GoodShit

Jim Carrey – Official Site.

Gary Shteyngart — author, essayist, friend of James Franco — is among our foremost satirists. His appearance on the New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list and essays in The New York Times Book Review have earned him serious literary street cred. And now he’s the doomsayer behind “Super Sad True Love Story,” a near-future dystopia that foretells the collapse of the American economy and the ruinous decline of literacy. It’s a bleak world, in which books are known primarily for their off-putting smell.

Photo: Brigitte Lacombe

Shteyngart’s own book, and its marketing campaign, have made him, in the parlance of his brave new world, “so Media.” You can find him online, on the air, on your iPhone, in your magazine of choice (don’t read Travel + Leisure? How about GQ?) and on any number of blogs and news aggregators, forecasting the gradual and inevitable collapse of what we quaintly refer to as “civilization.” The book is a darkly funny romp through a kooky, nightmarish America, where people are slaves to metrics and American expatriates are forced to divulge their most intimate details to the semi-authoritarian American Restoration Authority (“For statistical purposes only,” the regime’s sinister mascot, a cartoon otter, reassures).

Shteyngart is writing from experience: He was born and raised in the twilight years of the Soviet Union, and the authenticity of his dystopian vision is apparent. “I sort of know when an empire reaches its end,” he said in a recent interview.

BOOK TRAILER VIDEO

And yet, Shteyngart also guards a secret, a quintessentially American affliction: He is an optimist.

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A colleague over at Democracy in America[1] (DiA), The Economist’s blog about American politics, has written a very interesting post[2] on the nature of online commenters. While the formality of composing a letter to the editor continues to generate considered and often polite prose by even the most aggrieved readers, the immediacy and anonymity of online commenting seems to encourage a tendency to insult and attack. “Faceless communication leads to disinhibition, whether it’s online, in a car or on the phone with a customer-service representative… Psychologists even have a name for the online phenomenon: ‘online disinhibition effect[3]‘.”

Publishers keen on a solution to nasty commenters will follow what happens at the Buffalo News[4]. The paper has just proposed requiring readers to supply accurate identification if they want to weigh in, which is promising. (As one of the 65 commenters[5] on the DiA post wrote, “I used to think anonymity was a good thing… However, over time my view has changed to the opposite. For every unique voice, there are thousands of mindless, thuggish screams.”)

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The single most publicised event of the Bophuthatswana coup was the killing of three wounded AWB members who were shot dead at point-blank range in front of journalists by a Bophuthatswana police constable, Ontlametse Bernstein Menyatsoe.

AWB Colonel Alwyn Wolfaardt, AWB General Johannes Fourie and Veldkornet (Field Cornet) Jacobus Stephanus Uys were driving a blue Mercedes at the end of a convoy of AWB vehicles, firing into a crowd of Bophuthatswanan civilians. Members of the Bophuthatswana Defence Force returned fire and hit the driver of the car, Nicolaas Fourie, in the neck, another gunman, Alwyn Wolfaardt, in the arm and the remaining gunman, Jacobus Uys, in the leg. When Wolfaardt got out of the car and waved a pistol, a Bophuthatswana police officer quickly took his pistol. Another policeman tried to fire on journalists but his rifle jammed and it was taken from him by another policeman. The wounded survivor Alwyn Wolfaardt waved a pistol but was advised not to start shooting by nearby journalists.

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Poetry Daily: Today’s Poem.

Drinking alcohol may reduce the severity of rheumatoid arthritis according to new research published today. It is the first time that this effect has been shown in humans. The study also finds that alcohol consumption reduces the risk of developing the disease, confirming the results of previous studies.

The study which is published online today in the journal Rheumatology (Wednesday 28 July), looked at 873 patients with rheumatoid arthritis and compared them with 1004 people without RA (the control group). The researchers, led by Gerry Wilson, Professor of Rheumatology at the University of Sheffield (Sheffield, UK), asked the two groups how frequently they had drunk alcohol in the month preceding their inclusion in the study. The study participants completed a detailed questionnaire, had x-rays and blood tests, and an experienced research nurse examined their joints.

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DAILY ROTATION.

The Real Cyrano: Big Nose, Little Panache

On this day in 1655 Hercule Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac died at the age of thirty-six. He was the model for the hero in Edmond Rostand’s 1897 hit play, and a writer himself — several plays, and two science-fantasy novels. The real de Bergerac wasn’t the swordsman of legend, but he had a big nose, and a belief that "A large nose is the mark of a witty, courteous, affable, generous, and liberal man."

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An opium den was an establishment where opium was sold and smoked. Opium dens were prevalent in many parts of the world in the 19th century, most notably China, Southeast Asia, North America, and France. Throughout the West they were frequented by and associated with the Chinese because the establishments were usually run by Chinese who supplied the opium as well as prepared it for visiting non-Chinese smokers. Most opium dens kept a supply of opium paraphernalia such as the specialized pipes and lamps that were necessary to smoke the drug. Patrons would recline in order to hold the long opium pipes over oil lamps that would heat the drug until it vaporized and the smoker could inhale the intoxicating vapors. Opium dens in China were frequented by all levels of society, and their opulence or simplicity reflected the financial means of the patrons. In urban areas of the United States, particularly on the West Coast, there were opium dens that mirrored the best to be found in China, with luxurious trappings and female attendants. For the working class, there were also many low-end dens with sparse furnishings. These latter dens were more likely to admit non-Chinese smokers.[1].

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mental_floss Blog » Morning Cup of Links: Ant Invasion.

The Work of the Weavers: The Highwaymen

This is from The Best of the Highwaymen.

via The Work of the Weavers: The Highwaymen «.

all things amazing.

Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century by Ruth Harris – Powell’s Books.

cheap labor: http://bit.ly/bRUkcr

unclutter

PM Erdogan: The Term “Moderate Islam” Is Ugly And Offensive; There Is No Moderate Islam; Islam Is Islam

Speaking at Kanal D TV’s Arena program, PM Erdogan commented on the term “moderate Islam”, often used in the West to describe AKP and said, ‘These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.”

Source: Milliyet, Turkey, August 21, 2007

via via.

you like me, right? you love me, right? well, for xmas….http://bit.ly/bNpOZM

something of a game changer: http://bit.ly/d2uBlK

A tenth of Mexico’s population could surge north to escape climate-triggered crop failures, study claims.

Zoë Corbyn

A wave of up to 6.7 million migrants from Mexico could head to the United States to escape the ravages of climate change on crops, say the authors of a new study. The findings are claimed to be the first to thoroughly quantify how shifts in global climate might affect human migration from one region to another.

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Exoplanet

In a recent presentation, Kepler co-investigator Dimitar Sasselov preempted the official announcement that the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope has discovered about 140 candidate worlds orbiting other stars that are “like Earth.”

Usually, announcements like these happen after an official press release, but during the TEDGLobal conference in Oxford, U.K., Sasselov unexpectedly dropped the groundbreaking news in one of his presentation slides.

SLIDE SHOW: Top 10 Places to Find Alien Life

Can you guess which exoplanet discovery was voted #1?

“You can see here the small planets dominate the picture,”he casually said while referring to a graph depicting the different exoplanet sizes and their number as of July 2010.

Although he refers to these exoplanets as "candidate" Earth-like worlds, Sasselov goes on to talk about the statistical prevalence of small planets throughout the Milky Way.

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Analysis | Pakistan intelligence | Wikileaks
By Michael Moran[1] GlobalPost Columnist

Camp Nathan Smith

A resident of Kandahar City walks past the outer perimeter of Camp Nathan Smith, July 11, 2010. (Ben Brody/GlobalPost)
Click to enlarge photo

NEW YORK — Back in November 2001, just a week after Kabul fell to the U.S.-led invasion forces in Afghanistan and just as the city of Kunduz began to capitulate, the air filled with the steady drone of C-130 transport aircraft landing at the dusty airstrip.

The planes, American-built but flown by the Pakistani Air Force, ostensibly arrived to pick up a few dozen diplomats and their families ahead of the final onslaught on the city. In fact, the transports were stuffed full of agents of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), along with as many as 4,000 Taliban leaders and foot-soldiers.

It was an outrage I wrote about at the time, but amid the rubble of 9/11, most people shrugged it off. Now, in the wake of this week’s revelations[2] about the extent of continued ISI contacts with the Taliban, you have to wonder how many of those who flew out of Kunduz courtesy of the ISI (and with the tacit permission of the George W. Bush administration, since we controlled the skies) have filtered back to kill American soldiers.

The leaking of a small library of classified documents on the Afghan War should put an end to this lie once and for all. Among the revelations found in the documents is that ISI agents meet regularly with Afghan Taliban commanders to help plot attacks and assassinations of selected Afghan officials.

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PHOTOGRAPH: PHILLIP TOLEDANO, “BIRTHDAY BALLOON,” FROM “DAYS WITH MY FATHER” (2008)
(The New Yorker)

Letting Go
What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?
by Atul Gawande August 2, 2010
Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions—and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left.

Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die. It started with a cough and a pain in her back. Then a chest X-ray showed that her left lung had collapsed, and her chest was filled with fluid. A sample of the fluid was drawn off with a long needle and sent for testing. Instead of an infection, as everyone had expected, it was lung cancer, and it had already spread to the lining of her chest. Her pregnancy was thirty-nine weeks along, and the obstetrician who had ordered the test broke the news to her as she sat with her husband and her parents. The obstetrician didn’t get into the prognosis—she would bring in an oncologist for that—but Sara was stunned. Her mother, who had lost her best friend to lung cancer, began crying.

The doctors wanted to start treatment right away, and that meant inducing labor to get the baby out. For the moment, though, Sara and her husband, Rich, sat by themselves on a quiet terrace off the labor floor. It was a warm Monday in June, 2007. She took Rich’s hands, and they tried to absorb what they had heard. Monopoli was thirty-four. She had never smoked, or lived with anyone who had. She exercised. She ate well. The diagnosis was bewildering. “This is going to be O.K.,” Rich told her. “We’re going to work through this. It’s going to be hard, yes. But we’ll figure it out. We can find the right treatment.” For the moment, though, they had a baby to think about.

“So Sara and I looked at each other,” Rich recalled, “and we said, ‘We don’t have cancer on Tuesday. It’s a cancer-free day. We’re having a baby. It’s exciting. And we’re going to enjoy our baby.’ ” On Tuesday, at 8:55 P.M., Vivian Monopoli, seven pounds nine ounces, was born. She had wavy brown hair, like her mom, and she was perfectly healthy.

The next day, Sara underwent blood tests and body scans. Dr. Paul Marcoux, an oncologist, met with her and her family to discuss the findings. He explained that she had a non-small cell lung cancer that had started in her left lung. Nothing she had done had brought this on. More than fifteen per cent of lung cancers—more than people realize—occur in non-smokers. Hers was advanced, having metastasized to multiple lymph nodes in her chest and its lining. The cancer was inoperable. But there were chemotherapy options, notably a relatively new drug called Tarceva, which targets a gene mutation commonly found in lung cancers of female non-smokers. Eighty-five per cent respond to this drug, and, Marcoux said, “some of these responses can be long-term.”

Words like “respond” and “long-term” provide a reassuring gloss on a dire reality. There is no cure for lung cancer at this stage. Even with chemotherapy, the median survival is about a year. But it seemed harsh and pointless to confront Sara and Rich with this now. Vivian was in a bassinet by the bed. They were working hard to be optimistic. As Sara and Rich later told the social worker who was sent to see them, they did not want to focus on survival statistics. They wanted to focus on “aggressively managing” this diagnosis.

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Pete Seeger may be 91 years old, but the iconic folk singer still has plenty to protest. On Friday night at New York’s City Winery, Seeger debuted a new song he wrote about the disastrous BP oil spill as part of a fundraising concert for the Gulf Restoration Network and Global Green USA . “t’s a strange, strange song,&”said Seeger about the new tune, which featured a simple finger-picked chord progression and gravelly ominous lyrics like, “When the drill baby drill turns to spill baby spill/God’s counting on me/God’s counting on you.”Check out video of “God’s Counting on Me, God’s Counting on You”above.

After his set, Seeger told Rolling Stone he doesn’t write many songs these days, but the oil spill inspired him to team up with folk singer Lorre Wyatt to write the track at his home in Beacon, New York. “I’m a fan of old songs that have a lot of repetition, spirituals” Seeger said.”Some of the greatest songs in the world only have one line, like ‘This little light of mine.’ “

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lean back. relax with this

GALLERY HERE.

WHY ARE WIKILEAKS FOUNDERS ANONYMOUS?

WIKILEAKS FEAR IN THE WESTERN FOURTH ESTATE

WIKILEAKS POLITICAL BIAS

From US military computers to a cafe in Brussels, how thousands of classified papers found their way to online activists

Nick Davies

[go here for hyperlinks]
Julian Assange on the Afghanistan war logs: ‘They show the true nature of this war’

US authorities have known for weeks that they have suffered a haemorrhage of secret information on a scale which makes even the leaking of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war look limited by comparison.

The Afghan war logs, from which the Guardian reports today, consist of 92,201 internal records of actions by the US military in Afghanistan between January 2004 and December 2009 – threat reports from intelligence agencies, plans and accounts of coalition operations, descriptions of enemy attacks and roadside bombs, records of meetings with local politicians, most of them classified secret.

The Guardian’s source for these is Wikileaks, the website which specialises in publishing untraceable material from whistleblowers, which is simultaneously publishing raw material from the logs.

Washington fears it may have lost even more highly sensitive material including an archive of tens of thousands of cable messages sent by US embassies around the world, reflecting arms deals, trade talks, secret meetings and uncensored opinion of other governments.

Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, says that in the last two months they have received yet another huge batch of “high-quality material” from military sources and that officers from the Pentagon’s criminal investigations department have asked him to meet them on neutral territory to help them plug the sequence of leaks. He has not agreed to do so.

Behind today’s revelations lie two distinct stories: first, of the Pentagon’s attempts to trace the leaks with painful results for one young soldier; and second, a unique collaboration between the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel magazine in Germany to sift the huge trove of data for material of public interest and to distribute globally this secret record of the world’s most powerful nation at war.

The Pentagon was slow to engage. The evidence they have now collected suggests it was last November that somebody working in a high-security facility inside a US military base in Iraq started to copy secret material. On 18 February Wikileaks posted a single document – a classified cable from the US embassy in Reykjavik to Washington, recording the complaints of Icelandic politicians that they were being bullied by the British and Dutch over the collapse of the Icesave bank; and the tart remark of an Icelandic diplomat who described his own president as “unpredictable”. Some Wikileaks workers in Iceland claimed they saw signs that they were being followed after this disclosure.

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By SEAN B. CARROLL

In 1909, Charles Walcott, a paleontologist and secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, discovered one of the greatest and most famous fossil troves high in the Canadian Rockies on Burgess Pass in British Columbia. The slabs of Burgess Shale that Walcott excavated contained the earliest known examples at the time of many major animal groups in the fossil record, in rocks that were about 505 million years old.

Walcott’s discovery was further evidence of the so-called Cambrian Explosion — the apparently abrupt appearance of complex animals in the fossil record within the Cambrian Period, from about 542 to 490 million years ago. Although not seen before on the scale documented in the Burgess Shale, the emergence of trilobites and other animals in the Cambrian was familiar to paleontologists, and had troubled Charles Darwin a great deal.

The difficulty posed by the Cambrian Explosion was that in Darwin’s day (and for many years after), no fossils were known in the enormous, older rock formations below those of the Cambrian. This was an extremely unsettling fact for his theory of evolution because complex animals should have been preceded in the fossil record by simpler forms.

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Van Gogh’s Last

On this day in 1890 Vincent Van Gogh shot himself in a wheat field outside Auvers-sur-Oise, in France; he died two days later, at the age of thirty-seven. His last letters are fascinating reading, and full of mixed signals about his mood; one final note to his brother, found on his body, says, “Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half foundered because of it. . . .”

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Morning Cup of Links: Real Sea Monsters.

Today’s picture was taken in 1944, and shows roughnecks “making a connection” on a rotary drilling rig in Southwest Oklahoma. Notice that two of the roughnecks are not wearing hard hats. The pipe coming out the rig floor is the drill stem. Each stem is about 30 feet long. So, after drilling each 30 feet, they have to lift the entire drill string, and put another section of pipe on. The large implements connected to the drill stem are the tongs. They are like enormous pipe wrenches. The end of the tongs are connected by chains to a motor. The "driller" operates the motor to pull the chains. The roughnecks keep the tongs on the drill stem. The driller and roughneck work the tongs together to either loosen or tighten the drill stem. It takes about 30 minutes to drill 30 feet, and so this operation has to be done a couple times an hour. When making a connection, there are lots of heavy objects moving around under a lot of force, and the roughnecks are right in the middle of it. As you can imagine, a very dangerous job.

Old Picture of the Day.

A Crooked Road: Darrell Scott

This is the title song from his album released last January

via A Crooked Road: Darrell Scott «.