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Swing Dance Clubs Go Retro in New York City – NYTimes.com

23 Dec

Here’s some truth in an old tradition:

The swing-dance social world is an extremely fluid and democratic fellowship. Women ask men to dance and vice versa. Partners switch with every song. One might arrive with a significant other or alone. Just as older people dance with youngsters, one can expect to see same-sex as well as male-female couples. Markedly absent is the supremacy of the ultrabeautiful or the ultrathin. People who are plain while standing on the sidelines are often transformed into dynamos of charisma on the dance floor. Those who are heavy execute complicated moves with grace.

via Swing Dance Clubs Go Retro in New York City – NYTimes.com.

Community Bands in America

18 Dec

In 19th century America, the community band was at the center of community life. Here’s a documentary about them:

Meet The Band, a Hindsight Media production, is a one-hour documentary tracing the history of community bands n the United States. We profile four very different bands from around the country and takes us through the American Revolution, the Civil War and the 20th century.

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Language Log » The assholocracy

14 Dec

A new word: “assholocracy.”

The whole Arab Spring has been a process of bringing down assholocracies. Italy suffered under one until recently. Russia and Syria are now protesting against their own crooked assholocracies, and the only reason North Korea and Zimbabwe don’t do the same is that they daren’t, they could be killed. We in the West are going to need a term for being ruled by assholocrats, because they continue to threaten to exercise power over huge parts of the earth’s population even if not (yet) over us.

via Language Log » The assholocracy.

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NPR’s domestic drone commercial – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com

6 Dec

Coming to the sky near you:

Excitement over America’s use of drones in multiple Muslim countries is, predictably, causing those weapons to be imported onto U.S. soil. Federal law enforcement agencies and local police forces are buying more and more of them and putting them to increasingly diverse domestic uses, as well as patrolling the border, and even private corporations are now considering how to use them. One U.S. drone manufacturer advertises its product as ideal for “urban monitoring.”…

the use of drones for domestic surveillance raises all sorts of extremely serious privacy concerns and other issues of potential abuse. Their ability to hover in the air undetected for long periods of time along with their comparatively cheap cost enables a type of broad, sustained societal surveillance that is now impractical, while equipping them with infra-red or heat-seeking detectors and high-powered cameras can provide extremely invasive imagery. The holes eaten into the Fourth Amendment’s search and seizure protections by the Drug War and the War on Terror means there are few Constitutional limits on how this technology can be used, and there are no real statutory or regulatory restrictions limiting their use.

via NPR’s domestic drone commercial – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

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On the March

20 Nov

I’ve got another case to add to those in my earlier post on intuition and the sense of reality. This case arose in a long, and often interesting, discussion of the recent evictions of Occupy Wall Street encampments. The discussion has been taking place at Crooked Timber and has involved, among other things, a fairly extensive conversation between one Adrian Kelleher, about whom I know nothing, and Rich Puchalsky, whom I know from The Valve and CT.

Kelleher has been making long, detailed comments saying, more or less, “you’re doing it wrong, you can’t possibly succeed.” Puchalsky, who’s been working with the Occupy group in his neighborhood somewhere in in not-Boston Massachusetts, has been saying, “you don’t at all understand the Occupy movement.” In particular, Kelleher made two long comments, 333 and, particularly 334, which is about how OWS is swimming against “the tide of history.” Puchalsky responds in 341.

Here’s my reply to Puchalsky:

Puchalsky: It’s possible for someone to have quite conventional political views and yet act quite differently within a social situation that is different.

BB: Bingo!

Puchalsky: When that failure happens, people in OWS will have friends that they can trust, people who they’ve worked with at a very elemental level.

BB: Bingo! Bingo!

BB: Let me invoke Marley’s Theorem, named after my old buddy Jason Marley: “If you want to know what it’s like to drive a car, you’ve got to sit in the driver’s set and drive the car.” Sitting in the passenger’s seat watching the driver won’t do it, nor will sitting in the back seat, and certainly not sitting at home in your den imagining what driving a car is like. You’ve got to be IN the car, making decisions about traffic, the road, and pedestrians. It’s that elemental.

That last paragraph is where we get the intersection with my earlier remarks about intuition. Puchalsky is IN the OWS movement and so understands it from the inside; he’s in the driver’s seat. Kelleher, apparently, is not. Continue reading →

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Ron Paul Gaining Momentum From Niche Voters in Iowa Polls – NYTimes.com

19 Nov

In a year when the Republican field is unusually fractured, with front-runners coming around as often as carousel ponies, Mr. Paul’s ability to mobilize niche groups like home-schoolers may make a big difference. His campaign, which has won a number of straw polls and is picking up momentum, has demonstrated its ability to organize and mobilize supporters, which is particularly relevant in Iowa, where relatively small numbers can tip the scales in the caucuses. …

But now, thanks to the best organized grass-roots campaign in Iowa and heavy spending on television advertisements that portray him as consistent while other Republicans have flip-flopped, Mr. Paul is breaking through that ceiling, giving rise to a once far-fetched scenario — that he might win the state’s caucuses on Jan. 3.

“I’m buying Ron Paul today,” said Craig Robinson, a former political director for the Republican Party of Iowa, who on Wednesday sent a Twitter message saying, “Ron Paul’s Iowa Campaign Office was abuzz at 8 p.m. tonight when I drove by on my way to the bank. Impressive.”

Two state polls this week show him in a statistical tie for first. One, released Monday by Bloomberg News, showed Mr. Paul winning 19 percent of likely Republican caucus voters, within the margin of error with Herman Cain, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.

via Ron Paul Gaining Momentum From Niche Voters in Iowa Polls – NYTimes.com.

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Populism in the Twenty-first Century – Rodney Roe – Open Salon

10 Nov

A number of populist movements have arisen in the history of the U.S. The issues creating the movements have varied because the definition of “the people” and “the elite” have varied.

Populism is often spoken of in a derogatory manner by some members of the media, those holding political power, and the wealthy. There is no mystery about why this is true. Populist movements seek to change society in fundamental ways.

Followed by brief discussions of the Grangers, Huey Long, the Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street.

via Populism in the Twenty-first Century – Rodney Roe – Open Salon.

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Thousands Chip In to Help Dissident Artist Pay Fine – NYTimes.com

6 Nov

BEIJING — In the days since the Chinese government delivered a punitive $2.4 million tax bill to the artist Ai Weiwei, thousands of people have responded by donating money in a gesture that is at once benevolent and subversive.

More than 20,000 people have together contributed at least $550,000 since Tuesday, when tax officials gave Mr. Ai 15 days to come up with an amount that was more than three times the sum he was accused of evading in taxes.

via Thousands Chip In to Help Dissident Artist Pay Fine – NYTimes.com.

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Our Unpaid, Extra Shadow Work – NYTimes.com

30 Oct

When we ‘automate’ many tasks we take tasks from one group of people, who perform them as full-time jobs, and redistribute them across another, larger, group of people who perform them as ancillary accompaniments to other tasks.

Of course, these shadow chores never appear in one’s job description, let alone justify any salary increase. Shadow work is just covertly added to our daily duties. As robotic devices replace human workers, end-users like customers and employees are taking on the remnant of the transaction that still requires wetware — a brain. New waves of technology change how things are done, and we docilely adapt — unavoidably so, as there’s usually no alternative. Running a business without e-mail is hardly a viable option, but with e-mail comes spam to be evaluated and deleted — more shadow work.

via Our Unpaid, Extra Shadow Work – NYTimes.com.

Field Studies

25 Oct

4772rd

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