Blood and Sunflowers

I saw this film in an art gallery 20 years ago, and flirted a little with the animator who made it. I thought I would never see it again.

I stumbled across it again on YouTube today. I love living in the future.

Organizational culture and purpose

Over on the Twitters, Marc Rettig points us to a little Forbes piece, ‘Culture of Purpose’ Is Key To Success According To New Research From Deloitte.

What’s the leader of the world’s largest audit, tax and consulting firm doing preaching about what seems like a squishy business attribute like “purpose”? As Punit tells me, “exceptional firms have always been good at aligning their mission or purpose with their execution, and as a result have enjoyed category leadership in sales and profits,” (think Whole Foods, Tom’s Shoes or even Apple). This seems particularly clear for companies where the founder is still very much involved in the business or where the founder’s ethos is culturally ingrained in the organization. Companies that are singularly focused on exceeding customer expectations tend to fall into this category. “So there is an empirical financial benefit to organizations that instill a purpose-driven culture,” says Punit.

The piece says some very good things, but it has such a stiff and awkward tone, it reads like a virgin talking about sex. Take this little passage.

Through interviews with the media and then in speaking engagements that he did at various campuses around the world during those times, the Deloitte Chairman was regularly challenged to justify business in general and even more specifically Deloitte’s reason for being beyond returning profits to its partners. “I found it disconcerting that business has been cast in a not so positive light,” said Punit.

Companies like Deloitte have earned disconcerting questions about what purpose they serve. So business has not “been cast in a not-so-positive light”, business has screwed up and we haven't held businesses nearly accountable enough.

It makes me wish this article didn't make these questions about purpose sound like the usual rah-rah corporate BS, because I believe in what it says. Devotion to purpose supports business success. It makes money.

Having been inside organizations with a strong purpose (and many more organizations without it), one can scent a true purpose focus in discussions of even the smallest projects. When one asks folks why they are doing something, they can — they will — tell you things like, “We are doing A in order to prepare the ground for B, which we are doing despite it being a compromise on C because it will help with the more important project of D and the essential project of E because D and E are both major initiatives in service of our organizational mission of F.” Not only can everyone walk up and down that chain from tactical moves to strategic projects to fundamental purpose and back again, they do it constantly. This makes the organization more effective because tactical actors keep the whole system aligned ... and they need less supervision to do it, freeing up executive attention for doing the work they need to do.

Breaks in this chain test the culture.

In truly purpose-driven organizations people will talk about a break constantly, with the expectation that fixing it matters more than the proximate work in front of them, since the fix must necessarily transform their tactical work.

In organizations without a true commitment to their purpose, people avoid talking about a break between purpose and tactics. Talking about these ruptures becomes politically dangerous, regarded as “distractions from the task at hand”.

That does not mean that every project in a purpose-driven organization must have some kind of perfect conception. People sometimes say, “Yes, we are neglecting the important principle X in service of the urgent need for Y.” But it is not only safe to say that in the organization, it is encouraged, because a purpose-driven organization makes its necessary compromises with its eyes open in order to ensure that those necessary compromises really are necessary.

This a deep organizational culture question. Having a purpose and talking about it isn't enough; you need a cultural commitment to talking about how it connects to everything you do.

And culture is hard to address.

When I was in consulting, I lost count of the number of companies I worked with who worried about keeping their culture as they grew. And I would always tell them, “That's not your problem. What will happen as you grow is you will discover what your culture really is, not what you have told yourself it is. As you get bigger, what will get harder is not keeping that culture, but changing it ....”

David Simon on what happened to journalism

David “The Wire” Simon explains in a comment on his blog responding to the question, “ I’m curious to hear your thoughts regarding the Koch’s play for the Tribune company.”

My thoughts?

First, the locally-owned newspapers went to the publicly-traded newspaper chains, which promised economies of scale and great wealth to the owning families at the point of sale, as well as the preservation of editorial independence. It was a lie.

Then the chains went to Wall Street, where analysts who only measure the health and purpose of any endeavor in terms of short-term, quarterly profits, demanded greater mediocrity long before the internet arrived to pressure the industry. The analysts promised greater profits than ever before. In the end, they lied and diminished the product just in time for digitization.

Then the newspapers went to the internet hat in hand, afraid to charge for their weakened, eviscerated product and hoping against hope that giving the news report away for free would somehow encourage a revenue stream. The mavens of new media lied.

And now, those end-game capitalists who will not be content until nothing — no societal need, no communal ambition, no other American ideal save for maximized profit — is left standing. They , will buy up the gutted newspaper carcasses, so that they can lie on a scale that makes all the previous dishonesty a trifle. They will regard what remains of the news report merely as a platform to advance themselves and their capital, just as they regard the political system as such.

Once and forever, capitalism is a worthy tool and a necessary one for creating mass wealth, but as to the distribution and uses of that wealth within a society? No, capitalism is not a metric for anything but profit itself. This is the lie at the core of free-market ideology and libertarianism. And free markets are never the whole or complete answer when addressing any societal goal, compact or responsibility. It’s easy to make money when all you give a fuck about is making money, to invoke Orson Welles. And the Koch brothers and others of their kind wish to build a society that does little but transfer wealth to a select few while obliterating any other ambition for American society. If newspapers can help them secure that future, so be it.

But journalism in those cities where they own the daily newspaper and its digitized versions will be crippled until alternative news sources are developed by independent, professional journalists.

What do you call it when capital has purchased not only government, but all plausible means to criticize governance? A prelude to fascism.

We live in the future

Goofy, I know. But I couldn't resist.

IRS mini-scandal

So I guess scandal season is upon us, as once again Republicans try to disrupt a Democratic President's electoral victory through a combination of legal action and press manipulation. Benghazi has been a big success with the Republican base and a nonstarter with anyone else because there's just no there there; like a lot of lefties, I cannot even tell what the scandal is supposed to be on that one. The Department of Justice getting Associated Press journalists' phone records, on the other hand, is a legitimate scandal that I'm upset about. I expect to post about again, but it hasn't quite caught fire yet, in part because it's a continuation of the ongoing development imperial executive in the name of national security which has been an uninterrupted process whichever party has held power.

Then there's this IRS thing. That one's legitimate but not actually all that big a deal; hence “mini-scandal”. I have a couple of helpful commentaries.

The first is from the Rude Pundit, who lays out what obviously happened.

Look, we know how this went down: Post-Citizens United, the Internal Revenue Service was flooded with applications for tax-exempt status for whatever organization a couple of fucksacks with a tricorner hat wanted to start. “Social welfare” groups, they were called, and they could not be involved with specific political candidates or advocacy (although, you know, c'mon). So the IRS told its low-level drones who had to look at all the fucksack applications to flag ones that looked hinky. So the low-level drones, who are overworked to begin with because Congress won't give the IRS the funding it needs to do its fucking job, used some search terms.

It's 2010 and who are the fucksacks who are everywhere? The “Tea Party” groups. So, sure, fine, let's fuckin’ search that. Low-level drone 1 tells low-level drone 2 (and for god's sake, they live in the dull, dull, boring, dull city of Cincinnati, so give ’em a little break), “Hey, just use ‘Patriot’ as a search term and you'll get your job done faster because if there's one thing we know, it's that a whole bunch of these applications are from crazed fucksacks applying for tax-exempt status because they hate them that black guy in office.” Low-level drone 2 might have said, “Oh, shit, that'll get us in trouble.” But low-level drone 1 had a convincing argument by saying, “You wanna get to the bar sooner?” By the way, chances are that LLD 1 and LLD 2 have been LLDs forever, under at least one GOP president.

Does this narrative need to be completed?

Digby offers a quote from Josh Micah Marshall which explains why this trivial thing is such a big thing.

If you wanted create a scandal to have maximal appeal to GOP base freakout, this is it. And it has the additional advantage of not creating the same sort of off-putting crazy as hitting other bugaboos beloved by base Republicans. It’s not about Obama’s ties to the Muslim brotherhood or his foreign birth. It’s about taxes, something everyone has an experience with and understands. And it’s at least rooted in something that’s true. Something really did happen. And it’s not good. It shouldn’t happen. It even has unexpected knock-on effects like the IRS’s supposed connection to the dreaded ‘Obamacare’.

White House Down

So I go to see Iron Man 3 and there are a bunch of action movie trailers before the movie starts. Including this one for White House Down. I want to say something serious about it.

Hang on a second before you watch that trailer. I'd already seen an earlier trailer, cut rather differently, playing up the classic Bruckheimer stuff: explosions, crowds of people running, explosions, the US military's expensive toys, explosions, famous landmarks, and explosions. Since Independence Day opened big on the strength of an effects shot of aliens blowing up the White House, here we get the White House and the Capitol Building on fire. Jerry Bruckheimer and Roland Emmerich sure know how to hook a certain deep part of the American id.

The newer trailer, which I posted above, is more character-driven. We meet Channing Tatum as the big dumb lunk who's going to have to save the day, a failure who will be redeemed by his standing up as a hero when his moment comes. Add some rifles and terrorists and running around in corridors and our hero wearing an A-Shirt with a few scratches on his face and we've got the Die Hard formula: it's Die Hard in the White House, a perfect set-up for a big dumb action movie.

And then we meet his co-star, Jamie Foxx, who will be his action-comedy buddy, a reluctant hero who has to overcome his discomfort with violence to pick up a gun and save the day. Check them out. Does Foxx look like a dapper badass or what?

Foxx is the brains of this team, right? Of course, because This Is America, that just means that he has a lot to learn from the big dumb lunk. Still, remember that back when Emmerich did this in Independence Day, to have Will Smith as the hero we needed to give him a Jewish sidekick to figure out the brainy stuff, because racism with racism sauce. So this is progress, sort of.

Foxx is the smart one in a nice suit because he's playing the President of the United States, following in the footsteps of Action Hero President Harrison Ford from Air Force One. Because Obama. Now I don't want to be one of those White guys who's all now that Obama is President racism in America is totally solved because obviously not. But. Something's happening here.

And I cannot help but notice that the image of a black guy in a suit running around the White House with a gun ... because he's Action Hero President ... is quoting one of the most powerful propaganda images of the 20^th century.

What do you want to bet that there's a shot in this movie which mirrors that photo exactly?

We've gone from that image signifying Malcolm X deliberately evoking White fears of Black political violence to it signifying that we need a heroic Black leader with a gun to save America.

Progress.

Sort of.

God bless America.

The paranoid style

Driftglass offers a thumbnail sketch of paranoia and deceit entangled in pseudo-libertarian politics.

For them, the world makes only makes sense as a Philip Dick novel in which everything the government does at virtually every level is suffused with monstrous intentions and dark designs. For them, the world is The Matrix: a massive scam built on top of a web of far-reaching and apparently infinite number of conspiracies in which everyone who is not 100% on their side is either a co-conspirator or a somnolent dupe.

Of course, when the mundane realities of the business of government — even government during a crisis — falls short of proving their specific brand of vast and terrible plots, they have to back-fill or pave over all bits that don't fit — all the chuckholes and logic-chasms and tire-shredding facts — with, well, bullshit.

He provides a tidy example in the form of a clip about Rand & Ron Paul.

Wolf + Rockwell

Another item for the “Naomi Wolf is not too bright” file: she's allowed LewRockwell.com to post several articles of hers.

Lew Rockwell is almost certainly the author of Ron Paul's old racist newsletter and his site is a hotbed of goofy crackpottery, predictions that a civil war is coming when the government sends former gang members to confiscate our guns and put us in FEMA concentration camps, and other craziness. No responsible person should allow their byline under his masthead.

Criticism of Obama from the left

A long, unhappy index of links for Obama: An Authoritarian Corporatist.

Nice hypothesis

Another silly meme image. It was going around Facebook and I couldn't resist.

Hanlon's Razor

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

I am also informed of the variant known as Grey's Law:

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

And that is, of course, an allusion to Clarke's Third Law.

The blood of White people

Andrew O'Hehir has an good screed in Salon, How Boston exposes America’s dark post-9/11 bargain, which says that the events around the Boston bombing indict pretty much every sector of the Republic as having failed in the wake of 9/11: the press, the government, the commentariat, the polity, the whole thing. Not anything anyone who's reading me doesn't know, but still: a good screed. So check it out.

I want to focus on how, near the end, this jumped out at me:

In America after 9/11, we made a deal with the devil, or with Dick Cheney, which is much the same thing.
....

The supposed tradeoff for that sacrifice was that we would be protected, at least for a while, from the political violence and terrorism and low-level warfare that is nearly an everyday occurrence in many parts of the world. According to the Afghan government, for example, a NATO air attack on April 6 killed 17 civilians in Kunar province, 12 of them children. We’ve heard almost nothing about that on this side of the world, partly because the United States military has not yet admitted that it even happened. But it’s not entirely fair to suggest that Americans think one kid killed by a bomb in Boston is worth more than 12 kids killed in Afghanistan. It’s more that we live in a profoundly asymmetrical world, and the dead child in Boston is surprising in a way any number of dead children in Afghanistan, horrifyingly enough, are not. He lived in a protected zone, after all, a place that was supposed to be sealed off from history, isolated from the blood and turmoil of the world. But of course that was a lie.

Well of course it was a lie. Again, not anything anyone who's reading me doesn't know.

But while I understand why O'Hehir is saying that Americans don't really think our children's lives are more important than other children's lives, we sure act like it. And that reminded me of a blog post from Mia McKenzie of Black Girl Dangerous that I've been meaning to blog about, Hey, White Liberals: A Word On The Boston Bombings, The Suffering Of White Children, And The Erosion of Empathy.

Your constant prioritization of the lives of white people over the lives of people of color is taking a serious toll on my psyche and those of many in my community. And by that I don't mean what you might expect. Most of us already know that racism and its BFF white privilege have detrimental effects on people of color. Racial oppression leads to any number of unhealthy conditions, including high blood pressure, depression, heart disease, diabetes and even asthma. But what I’m talking about is something different. Something I’m going to call DSWP: desensitization to the suffering of white people.

O'Hehir is nosing around the foothills of that mountain whose slopes McKenzie is climbing — because after all, when he says “Americans” he's mostly talking about a mediasphere of White people — and I have to admit that there are moments where I feel like I'm drifting toward the altitude where McKenzie finds herself with the DSWP. White people beating their breasts about their misfortunes is starting to feel very, very unseemly to me ... and I am a White person.

This means that this is an even worse moment for the Republic than O'Hehir says, does it not?

Gender archaeology

These words were published by a well-known radical feminist in 1974. (Note that at that time, “transsexual” was used where today one would more politely use “transgender”.)

There is no doubt that in the culture of male-female discreteness, transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency as a transsexual. There are 3 crucial points here.

One, every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions. This is an emergency measure for an emergency condition.

Two, by changing our premises about men and women, role-playing and polarity, the social situation of transsexuals will be transformed, and transsexuals will be integrated into community, no longer persecuted and despised.

Three, community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disppear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior.

Can you guess who? Seriously, guess. Then go see; there's more.

Instructive.

(Spoiler: It's Andrea Dworkin!)

If we create a better world for nothing

I keep referencing this cartoon and having to track it down again, so I'm posting a copy of it here for my convenience. It makes the point beautifully.

At the Climate Summit we see a man giving a presentation, showing a slide saying:

• Energy independence
• Preserve rainforests
• Sustainability
• Green jobs
• Livable cities
• Renewables
• Clean water, air
• Healthy children
• etc., etc.

An angry man in the audience asks, “What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?”

University tribunals

I don't know if this story is true, but I know that it's plausible.

I am a feminist. I have marched at the barricades, subscribed to Ms. magazine, and knocked on many a door in support of progressive candidates committed to women's rights. Until a month ago, I would have expressed unqualified support for Title IX and for the Violence Against Women Act.

But that was before my son, a senior at a small liberal-arts college in New England, was charged—by an ex-girlfriend—with alleged acts of “nonconsensual sex” that supposedly occurred during the course of their relationship a few years earlier.

....

On today's college campuses, neither “beyond a reasonable doubt,” nor even the lesser “by clear and convincing evidence” standard of proof is required to establish guilt of sexual misconduct.

These safeguards of due process have, by order of the federal government, been replaced by what is known as “a preponderance of the evidence.”

It's trivial to notice that the criminal justice is horrifically ineffective in protecting women from nonconsensual sex, largely through dismissiveness about women attesting to their experience. But a standard which assumes that women would never lie is terrifying.

---

In a discussion of this story on Facebook, a male friend observes

Women have tremendous power over men.

I replied at length.

It's tricky.

On balance, men as a class still have power over women. It's categorically less skewed than it was fifty years ago, but the bottom line is unmistakable: society advantages men and disadvantages women.

But this is the sum of a system of injustice which also creates meaningful injustices for men. I think we can recognize that the injustices against women are categorically greater while still objecting that the injustices against men need correcting. (Indeed, because these are interlocking systems, I suspect that one cannot fully correct the injustices women experience without also attending to the injustices that men experience.)

The model of the civil rights movement against racism adopted by feminist rhetoric proves misleading in this respect. Racism doesn't have significant injustices which cut the other way, but sexism does.

And the forms of power women have over men are largely threats that men face from extraordinarily unscrupulous women exploiting systems that serve typical women. This is very different from the way that injustices women encounter come from the exercise of power by typical men unconscious of the effect that they are having.

The flawed analogy to racism, the overall condition that women are treated less well by society, and the power that women do hold over men being largely a threat from atypical women makes men's vulnerability to the operations of power from women invisible to most women.

The story I linked is an example of a form of power that women don't notice because it would not occur to them that it could be used for ill. Women's sphere of experience is the pervasive threat of being coerced into sex through social pressures and violence. Saying that women making false accusations of rape is a threat to men sounds absurd to them, like a denial of the very real rapes that happen horrifyingly routinely.

But men have commonly had the experience of an encounter with a woman who was more unscrupulous than they realized at first and think to themselves, there but for the grace of God ....

Update:

It occurs to me that it would be useful to link my long note about the challenges men face in getting their heads straight about consent.

Buddha compassion

I just discovered that Blogger has mislaid my post about what may be my favorite news story ever.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

“He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, ‘Here you go,’ ” Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, “Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”

You know what happens next, right?

---

Update: Diaz tells the tale.

Brooks

This nugget of snark about David Brooks' writing, from Charles Pierce, is irresistible.

Irritable mental gestures that resemble thought indeed.

In time of crisis

Jesse Walker at Reason has a good overview of things to know about crises like the Boston bombing. This snippet stood out for me:

Movies and TV shows have given us a deeply misleading picture of how people behave after incidents like this, one where the folks at the scene of the crime lose their minds while those who have the benefit of distance keep a steady head. This is backwards. Sociologists have shown that people tend to behave very admirably under the pressure of a disaster; panic and anti-social behavior are fairly rare. We saw that pattern play out again in Boston, from the bystanders who instantly rushed toward the blasts to help the injured to the locals who opened their homes to stranded strangers.

This is a striking contrast to this quote from Rebecca Solnit, provided by Cory Doctrow at bOING bOING.

The term “elite panic” was coined by Caron Chess and Lee Clarke of Rutgers. From the beginning of the field in the 1950s to the present, the major sociologists of disaster — Charles Fritz, Enrico Quarantelli, Kathleen Tierney, and Lee Clarke — proceeding in the most cautious, methodical, and clearly attempting-to-be-politically-neutral way of social scientists, arrived via their research at this enormous confidence in human nature and deep critique of institutional authority. It’s quite remarkable.

Elites tend to believe in a venal, selfish, and essentially monstrous version of human nature, which I sometimes think is their own human nature. I mean, people don't become incredibly wealthy and powerful by being angelic, necessarily. They believe that only their power keeps the rest of us in line and that when it somehow shrinks away, our seething violence will rise to the surface — that was very clear in Katrina. Timothy Garton Ash and Maureen Dowd and all these other people immediately jumped on the bandwagon and started writing commentaries based on the assumption that the rumors of mass violence during Katrina were true. A lot of people have never understood that the rumors were dispelled and that those things didn't actually happen; it's tragic.

But there's also an elite fear — going back to the 19th century — that there will be urban insurrection. It's a valid fear. I see these moments of crisis as moments of popular power and positive social change. The major example in my book is Mexico City, where the '85 earthquake prompted public disaffection with the one-party system and, therefore, the rebirth of civil society.

Doctrow talks about why this is important.

In crisis – in the horrible, slow-motion, global economic/environmental catastrophe that we inhabit – we form theories about how everyone else will react and plan accordingly. When Katrina hit, people nodded when soldiers and mercenaries shot “looters” in New Orleans, convinced that looting was the sort of thing that transpired after disasters. That was news. Hardly noticed, months after the fact, was the truth that there was practically no looting in post-Katrina New Orleans, and that those shot – particularly those shot by Blackwater mercenaries – were innocents who’d been killed in the service of a lie: the lie that human beings are bad, and that the first thing we do when the veneer of civilization falls away is kill, rape, and/or eat one another. This lie was a racist lie, and it was a speciest lie, too.

This is the worst kind of lie: the lie that makes itself true. When enough people believe the libel against the human race, the vile calumny that “human nature” would have us all at each others’ throats were it not for coercive force, it becomes a truth. If you are sure your neighbor will kill you when the lights go out, the natural thing to do is kill him at the first flicker – and even if you’re more reasonable than that, you still won’t want to let a potential killer into your shelter; you won’t want to share your food with him; you won’t want to take in his children when they need it.

Terrorists

Tim Wise helpfully provides a list of White terrorists.

For future reference.

Appropriation?

NPR's new Code Switch blog features a knockout long article, When Our Kids Own America from Gene Demby of Postbourgie. It's about how the critiques of appropriation and gentrification and cultural ownership that have been common in social justice circles in recent decades don't apply well to the world we live in now. Here's a taste:

Hip-hop is now the lingua franca and the background music for an entire generation of kids. And one of its dynamics — the idea of a marginalized group rapping about that marginalization — has remained essentially intact as hip-hop has conquered the world, in part because marginalization is the narrative that teenagers everywhere fit themselves into.

If something is everywhere and everyone trafficks in it, who gets to decide when it’s real or not? What happens when hip-hop stops being black culture and becomes simply youth culture?

Cecelia Cutler, a linguist at New York’s Lehman College, says that when kids who aren’t black traffic in hip-hop slang or African American Vernacular English — even if they aren’t themselves hip-hop fans — they’re not trying to mimic blackness, per se. They’re calling upon this language to signal (or “index,” as linguists like to say) some of the postures that people associate with hip-hop — coolness, toughness, hipness, swagger, separateness. The black part is being referenced, but it’s not quite the point. In some circles, Cutler said, hip-hop-inflected black speech has become a kind of prestige English.

It's long, and it's all that provocative and smart. Check it out. And the official NPR comment thread is already looking lively. Here's something I said to the author on Facebook:

I've already been circulating this article, because it's a home run. Bravo. I live in the SF Bay Area and you've definitely captured something about Oakland: my friends half-tease me when we are in Uptown and I say, “This looks like the America I was promised.”

I think you've managed a nuanced description of how the way we have been talking about appropriation has often been a little screwy. Minstrelsy and deracination are all too common, yes, and bad for all the reasons we know, and deserving of the vigorous critique they get. But the rhetoric of “appropriation” has been too broad and sloppy a brush. The implication that group X owns cultural idea Y and practice Z and so forth never really made sense. Culture just doesn't work that way; it's always a stew of overlapping influences.

These days, our mediasphere makes that process faster, and therefore more visible; I think that's part of what you're pointing to here.

But I suspect more importantly, you're describing is the generational effects of some victories. Bigotry is a long way from being over, but we have a lot of young people who aren't poisoned by it in the same ways. And the effort to break the hegemony of White Culture has worked: a lot of people are seeing a lot more culture from folks different from themselves. It would be absurd to imagine that young people coming from that experience would dutifully obey the boundaries of what culture they supposedly do and do not “own” because of the racial identity which they viscerally know is socially constructed.

Loper's Seven Laws of Sane Personal Computing

Interesting. Though it's funny and frustrating that this stuff need to be said.

A sanely designed personal computer system:

I – Obeys operator

II – Forgives mistakes

III – Retains knowledge

IV – Preserves meaning

V – Survives disruptions

VI – Reveals purpose

VII – Serves loyally

Natural News

For future information hygene reference: NaturalNews.com is not a source of reliable information.

Brooks

Driftglass offers a stunning demonstration of David Brooks denying his own statements in support of the Iraq war.

Torture, again

The UK Guardian article Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres is a cavalcade of horror. It pains me to excerpt it; almost every sentence is stunning.

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.

....

After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.

Petraeus is implicated. Military advisors who helped set up the death squads in El Salvador back in the ’80s are implicated. The leads came from the WikiLeaks documents that put Bradley Manning in prison. Torture victims were shown on a reality TV show in Iraq.

I had this stupid fantasy that I'd be able to retire my tag for the horror on this blog thanks to Obama. How naïve I am.

We need to be sending people to the The Hague for this.

#ack140

On Twitter, I find that I often need to express this idea.

It is obvious to me that you have badly misunderstood what I was trying to say. But I don't blame you, I blame me. I was trying to fit too much into a single 140-character tweet, and in my effort to keep it short I wrote something that could be easily misunderstood.

So I propose this new bit of Twitter vocabulary to be able to say that in just a few characters: #ack140

Drug policy

In an amazing interview at the Washington Post Wonkblog, Mark A. R. Kleiman succinctly delivers a lot of truth and clear thinking about drug policy.

When I was a kid, my parents would get The New Yorker, and the back cover was always a Johnny Walker Black ad. And they were great ads. Just terrific ads. One of them shows lights in an office building spiraling up. Next to it there’s a picture of Johnny Walker Black. And it says, “As you move up, the work doesn’t get easier, but the rewards get better.”

But another said, “If the difference in price between Black and ordinary scotch matters to you, you’re drinking too much.” And I regard that as the first principle of drug policy. Price matters a lot to people who use a lot, and so it’s a very good way to regulate consumption. So here I am in Washington state, thinking about regulating cannabis, and a big question is how to keep the prices up.

This kind of talk is what gets people like me excited about the neoliberal dream of smart technocrats setting policy ... and frustrated about our political institutions as we actually have them. It's easy to see how a public debate about the kinds of better policies Kleiman is advocating isn't even possible in our Republic as it is now.

Blood for oil?

Why did we invade Iraq? For oil? Then where's the oil?

Greg Palast has a different theory. He thinks it was to stop oil from flowing out of Iraq.

Big Oil could not allow Iraq's oil fields to be privatised and taken from state control. That would make it impossible to keep Iraq within OPEC (an avowed goal of the neo-cons) as the state could no longer limit production in accordance with the cartel's quota system. The US oil industry was using its full political mojo to prevent their being handed ownership of Iraq's oil fields.

That's right: The oil companies didn't want to own the oil fields – and they sure as hell didn't want the oil. Just the opposite. They wanted to make sure there would be a limit on the amount of oil that would come out of Iraq.

Saddam wasn't trying to stop the flow of oil – he was trying to sell more. The price of oil had been boosted 300 percent by sanctions and an embargo cutting Iraq's sales to two million barrels a day from four. With Saddam gone, the only way to keep the damn oil in the ground was to leave it locked up inside the busted state oil company which would remain under OPEC (i.e. Saudi) quotas.

Palast's evidence is not completely convincing, but it's at least plausible, which is more than I can say for most theories I've heard.

Fully dressed superheroines

Artist Michael Lee Lunsford has an interesting little project: Fully Dressed Redesigns of Superheroines. This hits me right where I live for a couple of reasons.

I have been enjoying the trend of artists offering up their redesigns of familiar superheroes. (Check out Project: Rooftop and Aaron Diaz experimenting with costumes.) There's something charming in the question it makes one ask about what makes a character recognizable as “the same”. One of my favorite panels in Warren Ellis' Planetary is the one in the very first issue in which a team of heroes who are transparent nods to ’30s pulps — Doc Savage, Tarzan, The Shadow — encounter characters from a parallel universe who are meant to represent the Justice League ... but who are drawn to be as unlike the Justice League we know as possible while still being recognizable.

Plus Lunsford's project riffs on the much remarked sexism of superheroine costumes, much like a favorite blog of mine, Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor.

Lunsford notes that his project isn't motivated by those political/cultural questions, it's an artistic experiment in taking characters and redesigning them with a challenging theme. All of the character's he's chosen ordinarily have revealing costumes while his experiments don't show any skin and aren't even tight. It's a cool project. He's a good artist, and all of them are clever and beautifully executed, but it's interesting that some worked for me and some didn't.

His Elektra is not just spot-on, it's so good that I feel like his version is her real costume which we haven't seen before because artists have tarted her up.

His solution to Power Girl is even better: it's an out-and-out improvement over the original in every way, distinctive and superheroic. A home run. I confess that I like that he kept her curves; if I were editor-in-chief of DC Comics, I'd stop making huge breasts the Most Common Superpower but keep Power Girl as the one superheroine with impossible proportions.

Supergirl is also pretty great, though the gray trousers look a little out-of-place with her colors. (Maybe they should go all the way to black? Or maybe a longer skirt that hangs over her boots?)

His Wonder Woman is interesting, but I think a near miss. It's does say “Wonder Woman” to me and I really like the armor at the shoulders, but overall it's just a little too busy. I can't really blame him, though. Wonder Woman's costume design is a perennial problem. Her “swimsuit” costume is iconic but terrible; to make it work you need either Lynda Carter's præternatural poise or to hang a lampshade on the absurdity of it. Her old ’40s skirt somehow feels even sillier to me, and pants seem like a good idea in principle but I've never seen a version that sits right. I've long thought the best solution might be to play off of her Hellenic background and give her a Greek pteryges as a “skirt”. (I've also long thought that she should be Black, as Warren Ellis hinted at with his character Rite.)

Conversely, his Vampirella costume is a terrific costume ... but it just doesn't say “Vampirella” to me. I don't have much of a taste for the character, but to my mind the whole point of her is to be over-the-top exploitive; she's supposed to be running around killing monsters by throwing running chainsaws at them, dressed in something that's not only pornographic but could not stay on her body even if you used glue. (Though maybe I'm wrong about that; I was astonished to discover that Trina Robbins created her costume and objects to it having shrunk away to almost nothing.)

His Zatanna is a different kind of frustrating near miss. It's a nifty costume, and I can tell it's supposed to be her, but it just reads as Not Right to me. I think the main thing is that the tailcoat is essential; replacing it with a fuller cape seems to violate the iconography. As does losing the white tie. I don't like that Zatanna is often drawn with a silly cleavage window, but I suspect that a fully-dressed Zatanna is inherently doomed. Her classic costume really is just classic, one of the best ever, not least because unlike so many superhero costumes that in real life seem silly, or even physically impossible, actual real-life Sexy Lady Magicians have worn it to good effect. The fishnet stockings are part of the cocktail; change that, and it just ain't the same.

Psyloche's costume is recognizable — barely — but his version of it comes off as bland. Maybe trying to do a fully-dressed version of her Sexy Cyber Armor costume would have worked better than this attempt at a fully-dressed version of her Sexy Ninja costume? I dunno.

And last, his Black Canary is the only total failure. I see he's trying to play off of her motorcycle, which is a good idea, but it doesn't work for me. It barely says “Black Canary” (which is inherently tricky to achieve, since her original costume is also lacking in character) and even on its own terms it's just a little goofy.

Of course, most interesting of all is the very fact that I have these opinions in the first place. Where does that even come from?

So of course now I'm looking forward to his next project ....

Ken Wilbur

Mark Manson writing at Postmasculine gives us The Rise And Fall of Ken Wilber, a frustrated critique of Wilber's thought and the Integral movement he spawned.

Although flawed, Wilber’s integral perspective continues to be an inspiration in my life. I do believe he will be written about decades or centuries from now, and will be seen as one of the most brilliant minds of our generation. But as with most brilliant thinkers, his influence and ideas will be carried on by others in ways which he did not anticipate or plan.

Wilber’s story is a cautionary tale. His intellectual understanding was immense, as much as I’ve ever come across in a single person. He also tapped into some of the farthest reaches of consciousness, spiritual or not, that humans have self-reported. I do believe that. But ultimately, he was done in by his pride, his need for control and, well, ironically his ego.

Jordan Gruber has a similar piece, “Beyond My Ken?”, which includes a link to a link index of criticism.

Interface evolution

There's a blog post from the LayerVault folks making the rounds among interaction designers. It's about what they call “progressive reduction”, in which they change their interface over time in response to use, simplifying the way the elements appear.

In a way, this is a moment in which Everything Old Is New Again. Many people don't remember Kai Krause now, but back in the mid-90s, he made a series of graphics tools with exotic interfaces. Check out these screenshots of the Kai's Power Tools Texture Explorer and Sphereoid Designer (ganked from Veerle Pieters):

Crazy, right?

Kai's software was even weirder than it looks in screenshots. Many of those beady little buttons started out with text labels which would then wear off over time, getting fainter and fainter until they disappeared entirely, because Kai figured that eventually you just knew the button by its position rather than by its label. Many of those buttons never had a label at all, they did things to the image that were hard to name; the interface instead provided an abstract, memorable-looking button from the beginning. And in some tools, Kai had bonus features that would only show up after you had used the system for a while. The reasoning was that you wouldn't want the complexity of those functions at first anyway, so it was more fun to have them show up as a surprise bonus reward.

LayerVault describes the principle this way:

As designers, the longer we live with a product, the greater our bias shifts towards the professional user. Alternatively, blindly applying basic usability heuristics results in a bias towards new users. The mistake isn’t biasing your UI towards one type of user, it’s failing to realize that your user’s bias is changing.

How does one guide a new user from on-boarding, to low proficiency, to high proficiency? With progressive reduction, the UI adapts to the user’s proficiency.

I would never do something as garish or abstract as Kai's interfaces in my own UX design work, but this idea of progressive reduction stuck in my mind from back then, and a few times I've proposed versions of the same idea ... though they've always been shot down.

I don't mourn those missed opportunities too much though, because it's a risky, shoot-the-moon design move. If you get it just right, I think there's an opportunity to get some big benefits, but executed sloppily it could easily create more problems than it solves. LayerVault are swinging for the fences; good for them.

I have a hunch that this must be connected with the rise and fall of cursor-hover behaviors. When I doing interaction design for desktop applications at Cooper in the mid- to late-90s, we often tried to convince clients to make better use of tooltips and other cursor-hover behaviors, usually to no avail. The original edition of Alan Cooper's About Face included a lot of discussion about this. Then along came web applications implemented in Flash, which often included a lot of hover behaviors (often frivolously) because early on it was one of the few bits of crafty interaction it could provide easily. As a result, web applications have actually led the way for desktop applications, a reversal of the general pattern that the desktop has provided richer interface idioms than the web.

But just as the world has reached the point at which colleagues understand why I'm proposing extensive use of mouseover behaviors, they've started resisting them for a different, better reason. We need to accommodate tablets which cost us the use of this powerful interface idiom. Indeed, the tablet is killing a lot of idioms we used to use because it also doesn't support right-click or compact clickable buttons.

My hunch is that the (re-)emergence of progressive reduction in the LayerVault example reflects a secondary effect of the tablet revolution. Suddenly we are losing some of the idioms which have served well for years, while at the same time we don't think as much about “user expectations” on the new platform, resulting in software development organizations with a greater willingness to experiment with user experience.

You can see another way in which new hardware affects thinking about interaction design in software here. The garish-looking textures of Kai's interfaces and the LayerVaulters' enthusiasm for the opposite support John Gruber's theory that all that stuff was actually crafty technique for compensating for the crummy displays of the old days, and the trend toward “flat” interfaces reflects the emergence of better display technologies.

The trend away from skeuomorphic special effects in UI design is the beginning of the retina-resolution design era. Our designs no longer need to accommodate for crude pixels. Glossy/glassy surfaces, heavy-handed transparency, glaring drop shadows, embossed text, textured material surfaces — these hallmarks of modern UI graphic design style are (almost) never used in good print graphic design. They’re unnecessary in print, and, the higher the quality of the output and more heavy-handed the effect, the sillier such techniques look. They’re the aesthetic equivalent of screen-optimized typefaces like Lucida Grande and Verdana. They work on sub-retina displays because sub-retina displays are so crude. On retina displays, as with high quality print output, these techniques are revealed for what they truly are: an assortment of parlor tricks that fool our eyes into thinking we see something that looks good on a display that is technically incapable of rendering graphic design that truly looks good.