WaPo stats on healthcare voting in the US. Show (by eyeballing, anyway, & as pointed out by James of England) no correlation between voting patterns and either health industry donations or number of uninsured constituents.

This strikes me as pretty weird. Maybe an excuse to load the data into pandas and play round with it.

EU and ACTA

The EU parliament are something like the House of Lords -- you don't tend to pay them much attention, or really trust them, but every now and again they come through and Do The Right Thing when the rest of the Powers That Be are in thrall to some ridiculous lobbyist-enhanced monstrosity.

Last week is one of those cases: the European Parliament has passed a resolution thoroughly condemning the secrecy of the ACTA negotiation process, in terms that are, compared to the normal EU bureacratese, pretty fierce:

2. Expresses its concern over the lack of a transparent process in the conduct of the ACTA
negotiations, a state of affairs at odds with the letter and spirit of the TFEU; is deeply concerned
that no legal base was established before the start of the ACTA negotiations and that
parliamentary approval for the negotiating mandate was not sought;

Rolling Stone on pig farming

Rolling Stone still has an incredible collection of writers:

The biggest spill in the history of corporate hog farming happened in 1995. The dike of a 120,000-square-foot lagoon owned by a Smithfield competitor ruptured, releasing 25.8 million gallons of effluvium into the headwaters of the New River in North Carolina. It was the biggest environmental spill in United States history, more than twice as big as the Exxon Valdez oil spill six years earlier.

E-voting in Estonia

Certain small post-Soviet states have a tendency to be hooked into all the latest fads among global policy wonks. It's an outgrowth of their size and history: ambitious young people who left for Western Europe or the US in the 90s, have now returned and found themselves wealthy, skilled, and ready to govern. Georgia and Estonia, in particular, have been quick to dive into every technnical/governmental trend, from twitter to linux to...e-voting.

As regards the latter, Estonia is forging ahead. 14% of votes in the European elections were cast online. 44% in the municipal elections in Talinn -- which, to judge by the percentage of Berlin's technorati vanishing there for mysterious projects, must be turning into something of an electronic mecca.

One of k-punks many, many worth activities is his full-frontal assault on the rhetoric of modernisation:

it's necesary to reclaim the public sphere and public services as achievements of modernity (much as they was celebrated by the GPO Film Unit), and, therefore, to re-narrativize their dismantling as acts of barbaric anti-modernisation. Think about it for a second: what is "modern" about the standard neoliberal package of outsourcing, a poorly motivated and casualised workforce delivering a poorer quality service, and exorbitantly overpaid executives? Wasn't the postal service more modern when you could post a letter in the morning and quite often have it delivered by a well motivated worker the same day?

Further reasons to hate my generation

those of us who are reaching adulthood in the 21st century are in many ways more conventional than our parents....orthodox, driven, a little boring, and with a deep desire to save the precarious world that we are about to inherit.

With a few notable exceptions, my peers are driven not to create, nor to rebel, but to stabilise. We want jobs, a foot on the housing ladder, and to protect the planet....My generation may not be turning up at a church, temple or synagogue every weekend, but nor are we running through the streets strewing flowers and reinventing rock music. On the contrary: the millennial generation is replacing the cultural and spiritual orthodoxy of its parents and grandparents with orthodoxies of its own.

--- Laurie Penny in CiF

Reasons to hate my generation

Mumblecore movies are made by buddies, casual and serious lovers, and networks of friends, and they’re about college-educated men and women who aren’t driven by ideas or by passions or even by a desire to make their way in the world. Neither rebels nor bohemians, they remain stuck in a limbo of semi-genteel, moderately hip poverty, though some of the films end with a lurch into the working world.

-- New Yorker

Sweet Movie

Sweet Movie sounds like just the thing to jolt us out of bourgeois lethargy:

Makavejev shows us a commune where the members collectively immerse themselves in the fundamental processes of the body: eating, drinking, suckling, sex, vomiting, urinating, defecating, touching, screaming, hitting, caressing.

Makavejev doesn't exploit this material -- "Sweet Movie" is anything but a sex film -- but uses it to confront us in a very unsettling way.

I've never seen the film Waking Life, but this quote makes me want to:

Quiet Woman at Restaurant: When it was over, all I could think about was how this entire notion of oneself, what we are, is just this logical structure, a place to momentarily house all the abstractions. It was a time to become conscious, to give form and coherence to the mystery, and I had been a part of that. It was a gift. Life was raging all around me and every moment was magical. I loved all the people, dealing with all the contradictory impulses - that's what I loved the most, connecting with the people. Looking back, that's all that really mattered.

I've never seen the film Waking Life, but this quote makes me want to:

Quiet Woman at Restaurant: When it was over, all I could think about was how this entire notion of oneself, what we are, is just this logical structure, a place to momentarily house all the abstractions. It was a time to become conscious, to give form and coherence to the mystery, and I had been a part of that. It was a gift. Life was raging all around me and every moment was magical. I loved all the people, dealing with all the contradictory impulses - that's what I loved the most, connecting with the people. Looking back, that's all that really mattered.

Infected Mushroom, with some of those lyrics that, when heard as lyrics, sound like some kind of missing key. When written down, the magic fades into the air -- so imagine this to the background of some unusually determined and driving trance:

We gonna run run run
To the cities of the future
Take what we can and bring back home

From Bruce Sterling's compellingly-annotated Flickr set studies in atemporality, presumably a companion to his Transmediale speech:


What I love about this is that it's obviously part of that Strychnin aesthetic of steampunk victoriana and Gaimanesque fairy-tales, but has managed to bridge the gap between there and the real world. Oh what a world, where introducing punk into steampunk can be a revelatory gesture.

Valérie Pécresse achieves total obliviousness as regards racism:

A un homme d’origine africaine qui lui demande l’application de la loi sur les CV anonymes, la ministre répond en le renvoyant sur les bancs de l’école. Selon cette native de Neuilly-sur-Seine, “une lettre de motivation avec une faute d’orthographe a plus d’impact” sur un recrutement qu’une photo…

In other words, two wrongs make a reason to ignore the public.

[via AG, of course]

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.

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).

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.

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?

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."

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.

"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 :)

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

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.

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.

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?"

"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

Erdos as a guest

Paul Erdos, Tom Waits, and women in Philosophy:

But he wasn’t just moving from one university or research center to the next in a restless quest for mathematical talent. He was on the move so much because he was holy hell as a house guest. —He “forsook all creature comforts—including a home—to pursue his lifelong study of numbers,” the blurbs will tell you. Bullshit. He forsook the bother and worry of creature comforts. Other people cooked his food. Other people washed his clothing. Other people kept him from wandering into traffic. Other people woke him in time for his “preaching” appointments. Other people filled out his paperwork.

Brecht: if sharks were men

Linked, because it has slipped my mind for almost a year, and because it's highly entertaining (if a little obvious). If sharks were men:

There would, of course, also be schools in the big boxes. In these schools the little fish would learn how to swim into the sharks' jaws. They would need to know geography, for example, so that they could find the big sharks, who lie idly around somewhere. The principal subject would, of course, be the moral education of the little fish. They would be taught that it would be the best and most beautiful thing in the world if a little fish sacrificed itself cheerfully...

More romantics: Wordsworth

Wordsworth, however, is a poet I've never been able to make mean something. The main reason, probably, is that I have no time for the pastoral. I'd rather see allusive intensity in the cities I love than in a natural world with which I find no connection.

But the above-linked article by Adam Kirsch turns up other reasons. Apparently "many of what we now see as the Victorian virtues—earnestness, mature optimism, easy authority—are first incarnated in his poetry". And, perceptively:

If his first readers turned against him because he was undignified, today we are more likely to turn away from him because he is too dignified. He knows what he knows so surely, so completely, that he cannot think against himself; no poet besides Milton is as devoid of humor.
....

His emergence as the great, challenging poet of natural sympathy and his subsequent decline into dull institutional benevolence form one of the key instructive dramas of modern poetry.

And then, there's the politics. Shelley embodied it with Queen Mab and the Masque of Anarchy. Byron died for it in Greece, and even Coleridge kept up some level of political involvement through his life. Wordsworth did absorb the afterglow of the French Revolution, but as a spectator rather than an actor. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive" is no attempt to change the world, just a thrilling to the work others were doing around him. And even here, argues Kirsch:

“The Prelude” was written as an act of convalescence from and penance for politics, which he finally comes to see as “a degradation” fortunately “transient”

[Kirsch, admittedly, then goes on to praise Wordsworth's "struggle to transcend the radicalism of his youth, to rescue its benevolent impulses while escaping its shallowness and intolerance".]

Celebrity duel: Kleist vs. Rilke

Have just emerged from reading Rilke's Letters to a young poet. Surprised by how much I like it, given that I've come to think of myself as basically unsympathetic to Romanticism. I'll chalk this one up to my general sensation of reverting to adolescence. But...

I tend to forget how late Rilke is. When he's writing, well over a century has passed since the revolution in France and Young Werther in Germany. The years since had been filled by the aftershocks and farcical imitations of one, and the gradual swelling and dissipation of the Romantic movement kick-started by the other. Kleist, for example, feels like he should be writing later than Rilke. just as Marx had seen and analyzed capitalism at the moment of its birth, perceiving and criticising the mechanisms of the next decades, so did Kleist perceive the opposition between Romanticism and the Enlightenment, and find their synthesis. I'm thinking of his essay on hte Marionette Theatre, which punctures the Romantic idealisation of youth and innocence, while describing how the essential Romantic intensity can be reborn through experience:

...grace itself returns when knowledge has as it were gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.....we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence

Rilke, in 1903, is still a believer in innocence. His advice to the young poet remains at the level of "to thine own self be true", never touching on the possibilities of schizophrenic self-invention which now endure as the only conceivable engine of intensity in a time of post-modernism.

The Arabs: a history

The Arabs: A history, by Eugene Rogan, has just been published in hardback. The various reviews present it as an important work, perhaps even as a successor to Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples -- respected, but now somewhat long in the tooth. Hourani was Rogan's "mentor", whatever that means, but the younger historian has concentrated mainly on media and historical circumstances, in contrast to Hourani's excursions into "demography, trading patterns and literature".

Sadly, the reviews in the Guardian and Telegraph concentrate on the Arabs' contact and conflict with the West. I'm hoping this is just an artefact of the British newspaper industry, not of a narrow focus in the book itself.

My new favourite christmas tradition

BBC:

A giant straw goat - the traditional Scandinavian yuletide symbol - erected each Christmas in a Swedish town has been burned to the ground yet again.