An introduction

This is a semi-public place to dump text too flimsy to even become a blog post. I wouldn't recommend reading it unless you have a lot of time to waste. You'd be better off at my livejournal. I also have another blog, and write most of the French journal summaries at the Eurozine Review.

Why do I clutter up the internet with this stuff at all? Mainly because I'm trying to get into the habit of displaying as much as possible of what I'm doing in public. Also, Blogger is a decent interface for a notebook

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Spanking cliches: a transatlantic comparison:
The Cowboy spanking story is as American as apple pie, while the Schoolmaster caning story reaches its perfection on the other side of the Atlantic.


Interesting for the comments, almost as much as the post itself. It's somewhat odd how clearly I can see that neither of these appeal to me.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Activists and insurrectionists: an article that gives the most damning definition of activism I could imagine:

. Activism can be defined as any activity which petitions the support of leaders and policy-makers (for the liberal activist) or which petitions the support of “the people” (in the case of “anarchist” activists).

Monday, January 25, 2010

Converting realaudio streams to mp3

To pull a realaudio stream and convert it to mp3:


mplayer -noframedrop -dumpfile out.rm -dumpstream rtsp://media.real.com/showcase/service/samples/b56realaudiog2.rm
ffmpeg -i out.rm out.mp3


[this uses mplayer to pull the stream, and ffmpeg to convert it to mp3.

Or, here's how to do it in one command-line:

mplayer -noframedrop -dumpfile /dev/fd/3 -dumpstream rtsp://media.real.com/showcase/service/samples/b56realaudiog2.rm 3>&1 1>&2 | ffmpeg -i - /tmp/output.mp3


Why do this? Mainly because I can then use vlc to play the audio speeded up, which is great for slow-moving radio shows.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Perhaps the most successful in a long line of attempts to justify and explain Twilight:

Because Edward Cullen is porn. Weird, pre-sexual, socially conservative, deeply repressed and fucked-up porn, but in a world where ladies’ sexy feelings are fenced in with shame and warnings of danger from Day 1, is it any wonder that porn which consistently ties sex to death and fear and the urgent need for repression is selling to the girls?

Friday, January 15, 2010

Shock Doctrine coming to Haiti

Heritage Foundation, via Naomi Klein, via some new facebook group:

"In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region."

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

oooh, a fantastic article in the NY Times:


we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.

Monday, January 11, 2010

"Jahrelang wurde es angekündigt, jetzt ist es vom Tisch: Berlin bekommt kein flächendeckendes Wlan." [Morgenpost]. So we'll have to make do with freifunk
And here's the article from Le Monde. Love the half-hearted defence put up by the mairie:

"Le contexte actuel est difficile pour les professionnels de la nuit, mais il est excessif de dire que la nuit parisienne est morte. Auprès des étrangers, elle garde une excellente image."


These days, Paris-bashing is starting to seem too easy. Maybe in a decade or two, it'll be time to rediscover its good side ;)
Even the New York Times is getting in on the Paris-bashing party :)

Thursday, January 7, 2010

John Harris musters more enthusiasm for centre-left policy wonks than I could ever hope to manage:


thousands of people know pretty much what a social-democratic, forward-looking and eminently electable Labour party might put before the voters – so why do so few people on the inside?
Sometimes, when I fail to mentally or technically filter them out, online ads really get to me:


This is from the friggin' Guardian

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Cory Doctorow:

[Myspace] pages are made by people who know – to the femtometre – exactly how ugly they are. They are supposed to offend your sensibilities. They are intended to make designers weep. Their ugliness is a defence mechanism that protects them from being knocked off by marketing/communications firms, because most designers would rather break their own fingers than commit such an atrocity.

Monday, January 4, 2010

Der Spiegel's review of the decade is appropriately grim.
English-language German news site thelocal puts out a review of the events of 2009. Shorter version: a year of no significance.
Also, not entirely unrelatedly:

Germans have less faith in their political system than at any point in the post-war period, mainly due to what they see as a weak response to the financial crisis, a poll published Sunday showed.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Bruce Sterling's State of the World is back for another year. I swear, this is the only piece of punditry that ever seems close to grokking what's going on:
Campaigners succeed in getting bull-fighting banned in Catalonia:

As far back as 1909, Barcelona hosted Spain's first anti-bullfighting protest, and by 2004 more than 80 per cent of Catalans were opposed to the practice.
Sy Hersh's Nov 09 article on Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is not all that revelatory. But, given the last post here, it's hardly reassuring to read of the Pakistani president defending nuclear security in these terms:

"Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban. They’re British-trained. Why would they slip up on nuclear security?"

Saturday, January 2, 2010

"until less than ten years ago, the locks on RAF nuclear bombs were opened with a bicycle lock key. " [BBC]

Admittedly, this looks like a case of auntie spinning their info as far as it'll go. e.g. no bicycle lock itself, necessarily, just the same kind of key.
Self-criticism:

A lot went wrong and my own sorry generation are largely culpable. Smug, lazy and intellectually self-satisfied; historically uneducated and therefore fixated on superficial understandings and re-stagings of the past; unwilling to risk seriousness, or rather, mistaking creative conservatism and po-faced self-absorption for seriousness; lacking sex, glamour, rage, resentment, a death drive, or anything vaguely fucking resembling a reason to make a mark upon the world – you, my peers, are possibly the most boring lot of Westerners since those born ‘tween the World Wars grew themselves up on Patty Boone and Georgia Gibbs.


Couldn't agree more.
More optimism from Hari, this time idolizing JJ & co:


It works. Look at Britain. Three years ago, eight new coal power stations were being planned, and the third runway at Heathrow was all but inevitable. A few thousand heroic young people took direct action against them. Now all the new coal power stations have been cancelled, and the third runway is dead in the water. Here in the fifth largest economy in the world, they have stopped coal and airport expansion. Politicians felt the heat. That was done by a few thousand people. Imagine what tens or hundreds of thousands could do.
I'm piously encouraged by Johann Hari's list of objects of emulation from 2009