Author Archives: postroad

Syria: Iran Shows How It Is Done.

Satellite imagery of Israeli airstrike at Damascus airport released – .

Al-Qaeda’s Syrian wing takes over the oilfields once belonging to Assad – .

Russia’s missile shipment will embolden Syria: US.

Syrian-Hizballah’s capture of Qusayr opens direct weapons route to Lebanon.

In Tomorrow’s Wars, Battles Will Be Fought With a 3-D Printer.

.:Middle East Online::US-led navies flex muscles in Gulf manoeuvres :..

Strife hangs over China billions in Myanmar .

In the wee hours of the morning of January 27, 2013, a Wikipedia editor named “Qworty” made a series of 14 separate edits to the Wikipedia page for the late writer Barry Hannah, a well-regarded Southern novelist with a taste for the Gothic and absurd.

Qworty cut paragraphs that included quotes from Hannah’s work. He removed 20 links to interviews, obituaries and reminiscences concerning Hannah. He cut out a list of literary prizes Hannah had won.

Two edits stand out. Qworty excised the phrase “and was regarded as a good mentor” from a sentence that started: “Hannah taught creative writing for 28 years at the University of Mississippi, where he was director of its M.F.A. program…” And he changed the cause of Hannah’s death from “natural causes” to “alcoholism.” But Hannah’s obituaries stated that he had died of a heart attack and been clean and sober for years before his death, while his role as a mentor was testified to in numerous memorials. (Another editor later removed the alcoholism edit.)

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Sophia and I were dating a week when we created The List. We had a lot in common — we were both writers, lived in the same neighborhood, and had just gotten out of marriages — but it was our shared desire to be sexually experimental that really defined our relationship. I’m hardly this adventurous on my own, but after being married for 10 years and realizing Sophia had a yen to try just about anything, I felt at ease about traveling out of my comfort zone with her.

One night, while sipping wine in my apartment, we started adding items to the list of lascivious things we wanted to do together:

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GALLERY.

Going Back to Bimble

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8 classic articles by an outstanding columnist, all free to read online

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On this day in 1937 W. H. Auden’s Spain was published in England; the proceeds from sales of this pamphlet-length poem went to the Spanish Medical Aid Committee, one of a number of international organizations supporting the anti-Franco cause, and a group which Auden had tried to join as an ambulance driver in Spain just months earlier. One who would have had need of such aid was George Orwell: also on this day in 1937, and also in Spain while fighting for the Republican cause, George Orwell was shot in the throat in front-line fighting.

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More Civil War cutups. “Unidentified men in Union uniforms, one pointing a revolver at another’s head.” Half-plate tintype, hand-colored. Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, Library of Congress

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Today’s picture is from 1902, and it shows a Hopi Indian Man with a hoe. The man is a farmer, and it looks like he is growing corn. The picture was taken in New Mexico. If you have ever tried to garden, you know how hard it is to grow things. I sometimes wonder how mankind survived before mechanized farm implements and pesticides. When I grow things it is an enormous battle with bugs, the weather, and the soil. Even in the picture above, the man has the incredible resource of a steel hoe. Imagine trying to farm before steel implements.

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The International Council of Museums (ICOM) established International Museum Day (IMD) in 1977 to encourage public awareness of the role of museums in the development of society.

Every year, International Museum Day has a theme in order to promote museum issues within society. This year, the museum community decided to celebrate IMD 2013 around the theme: Museums (Memory + Creativity) = Social Change

Alfred Eisenstaedt, A Dutch grandmother and child at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam looking at the “Nightwatch,“ 1932 (326.1989)

I love museums: the beauty, and sometimes the horror, that they are preserving from the ravages of time.

Fans in a Flashbulb.

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Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George (left) and Former Acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller testify before the House on Friday. (Alex Wong/Getty)

May 18: This post has been corrected [1].

The IRS division responsible for flagging Tea Party groups has long been an agency afterthought, beset by mismanagement, financial constraints and an unwillingness to spell out just what it expects from social welfare nonprofits, former officials and experts say.

The controversy that erupted in the past week, leading to the ousting of the acting Internal Revenue Service commissioner, an investigation by the FBI, and congressional hearings that kicked off Friday, comes against a backdrop of dysfunction brewing for years.

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1960 : Los Angeles Policemen in Drag

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Walk this way

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Whenever a new acquaintance learns that I report on porn sets, I end up fielding a similar line of questioning about What It’s Like. Are the performers trapped? Are they hurt? Coerced? On drugs? Do they have no other options? Are they dumb?

Most of those questions have easy answers—it’s usually “no”—but it’s difficult to communicate the full lives and experiences of a diverse group of people working in an industry steeped in public fascination and shame. Now, I can tell them to buy a ticket to I Love Your Work, a new online documentary that follows the lives of nine women over ten days of shooting a lesbian porn film in New York City in 2010. Jonathan Harris, 33, followed these women from wake to sleep, capturing ten-second video clips every five minutes of whatever they happened to be doing—taking the subway, sharing their wedding photos, putting on their shoes, discussing their tattoos, debating feminism, talking about frogs, walking in the park, undressing for the camera. Then, he compiled the footage into a six-hour interactive experience, and offered it up to viewers for $10 for a 24 window of access. (You can watch the trailer here). I talked to Harris, 33, about his experience making the documentary.

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Rubens, His Wife Helena Fourment and Their Son Frans by Rubens c.1636This superb portrait by Rubens of his wife Hélène and their three year old son, Frans can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Frans is the only one of their children featured which makes us think that Rubens did not see this work as a family portrait but had more to do with his desire to show off the beauty of his second wife. Look how Rubens has depicted himself and his son in this work. They both look lovingly at Hélène. She is the wife to one and the mother to the other. This in a way is Rubens’ intimate tribute to his wife. In the background we see a caryatid, the sculpted female figure which is serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar, which along with the fountain in the right background, symbolise fecundity

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edward hopper

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Artist Paul McCarthy is at it again. We spotted his newest inflatable sculpture, a massive pile of feces, on Booooooom. You can see it after the jump, along with other public artworks that display a naughty, irreverent, and pervy side. It’s fascinating to observe the public’s reactions to subjects normally kept hush-hush in polite company. These installations, performances, and sculptures have nothing to hide, though. See how potty humor, private sex acts, and other naughty themes have entered the public sphere, framed by the fine art world.

SLIDE SHOW.

An hour above high camp on the Southeast Ridge of Everest, Panuru Sherpa and I passed the first body. The dead climber was on his side, as if napping in the snow, his head half covered by the hood of his parka, goose down blowing from holes torn in his insulated pants. Ten minutes later we stepped around another body, her torso shrouded in a Canadian flag, an abandoned oxygen bottle holding down the flapping fabric.

Trudging nose to butt up the ropes that had been fixed to the steep slope, Panuru and I were wedged between strangers above us and below us. The day before, at Camp III, our team had been part of a small group. But when we woke up this morning, we were stunned to see an endless line of climbers passing near our tents.

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Airplane wrecks usually denote tragedies, but photographer Dietmar Eckell aims to highlight the rare miracles from the history of aviation where everyone survived….”‘Happy End’ is a photo-project about miracles in aviation history – 15 airplanes that had forced landings but all on board survived and were rescued from the remote locations,” says Dietmar Eckell a photographer from Dusseldorf, Germany….For nearly three years, Eckell trekked to extremely isolated locations across the world — nine countries on four continents — from Australia to Iceland looking for abandoned remains of plane wreckage. These planes have remain abandoned from anywhere between 10-70 years and have become part of the landscape. In the forests, trees grow through broken windows. In the desert, piles of sand conform to the shape of the fuselage. In the mountains, their gray metal innards start to resemble the rocks around them. According to Eckell, all wreckage involve stories of survival and sheer luck.

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The thick warm air, the hazy sky and the rugged empty mountains that gradually give way to the immensity of a white, shimmering salt desert all leave the traveller in awe of this cruel yet fascinating landscape. Overlapping the Afar region of northeastern Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti, this is the lowest point in Africa and one of the hottest places on Earth.

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Containers have been more important for globalisation than freer trade

THE humble shipping container is a powerful antidote to economic pessimism and fears of slowing innovation. Although only a simple metal box, it has transformed global trade. In fact, new research suggests that the container has been more of a driver of globalisation than all trade agreements in the past 50 years taken together.

Containerisation is a testament to the power of process innovation. In the 1950s the world’s ports still did business much as they had for centuries. When ships moored, hordes of longshoremen unloaded “break bulk” cargo crammed into the hold. They then squeezed outbound cargo in as efficiently as possible in a game of maritime Tetris. The process was expensive and slow; most ships spent much more time tied up than plying the seas. And theft was rampant: a dock worker was said to earn “$20 a day and all the Scotch you could carry home.”

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Dr. Annie Lennox, Dr. Willie Nelson & Dr. Carole King

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Vicky Pryce, the economist convicted of taking speeding points for disgraced cabinet minister Chris Huhne, is writing a book inspired by her time behind bars. What can people glean about life inside from books written by prisoners?

Vicky Pryce, the economist convicted of taking speeding points for disgraced cabinet minister Chris Huhne, is writing a book inspired by her time behind bars. What can people glean about life inside from books written by prisoners?

Pryce’s book Prisonomics will explain the economics of imprisonment. She joins a long list of people who have squeezed a book out of their experience of life inside.

All have shown something about the nature of incarceration.
You meet some interesting characters

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Every year National Geographic asks the world’s adventurers to enter their epic photographs into its Traveler Photo Contest – and each year the submissions prove stunning.

The 25th annual National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest is now accepting submissions, and thousands of professional and amateur snappers have already entered their stunning travel pictures of proud leopards and swimming pigs.

GALLERY.

Who owns the stars? Nobody, right? Therefore, you can put stars under your name and get certification for it! This, of course, comes with a price. International Star Registry (IRS),the original star registry that has been naming stars for people since 1979, allows you to do just that. Celebrities, dignitaries, and individuals all over the world have used its services to buy a star for friends and family….The IRS offers a gift package wherein a special star is selected in the sky and you get your Star Name and Star Date recorded along with it. The gift package includes a beautiful parchment certificate, a sky chart with your name and the star’s coordinates, and an informative booklet on astronomy. All names in the astronomical compendium will be published in Your Place in the Cosmos©, which is registered in the U.S. Copyright Office. However, this is not recognized by the scientific community. Stars’ names are only reserved in the International Star Registry.

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A couple of years ago, my friend moved out to Malaysia in search of a life where a winter wardrobe isn’t a thing and you don’t have to worry about stuff like moronic bro culture or seeing Kim K’s face on television. What he found was a job as a bar manager in an establishment frequented by Malay punks covered in swastikas, wearing Combat 18 (a neo-Nazi terrorist organization) T-shirts and harping on about “Malay power.”

Turns out they’re a group of far-right nationalists who want to rid Malaysia of any non-ethnic Malays and stop immigration into the country. Which, although pretty backwards and reductive, isn’t all that surprising in the current world climate. What was surprising, and kind of confusing, is that they identify themselves as neo-Nazis, are fond of sieg-heiling and listen to Nazi bands like Skrewdriver and Angry Aryan, yet definitely aren’t Aryan themselves. And adopting a worldview that specifically discriminates against your race seems a very odd thing to do.

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Years ago, along the cacophonous roads leading from Ramses Train Station in Cairo, I came across a small girl with a bright red headscarf weaving her way in and out of the slow-moving traffic, her bare feet shrouded in a haze of exhaust fumes. I watched as she banged on the windows of vehicles, the red of her headscarf a lurching traffic light forcing buses and trucks to a sudden halt. When drivers opened their windows to shoo her away, the girl pleaded for a chance to say something, running alongside the traffic to keep up. Uncowed by dismissive hand gestures or hastily resealed windows, she visited car after car, like a bee in a field of giant flowers, looking for a chance to speak to someone. She accepted the dregs of a water bottle and the tossed remains of snacks, but it wasn’t until she made one driver laugh, then another, that she finally received two precious coins.

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You press the pedal at the base of Eduard Bersudsky’s sculpture Piper (2013). The shadow on the wall moves, the cogs begin to hum, the little bell rings, and the pair of gendered fauns flex their legs to activate the dog typist at the typewriter hammering out memos lost to history. Tip, tap, tippity-tap, its tail sways, and the muscular fauns leer. They have wolves’ heads, just as the humanoid pair animating the giant buggy face is monkey-headed. They make the face smile, his eyes move this way and that, and his pipe — crikey, there’s a bird in his pipe! — go up and down. And are those tiny feline-ursine centurions armed with shields guarding the Piper, and what are they guarding it from? Unless, of course, this is a Jungian dream of the unconscious where beasts and innocents are deliciously free to copulate, poke fun at authority, snack on bugs, and squeak instead of talk?

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“I always use this chart of childhood death,” Bill Gates says. “In 1960, 25% of kids died before the age of 5. And now we’re down below 6% of kids dying before the age of 5.”

We’re sitting in a bare conference room at his foundation’s D.C. headquarters. Gates — who Bloomberg News calculates is once again the world’s richest man — is in town to talk to members of Congress about his top priority this year: Global health – and, in particular, the total eradication of polio. He wants to drive that 6 percent even lower, and he believes he can. Wiping out a disease like polio sounds impossible. But it’s actually, Gates tells me, completely achievable. Perhaps even by the end of 2013. This is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Bill Gates holds vaccine during a news conference after his address to the 64th World Health Assembly at the United Nations European headquarters in Geneva, May 17, 2011. (DENIS BALIBOUSE / REUTERS)

Bill Gates holds vaccine during a news conference after his address to the 64th World Health Assembly at the United Nations European headquarters in Geneva, May 17, 2011.

(Denis Balibouse / Reuters)

Ezra Klein: Your Foundation is known for taking a particularly data-driven approach to its work. So how do you know what’s actually working when you’re in failed states with very little data-collection capacity?

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