|
Saturday, November 20, 2004
"My advice to anyone in any field is to be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker" RE/SEARCH has a new book of Jim Ballard quotes
Some people have suggested that mental illness is a kind of adaptation to the sort of circumstances that will arise in the future. As we move towards a more and more psychotic landscape, the psychotic traits are signs of a kind of Darwinian adaptation.
10:20 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Saturday, November 13, 2004
The Mexican government is lauded in this piece for making their biggest conservation purchase ever; but the roster of the Nature Conservancy Board of Governors (see pdf link here) -- which put up more than half the purchase price -- makes you wonder if anti-Fed/anti-"environmental mafia" hypercapitalist property rights wonks aren't onto something despite the sometimes self-serving motives of landowners and the superheated and often delusional rhetoric of their screeds People like the vice-chairman of NASDAQ, the vice-president of Con Agra and the CEO of Georgia-Pacific Paper just might have something else in mind than protecting the environment.The Nature Conservancy receives its seed money to buy land from many of our country's largest corporations. By giving TNC grant money and outright gifts those companies hope to cloak themselves in a green veil. It quickly became apparent to TNC's President McCormick that begging for dollars the old fashioned way, with phone solicitors and junk mail, was not the most cost efficient way of doing business. So, McCormick went after corporations. "It's just a greater return," he says. This author obtained records from 1994 through 1999 to see what companies, groups or foundations gave money to TNC. The biggest contributor by far was the David & Lucile Packard Foundation who gave TNC grants on 34 occasions totaling over $45 million between 1996 and 1999. The John and Catherine MacArthur Foundation gave money 18 times. General Motors donated nearly five million dollars and more than 100 trucks. Canon U.S.A. contributed $10.3 million in cash and equipment. Some readers were appalled to read in this publication a few months back that The Nature Conservancy was involved in developing up-scale homes for sale on the coast of Virginia. TNC is also involved in oil production and receives oil royalties. In fact, TNC has gone to the well quite often. From 1994 through 1999 the following oil companies contributed land, mineral rights or money to TNC: Amoco Foundation four times, Texaco Foundation five times, Arco Foundation five times, Mobil Foundation four times, Phillips Petroleum Foundation 10 times, Chevron Foundation 13 times, Unocal Foundation and Exxon Mobil one time each. The Georgia-Pacific Foundation and Weyerhaeuser Company Foundation, both businesses built on what environmentalists prefer to call "resource extraction," were also major donors. More recent donations to TNC include those of the Doris Duke Foundation, Wolf Creek Charitable Foundation and the Morgridge Family Foundation who all gave between $10-20 million to TNC's Campaign for Conservation. Five to ten million dollar donors for the same campaign included the Paul G. Allen Forest Protection Foundation, the Mary Flagler Chary Charitable Trust, Central & South West Corporation and the George S. & Delores Dore Eccles Foundation. Charities and corporations donating $1 million or more include the Ahmanson Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Georgia Pacific Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Victoria Foundation and the William Penn Foundation. The Nature Conservancy's business model of extracting large sums of cash from companies and then using the money to buy up conservation easements, is brilliant and quite effective. But doesn't it seem ironic that this nation's businesses, the product of free enterprise and private property rights, are financing the potential lock-up of vast areas of this country? Is this what our founding fathers had in mind? Land owners and ranchers who might be considering donating development rights or a conservation easement on their land to the TNC, believing it will be protected forever, might want to consider The Nature Conservancy's seemingly unquenchable thirst for land, money and power. Who's to say what the TNC will do with your land in 10, 50 or even or even 100 years from now if they need the cash? [link] Audio of NPR report on the Tallgrass Prairie preserve linked on this page. See this is one of the reasons I let go of my political blog, charging the canvas: trying to get to the bottom of things was becoming like grabbing ice cubes out of a furnace. The places you have to go, the rhetoric you need to cut through, the whole Alice on a Sleigh Ride to Hell got to be too exhausting. Still can't resist sometimes though...
1:58 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Surreal park in Ljubljana, Slovenia [via Zippy, thanks to David Kurtz for the image]
1:03 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Movie gangsters try last ditch effort to put over disposable DVDs with indy Noel release
1:02 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Friday, November 12, 2004
Can you say "paper trail"? Peter Coyote's letter on what you have to believe to think Bush won the election legally [xymphora] Or media censorship?
9:13 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Thursday, November 11, 2004
The darkness takes her Historian and author of The Rape of Nanking Iris Chang has apparently killed herself I always knew it was a fine book and meant to read it, but if you know anything about the atrocities committed by the Japanese army in 1937 China, you know how depressing a read it would be. Things are intense enough these days. But Chang's book was a landmark about events little known outside China, and an impassioned plea for reparations. I guess she passed one too many windows. R.I.P. Ms Chang.
8:30 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Sunday, November 07, 2004
The CyberTimes Navigator from the New York Times A decent reference guide.
2:12 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
American Way of Death file For as little as $1500 you can have your or your loved ones' cremains interred in an underwater column, part of an elaborate, baroque city beneath the wavesThe project is aimed squarely at America's Baby Boomers, a 76 million-strong group who, in the delicate language of the funeral industry, "have finally come of age for death-care purposes". Mr Levine was inspired by a report that between six and seven million cremation urns sit on American mantelpieces, in cupboards, or in attics and garages. He believed that relatives would welcome a more creative final resting place. [...] AfterLife Services, will also encourage relatives to don scuba gear and pay their respects at the watery graves. [...] Mr Levine hopes that maintenance costs will be low. The concrete used will be twice normal strength to withstand the most violent seas. In any case, some of the columns will be deliberately snapped off at the base to suggest a city in glorious ruin. The small print, however, warns clients that they will have no redress if the columns are toppled by "acts of God or man". Somewhere, Jessica Mitford is rolling on the floor laughing.
12:32 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
A belated R.I.P. John Mack If the name doesn't ring a bell, he was a Pulitzer prize-winning biographer and professor of psychiatry at Harvard who was pilloried for writing about alien abductions. Chances are, his "intellectually questionable" interest in the spiritual experience and the nature of reality will be what he's remembered for by future generations.Asked what his message would be if he could broadcast to the world, he replied, "I would be humbled", but offered the following prescription: "Wake up, find your way, whether it is with prayer or psychedelics or abductions or shamanic journeys or talking with gurus or seeing movies like The Matrix and The Truman Show, whatever it is, find your way to break out of the program, the commercial materialist program."
12:09 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Saturday, November 06, 2004
Some good movies I've seen recentlyThe Return (Vozvrashcheniye) Arlington Road Conspiracy (2001) Secret Honor Early Summer Noises Off! The Scent of Green Papaya Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy - Working With Time Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
1:55 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Could it be? Looks like the postdrought is over. I'll post stuff soon.
1:13 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Saturday, September 04, 2004
R.I.P. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross [See username/password for the NYT at left, for this and other links to Times articles] Perhaps the most important advocate of a new more compassionate treatment of the dying. Definitely on my list of the greatest people of the 20th century.Whatever scientists think about her views of life after death, they continue to be influenced by her methods of caring for the terminally ill. Before On Death and Dying, terminally ill patients were routinely left to face death in a miasma of loneliness and fear, because doctors, nurses and families were generally ill equipped to deal with death. Dr. Kübler-Ross changed that for many, though by no means for all, dying people. By the 1980's, the study of dying became part of medical and health-care education in United States. "Death and Dying" became an indispensable manual, both for professionals and family members. [...] In 1962, she became a teaching fellow at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver. A small, outwardly shy woman who spoke with a heavy German accent, she was nervous when asked to fill in for a popular professor and master lecturer. At first, she was ignored. But the hall became noticeably quieter when she brought out a 16-year-old patient who was dying of leukemia and asked the students to interview her. Now it was they who seemed nervous. When Dr. Kübler-Ross prodded the students, they asked the patient about blood tests, chemotherapy and other clinical questions. Finally, the teenager exploded in anger and began posing her own questions. What was it like not to be able to dream about the high-school prom? Or going on a date? Or growing up? "Why won't people tell you the truth?" she demanded. When the lecture ended, many students had been moved to tears. "Now you're acting like human beings, instead of scientists," Dr. Kübler-Ross said. A bit late but notable enough anyway.
10:45 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Anti-Flag never bought the shrubspell"A couple of years ago, we were the only band on Warped going, and I'll be blunt, 'Fuck George Bush and fuck politicians who like George Bush,' " says charismatic bassist-singer Chris #2, calling from a sunbaked Phoenix tour stop. "That time was so bizarre for us. We had people inside the punk movement, that we considered friends, giving back our T-shirts, sending back our records, and totally buying into the nationalism movement. I don't know if they thought George Bush had suddenly taken genius pills, but people who'd previously been demanding a recall were giving him their blind faith." That's not the case today, and not just because Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 has given Americans something to seriously think about. As the casualties--and the wartime atrocities--mount on both sides, a whole lot of people have become outraged at what's transpired in Iraq over the past year. "We've been saying all along that on September 10 George Bush was an asshole and on September 12 he was an asshole," Chris #2 says. "This year on the Warped Tour there isn't a band that's not saying that same kind of thing, which I think is awesome. I'm glad that popular sentiment on the tour is a progressive one."
11:00 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Nice Shockwave video on surveillance culture from the ACLU
10:54 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Looks like we're back
10:47 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Thursday, July 01, 2004
Just added A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family by Peter Dimock to my wish list [Literary Saloon]
2:35 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Nice long J G Ballard interview [American Samizdat]Jeannette Baxter: The majority of your novels can be read as provocative celebrations of the transformative and transgressive powers of the imagination. In Millennium People, however, the imagination is spectacularly lacking. Your cosy phrase "the upholstered apocalypse" gestures, rather worryingly, towards an imaginative and critical impasse of sorts, doesn't it? Is this decay in the life of the mind a terminal state of affairs? J G Ballard: Nothing is ever terminal, thank God. As we hesitate, the road unrolls itself, dividing and turning. But there is something deeply suffocating about life today in the prosperous west. Bourgeoisification, the suburbanisation of the soul, proceeds at an unnerving pace. Tyranny becomes docile and subservient, and a soft totalitarianism prevails, as obsequious as a wine waiter. Nothing is allowed to distress and unsettle us. The politics of the playgroup rules us all. The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change. When Markham (not JGB) uses the phrase "upholstered apocalypse" he reveals that he knows what is really going on in Chelsea Marina. That is why he is drawn to Gould, who offers a desperate escape. My real fear is that boredom and inertia may lead people to follow a deranged leader with far fewer moral scruples than Richard Gould, that we will put on jackboots and black uniforms and the aspect of the killer simply to relieve the boredom. A vicious and genuinely mindless neo-fascism, a skilfully aestheticised racism, might be the first consequence of globalisation, when Classic Coke® and California merlot are the only drinks on the menu. At times I look around the executive housing estates of the Thames Valley and feel that it is already here, quietly waiting its day, and largely unknown to itself. Millennium People is still basically unpublished in the US, though the UK edition is available at the above link from amazon. Spike Magazine's Ballard site.
12:00 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Abu Ghraib protester in Boston charged with crimes which could mean more jailtime than any soldier involved in the atrocities will get
11:45 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Email eavesdropping OK'd by Appeals Court
11:41 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Unique "national treasure" archaeological site in Utah finally revealed by Utah rancherFor more than 50 years, rancher Waldo Wilcox kept most outsiders off his land and the secret under wraps: a string of ancient settlements thousands of years old in near perfect condition. Hidden deep inside eastern Utah's nearly inaccessible Book Cliffs region, 130 miles southeast of Salt Lake City, the prehistoric villages run for 12 miles along Range Creek, where Wilcox guarded hundreds of rock art panels, cliffside granaries, pit houses and rock shelters, some exposing mummified remains of long-ago inhabitants. The sites were occupied for at least 3,000 years until they were abandoned more than 1,000 years ago, when the Fremont people mysteriously vanished. The Fremont, a collection of hunter-gatherers and farmers, preceded more modern American Indian tribes on the Colorado Plateau. What sets this ancient site apart from other, better-known ones in Utah, Arizona or Colorado is that it's been left virtually untouched, with arrowheads and pottery shards still covering the ground in places.
11:37 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
|