11 due to this and the fact that Culture Bore is presently written in a basement in Chicago. On the plus side, the new carpet feels kinda nice.

European Disunion

French and Dutch speaking Belgian disputes threaten unity of EU

Belgium, a federation of Flemish and Walloon communities, hosts the EU in Brussels and is often held up as example of European integration.

Le Soir newspaper, the voice of the Belgian establishment has warned that the country's demise would signal the end of an EU "project" that, like Belgium, faces a popular backlash.

Wide Network

Xinjang attack linked to Pakistan?

Many Uighur groups have, in the past, accused the government of portraying local protests and ethnic unrest as being driven by separatist groups in order to justify security clampdowns.

In 2009, the government blamed overseas groups for orchestrating ethnic riots between Uighurs and Han Chinese in the city of Urumqi, which left more than 197 people dead. However, dozens of the city's residents, in interviews with The Hindu last year, blamed long-standing distrust between both ethnic groups, driven by increasing migration and rising inequalities, as sparking ethnic tensions.

They Did It For The Lulz

Interview with Lulzsec figurehead, Topiary

I believe in some principles, but I think this ties back into what I said earlier about the younger generation and learning from common ground (the internet). Most of us aren't in too deep with politics, we have a lot to learn and experience to gain, so I don't want to take a complete side. Maybe if we're both still going in a year or two, we'll go over the same questions.

Back-Up Plan

Turkish basketball team makes offer to Kobe Bryant amid NBA lockout

Besiktas is trying to make the biggest splash in the business of luring locked-out N.B.A. players, and it remains one of the few teams with enough money to lure N.B.A. players abroad. Other clubs have seemed less willing to offer deals with escape clauses for when the lockout ends. Most of the other signings of N.B.A. players by foreign clubs have been for a full season, including Sonny Weems’s deal with a team in the Lithuanian league and Nenad Krstic’s with CSKA Moscow. Center Timofey Mozgov signed with B.C. Khimki of the Russian League. The Nets’ Sasha Vujacic signed with Anadolu Efes of the Turkish League; his contract has an option for a second season.

Field Trip

Why tougher laws against sending girls abroad for female genital mutilation are needed

"Headteachers have described to me happy and outgoing young girls who have returned from their summer holidays withdrawn and distressed. I struggle to understand why the systematic and brutal wounding of young girls is not considered a national scandal. I know that right honourable and honourable members would not tolerate a situation in which little British girls were taken abroad and returned missing their fingers. Likewise, we should not tolerate female genital mutilation."

Free Energy and The 90's Jesus Pop Machine (Link Round-Up 7/21/11)

2011-07-21T17:15:00.000-07:00

Out Of Thin Air
Device collects ambient electromagnetic energy from radio/tv waves

Tentzeris and his team are using inkjet printers to combine sensors, antennas and energy scavenging capabilities on paper or flexible polymers. The resulting self powered wireless sensors could be used for chemical, biological, heat and stress sensing for defense and industry; radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging for manufacturing and shipping, and monitoring tasks in many fields including communications and power usage.

Caste-away

The Indian university affirmative action lower caste quota system...goes Bollywood

Mr. Jha said he wanted to point out inconsistencies even in the attitudes of people who might think of themselves as having moved beyond the issue of caste. As in the U.S., with racial affirmative action, many Indians couch opposition to “reservations” in terms of merit – with Indian students echoing white applicants to colleges who complain of being passed over for minority applicants they see as less deserving for having poorer grades.

Mr. Jha said he hears people say things like, “‘Would you go to a doctor who has come on a reserved quota?’”

“At the same time, would you go to an upper-caste doctor who hasn’t got admission through competition but who’s bought a seat?” said Mr. Jha.

Jesus Christ Superstars
Christian Pop Rock: No Match For Tastemaking Market Research

Basically, CCM caught on to the number one rule of coolness: don’t let your marketing show. The best bands—the successful ones, at least—learned to gloss over the gospel message the same way TV producers camouflaged corporate sponsorship. Explicitly Christian lyrics prevented DC Talk from crossing over to the secular market in the ’90s; today it’s difficult to imagine their unapologetic faith making it in the Christian circuit.

It Gets Better...But Sometimes Worse
Ghana cracks down on homosexuality

The move by the Minister follows months of campaigning by the Christian Council of Ghana which last week called on Ghanaians not to vote for any politician who believes in the rights of homosexuals.

Muslims and Christians in the Western Region have been staging protests ever since a local media report claimed there were around 8000 homosexuals and lesbians in the district.

Mapping The Past
A Brief History of Mapmaking

Pei Xiu (224–271), known as the “Ptolemy of China,” produced maps with a geometrical grid and graduated scale to more accurately determine location and the distance between points. In the 12th century, during the Song Dynasty, detailed maps of China and the surrounding region were etched into stone. These stone stele maps (named after the Stele Forest of Xian where they were found) are impressively detailed, with intricate coastal boundaries, major river systems, and hundreds of settlements.

Wheeling and Dealing
Joint South Sudan/Glencore oil partnership sparks concern

Raising concerns in South Sudan, Glencore was founded by fugitive U.S. financier Marc Rich, who until receiving presidential pardon in 2001 from President Bill Clinton, was wanted in the United States by the FBI for alleged tax fraud.

Glencore International is a multinational mining and commodities trading company with headquarters in Baar, Switzerland, and is the world's largest commodities trading company. It had a 2010 global market share of 60 percent in the international zinc market, 50 percent in the global copper market, 9 percent in the world's grain market and 3 percent in the international oil market

It Takes Two (Foreigners) To Tango

2011-07-20T18:43:00.000-07:00

[Photo credit: me]

Some Argentines are furious about non-Argentines competing in and winning tango dance tournaments.

It seems paradoxical, in light of the present dispute, that tango originated among European immigrants here and in Uruguay in the late 19th century. The dance is "a blend of sex and chess," says tango expert Christine Denniston. After some down decades, tango started a renaissance in the 1980s, coinciding with the end of a repressive dictatorship in Argentina and the launch of a wildly successful international dance and musical show called "Tango Argentina." Last year, 100,000 foreign visitors came to Buenos Aires for August's "World Cup" and accompanying festival—a doubling of attendance in just two years.

Daniel Carreira, who runs the 2xtango.com website in Buenos Aires, says he can think of at least two cases in recent years when foreigners—Japanese and Colombians—won their categories in the "World Cup." He says Argentines are slowly having to come to grips with the fact they no longer have a monopoly on the dance.

What the article doesn't get into (but should have) is the intense cultural pride and nationalism that permeates the country. To me, this quote says it all:

"Is it xenophobia—or are they just afraid of getting beaten?"

It's both.

Sure, Argentina gets some tourists (like yours truly) for its European fusion in architecture styles and dishes (pasta, steak, empanadas, and not much else) and a lot of American and Spanish-language popular culture (such as Steven Segal's "Attack Force" and "White Chicks"). But the country, for the most part, is very insular.

Think of it this way: Buenos Aires is a large city in a sparsely populated part of the world that used to be very wealthy at the start of the 20th century. Argentina is former Spanish colony-turned-hub for European immigrants on a continent where the majority of people are non-white or mixed race. These factors contribute to a cultural bubble that raises Argentines to believe 1. they are the greatest people living in the greatest country in the world, and 2. they are beautiful Europeans in both culture and physical features.

I don't want to make a blanket statement about the country, because I met some wonderful, level-headed people in Argentina during my travels.

But in many respects, the earlier quote is a trick question - because the national identity of Argentina is based strongly on racial/ethnic pride, Argentines offended by non-Caucasian tango champions are actually driven by both xenophobia and fears of being beaten - because, in this case, they blur together.

...Kinda like the movements in tango are supposed to.

Forget The Debt Ceiling (Link Round-Up 7/19/11)

2011-07-19T17:35:00.000-07:00

[via Inhabitat]

Career Path
Teach For America? Or Teach For Resume-Padding?

Three years ago, a TFA recruiter plastered the Fordham campus with flyers that said “Learn how joining TFA can help you gain admission to Stanford Business School.” The message of that flyer was “use teaching in high-poverty areas a stepping stone to a career in business.” It was not only profoundly disrespectful to every person who chooses to commit their life to the teaching profession, it advocated using students in high-poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in “resume-padding” for ambitious young people.

In saying these things, let me make it clear that my quarrel is not with the many talented young people who join Teach for America, some of whom decide to remain in the communities they work in and become lifetime educators. It is with the leaders of the organization, who enjoy the favor with which TFA is regarded with by captains of industry, members of Congress, the media, and the foundation world. They have used this access to move rapidly to positions as heads of local school systems, executives in charter school companies, and educational analysts in management consulting firms.

But Where Do You Put The Banner Ads?
How to design a better online newspaper

“Featured” sections are irrelevant, opinion-shaping editorial promotion; not news.

Headlines matter and can be scanned; intro text does not and compromises scanning.

Author, source, and date/time are important.

Opinion or Op Eds are distinct from news.

Article ratings or “likes” are irrelevant in the context of news.

Comments are not contextual to news, but to social media

Media types (video, gallery, audio) are not sections. These are simply common components of each story.

Impermanence

Buddhist caves in India demolished during mining

Amid reports that the four caves, located around 3 kms from here, were destroyed during the routine mining activity of the Mana Opencast Mines of Western Coalfields Limited on Wednesday, District Collector Vijay Waghmare said WCL "had not obtained any permission for the demolition of caves"

Multitasking
Virgin Galactic team unveils hybrid flying car

There aren't plans to commercially produce the BiPod quite yet; the model vehicle was built to measure outside interest in continued development. But the recent news that the Terrafugia Transition--another flying car--has been cleared for use by the U.S. National Highway Safety Administration means that other companies may be more interested in this kind of vehicle, simply because many of the legal hurdles have already been cleared.

Organizational Management Theory
Why India has problems feeding itself

In recent months, Thanks to a surge in oil and petrol prices and the rampant corruption and inefficiencies of the public welfare system, food prices have skyrocketed by 20 per cent, and many of the country’s poorest—the labourers who actually grow the grains — can’t afford to buy them.

Some farmers see no way out. Between 1997 and 2009, an estimated 200,000 Indian farmers committed suicide, buried under mountains of rising debt.

“It’s a double crisis,” said C.P. Chandrasekhar, a scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “There’s both falling food production and people who can’t afford to eat. It’s a tragedy.”

What Debt Ceiling?
Warren Buffett calls for removal of debt ceiling

“We cannot go to Aug. 2 and tell the rest of the world, ‘Look because we’re having this little fight in our sandbox back here, that we’re going to essentially default on obligations of the United States for the first time in our history,’” he said.

Harsh Examples
China executes officials over corruption

Earlier this year, President Hu Jintao focused on corruption during his main speech to celebrate 90 years since the party was founded.

He warned that corruption could cost the party the support of the people.

Let's Meet Halfway
A liberal reads the conservative classics

Maybe, in part, it is because a central tenet of liberalism is that ideology should be eschewed in favor of the supposedly enlightened, pragmatic approach of making ad hoc judgments about issues. But on this conservatives are more realistic. Ideology is inevitable; we all have an ideology, whether we are aware of it or not. First of all, ideology is about values, and we can’t decide how we wish to solve policy issues without having a firm grasp on the values we are seeking to advance. Second, the world is too complex for us to make informed judgments about all of the issues that confront us. We need a philosophy to serve as a north star. One way I’ve been enriched by reading the great works of conservatism is that I’ve come better to appreciate how central ideology is to thinking about matters of governance and public policy.

When In Afghanistan...

2011-07-18T17:58:00.000-07:00

You kill enough leaders, and soon there's no one left to run the country.

A decade later, the Taliban's own leadership has been decimated by the U.S.-led campaign of drone strikes and Special Forces raids. Ironically, the highly successful effort to kill off midlevel commanders has managed to wipe out the very people who need to be engaged in any future negotiated peace process. Such figures, whether Taliban or local insurgent leaders, some of whom have already indicated that they are tired of conflict, are now being replaced by a far younger and more radical swell of commanders, many of them in their early 20s. Often born or trained on the Pakistani side of the border with little sense of Pashtunwali, the traditional Pashtun tribal code of honor, they are proving far more hard-line and ruthless than their predecessors.

Failed state, here we come.

The Tangible Costs of Polluted Air and Climate Change (Link Round-Up 7/16/11)

2011-07-15T16:13:00.000-07:00

[via Inhabitat]

Tragedy of The Commons

The Cost Of Polluted Air Could Run To Trillions Of Dollars

If someone offered you an investment that would pay out $25 for every $1 you paid you would probably take it.

It turns out that investing in clean air generates exactly those returns in health benefits to the American public. The rules that keep our air safe to breathe raked in annual benefits of $1.3 trillion compared to costs of only $53 billion in 2010. Things like avoided doctors’ visits, increased property values, and pollution-related deaths postponed add up to major money in the pockets of families around the country.

Indonesian military vs. global warming

Indonesians are expected to experience warmer temperatures, increased precipitation (in the northern islands), decreased precipitation (in the southern islands), and changes in the seasonality of precipitation and the timing of monsoons. These phenomena could increase the risk of either droughts or flooding, depending on the location, and could also reduce biodiversity, lead to more frequent forest fires and other natural disasters, and increase diseases such as malaria and dengue, as well incidences of diarrhoea.

The political, economic, and social impact of this will be significant for an archipelago-based country with decentralized governance, poor infrastructure, and a history of separatist and radical conflict. According to a World Bank report, the greatest concern for Indonesia will be decreased food security, with some estimates projecting variance in crop yields of between -22 percent and +28 percent by the end of the century. Rising sea levels also threaten key Indonesian cities, including Jakarta and Surabaya, which could stimulate ‘disruptive internal migration’ and result in serious economic losses. Unsurprisingly, the poor likely will be disproportionately impacted by all of this.

Private Discourse

Ethiopian self-censorship

The MPs noted that state media, especially the Ethiopian Radio and Television Agency (ERTA) is not transmitting to the public about the weaknesses of the executive organs (ministries, authorities and agencies) which are identified by the standing committees because it is afraid of the executives.
“Whenever we meet some folks, they always teeth at us as if we are not worthy and do nothing at the parliament, except raising our hands to approve laws,” said one angry MP.

“You, state media journalists, don’t have the moral and professional integrity, like doctors and other professionals. Yon only report good parts of the executive organs,” he said adding that he never expects any improvements from ERTA in the future. The MP rather suggested that the best solution for the parliament is to have its own media, like some countries such as India.

Rebranding

Do Cities Need Creative Directors?

In the the private sector, a creative director is actually in charge. In the public sector, a wide variety of agencies and private institutions are doing their own thing. What would the creative director for a city actually control? Logos? Signage? Street design? Planning reviews? It strikes me that in almost any case, the creative director would be a classic “czar” – that is, someone with nominal responsibility for something, but no real portfolio. The job of a czar is virtually impossible, as anyone who has held one can attest. If you don’t own bodies or budgets, you are basically reduced to begging people to do what you want. This requires deft salesmanship and relationship skills, but are those what creative director types are known for?

Indian Gigolo

Male prostitution across India on the rise

Last year, 21 boys under 18 contracted HIV in Bombay. Seven succumbed to 'professional hazards'. Migration of men from the mofussils to the metros has been a centuries-old transition, and while patterns and compulsions of movement remain more or less unbroken, motives have got distorted. Young boys (mainly heterosexual), who in the throes of these times mature sooner and show physical signs of such ripening, have discovered a new inroad to money, and contrary to belief, it isn't easy money. This is a profession where youth and physical beauty have high stock. To understand this, process the recent commoditisation of masculinity, where smooth figures with waxed chests and shining hair move with a sensuality previously only imputed to femininity in the ads. Men sell sexuality as well as women today, if not better. (Perhaps that's why we see so much of John Abraham .)

Internet Killed The Periodical Star

Did Pitchfork kill the music critic?

“It is really interesting to me that Pitchfork has reached the level of prominence without having the bylines that you die to read,” he says. “I think it’s partly about the brand. Make the brand as big as possible. Take Lollapalooza. That fest has nothing to do with the name it comes from. Pitchfork has been really good at building a name. What does that mean for criticism? The jury’s out.”

Arab Democracies, Modern Media Discourse (Link Round-Up 7/15/11)

2011-07-14T17:17:00.000-07:00

[via Boing Boing]

All The News That's Fit To Press Release
Newsrooms shrink, public relations firms grow

Michael Schudson, a journalism professor at Columbia University, CJR contributor, and author of "Discovering the News," said modern public relations started when Ivy Lee, a minister's son and a former reporter at the New York World, tipped reporters to an accident on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Before then, railroads had done everything they could to cover up accidents. But Lee figured that crashes, which tend to leave visible wreckage, were hard to hide. So it was better to get out in front of the inevitable story.

The press release was born. Schudson said the rise of the "publicity agent" created deep concern among the nation's leaders, who distrusted a middleman inserting itself and shaping messages between government and the public. Congress was so concerned that it attached amendments to bills in 1908 and 1913 that said no money could be appropriated for preparing newspaper articles or hiring publicity agents.

But World War I pushed those concerns to the side. The government needed to rally the public behind a deeply unpopular war. Suddenly, publicity agents did not seem so bad. Woodrow Wilson picked a former newspaperman, George Creel, to head his new Committee on Public Information in 1917. The group cranked out thousands of press releases in support of the war and started a speakers bureau that eventually grew to 75,000 people, all giving morale-boosting talks across the country.

*I currently intern at a subsidiary of one of the largest PR firms in the world.

Schmarvard

A Montreal native's underwhelming time at Harvard

So while going to Harvard constitutes an invitation to join the American upper class, this invitation is pretty useless if you’re living in Canada. I often think about how I was given this invitation—this tremendously valuable thing—and I just kind of threw it away. I’m not sure how I feel about this.

The Enemy Of My Enemy Is Still My Enemy

Did the United States push Iran and Pakistan closer together?

As new Wikileaks reports indicate, despite the help of Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q Khan in building Iran's post-revolution nuclear program, some top Pakistani officials do not want Iran to become a nuclear armed power. The Pakistani leadership, wishing for their country to remain the only nuclear Islamic state, cooperated with George W. Bush's efforts against Iranian nuclear development.

This is unlikely to change anytime soon. Pakistan, for all its rapprochement with Iran, considers it to be a rival in Afghanistan.

Evolution Theories Evolve

Is there a fourth "domain" of life?

For now, Eisen’s undecided on where giant viruses fit into the tree of life. They could have branched off early, he says, “but I think it is equally plausible that even the big viruses have stolen their cellular-organism-like genes from hosts of some kind.”

One way to cut down on the uncertainty would be to fill in more branches on the tree of life. It’s easy to forget that for all the millions of species scientists have discovered, there are millions–maybe tens of millions–more that are waiting to be found. Right now, scientists are forced reconstruct the tree of life by comparing species that are separated by hundreds of millions or billions of years of evolution. The more species scientists add to the tree of life, the closer those comparisons will become. And there’s no telling what sort of strange branches the tree will turn out to have.

Party Time
Will ultraconservative Salafists benefit the most in the Egyptian election?

Before Egyptians took to the streets to topple former President Hosni Mubarak, the only option for a religious vote were candidates from the Muslim Brotherhood, who ran as independents in Egypt's parliamentary elections. Despite the regime's attempts to restrict its participation in the political system by banning parties organized along religious lines, it was the best-organized Islamist movement in the country. These days, the Brotherhood has moved to the center and shows signs of fracturing, with members branching off to start their own political parties. The emergence of Salafi parties has broken the Brotherhood's monopoly on the religious vote and created an opening for more fundamentalist views.

The history of Syria's failed Baath Party ideals

Between 1947 and 1949 an odd group of idealists and hard realists in the American government set out to intervene in Syria. Their aim was to liberate the Syrian people from a corrupt autocratic elite - and allow true democracy to flourish. They did this because they were convinced that "the Syrian people are naturally democratic" and that all that was neccessary was to get rid of the elites - and a new world of "peace and progress" would inevitably emerge.

What resulted was a disaster, and the consequences of that disaster then led, through a weird series of bloody twists and turns, to the rise to power of the Assad family and the widescale repression in Syria today.

Murdoch, Afghanistan, Vomiting, and Dating (Link Round-Up 7/12/11)

2011-07-12T18:09:00.000-07:00

[via Reddit]

Can't Live Without Him

Why politicians are more afraid of Rupert Murdoch's absence

Murdoch gets the approval of politicians, then, not by frightening them—anyone frightened by Fox News would be best off staying indoors all day—but by making their professional lives so pleasant and easy, by insulating them so thoroughly from journalistic scrutiny, that they dread the removal of the protection.

Things Better Explained With Venn Diagrams

Yes, Afghanistan has terrorists, but not enough to spend $5.4 trillion on war there

In numerous occasions Taliban leader Mullah Omar himself has characterised his struggle as a "nationalist movement". Apart from the historical record showing that Washington always fears and fights nationalist movements, Omar's comment also shows that the Taliban strategy has nothing to do with al-Qaeda's aim of establishing a Caliphate via global jihad.

So al-Qaeda is not the major enemy - not anymore, nor has it been for quite some time now. This is a war between a superpower and a fierce, nationalist, predominantly Pashtun movement - of which the Taliban are a major strand; regardless of their medieval ways, they are fighting a foreign occupation and doing what they can to undermine a puppet regime (Hamid Karzai's).

Afghanistan's ethnic divisions aren't the problem

Ethnicity matters among Afghan politicians, but it is not a reliable indicator of political affiliation or loyalty. Even party affiliation isn’t a reliable indicator of where an individual legislator will come down on a nationally controversial issue, because Afghanistan’s party system is weak and party discipline within the parliament is almost non-existent.

The president knows that his special court could, for example, replace 10 Tajiks affiliated with the “opposition” Jamiat-e Islami party with 10 different Jamiati Tajiks and still give him 10 additional supporters in the parliament. And it appears that, broadly-speaking, that’s Karzai’s plan.

Purging Toxins
"Rehab Tourism" in Bangkok included vomit therapy

The Cabin reportedly takes in 15 foreigners per month, which works out to about 180 per year. A spokesperson at Tham Krabok said they get about 120 foreigners a year, "although the peak time is between August and December when we normally have around 20 foreigners here at any one time."

"I think this is because people tend to party during the summer months and then when summer ends they start to realize that maybe they have a problem," said the spokesperson. "We get people from all over the world but the most common countries are probably the United States, U.K., Ireland and Australia."

(Patent) Rules Were Made To Be Broken

India continues generic HIV drug production

"To make them available to all countries, India will also use the flexibilities allowed under TRIPS (trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights) to ensure that people living with HIV have access to all life-saving medicines," Sharma added.

Incentives
GA crackdown on illegal labor threatens $300 million loss in agriculture sector

In short, we have turned good workers into criminals and turned criminals into bad workers, losing on both ends of the deal. Incredible.

Can't Byte Me Love

The number-crunching behind online dating

She identified two big social trends that have led to a greater reliance on online dating: an aging population, and women around the world entering the workforce, marrying later, divorcing more, moving from place to place. “Our social and sexual patterns have changed more in the last fifty years than in the last ten thousand,” she told me. “Our courtship rituals are rapidly changing, and we don’t know what to do.”

Pakistan and the United States: Worst Friends Forever

2011-07-11T19:23:00.000-07:00

The US just announced that they are cutting $800 million of aid to Pakistan.

Since 2001, the US has provided $21bn in civilian and military assistance, including $4.5bn in the 2010-2011 financial year, as aid was increased under the Obama administration. Two proposed bills in Congress over the last week, which were voted down, would have cut off aid to Pakistan altogether.

Pakistan's economy is spiralling downwards, with electricity shortages shutting down industry, and rising food and fuel prices causing protests on the streets. Karachi, the country's economic powerhouse, is often shut down by ethnic gang violence, which has claimed more than 100 lives in the current spate of bloodshed.

Sure, nobody wants to see even the hint of state support for terrorist groups that bomb fellow Muslims in the name of Islam, nobody wants an aggressive, fundamentalist Pakistani state aiming its nuclear weapons at India or elsewhere, and nobody wants to see the Taliban defeat the Pakistani military and establish regional dominance, which is why we've given this kind of military aid before.

But I'd sure like to see a cost-by-cost break down of how the previous aid money was spent.

Agent Orange vs. The Amazon Rainforest (Link Round-Up 7/9/11)

2011-07-09T08:37:00.000-07:00

[via Roger Ebert]

Independence Day

South Sudan becomes officially-recognized country

The UN Security Council has passed a resolution approving a new 7,000-strong peacekeeping force for South Sudan - but this is basically a rebranding of the force which was already in Sudan, mostly in the south.

Khartoum has said its mandate would not be renewed, leading the US to argue that the 1,000 UN troops should be allowed to remain in South Kordofan. The 1,000 troops in the disputed town of Abyei are to be replaced by 4,200 Ethiopian soldiers.

Fight The Power

Egyptians gather in mass protests over ruling body

Muslim Brotherhood member Khalid Dawood, who attended the protest in Alexandria, said the Brotherhood – which in recent months has been plagued by internal splits and squabbles – was persuaded to attend because it was worried about the ruling military council's lack of transparency.

Malaysian government protests end in tear gas

Rally organisers say Malaysia's electoral system is plagued with fraud - they want longer campaign periods, automatic voter registration and equality of access to the largely government-linked mainstream media.

The authorities say the protesters are trying to promote communist ideology, thereby "waging war against the king".

Right Hand, Meet Left Hand

ATF blames FBI miscommunication on Mexican cartel gunrunning scandal

Kenneth E. Melson, the ATF's acting director, has been under pressure to resign after the agency allowed guns to be purchased in the United States in hopes they would be traced to cartel leaders. Under the gun-trafficking operation known as Fast and Furious, the ATF lost track of the guns, and many were found at the scenes of crimes in Mexico, as well as two that were recovered near Nogales, Ariz., where a U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed.

In two days of meetings with congressional investigators over the weekend, Melson said the FBI and DEA kept the ATF "in the dark" about their relationships with the cartel informants. If ATF agents had known of the relationships, the agency might have ended the investigation much earlier, he said.

Al-Robin Hood

Nigerian Islamist group robs banks, gives money to poor

Nigerian authorities blame a radical Islamic sect known as Boko Haram for a series of attacks on government officials and security forces in the north. The group, modeled after Afghanistan’s Taliban, claimed responsibility for a June 16 blast at the national police headquarters in the capital, Abuja, which killed at least five people and injured 11.

Jungle Fever
Agent Orange used to clear Amazon

"They [deforesters] have changed their strategy because, in a short time, more areas of forest can be destroyed with herbicides. Thus, they don't need to mobilize tree-cutting teams and can therefore bypass the supervision of IBAMA," says Jerfferson Lobato of IBAMA.

While Agent Orange was originally designed to clear forest coverage in combat situations, its use became a subject of controversy due to its impact on humans and wildlife. During the Vietnam War, the United States military dispersed 12 million gallons of herbicide, impacting the health of some 3 million, mostly peasant, Vietnamese citizens, and causing birth defects in around 500 thousand children. Additionally, the chemical's effect on the environment have been profound and lasting.