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How cities should work – Imprint – Salon.com

19 Oct

An interview with Gary Hustwit, director of , “Urbanized,” a design documentary.

Everybody wants to change their city and make it better, but a lot of people don’t really know how to go about doing that.

Is there a message you want people to take away from the film?

A lot of it is about how cities should work. The projects take so long that it’s a detriment because political winds change and citizens who should be involved in the project don’t even know it’s happening until the bulldozers start rolling in. It’s never the case where government is going to ask “What projects do we need?” and really use the public as a compass. The main time the public interfaces with the city is when they are against something that is already underway. They are not leading a positive initiative to get something done. That’s the takeaway of this film: Be more involved and critical about how you want your city to be.

via How cities should work – Imprint – Salon.com.

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Come Together, Right NOW! Music on the March

18 Oct

Yeah, Dylan was cool. But today we have marchin’ music that would burn his protestin’ butt.

Last Saturday Salon published an article by Stephen Deusner on protest music: Will a new Dylan emerge from Occupy Wall Street? For better or worse it struck me as a bit of a lament for the Good Old Days when they had Good Old/New Protest songs, but, alas, kids today don’t write ‘em like they used to:

As Occupy Wall Street has gained momentum, it has been compared to the anti-war and civil rights protests of the 1960s by commentators as diverse as comedian Dick Gregory, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and scores of newspaper columnists. Yet, as Mangum’s performance demonstrates, they are very different in at least one regard, however minor: Music is not quite the central force today that it was 40 and 50 years ago, when a song like “We Shall Overcome” or “Fixin’ to Die Rag” could communicate certain motivating ideals and reinforce solidarity among a great throng of participants. Instead, it remains peripheral.

Things get moderated toward the end:

The lesson of the 2000s seems to be to approach politics obliquely instead of head-on, to make it one concern among many. If protest songs are largely absent from Occupy Wall Street, it’s not that they aren’t being written. It’s that they no longer serve the same purpose they once did — and are so spread out across genres and audiences that they don’t register as broadly as they once did. …

On the other hand, protests inspire music, not vice versa. Perhaps the artists participating in or even just witnessing the Occupy Wall Street gatherings will be moved to write about their experiences. Perhaps the next great wave of radicalized pop is just a few months or years away.

Well, maybe.

People’s Music

But I have a somewhat different take on the whole business. Back in the day the most important music was the music sung in black churches, mostly traditional hymns and gospel. That’s the music that summoned, organized and energized the civil rights movement. The anti-war movement was a different group of people and, of course, a different issue, but it emerged in a public arena that had been activated by the civil rights movement. Continue reading →

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A State of Nature

17 Oct

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Amazing Charts Show How 90% Of The Country Has Gotten Shafted Over The Past 30 Years…

16 Oct

Basically, the charts show that, starting in the early 1980s, a 60-year trend changed, and most of the country’s wealth gains started going to the top 10% of the population. In other words, the charts show how 90% of the country has gotten shafted over the past 30 years, and especially over the past 10.

via Amazing Charts Show How 90% Of The Country Has Gotten Shafted Over The Past 30 Years….

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Vital Bus Lines are Closing, Leaving People Stranded

13 Oct

From Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, to Town Square, USA, thousands upon thousands of people rely on public transportation to take them to jobs, shopping, to the doctor, and so forth. But bus lines are closing in cities across the nation and leaving people stranded in their homes, especially poor people and old people. It’s happening in Detroit, Longmont (Colorado), Washington D.C., and in my neighborhood in Jersey City, NJ.

Three neighborhood associations met at the Monumental Baptist Church last night to make plans on how to meet the crisis. While there is some reasonable hope that the abandoned routes will be taken-up by other providers, it is clear that this is a recurring problem that must be met by sustained action.

What’s happening in your neighborhood? Have any bus lines been closed in the last two or three years? Are bus lines being closed in the near future? What will happen to people stranded by these closures?

How is it that the so-called richest nation on the planet cannot figure out how to provide transportation for ALL of its citizens?

If you’ve got a story, put it in the comments.

Other stories below the fold. Continue reading →

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Occupy Together Meetups Everywhere – Meetup

12 Oct

Find a group new year. There are almost 1500 of them.

About Occupy Together Meetups Everywhere

* 9,846 Occupiers

* 1,491 cities

This is OCCUPY TOGETHER’s hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St. See what’s going on in your community or get something started!

via Occupy Together Meetups Everywhere – Meetup.

The Decreasing Reliability of Accounting Data for US Firms

12 Oct

This post is rather technical, but it indicates the corporations routinely cook their books and that the practice is very widespread.

While these time series don’t prove anything decisively, deviations from Benford’s law are compellingly correlated with known financial crises, bubbles, and fraud waves. And overall, the picture looks grim. Accounting data seem to be less and less related to the natural data-generating process that governs everything from rivers to molecules to cities. Since these data form the basis of most of our research in finance, Benford’s law casts serious doubt on the reliability of our results. And it’s just one more reason for investors to beware.

H/t Tyler Cowan, Marginal Revolution.

via Studies in Everyday Life: Benford’s Law and the Decreasing Reliability of Accounting Data for US Firms.

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Wall Street: The Dead Face of Domination

9 Oct

IMGP4452rd - The Face of Domination

Look at those huge buildings. What do they say? What do they express?

Only one of them, the smallest one, at the lower right, has any articulation (detail, action) on its surface. The others, smooth, glassy, slick.

Dead.

Those buildings are in New York City’s financial district (aka Wall Street). That’s where the captains of finance manipulate our world while playing ‘King of the Hill’ against one another. They’re keeping score with our money, while we go without health care, without pensions, without hope for our children and grandchildren.

The design of those buildings speaks volumes. Clean and slick, very smooth and efficient. But completely out of scale with human life. That’s what the lack of articulation in the surface says, nothing at human scale.

Nothing.

We don’t have to wait for the future in which the machines take over. They already have.

Those buildings are the machines. They are the Borg. We ARE living in The Matrix. We are nothing but feedstock for the adolescent games those machines play with one another.

See those people down front, left of center? That’s us, the 99%, the feedstock, as it were. See the foliage, the foliage that breaths life into the air by transforming the sun’s energy into bioenergy? More feedstock for the Borg Buildings. Continue reading →

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Sunrise

2 Oct

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How a Famous ‘NYT’ Reporter Led the Media Cover-Up of Radiation Dangers | The Nation

8 Sep

But Laurence was keeping a lot to himself. Embedded with the Manhattan Project for months, he was the only reporter who knew about the fallout scare surrounding the Trinity test: scientists in jeeps chasing a radioactive cloud, Geiger counters clicking off the scale, a mule that became paralyzed. Here was the nation’s leading science reporter, severely compromised, not only unable but disinclined to reveal all he knew about the potential hazards of the most important scientific discovery of his time.

This happened half a century ago. But it surely does make you wonder: What’s The New York Times, the so-called paper of record, sitting on now?

via How a Famous ‘NYT’ Reporter Led the Media Cover-Up of Radiation Dangers | The Nation.

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