Atomized Mk ii

Ad Astra

Again it is Christmas time and I return to one of my constants for this web log. A near random pixel drawing featuring St. Nickolaus, and my attempt to gin up some context for it. Pixel drawings amused me enough when I first encountered them in the late 90s; their increasing quaintness endears them to me even further now. This years pixel drawing is Orbital Sciences's failed launch of a cargo module to the International Space Station earlier this fall.

Wallops Island VA 28Oct14 /pb

The scene is Wallops Island Virginia, 28 October this year. The second-hand Russian motor (AJ-26, formerly NK-33) powering the first stage of the Antares rocket has just given out negatively affecting the rocket's vertical aspirations. Santa, hmm well, this was back in October. So we'll say he was out on a qualification run...for the reindeer. Part of a training cycle; takeoff and landings, air navigation, that sort of thing. He got more than he bargained for here, having to pull up hard and jink like mad to avoid flaming debris.

I don't intend to be hard of the space game. Yes Orbital will be 12 months rebuilding and remediating the Wallops Island launch site, which is down by Chincoteague (no ponies were harmed in this incident), but it wouldn't be fair not to note NASA's successful launch and recovery of the Orion test vehicle a little more than month later. The Orion Spacecraft, an unassuming but substantial update of the basic Apollo design, and the SLS heavy lift rocket, the newly designed launch vehicle that will eventually carry it, is a platform with a future.

This may hardly seem a Christmas message, but it is -- with a little assembly. A ragged metaphor of sorts; offered at the risk of channeling my inner Luddite to say nothing of a mordant skepticism. The way forward is ever a line drawn from the summed vectors of success and failure.

More than a metaphor or less depending on how you view it. An exemplification perhaps. What is the way to the Stars. What course do we plot between the poles of human nature towards our destiny? Our empathy and problem solving cleverness on one hand. Our aggression and callousness on the other.

Widening this, putting it at another remove: technics, to use the old term, is what humans do. We are a tool using Animal. It's near all we have. We need to make the most of it.

Space exploration is a leading and freighted example of what can be called technological optimism. I have doubts about technological progress, as a category. I measure this doubt against a positive desire for human progress. Specifically I am against conflating the two. For me this doubt results in a hierarchical reduction of technological progress to technological innovation. I accept that technological solutions generally engender a new range of problems. Still I am enough a person of my times that I view technology as more than a mere lateral spinning out, a material cornacopia. But a lessor victory than true progress.

Let us view progress as against entropy; the ordering of higher energy levels in the physical world. Thermodynamic Entropy is defined as the unavailability of energy to do work within a system. It is an equilibrium state, a perfect unorder, in which without additional energy no further change can occur.

Entropy is a measure of disorder or uncertainty. Viewed from the perspective of information entropy is zero when only one certain outcome is expected. Absolute when no outcome is certain. The second law of thermodynamics supposedly says, the entropy of an isolated system can increase, but not decrease. This is one of those things covered by the rubric the Arrow of time. Social entropy implies the tendency of social networks to break down over time, moving from cooperation and advancement towards conflict and chaos.

What I see as progress, that order of higher being, a more ordered existence. A better human nature. Is a state a progress at odds with entropy. What might be added to the game is more information, more certainty, more self knowledge. Our civilization, and our individual lives are layered like an onion with self deceptions and rationalization. Denial of the future, denial of how the present came about from the past. When we can more clearly inescapably see outcomes emerge from our actions, we will be halfway there.

Wednesday, 24 December 2014 15:15 EST #

Rehoboth Film Festival

One of the things I look forward to in the late fall is the Rehoboth Beach Independent Film Festival. This is Delaware and Dogfish head beer we're speaking of here: Sussex county. What some refer to as Lower Slower Delaware. My older sister has a vacation house in Milton, a staging ground to the Cape Henlopen beaches and towns.

This is inspired strongly by our childhood in Massachusetts where our grandfather, himself a native Vermonter, had a cottage in Pocasett on Cape Cod. A small place by the sea.

Rehoboth's film festival usually goes off the first week of November and revolves around the local cineplex, the Atlantic Midway theaters, and the little big tent they set up in the parking lot behind the theater for this affair. One of those white pavilion style tents you see at outdoor receptions.

The serendipitous charm of this festival's off-Hollywood features draws in no small part from its occasion deep in the communities off season when ordinarily the towns of Milton, Lewes, Rehoboth and Dewey are pretty dead. It is true that the older I get the more I like the off season . My grandfather was similarly amenable to trips to the Massachusetts Cape in the New England dead of winter when the cape became little more than a village.

The first year I attended I saw a movie by the ever-unique Miranda July. A couple plan to adopt a cat, paw -paw, a decision that utterly disrupts the future of their small world.

It was also at this festival that I saw the documentary Searching for Sugarman about the partially forgotten 60's Detroit singer Sixto Rodriguez.

I watched several films for the 2014 festival and thought five or six deserved mention. The first; the program's tribute to Matt Haley. For this you actually get two films and a story. Matt Haley was a restauranteur in the Delmarva beach area. He owned I think eight in the region and more elsewhere. He was a benefactor to this film festival.

On Columbus day weekend earlier in the fall I was having dinner at Papa Grandes in Rehoboth, which is one of his restaurants. I ordered a balsamic vinegar soda a house product and was taken enough by it to make a note of the companies URL on the bottle. When I plugged this in to Google a few hours later I was saddened to learned that he had in fact died in a mountain automobile accident while on a motorcycle trip through the Indian Himalayas just two months earlier. He was 54 years old Matt Haley, SoDel Concepts.

The first film, a short, was called Interview 7 P.M. and features Haley himself as one of the main characters.

The second a 2006 long feature length documentary was called Riding Solo to the Top of the World (2006) - IMDb. This one was fascinating and the photography stunning especially as we are told essentially untrained. The director-narrator, a resident of Mumbai, decides to outfit a medium sized motorcycle for camping and carrying a video camera the ride up to Leh in Kashmir and around the Changthang Plateau. Haley was apparently riding with this filmmaker, Guarav Jani, in a recreation of that trip at the time of his accident.

The next film was another documentary, the Overnighters. This one was about a paster in a town in the North Dakota Fracking fields. A boom town in the Natural Gas economy. People flocked to this town for work with little or nothing in the way of a plan, there is no longer any affordable housing. The paster is putting up the temporarily homeless in his church and this is causing conflict with his congregation and with the town. The themes are small towns and small minds for one. The sort of brutal determinism this type of economy brings on for another. In the end the crux of film is made by the filmmakers own adjustments as the intended story takes complicated turns.

Frontera was a feature with a number of well known Hollywood actors: Ed Harris, Eva Longoria, Amy Madigan and Michael Pena. The plot was somewhat pat, overlaying a murder investigation on a story of a group of illegal immigrants crossing the Arizona border. The message of the movie primarily seemed to be there are bad people, but nothing is gained from automatically imputing bad motives to those no different from yourselves. Well that and "good fences make good neighbors". I found myself humming Thao Nguyen's song We the Common as I walked out of that one ["All they wanted was a villain, all they had was me"]

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter was a good movie, perhaps the best there. It was also a little confusing even tricky, and sad. The basic plot has a young Japanese woman, while on a self styled treasure hunt which seems to be her pastime, happen across a VHS cassette of the Coen Brothers movie Fargo. She believes the movie depicts a true story -- in large part because the movie's preface says so. That there is a suitcase full of money in the Dakotas in the the United States becomes her purpose in life: to decode the movies clues, and go and find it in the featureless white North Dakota landscapes . Kumiko I should add here is played by Rinko Kikuchi who played Mako Mori in the movie Pacific Rim.

Ticket for Kumiko the Treasure Hunter at the 2014 Rehoboth Fim Festival :photo pb

The trickiness of the movie which I believe is intentional on the part of the filmmakers, David Zellner (who plays a role in the movie) and his brother Nathan (They wrote the script also). It lies in the portrayal of Kumiko's actions as cute funny or mischievous in the first portion of the film. Her repeated simple statement in English that she wants to "go to Fargo." This masks the fact that she is suffering from a profound psychiatric breakdown. One clue is her notebook on her treasure hunts glimpsed briefly which takes her obsessions away from the merely idiosyncratic. Another is her inability to relate to or appreciate the people trying to help her. After the movie I was listening to people as they filed out into the Cape Henlopen High school cafeteria. Many said they were disappointed by the ending which they thought was too facile and unlikely. It was not.

Belle and Sebastien is essentially a movie about A boy and his dog. [this should be in no way confused with the movie a boy and his dog from the Harlan Ellison short story. Never watch that movie ever]. This film is set in the french alps during the War. It visually stunning, more than a little indie film on that account at the very least. It is also reboot of the Belle and Sebastien franchise as nearly as I can tell. The World war II subplot being new to this telling

The original story was written by the French author, Cecile Aubry, in 1964. It was made into a tv series the next year and dubbed into English for commonwealth audiences the next. In France and UK pop culture it seems to have functioned as their "Lassie". Aubry was a well known French actress and had made one Hollywood movie the Black Rose in the early fifties. Her son played the part of Sebastien in the original 1960's series.

My sister Ann saw the documentary Code Black and liked it enough that I'll mention it for her. Code Black follows Los Angeles County Hospital's emergency room. The title refers to the term for when an emergency room is over-capacity and losing its effectiveness. One of our other sisters is a nurse at Anova Arlington.

Now in its 17th year the Rehoboth International Film Festival seems to be encountering some growing pains. There was a petition in the big tent urging the Midway theaters not to drop the festival from their screens next year. A letter on page three of the festival program from the organizers to the Midway theater further treats this issue without getting to whatever is the heart of the problem. The festival is highly dependent on the Midway Theaters, being the only theater in the area. Already available screens given over to the festival have dropped from six to two.

I can easily imagine that whoever distributes industry product to the Midway theaters does not like losing seats, but early November seems like a moment of reduced urgency. The Midway Theaters themselves are likely sell as much popcorn and soda for these as any other movies. The "why" here is not immediately clear.

Cape Henlopen High School venue used this year as a temporary option, is fine as a supplement (being mile away from the Midway screens complicates scheduling a little). A large modern High School with an outstanding and large (800 seat) auditorium. Capable of 16mm and 35mm projection and medium resolution digital; blu-ray and the like. But it is just one screen, not able to support the infrastructure of the festival on its own.

Even indie film festivals, Like this one, if it hasn't already, will be moving onto Digital Cinema. When I think of small town movie theaters or repertory theaters, like the Avalon by my sisters house in DC. I wonder how much digital conversion cost. I assume most commercial theaters have done this already, I assume also for them it was done on a cost sharing basis among the concerned parties. According to Wikipedia the costs are in the neighborhood of $100,000 per screen with perhaps another $30K for installation and fitting out. That could vary considerably depending on what type of system you are installing. The BigScreen Cinema Guide pages on this while skirting the issue of cost refers to five companies selling two basic systems coming in two resolutions. These are Texas Instruments' DLP system sold by Barco Christie and NEC, and Sony's SXRD system. The films arrive in a digital cinema package (DCP) 90 to 300 GB wrapped in XML metadata -- via either a special external drive or massive download. The resolutions are 2k (2048 × 1080) and 4k (4096 x 2160), only 4k seems the viable installation currently and is designed to handle 2k input.

The ticket handling and administration of the festival is also showing a little strain. The manual "Shoebox" ticket system perhaps foremost. Sales and seat counts need to be separate from the Midway's commercial fare so their practice is to print out card-stock tickets for as many seats as the designated venue has for each showing. These are arranged in sections across around ten shoebox-sized card board boxes. When a set of tickets is gone, the sales volunteers communicate that a movie is no longer available through a (physical) bulletin board to those planning their schedules. This goes through an extra round as festival favorites get additional showings at the end of the weekend. This proves cumbersome and labor intensive when the number of screened films is over 80 as it is now.

The festival directors in the program preface are aware of these problems and speak of a reformatted festival for the future. Something that suggests smaller and distributed. A difficult thing when by its nature a film festival is a singular exceptional event focused on the big screen as an art form.

Sunday, 21 December 2014 18:00 EST #

Islamic Un-Stated

The pivot to Asia, the US military and foreign policy refocus, is currently doing a double-to-left-march. We arrive again in the middle east; still in Afghanistan, back in Iraq, in Syria as well, engaged only in a technical bombing campaign, although under the same Authorization of Military Force (AUMF) as the initial war Lawfare > Obama Administration Explains Why It Thinks Islamic State Strikes Comply With War Powers Resolution. This collective struggle is now America's longest war America's Never-Ending War by Brahma Chellaney - Project Syndicate:. Didn't we already try this? Well yes and no.

In Afghanistan we have fought the Taliban, hosts of Al Qaeda (original formula), for over a dozen years with little to show for it. There is a nominally free government -- in the patch of the country around Kabul enjoying a tenuous security Afghanistan: 'A Shocking Indictment' by Rory Stewart | The New York Review of Books. We have destroyed Iraq, a creative destruction, but rather complete to the indigenous sovereign political process as practiced.

So whats different now? It's a post Arab Spring world out there and authoritarian governments have stepped up suppression of dissent in winning and losing bids for stability. Syria is broken, Iraq is broken. And in the yawning vacuum, extreme and radical groups form and gather Bad Moon Rising.

Our elected leaders have made a declaration to destroy the group that calls itself (variously) the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL) ISIS used to be al-Qaeda in Iraq - 17 things about ISIS and Iraq you need to know - Vox. This is the form of the name I prefer capturing both their ambitions and limitations What's In a Name? Debating the Islamic State Moniker(s) . Our inability to tolerate them is directly opposed to the great appeal for a group like ISIL for many in this region. ISIL is little different from other Islamic rebel groups from it's origins as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) to other groups fighting in the incinerating chaos of the Syrian civil war. Irregardless of the varying grouping and sides they take (which not even the great sunni / shiite divide clarifies). Perhaps more aspirational in their cinematic B-roll violence The real ideology driving ISIS isn't Islam or caliphate revivalism: it's ultraviolence - Vox:. A violence like a drug gang in a turf war; thuggish and brutal. Miami in the eighties. Northern Mexico over the last two decades. All oil, rackets, and street control [The Gangs of Iraq:](http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/11/03/.

By contrast the Khorasan group (wolf team of al qaeda) identified a half-beat later as an additional critical target has an almost refreshingly normal terrorist cast to it.

It is worthwhile here to pause and ask if any particular concrete idea driving us to war. What does the President think he is going to accomplish here? If he is reacting to the alarmists of whatever cast or motivation, we ask: there is an existential threat to what exactly? What reading to national security do we give to the chaos of militias and civil wars isolated in regional conflicts? To King Oil and America inc.? How fragile is the World Order? How resilient?

The world order America represents -- this is everything touched by the Bretton Woods agreement and most of what gets called and named by trade agreements and globalization -- even if suffused with our self interest remains an order pushing towards an ideal of cooperation. A Pax Americana.

At the least, all this shows the return of, or persistence of the view of the greatest structural threats coming from areas termed the non-integrating world. Which in addition to the arc of the Tigris and Euphrates river basins in Syria and Iraq also includes Libya, Sudan and much of West Africa. These are roughly the areas identified a decade ago under the rubric the Pentagon's new-map. This was the title of a book by Thomas Barnett representing Department of Defense thinking in the recent post cold war period. Reflecting a tentative comprehension that a bipolar world had not given way to a uni-polar world but a manifold one.

When it comes to the constant work of enforcing comity, subduing extremism and violence. civil repair and exercises in nation building; the line is whether we believe in our order or not Governing a World Out of Order by Anne-Marie Slaughter - Project Syndicate. It is the position of the philosophical egoist who believes their order is a just one, that it is optimal for everyone and ought be extended. Or that of the psychological egoists who are aware at end they are only engaged capturing the world's good for themselves. It is a tricky line. A primary view of the modern nation state is of a community that creates a compact among its citizens for greater concern, value and law than is found in the void without. There is little tolerance in this view for sharing. For sharing the wealth, or for sharing world organizational principles. With China, for example.

The danger incumbent on the course of ever maintaining the order of things is that we become serial interventionists. That with every iteration of this with every strained ad hoc coalition thrown together the least lovely aspect of our motivations are cast in stark relief. As well, among the myriad waring factions of the world there is the constant often desperate call for outside intervention to save them; the hunt for a De(US) ex Machina to answer their troubles.

There are limits to the efficacy of kinetic approach. The bundle of loose conceptions that one can guide events to positive outcomes through means that seem full of purposeful action, but are only themselves violence and destruction. We have great capacity and predilection for bombing countries and peoples, then bombing in turn those radicalized by that bombing in an endless repeat cycle. It shouldn't be necessary to say how this is madness.

The problem is that airstrikes don't win wars, or accomplish much beyond the merely tactical. Ground troops occupying and controlling territory do. They don't necessarily need to be, or even ought to be, American troops.

To that point, a practical consideration of such a war is the supply chain. The long distance logistics involved in what is inevitably a war of attrition. A group like ISIL can equip and field a fighter on this battlefield for only a few hundred dollars a month. Car bombs and truck-mounted machine guns combined with small-arms attack co-ordinated by cell phone and radio are as effective as helicopters and networked C3 in against the Iraqi army we spent half a decade training. They would also be effective enough against any thin force the US puts on the ground not backed by full modern airpower. A last consideration, often overlooked, is how the US Soldier is always the bigger target. Not a soft target, but always the prize target. To be seen attacking Americans is a resource and a recruitment tool. The physical presence of US soldiers is a embodiment of the sense of powerlessness that drives the frustration with and hatred of the West in the region.

What kind of Just War, or even legal one can can be waged by wading into this regional disorder? Something that for all the talk of the radical newness of wars against non-state actors like al Qaeda and ISIL, resembles colonial wars more than a little. Not least by the the centrality of violence against external structures of control. Control that forms patterns even the fabric of ethnic and religious divides. Here the Lawfare blog's suggested updating of the AUMF Lawfare > A Draft AUMF to Get the Discussion Going is an attempt at grounding and narrowing this uncontrolled conflict.

Confronting lawlessness seems reasonable even demanded, but war always equals the failure of diplomacy. This administrations instincts are laudable: we do not need to be rushing back into a middle east war. There is not a military solution to this set of events. Neither this administration not the last were able to articulate a clear and rational set of policy goals for the region. We have no real program.

A phrase that often circles the edge of subsequent discussion is Drain the Swamp A metaphor of mosquitoes dengue fever and crocodiles. This is closely related to the "Failed States"; line of thinking eg: The birth and perhaps death of anxiety about failed states - The Washington Post. Separate the dissatisfied and the roots of their bitterness goes the reasoning and hostility will end. Gainfully employed people able to speak towards their own moral destiny are people without need for violence. Of course US support for democracy occasionally results in popular demagogic extremists gaining local power; with no intent to share or ever leave power. Which leads to policy disintegration that ends often with Washington quietly supporting reactionary backlashes.

The best approach might be to reduce how much we try to do. Lead by example and investment not intervention, Violence is a strange attractor, of more and worse violence. Some level of active authority is a bulwark against anarchy. To the libertarian-minded safe in places with a grid of existing cultural norms anarchy can appear un problematic, others find a state of lawless and savage nature. But it is each societies own responsibility (and duty) to find the balance they can live with. An interventionist can not find it for them. I could add here that sovereignty is only as strong as its legitimacy. Democracy has its discontents, brittle tyranny, its own problems.

Left unstated this weakness and chaos across the mid-east may be seen by some as preferable to strength and unity.

War has this proactive allure -- taking arms against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and all. The US needs to get beyond fighting everyone who wants to fight us. Minding the concept that regional wars and civil disintergrations ought to be treated like wild fires; isolated, fire-breaked, and allowed to burn out. Small wars becoming plural and of steady state are not that small. Duration alone deepens them. All wars descend into savage enterprise. It is about destroying and killing after all. A whirlpool of chaos a flood of distemper which no regime change or decapitation of a terrorist band can break.

This is inevitably transferred home; the violence disease the dysfunction, imported home to the public and to the labyrinth government.This is what mean little wars do. Increasingly efforts are turned to the sum of fears, to material security. A tower of jealousy, watch-full looking ever outwards and in.

Wednesday, 19 November 2014 20:30 EST #

RangerRanger

I want to take a moment here and write short and particular inquiry into old aircraft carriers. It is about that class of carriers they called the supercarriers when they were first built in the late 1950's. The Forrestal-class aircraft carrier.

Specifically I refer to the USS Ranger (CV 61), A ship I served on, the campaign to save the Ranger and those who are trying. A short list of these would include Rachel Shelton's SavetheRanger change.org petition Petition | U.S. Navy: Please save the USS Ranger from the scrap heap! | Change.org. The separate Save the Ranger Facebook Group Save the Ranger Facebook page. And the now apparently defunct Ranger Foundation USS Ranger (CVA/CV-61) History and Memorial which seems to have stopped updating around the time the original museum campaign fell short. I would also round in others such as the Shipwreckology weblog for their post last month USS Ranger Museum Ship or Razor Blades - Shipwreckology, and a website called RangerGuy. The Ranger has been in mothballs out of the active fleet since 1993. In 2010 it was put up for disposal after a failed attempt to raise enough money for a preservation placement. On the Columbia river just up from Portland I believe was the working idea.

That ought to have put an end to things, but did not. The Navy's largely non committal stance to the public on this matter is part of the problem. I can't tell if the Navy has a policy of not discussing this type of matter with the public, or whether they don't know what they want here.

What is needed is a clear statement from the Navy: why or why not. Can they articulate convincingly why the Ranger needs to be disassembled or merely dissemble until it is? I can see there being reasons; I'm just not hearing them. Does the Navy need the money? Need the deal rather. Whatever it is about this process that makes it agreeable to put such a warship out to this market for a penny. Is there a tiny grey line on budget somewhere where this is accounted for? Does the steel industry need the steel? Its always possible that amount of high quality steel makes a difference on the finance and manufacture of new warships or other critical infrastructure. Is setting up a Forestal class carrier as a museum too expensive? Are the Forestal's just too massive to house and maintain properly? These are big ships -- over a thousand feet long, 60,00 tons, drawing about 35 ft of water.

Does the Navy feel there are already enough aviation museums? Between four Essex class ships and the Midway in San Diego? The first four, Yorktown, Intrepid, Hornet, Lexington; (CVS 10-12, and 16) were all built during World War II. Later rebuilt to the Oriskany class standard with angled flight decks and (most) steam catapults in the late 1950's, to operate modern jet aircraft. The significantly larger Midway (CV 41) designed as a category killer during the war wasn't completed until late 1945. The Midway went through two major refits not coming out of service until 1997. The Forrestal's are a magnitude larger than that.

Finally it needs to be asked does the Navy have a legitimate stake in not letting such a museum fail? If the fund raising to acquire a ship and permanent berthing is weak, what does that say about the program going forward and inevitable climbing maintenance fees. The Navy likely views this as a significant potential public relations problem.

The USS Ranger in a frisket from the period I was on her and used to ink friskets for a living

That said there is a case for having another museum and picking the Ranger. The Forrestal's were a critical cold war weapon system (the Ranger was the first US carrier built with a co-axial flight deck, rather than as a shipyard change order or refit). Without keeping one an entire and unique class of warship is lost. I have the impression after following this matter for several years that many people thought that one of the Forrestals would be preserved (the one-for-all slogan). A generation or two of naval aviation sailors have called these ships home. The whole fleet sailed with them. This means something. A legacy to share with friends relatives children and grandchildren. I was also particularly taken with Len Dalat's (@landalat on twitter) recent testimonial in the Seattle Times about being rescued by the USS Ranger with his family as a Vietnamese boat person in 1980 Guest: Save the USS Ranger -- for saving my life as a Vietnamese refugee | Opinion | The Seattle Times. Something the Ranger had done the year before as well when I was on her. He is currently a colonel in the US Army.

At the risk of disloyalty it wouldn't have to be the Ranger; although the Ranger has its arguments and really is the only one of its class left. Moreover for me, deploying on a solitary Ranger Westpac as part of the airwing, before being assigned to a shore billet for the remainder during my enlistment (RVAH 7 decommissioned), it is my one and only ship. My brother-in-law Doug served on three different USCG vessels. All other things being equal I would trade those last two years at OpNav for two more years in the fleet. Sometimes I have dreams where for variously improbable sets of circumstances I am impelled to put to sea again. Of course these dreams never involve 15 hour work days or galley food two weeks into an at-sea period, but the USS Ranger stays with me. There is the possibility of preserving one of the latter Kitty Hawk class carriers, arguably the perfected vision of conventionally powered super carrier. The USS John F. Kennedy is currently on donation hold in Norfolk, Potentially the USS Kitty Hawk (CV 63), currently on reserve in Bremerton with the Ranger is still available too.

The thing that bothers me about the dragged-out-low-information way this is being handled is the discreditable nature of the scavenging practice that appears to be happening. This was alluded to and evidenced on the @SaveTheRanger twitter feed a few weeks ago [around 19 Aug see @Tuckerpete] . Someone in NavSea is allowing groups to come onto the Ranger and rip chairs lights phones equipment NTDS counsels out wholesale -- degrading its preservation potential. Does the Navy's right hand not know what its left hand is doing or are they just being assholes? This would have to be the sort of pilferage a ship in catagory X RANGER - Naval Vessel Register is supposed to be guarded against. Pitting Museums and Foundations against one another; that's some bad gumbo.

Sunday, 07 September 2014 19:03 EST #

Illiberal States

There is a grand argument out there. More than a mere disagreement, a dry academic exercise. A cold hard dialogue on what is the best way to organize a countries governance, and engage the world. The argument doesn't break down necessarily along the lines of market economies and communist systems. Or democracies and dictatorships. Although it doesn't not do that. More, it is a way of continuing those arguments away from the outcomes of the last quarter century since history's settled end. History continues unabated filled with Crackdowns and Cauldilos. The former comprising elites afraid of their people, and losing control of things - losing control of cultural and economic systems that feed their wealth. The latter the tendency to let a "big man" run things. The big man seems to know what he (or she) is doing, really seems to want the job and represents that he (or she) understands your national character better that you do.

With some 168 sovereign nations there are always some that are particularly afflicted with this kind of retrenchment on liberty at any given time -- and doing things that get the sort of notice that lands them in the western press where I might hear and read about it. I except Syria because crackdowns evolving into full-blown civil wars are outside the purview of this line of thinking. Venezuela is more on target, but at the moment with its big man gone, the country is in a transition either into a petty pattern tyranny or back to an open society.

Thailand has had 17 constitutions since 1932. The 19 coups attempts in the same period Why Thailand Has Had More Coup Attempts Than Almost Any Other Country:, with 12 of those successful Thailand's coup addiction: the story of its 80-year, never-ending crisis - Vox:. These coups have been the mainspring of this constant flux. The causes for this are several foremost perhaps the un-remarkable presence of the same sovereign since 1946, Bhumibol Adulyadej Thailand's king and head of state. you have new money versus old money in a state where the cities are intagrated with the modernizing world economy. Am urban educated elite against a rural mass poor inclined toward populist politicians. These are the Yellow shirts and Red shirt demonstrators of recent years. Yellow a borrowed symbol of the monarchy. The countries prime Minister prior to last months coup was Yingluck Shinawatra the sister of Thaksin Shinawatra, a telecom billionaire exemplifying both populism and new money, who was prime minster in the previous decade before being ousted food corruption. Doubting the efficacy of subtly she apparently ran under the slogan 'Thaksin thinks, Pheu Thai [her political party] acts'. The country has deep structural problems for which their structural solution is a regular retrograde movement away from democracy.

Turkey is another major country that has taken to authoritarian ways. An elite composed of the main (near only) political party the AKP in a wary collaboration with the army. They were not looking for interference (protests) with any cozy business deals they had cooked up. The heart of the Gezi Park protests was urban land use and who profits, particularly a shopping center that was to be erected on the site of a historic army barracks. In a slight turn from Thailand the significant protesters arrayed against the regime were a young urban cadre populist in spirit though drawn largely from the elite. A mining disaster earlier this year demonstrated that political corruption reaches into many sectors of Turkish society but there were no lasting or widespread protests to mark that incident. Turkish leadership has made it clear that if it were up to them there would be no western style social media in Turkey, and they have reason for desiring that ZeynepTufecki_TurkishAttitudesSocialMedia. Restated they would rather not have a western style upper middle class for Turkey armed with thoughts of social prerogatives and participation.

The question I have is whether there is a trend-line away from democracy as regimes worldwide seek to arrange their affairs and relationship with their populations. Whether medium states take their cue from big states who repress with greater technique (the US) aplomb or (at least) faux populism of modern Russia. That other mid-sized nations will judge success and follow form based on the luminescence of a handful of cities.

Leadership nations will feel validated by other nations overtly or tacitly adopting their models of governance and incorporate it into their foreign policy and soft power projections. Or they may feel the need to present simple internal oppression as a political philosophy. Seeking to dress up their totalitarianism as expressing unique cultural values. A recent article detailed how Singapore authorities seized a decade ago on John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness Program (later folded into no less encompassing NSA endeavors) as the tool they needed to become, unencumbered by old-fashioned notions of privacy, the ultimate "harmonious" state The Social Laboratory : Foreign Policy.

At the head of all this it does seem circumstantially that we are witnessing an authoritarian rise. One marked by a certain gamesmanship, adventurism if not out-right aggression by states trying to lay out a position for the new century. The Beijing Consensus seems to work and work well for authoritarian elites seeking its flavor of mercantilism and querulous notions of political economy.

A political outlook marked by such adventurism will contain a parallel streak of aggression. China for its part seeks to cast a deepening shadow over Taiwan and the straits islands and extends an absurd nine (or ten) dashed line through the South China Sea PHL: New '10-dash line' map shows China's expansionist ambitions | News | GMA News Online. What little political autonomy exists within the Chinese concocation it leans on with palpable unease. The Regimes insistence on a veto on who can run for mayor. This resulted in mass rallies in Hong Kong demonstrating the desire of the people there to have Beijing stay out of their business Hong Kong's biggest pro-democracy protests in a decade are just making Beijing more strident - Quartz .

Russia also having descended into a closed circle of corruption, the new traditional values that trade under the name Putinism; The rise of Putinism - The Washington Posttakes up the cryptic populism of big nationalism takes Crimea and makes designs on Ukraine seeking to become again the empire it thinks it must be to succeed. Fostering only an endless cycle of aggression and repression Andrei Piontkovsky explains why Russia's president will do whatever it takes to preserve his rule. - Project Syndicate.

If there is one thing we have a surfeit of at the end of history its state capitalism, a mercantilism oxymoron , only marginally related to free markets which were barely more than a idealized abstract anyway.

The effect of what's called Regulatory Capture: financial institutions and environment effecting industries co-opting the administrative regimes legal tasked with overseeing them. This occurring largely and somewhat inevitable through limited technocratic knowledge supply. As well what I call Process Capture. That is the growing or buying of politicians who will accede to corporate agendas when in office. This would include such things as State and or local governments granting corporate tax exemptions, passing right-to-works laws to break labor unions -- the concept of labor rights and collective bargaining altogether. It brings one to the same place in the end, worker hostile places and practices. There is little practical difference emerging in these varying systems.

Most perspectives see in this a waning ability, by the free world in general by the U S in particular, to project democracy western values on unaligned and eastern bloc nations + Dani Rodrik examines the root causes of political malaise in advanced and developing countries. - Project Syndicate:. Rather some elements among the western elites now press to become more authoritarian, in the name of security -- with a retrenchment in matters of inessential liberty. Even taking advantage of the moment to become more plutocratic, oligarchic. Inconsistency of concern for human rights under the banner of realism and realpolitic, undercuts the moral authority that underpins our soft power. Without that the west has less than it imagines. Barely enough to sustain our core concerns American Values Are to Blame for the World's Chaos. It isn't just a few hand-wring artcles in magazines either concern on this topic has stabalized long enough to produce at least one recent book. Democracy in Decline: Steps in the Wrong Direction. , 2014. Internet resource.

The idea entire idea of authoritarian paternalism often directs my thoughts towards an old Birthday Party lyric. Could I keep you keep, you here in my pocket. I wouldn't bring you out much and show you around, no not much at all...[Say a Spell, Rowland Howard] It isn't ever good and it isn't done with the others interest in mind.

One universal in all of this is regimes world-wide walking back the internet. Something about the web seems to have surprised and briefly overtaken the ability of authorities to control and channel the bilateral discussion of the people at-large. Leaving them to either deploy an army of online bullies like Vietnam BBC News - #BBCtrending: Vietnam's 'online army', or to select from Gamma's popular suite of Fin Fisher software to control the narrative FinFisher - Wikipedia.

It shouldn't have surprised them. There was nothing about the technology and its antecedents that was unknown and extraordinary. It was perhaps the distributed, non centralized nature of the world wide web its bottom up enthusiast-driven nature that kept it out of the direct vision of officials until it was a thriving organic thing. Now the NSA (and everyone else) are focused on reducing the web. Because of terrorism and anyone may be a terrorist so...

As an aside it has to be said the NSA's methods and purpose seem at a cross with their stated purpose. They seem essentially useless at traditional spying. Over-collection is not will never be a dismissible or technologically fixable problem. It is not unreasonable to assume that a real purpose, organic purpose, is population control. An all-encompassing monitoring of society at large and individually.

Rather than the triumphant end point of history, the rule-of-the-people finds itself fighting for relevance. It seems entirely possible that in a few generations historian will ask What was Democracy? (Well they are already: What Was Democracy? | The Nation). Concluding that it was no way to run things. I would look at the role of corruption in inducing need for repression. By corruption I not only consider various rent seeking scenarios but as well all cases where the wealthy seek to rewrite the rules of a society to suit themselves. Its an open questioning whether democracy is a natural or un-natural state of human affairs. Little d democracy; that is, personal rule of affairs organized from the ground up (that is not just localized tyranny at least) seems most natural. But does history favor the big man and his illiberal state (Orban's Hungary) which projects a vision of national destiny or harmony and its required quiescence over the low level grind of daily adjudication and compromise. Autarchy promises simplicity.

Elections when they work right are a transparent mechanism of democracy. It should be obvious that a substantial valuation of democracy must exist beforehand in order for an election to produce a beneficial outcome Sorry, Americans, but sometimes democracy simply can’t bring peace - The Washington Post. More critical than bare voting though is the notion that no decision or use of resources is truly legitimate unless every one involved has a seat at the table and everyones voice is heard.

Human potential is realized in freedom of conscience, expression, and activity. That can stand alone as an expression of the desirability of freedom. The harmonious society asks for no discordant notes. So the arrangement of the music is done without discussion -- in secret. People sitting on the levers of control can't help but to take a paternalistic attitude towards the rest deciding for them what their suitable interests are. They then arrange their lives and those of their patrons maximally. Because they can.

The world for the people, is conflict and noise, differing from war and anarchy only by degree and sense of common purpose. It will forever frighten those whose minds are set only on control and fortunes.

Saturday, 23 August 2014 10:30 EST #

Under the Bridge

I set off on my bicycle commute home the other day against an impending thunderstorm. Same as the day before and the two days after. These are summer evenings in Washington DC and environs.They say the storm on this day 08 July may have been a derecheo, a widespread arc of thunderstorms. I wouldn't be surprised. It was dark windy grey with fast moving clouds rolling by like a leaden freight train. As I gained the mid point of my ride and got down on the bike path that runs along NorthWest branch creek I felt sheltered by the trees and a little relieved. The world smelled dank, not like the strange grassy earthy smell that accompanies the breeze on the aftermath of a thunderstorm, but a smell like wet lumber and mushrooms. It began to rain at this point and harder with every yard I gained. Pushing as hard as the uneven paving of the path would allow I gained the Riggs road Bridge just as the heavens opened.

Northwest Branch hiking/biking trail Riggs Road bridge by Adelphi Mill

Under the bridge there were others gathered already. Walkers some other bikers young men, hispanic, from the greater Langley Park neighborhood Adelphi is part of. Down on the bike path under the bridge close by the creek's surface the rain set against the background of the trees growing up from the steep banks by the Adelphi Rolling Grist mill seemed to be sheeting down in wrenching gusts from a great almost impossible height. Occasional thunder crashed untroublingly low in the distance to the west.

One individual out of this group, an average man short but not as short as me. Late twenties or early thirties comes over and starts a conversation with me; first talking of the rain then the wait. I didn't know why. English was key, perhaps, he had a little the others had none.

After this he began to talk of his son age aged two. This was spurred by my onomatopoeia of lighting and thunder. This made him laugh and he showed me how is son reacted to a recent thunderstorm by pulling his shirt up over his head to hide and exclaiming "oh daddy." He then grew pensive after this and began to tell me of his wife -- they were separated -- He didn't actually get to be with his son as much as he liked. Visitation was only on Sundays not Saturdays. His wife was inflexible about that. She was local in Maryland some where close by in Adelphi, he indicated. He lived in Virginia now. making it difficult to see his son. At the point he spoke of being on a long bike ride that day to get to this bridge to wait out the rain. I recalled he was one of the ones who had a bike. He had moved it so I could park mine.

He paused briefly continuing in a quite but animated state. There is a universal desire, I believe, to relate your circumstance to others. Especially those you believe might understand your circumstance. An urge to affirm your truths, bear witness to your fidelities your struggles. He tried to tell me of his wife, the state of their relationship. The story tangled and dissipated. His visible anguish as his English failed him tore at my complacency. I had neither Spanish nor grasp enough on what he was trying to say to help him untangle it. His head slumped to his chest. At the opposite end of the bridge tunnel the others talked among themselves without notice.

Something about the conversation made me think of Joseph Conrad's the Secret Sharer a story I read decades ago and only barely recalled. It turned on the burdens of loneliness and anxiety. True for both main characters. These character's narratives are particular to Conrad's own story and purpose. There is the narrator, a sea captain untried days into his first command. There is the interloper, the mate off a ship passing nearby, who has jumped and swam away because he had killed a crew man, and while he feels justified he fear the judgement going against him. The narrater takes him in and is taken in by his story, latter helping him complete his escape. The narrater does this largely on the force of a temporary camaraderie and sympathetic identity he later sheds as easily as he took it on. Saying "He was not a bit like me, really."

The Next few minutes were spent in silence watching the rain. I tried to his situation. Migration, he was surely an immigrant, strikes me as a simple thing. Neither blameworthy nor praiseworthy, a practical act not calling down on itself the moral judgement so many seem intent to give it. A movement towards opportunity the mere idea of a better more secure life, no border no fence will ever stop that. If a fulfilling life existed locally most nearly all would never migrate. Only the wanderers.

A rain pipe just beyond the bridge spewed water heavily into the creek a cloudy debris strewn stream that pooled and blossomed occluded the creeks sandy bottom. We both noticed this and commented on it by gesture. He told me of coming out to the playground by the mill with his son after a previous storm and seeing the water over the bike path and half filling the tunnel. I watched as the water level slowly grew up the sides of the tunnel two three then six inches. I thought of the section of the path further up. There a line of leaves and flotsam caught in a chain link fence told a story of the gentle Northwest branch creek surging up twelve or more feet from normal during the May storm. Four feet over the path. The rain seemed letting up some, the sky possibly brightening. I still had a mile ahead of me to get home. It was time to go

Thursday, 17 July 2014 07:45 EST #

Workflow

A few weeks ago I saw an off-hand tweet by a wfmu dj Dave Mandl recommending the writing program Scrivener. Intrigued I went and looked over their page Literature and Latte - Scrivener Writing Software | Mac OS X | Windows and I must say Scrivener looks, well, just swell. It is the Swiss army knife of compound complex writing. That is; the sort of writing where you are combining various streams into one. More of a project manager than a straight writing program it integrates notecards and an outliner into a Word Processor, each module capable of rearrangement of output and linked to the others.

It brings out the technological solutionist in me and since I had the idea of writing a "process" post for a while, this gives me an excuse to my intent.

I realize all this is adjacent to writing well. I have no tips for writing well here (you can borrow these The Anatomy of a Perfect Blog Post | The Passive Voice. I prove with every post I complete that I cannot write. All the same the goal of an effective process where everything flows (I think that may be a Teenage Fan Club song); that's a large part of the battle right there. A thing not to be diminished in the least.

I don't get paid to write. This necessarily restricts the resources it makes sense to put into it. My workflows in both soft and hard ware are largely limited to what is available for free, what I can afford. Still the average web log post is a bricolage of assembly. What I have needs to do that.

To continue working at a piece at all points of a day -- when the mood or thoughts strike. I want to push a piece of writing thru all my devices iBook, iPad, and AlphaSmart Neo. Not forgetting the simple (and simpler) notepad

Simpilist Note Pad possible

A good web log post even a short one demonstrate the complexity of any sort of DIY project. A collection of different things have to come together in the right arrangement at the right point to have an effect and be as entertaining as whatever your reader might spend his or her time on. The route to a completed post is a search for simplicity.

I've settled on a single sectioned text file for these web log posts. I rarely write a post all at once, but over several days, even weeks. The text file contain a section for notes, links (including links for pictures), an outline, and the draft. I generally don't start mixing the ingredients until after the draft is done, though that is not a hard and fast rule.

I'd like to add a note At this point concerning MarkDown. Markdown essentially is an idea a convenience; a tagged text file turns into html. The tags are common keyboard characters: underscores, asterisks, pound-signs to represent parenthesis and brackets to designate links. The genesis of the idea was old-school email markup carried through to a system by John Gruber from the website Daring Fireball Markdown. It is endorsed and standardized by Github. You can write markdown in any text-editor if need be, running it through a markdown editor accomplishes the html magic. A preview pane shows the rendered html, you can combine markdown with html for more complex needs. MarkDown is excellent at quick lists and big bright sections. Even on my AlphaSmart Neo (a simple battery operated keyboard word processor device which sadly is no longer made) AlphaSmart - Wikipedia. I start most drafts on this, and use markdown syntax in anticipation of later processing. The draft comes out of the Neo over a USB cable but otherwise I use dropbox to access things through various devices and places.

The kind of writing found on this and most weblogs benefits greatly from an outline whether you keep it in your head or written out. It organizes the piece, of whatever kind. It keeps you moving from point to supporting point in logical fashion. And for me it keeps me from getting to the end, or days later, and realizing I left out a bunch of stuff. Generally for pieces aimed to be around 1500 words I find it best to use a simple indented text list following Harvard style. Cutting and pasting subheads to rearrange things is fairly straight-forward. In college I wrote papers approaching 12,000 words, short in terms of real writing. I can not imagine trying to keep a piece of writing straight beyond that (again Scrivener).

Formal Outliners for better projects longer and more complex. I'm largely satisfied in these cases with the browser based Fargo.io outliner. This is made with a small team by Dave Winer who previously was responsible for the Radio Userland Web. He seems to be fashioning Fargo also into a simple blogging tool for those inclined, among other projects. The professional grade OmniOutliner - The Omni Group is what you would use for things getting north of fifteen pages. I also have an outliner app Outline creator on my iPad which, in its simplicity, is a favorite. The same app maker makes MindMap Creater. I am less sanguine about MindMaps in general. At the point where I would want one I usually prefer to just get out a pencil, and sketch arrangements of balloons and bubbles on paper.

At the end of my particular process the final draft is converted to html segment that I can drop into right place on this page, a hand operated weblog if you will. For this I need html text editors. On Windows machines (such as the Dell at work) I use Notepad ++, with a markdown syntax highlighter add-on. On my Apple device at home, an iBook, I use either Textwrangler or Komodo edit. This html draft takes all of the markdown file with its notes links and outline. It renders with the fonts of Atomized, approximates the same size and spacing and includes any tables or illustrations. This form I read over one last time and make any final edits (excising the paragraph numbering scheme e.g. (II.B.2.c) corresponding to the outline) ending with a clean proof. As a matter of habit I save this draft, even adding links to it afterwards for reference or further treatment.

But why blog at all? It's well so ...Oughts. Everyone knows Blogs is all but dead; like street cars and bicycles. One the day that this part of this post was coming to mind Dylan Byers of Politico was ruminating on the loneliness of the effective blogger. He was arguing that even the best of the power bloggers, such as Andrew Sullivan -- those who won the 80-20 wars, aren't driving the conversation Andrew Sullivan can't win - POLITICO.com. Those who found or made a perch in the new online publishing are. Whether Vox or Fivethirtyeight, or those manning a pro-am solution like Medium. You need a platform and a beat. No generalists, no informed observation, as he puts it "sensibility is cheap." I've read elsewhere, in keeping with this, that the remaining WordPress world will become the domain of experts working the knowledge economy directly rather than waiting for the Washington Post to call. That or abandoning weblogs altogether Tiny Letters to the Web We Miss The Message Medium for artisanal newsletters TinyLetter.

Something of a minor secret are Vox's micro blogs that many of its principles host quietly on the side. For links and whatever, for those occasions where you want to say something, more than you can say in a tweet. Even Ezra still wants to blog - a little

Around the same time in one of those inscrutable twitter arguments that only highlights how unsuitable twitter is to substantive discussions Nina Typewriter (freelancer journalist-humorist Nina L. Diamond) seemed aggrieved at those who write for free or nearly so (for exposure) on Medium, Atlantic, HuffPost Slate, Buzzfeed, Gawker, etc. are killing the former livelihood of freelancers Twitter / ninatypewriter: MY LAST WORD ON IT: New business ...:. I have a certain sympathy for this though it requires me to pretend I've never heard of stringers or the like.

I've heard this same argument levied against bloggers with similar effectiveness. There are a couple of distinctions to be made here. against amateurs it might be said that if everybody is writing, the patience of the reading public will be exhausted. Embedded here is the somewhat unwarranted fear that many amateurs write as well as professionals. There is again the distinction between generalists (amateurs) who write from the center of their personal experience and specialists (experts) who write from an acquired body of knowledge. The former likely do not affect the market of people being paid, people who want to be paid. Neither is really offering the same thing as freelancers.

The narrowed question is why blog in 2014? I've partly already answered that question. The weblog format and conventions make for a powerful and innately comprehensible platform. A medium equal technically to professional publishing provided you can get someone to read it. Leaving it largely to time and chance that you've written something that some one person might care about.

Web logs are a room of ones own. A place to set a tone against the world. Not with antagonism. but uniformly even comprehensively. Writing to my own web site is an additional creative outlet, a hobby within an avocation. Trying to bring my decades old html closer to the present, learn responsive design.

As journalism leaves web blogs behind, finding other solutions for informal view-from-somewhere content. Blogging may be able to find a stable definition for itself on the back crest of the wave. The writing and self editing has to be its own reward. Though it's not easy I've never felt it to be a chore. For better or for worse one's perspective, on the world, on some object of personal fascination, your take on the culture we live in means something. Not everything needs comment, but in the back of the truck there are always curious things attracting certainty or great uncertainty that can be looked at new.

Sunday, 29 June 2014 18:02 EST #

the Big Ferry

Some of the stories I read on the sinking of the Sewol, the Korean ferry that capsized and sank a few weeks ago Sinking of the MV Sewol - Wikipedia, suggested it to me as a metaphor for certain other types of human disaster.

It's tricky dealing with a tragedy, I apologize in advance if any thing I say here strikes anyone as sounding glib. From the outset I stress that I do not wish to dismiss the loss of anyones loved ones or trivialize their sadness. That is not my intent. It is the nature of and recurrence of such events I wish to examine. The event I would compare it to is also one of potentially great misfortune; the Sewol struck me as a metaphor of global warming or climate change.

A metaphor ideally exists to show hidden or over-looked similarities in disparate things, revealing an insight into the nature of these things. These things are not disparate really -- they are both disasters. I restrain the comparison to the idea that many disasters have paths they share.

The broad hinges of the metaphor are a disbelief, or a dismissal of the problem and the incompetence of leadership. The first is marked by an inability to accept change. This is related to the size of the vessel, of the firmament the foundation of our planet. And as well the hypnotic beat of the ordinary the normality the existing state.

The other central aspect of this is the un-ameliorate-ability of the essential outcome: the ship sinks, our way of living in this world collapses on the thin margin of our efficiency. All against a gradual hollowing of the program at hand.

The Sewol appears to have been a drastically overloaded and under regulated ferry. It didn't start out that way; this is the expansion part of human disaster. A gradual increase in passenger carriage, hull size, cargo -- at the expense of the ballast that would've kept the ship upright. Extra tasking matched with lack of care and concern.

The push by those in charge is always to obscure, to deregulate at each transition where nothing goes wrong. Incremental over-use increasing with each instance where no visible harm was observed.

With climate change the ramp to the present is the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution as it evolved was as much an energy revolution as technical, and the energy came increasingly from fossil fuels. Climate Change is a matter of heightened carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. along with other greenhouse gases This traps the suns energy in the atmosphere. warms the atmosphere, the ground, the oceans What is global warming? - Everything you need to know about global warming - Vox:. It causes climate patterns to change, flora and fauna patterns to change (on land and ocean). It will cause the worlds ice sheets eventually to turn back to water rais ing sea levels Consider Clashing Scientific and Societal Meanings of 'Collapse' When Reading Antarctic Ice News - NYTimes.com:.

For most of the planets history greenhouse gas levels have been part of a natural cycle. Natural in that they are part of a system of organic and inorganic physical process. Generally in some sort of prevailing balance, with occasional drastic swings. Charted data of the last 800 thousand years appears to show multiple subsystems -- cycles of 120 ppm co2 concentration over a hundred thousand years with smaller cycles embedded within those Carbon-dioxide levels haven't been this high in at least 800,000 years - Vox:.

The course of disaster runs on to a tipping point. This part is marked primarily by resistance to, even a disbelief in change. The behavior at onset of crisis The psychology of disbelief is a positive belief in immutability. The natural world is big. We are on a big boat. The boat hasn't sunk yet; therefore there is no reason to think it will. The captain and crew (leadership in general) decline to take action, the expectation that ship would right itself because it never had not. They backed this up by explicitly and deliberately ordering the passengers (citizens) to stay put, not create decision points, not create work, not rebel. In the big world the meta climate hasn't changed since modern man spread. Our sense of how the earth operates extends only to humankind's collective memory -- the world as it has existed since the last ice age. But the current pace of change in average temperatures is highest ever recorded. And we are beginning to take note of changes that are not just two or ten year droughts but changes that may last generations. What's really changed is our presence and our increasing powerful ability to affect the environment.

Beyond the palpable disbelief in even the possibility of change there is at work a psychological passivity. A persisting irrational belief that things will just turn out all right and nothing need be done. This is seen in the passengers willingness to continue to stay put, not use their own judgement (not develop new leadership) to be complacent, reticent to complain and not misbehave. I am lead to recall Terry Jones' character, King Arnulf of New Brasil, in the movie Eric the Viking pronouncing platitudes of calm to his people as the nation sank beneath the wave. And again it would be comic if it were not actually tragic.

If you prefer to wave aside low human mendacity as too common too jejune. I can offer you, more dramatically, the ghosts of ten thousand murdered villagers of Jeju island (where the ferry was headed) who may have reached out and pulled that ferry under. Vengeance for a an episode out of its recent past Jeju Uprising - Wikipedia. Such things; though, have little place in our natural world.

Until the moment it rolled over and there no longer was any way out the passengers thought that things would eventually turn out all right - even at the point of a 60 degree list. So as well will the effects of global warming slid towards a brutal tipping point where the cost may be a share of industrial age civilization.

In the face of climate change that disrupts land usage and farming patterns -- with attendant food panics and famines, and 10 ft sea level rise seen by the end of this century alone it is blithely stated that we will adapt. Yes, of course we will adapt. What choice do we have. And whatever is done well or poorly will be that adaptation. The cost of adaptation, given that we will not meet goals of lower GHG usage, is very high. Phasing in non extraction energy sources, life style and agriculture changes. But energy prices are not real now and the full costs eventually catch up with us latter and possibly more catastrophically.

The owners, societal elites, and fossil extractors won't pay or pay attention. They are aware of the costs and of the process of a consumption society that shifts cost away from price. Those in the manufacture of fossil fuels are aware that their way of wealth is bound up in that fuel and its already trading future value. Solar, wind and other energy sources are other industries in which they have no grounding or expertise. They are acutely aware; though, that their wealth allows them to deny sidestep all of this. The rich will use their wealth to keep themselves out of the direct line of harm and will then use their survival and prosperity as proof that no harm ever existed. The dead and doomed mean even less in death. the human race will have priced human life at less than nothing unless the authors of disaster are held accountable South Korea indicts four ferry crew for homicide | Reuters:.

There are general forms of global warming skepticism: Deny it's happening, dispute the costs, say in psuedo defeatism it's too late, so why bother. It is following the theme of Joshua Howe's book, at end a political fight Behind the curve science and the politics of global warming - eBook, 2014.

The last correspondence of these disasters is the rapidity of dooming occurrences at end. This a particular counterpoint to concept of some (Bjorn Lomberg others) that the market and human ingenuity will price solutions into existence at the last moment. This does not always happen it is never possible to pour more than finite wealth into a finite moment. Sometimes it is just too late.

Laissez Faire in not the answer. There is nothing about this that can be made better by leaving it alone. That is a cynical exercise in burden shifting and manslaughter.

Saturday, 31 May 2014] 16:30 EST #

Fall of Saigon

Today is the anniversary of the fall of Saigon, 30 April 1975 thirty-nine years ago. Ngay mat nuoc (the day we lost our nation) one of the many ways the day is referred to by. Next year will be a big anniversary the 40th, it might even get mentioned in the papers. Time to beat the rush then.

The collapse of the ARVN in the Spring of 1975 was quick and surprising. Or so everyone pretended: A Decent Interval had been observed from the withdrawal of US combat forces the year before, the Paris Peace Accord (27Jan73) the year before that, and from the decision to only vote a partial appropriation of funds to the Vietnamese war effort earlier that year. From Battle of Xuan Loc 09-20April 1975 to siege of Saigon 22-30April 1975 certainly things moved faster than anyone had anticipated Fall of Saigon - Wikipedia.

Nothing that had come before compared to the chaos of final days. Operation Frequent Wind (the helicopter evacauation of Americans) Operation Frequent Wind began at daybreak 29 April 1975. American presence in South Vietnam had already been drawn down to around 1400 in anticipation of this last minute evacuation. The runway of the only airfield the US had available, Tan Son Nhat, was put out of commission by a defecting ARVN pilot on 29th. From that point fixed wing aircraft, C-130's and such, were not usable. At 0345 30 April 1975 President Ford orders Ambassador Martin to only evacuate Americans. This was a rollback to an informal friends and family plan which was allowing large numbers of South Vietnamese to evacuate also, and should have been part of a larger and less ad hoc formal plan.

Graham Martin was one of the principle US officials in those last days. His role in the events is clouded by his refusal to believe Saigon would fall, that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam would hold or that the US would respond with massive air power intervention to repulse the North Vietnamese regular army (which had been a Washington promise). At any rate it is said the entire South Vietnam sigint system and employees were captured intact because of his failure to prepare. The Wikipedia article (op cit) references this to Matthew Aid's book Secret Sentry (p. 126). Amb. Martin evacuated to the USS Blue Ridge at 5 am that morning. One of his last acts was to convince Navy to stay on station a few more days allowing another increment of South Vietnamese to fly out to the fleet to escape the communist forces tearing through Saigon Naval History Blog Blog Archive Operation Frequent Wind April 29-30, 1975.

Tom Polgar was another, He was CIA station chief for Vietnam. Polgar just died a little more a month ago on March 23rd. The Washington Post ran an obituary on 30 March Thomas Polgar, CIA official during the fall of Saigon, dies - The Washington Post. This was also the occasion for a MetaFilter Post on Polgar "This will be final message from Saigon station" | MetaFilter:. Linked from that MeFi post was a piece that Polgar wrote (well narrated - worth reading at any rate) for the Pushing on blog; committed largely to the Vietnam war and Fall of Saigon. Both Polgar and Martin went into their postings with the idea that the US would maintain a deterrent force in South Vietnam to keep the North honest and that any major offensive by the North would trigger US air power counter attacks.

In contrast to the Sturm und Drang of the last days. There is the reality of the long slow fall of the Republic of Vietnam from a weak start. The elections scheduled for the mid fifties that were to lead to unification were made moot by the referendum in 1955 that placed Ngo Dinh Diem in power (Appointed prime minister in 1954 by former Emperor Bao Dai (Nguyen Phuc Vinh Thuy 1913-1997), head of state, the referendum established South Vietnam as a Republic without Bao Dai who had left for France in any regard). A leader and strong nationalist, Diem was unable even un-inclined to make himself popular. Regarding Buddhists, pastoral villagers, Chinese minorities in the business classes, Montanards and above all socalists, reflexively his enemies. He sought to create a power base only from his own urban catholic constituency, many of which were recently resettled from the North). His reversal of the land reform initiatives that preceded him particularly sending out his security forces to collect for the landlords didn't help Vietnam War - Wikipedia. South Vietnamese land reform (non reform) at least was less aggressively bloody than the North's of a few year earlier. That said Ho Chi Minh would've won any national election held in the late fifties. The South needed a leader confident and popular enough to force a power sharing arrangement on the north.

There was always disconnect in opinion about the war. Within America and the World. Whether America was a militaristic hegomon or a trustworthy ally. This was the internal as external opinion as well. Internally being a nation of peace and principle were more emphasized. Externally the perceived brutality and stupidity of the US effort was admonished -- amid hand wringing over US committedness The hawkish formula might have stated "In God we trust, in the U.S. you trust.

The idea of selling Democracy to the world. The idea we get from Winthrop's Arabella sermon, "city on the hill" beacon to the world. That we are uniquely and exceptionally positioned to deliver freedom to the peoples of the world, entered into the Vietnam debate. As it did thirty years latter in the last set of wars. It has always been hard for our foreign policy and public opinion to see our institutions as un-transferable. It keeps us at deteriorating situations that might benefit from better pragmatic policies. But they are un-transferable; they are particular and cultural. This is the big D and little d breakdown. The value of democracy is best transmitted at it broadest level. The concept is to empower locally and individually, a vote for each no more no less in things that affect the whole. The right to self-arrange generally protected. The need and desire for this must come from within that culture or society. Occupying armies do not accomplish this.

The other side of this coin is overselling our altruism. The US looks out for US interests. That is what we do. Our foreign policy will be the aggregate of our interests. One of our interests is our system -- from at least Bretton Woods on. A system of the world as an integrated social and commercial construct. Peace and prosperity with the US as leader is a by-product and benefit of this. Inside it, everything. Outside it a world of blocs that must be contained.

Reflecting on the meaning the fall of Saigon had to me, and the meaning it might have had to others. My insularity is highlighted. As a 15 year old, it didn't mean that much. The war as we knew it had ended two years before.a long time at that age. The story was over. It didn't mean as much as Nixon's downfall and resignation, which affected my views on authority and the general quality of the adult world far more. At the same time the Vietnam war had been going on my whole life. The idea that the US never lost wars, and always stood by our allies was an integral part of my world view. It was like coming to the end of a Shakespeare play, startled. Flipping back to the first page and saying to yourself: "it does say 'tragedy', right there on the title page". As time went on I accepted the view that the contradictions of that war sank the the fortunes of all involved. As though justice was satisfied by that.

A different perspective has crept up on me in recent years. Largely in the only way it can. I met and got to know some Vietnamese people. Hoa first, when I was in college. She was born in Vietnam but got out before the fall. She makes her living as a poet now.

Then there is Tran who I know now and take as seriously as any person alive. Tran also was born in Vietnam and was there as a bebe, part of a Catholic family in the city when the communists overran Saigon. She has communicated to me, not all at once but slowly over the years I've know her, the sense of abandonment, the terrors of retribution faced by individuals and families left alone. John Pike of Global Security.org in his gloss on the end of the Republic of Vietnam (op cit, 1rst link) picked falling Viet morale in face of disappearing U.S. interest over any diminution of funding as the significant factor in the collapse of the south. Tran's family only left Vietnam in 1994 nine-teen years later upon restoration of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Vietnam. She earns her living as a library technical clerk at a large university library, as I do also.

Vietnam itself continues in a stasis of wan tyranny. Unwilling to trust in the aspirations, fearful of the resentments, of its own citizens. Concerned only with corrosively protecting the "prestige and trust" of the corrupt self-serving state agencies and actors that constitute their decades of victory. An aside, but I would recommend a recent article in World affairs journal on attempts to fund the Ile de Lumiere a ship with the mission to rescue Vietnamese boat-people refugees in 1979 Isle of Light A Look Back at the Boat People and the European Left World Affairs Journal. A year when the ship I was on, the USS Ranger, also took aboard Vietnamese refugees. The broad and aging claims of unification aside the south is still run as a colony of the north.

Across the history American foreign policy uniting neo and paleocons, isolationist and engagists is this message: When you don't stand by your allies, it makes your motivations seem so much worse.

Friday, 30 April 2014 18:30 EST #

A Cory McAbee post

A few months ago while referencing some songs from the independent film the American Astronaut I wrote that I should do a post just on Cory McAbee; the films star, director, prime mover. McAbee has been active since the early 1990's, Cory McAbee - Wikipedia I only learned of him when Netflix, or rather the algorithm that lurks within it, began suggesting that I watch this movie. Frankly Netflix suggests a lot of things most of them not all that helpful. Eventually, worn down by artificial persistence I succumbed and dialed it up.

American Astronaut is a hard movie to describe. I noticed from the description and opening on that the writer, director and lead performer were all the same person. Usually this is not a winning sign, but in low budget independent productions, hardly worth mentioning. The movie was good. Grimy industrial subcultures, dressed-down camp hipster humor teetering on the deliberate edge of narrative chaos. The story follows our hero in space of the near-ish future -- solar system and asteroid mining colonies as analogue to the industrial west of the late nineteenth century. A societies consisting of the unhandsome leading unwholesome lives. If you allow yourself to be lured in and taken by its premise the movie is hilarious.

Having watched that, Netflix decided I would probably like Stingray Sam as well. This is another Cory McAbee project assembled in 2009 (about nine years after American Astronaut) and as well associated with Sundance's independent film initiatives. Conceived as a series of shorts with a possible cable tv use it was released as an episodic movie. A space western musical like the first it is set in a still trashy future but one of a gentler and more generalized American humor. The opening number "Welcome to Mars" sets the tone. The presence of his five year-old daughter in a later episode send the cuteness quotient into intersteller overdrive.

After watching both of these I did the obligatory cursory web search I do for things that intrigue me. The principles in this matter were largely the individuals comprising the band the Billy Nayer Show - Wikipedia. Which consists of McAbee, Bobby Lurie and a shifting set of other musicians Lee Vilensky (who has played with a band called Those Darn Accordions), Yuri Gragonovitch; "Crugie" and Frank Swart (who plays bass for the Indigo girls Norah Jones and Patty Griffin) most recently

On this first pass I was content by watching what clips from American Astronaut and Stingray Sam that can be found on YouTube under searches for those titles. Things like: "Hey Boy", "Love Smiles", "Party" and "Pegged legged Father".

At some point subsequent to this, the following weekend or month impelled by a strong curiosity I took a deeper dive through the World Wide Webbing. I wanted to find more clips and video goodies, true. As much; though, I wanted more about the individuals behind this work. The Wikipedia entries for the Billy Nayer Show and Cory McAbee are a little thin, but form adequate starting points for broader rounds information. All Musics bio is better The Billy Nayer Show | Biography | AllMusic but not particularly up-to-date . The most complete biography is is the one at the bottom of the blog the Smallest Star embedded in his own web site Cory McAbee (actually he has a dotNet and a dotCom site and they're not quite the same). McAbee is from California originally and the first version of the Billy Nayer show started up in San Francisco in or around 1990. Ostensibly a rock and roll band it seems to have always had a theatrical cabaret element to it. Almost everything is a multimedia project in some way. You wouldn't call them music videos though because there is no direct sense whether the video supports the song or the song the video. Most of the earlier works are collected under the videos the Billy Nayer Chronicles and the Ketchup and Mustard man. This is in addition to the six or seven albums they put out in those years.

Looking on from the outside a turning point seems to have occurred with the American Astronaut project. The band left California for New York, and remained there, the association with Sundance also started around this point.

These mid period years are the years where the sense of Cory Mcabee's gently warped vision, even a genius of sorts really begin to shine through. The innocence and the view askance. The small comedic touches to his performances which recall Stan Laurel at times. Mixed with the hipster/carny "Play-the-rube" take of his favored scenario's. There is the artistic integrity of the DIY generation, the punk and post punk late boomer early generation X cohort, there as well.

On the shifting sands of online availability, there are things to be found on YouTube. Most of these likely originate from his Vimeo channel Cory McAbee's Videos on Vimeo which is the best place to start. Of these my favorite is the short film he did for the song RENO.

The bigger movie length projects only appear on pay streaming services. American Astronaut and StingRay Sam were on Netflix last year but have come off and now can be found on iTunes, Hulu, Amazon VuDu, and Sundance films. Crazy and Thief, an hour long film he made in 2012 that stars his two children as precocious tiny runaway adventurers can, from last month, be seen in its entirety on Vimeo. Which formerly just hosted an excerpt and trailer from this film.

For some reason it didn't immediately occur to me that he would still be doing stuff and that there were ongoing projects. It was like discovering a rock band that you should've known about twenty-years ago, but hardly expect to still be together. For some the white whale is always out there. The entity that is Cory McAbee and his associates has new projects and stalled projects bubbling in the background. Among the later is Werewolf Hunters of the Midwest. I admit I'm unclear on exactly what this film was to be about, outside of what is given away by the title. A fansite Werewolf Hunters of the Midwest (unofficial) was set up for it and there was a teaser article on Twitch: For Werewolf Hunters of the Midwest, be prepared to wait a little longer... | Twitch both in the 2008 time frame. What is clear is that it never got sufficient funding and went into stasis.

One curent project of his is something he calls Rabbit a story, autobiographical in nature, he wrote ten years or so ago and is now being re-envisioned as a graphic novel. There was a tweet about a month ago, one of the snowed-in periods this winter had so many of, where @corymcabee showed blisters on his fingers gained from Rabbit drawings.

There is also a video of recent vintage of the Billy Nayer Show (well Cory McAbee and Bobby Laurie) perfoming the song I am the skinned Rabbit live. Mr. McAbee plays the electric autoharp in that song which by-and-large is not something you will encounter elsewhere This and many other videos can be found on his Vimeo Channel.

Rabbit was set back a bit not only due to the sheer amount of drawing it requires, but the desire to make the whimsical and delightful Crazy and Thief mentioned earlier at that particular moment in time.

At the moment all his artistic endeavors are tied together under the tent of Captain Ahab's Motorcycle Club. Their slogan is "participation equals membership". Drawing a club patch seems to get you in, though the site specifies that being able to bring something to the table helps. The patches conceptually similar to military unit, police or fire department patches, or motorcycle club patches (with which I am not familar). Some of these are really nice, and ought to exist as actual embroidered patches.

The current film project of CAMC involves Abraham Lincoln's long strange multi-state funeral procession at the end of April into early May of 1865 Funeral and burial of Abraham Lincoln - Wikipedia and is called The Embalmers Tale. There doesn't seem to be any particular time frame assigned to it. It is like all their projects an artisional endeavor. [As I was finishing up this post I saw a Tweet from a Lincoln walk he had organized along the path of the procession through New York City].

Sometimes I look over these assorted sites and ask myself: "How does this guy earn a living"? That's his own business not mine. I earn a living copy-cataloging and attaching barcode stickers to library books of the University of Maryland. I live to write here on Atomized. No one questions me on that. Well actually Tran does and so did Micaela, but all that is somewhat beside the point. With McAbee this interview he did for Crazy and Thief Director Cory McAbee Is Giving Away 'Crazy and Thief,' One of Our 10 Best Undistributed Films of 2012, for Free | Filmmakers, Film Industry, Film Festivals, Awards & Movie Reviews | Indiewire touches on his ethos of affordable and purposeful art. "if it touched you then it was made for you. The kickStarter video he put out for the Rabbit project, also goes into this RABBIT by Cory McAbee.

He also seems to have participated in a series of Seminars (thru Sundance?) on how to finance and put together films. Which delve into the details not the just the broad strokes of independent film making. Doing it and showing how its done. A measured ambivalence of fame and fortune against the job of placing the right art before the right audience. If someone wants to know who to pay attention in modern American cinema I would say: this guy.

A last thought; given that McAbee lives somewhere in the New York area and my favorite radio station free-form WFMU is there also (well Jersey City). A perfect storm of potential would be that someone at WFMU invites Cory McAbee up for a nice long interview someday. That'd be cool.

Friday, 25 April 2014 20:00 EST #

the Courage of their Convictions

There are actors in to-days socio-political debates who seem to lack the courage of their convictions. They engage in actions without thought or intention of taking responsibility for what they do. Outside of it being deemed universally heroic. They do this not comprehending that actions without consequence lack meaning or force. They steer themselves to this position though it does not effect change and is only weakly rhetorical at best.

Among those who crowd the the field are also they who believe, somehow, that their first amendment rights -- freedom of speech -- entitles them to have their squalid opinions once voiced, stand unchallenged. Defending these viewpoints is never the point with them. Reaching a tipping point where they don't have to justify their moral panics and bigotry is.

To the first point specifically I'm thinking of Jose Rodriguez Wikipedia) of the CIA who destroyed the CIA interrogation video tapes and Robert Eatinger CIA lawyer Robert Eatinger is no stranger to controversy - latimes.com: the CIA's General Counsel who gave him clearance to do so and whose name came up again recently Robert Eatinger, Lawyer Who Approved Torture Tape Destruction, Tries to Intimidate Senate Investigators | emptywheel. The CIA had little problem devising an interrogation system that would sweep people up into their systema on mere suspicion or less and subjected them to irreparable harm - physical pain - up to that of organ failure.Inflicting punishment ahead of adjudication. But they were not about to let any see this and judge for themselves whether anyone's rights under natural law were interrupted by this. They unilaterally destroyed the record.

There is a favorite scenario often interjected at this point to attempt a justification. The Ticking Time-Bomb (as seen on tv). Posited as a cruel necessity. There is danger there is information. Extracting the information saves us from the danger. There is a terrorist who has the information. He wears his guilt the way Harlequin wears his diamonds. The tick tock emphasizes the crisis, the inherent sadism becomes heroism -- it is a heroic tale or rather a satire of heroism. The courage to inflict harm is celebrated. The accused individuals humanity is reduced to a point and disappears. The history of the Enhanced Interrogation program and its archipelagro of black sites was criminal malfeasant at best. US laws were broken both in the likely extent of the activity and timing. They stretched the law and crossed lines. Even if they had something to show for it -- which they don't only unbacked assertions. The law and justice lie injured at their feet and they walk away.

For this foremost we can look to Dick Cheney and his coterie of Deep State shades, He Remade Our World by Mark Danner | The New York Review of Books always more focused on us/them than right/wrong and content to forge ahead into a further darkness: Dick Cheney denies war criminal allegations at KPU event.

It ought not need to be said but this also goes for those champions of our freedom, the whistleblowers. All whistleblowers really, but for rhetorical purposes here the well-known leakers of foreign policy communiques and the overcompensating (and somewhat inwardly focused) excesses of the national security institutions: Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden Snowden Gives Testimony To European Parliament Inquiry Into Mass Surveillance, Asks For EU Asylum Techdirt. Assange's Wikileaks hovering around both like flies on sherbet. It needs to be pointed out here that in neither of these cases are we talking about small targeted leaks, or the sort of leaks that come about from a reporter prying information from the bureaucracy for a particular story (or a reporter being offered a story from the bureaucracy). These were terabyte level takings of classified information. The problem is in a single individual Snowden Manning Swartz et al righteously believing you have sufficient knowledge to act. Then in not accounting for whatever dangers disasters deceptions flow from this.

This has been left to the journalists such as Greenwald and Gellman who have come in to tell this story to the public, and has proceeded unevenly from there. It isn't for anyone to say that these leaks are harmless. Russian military communications were significantly tighter during the recent operations in Crimea. While this was likely due to broad awareness of the NSA's capabilities rather than anything particular it hampered the US government's ability to access that incident accurately. The US government on strictly traditional espionage grounds will spend billions of taxpayer dollars rebuilding lost capabilities. It doesn't help to claim you are sure that the benefit outweighs the costs, no one person can know that. To take dump and run is not a position of responsibility and weakens whatever message you hope to have Snowden: Big revelations to come, reporting them is not a crime | Ars Technica.

Everything surrounding nation security and human rights. Everything surrounding issues of national security and the privacy of citizens -- and those they deal with which must have a certain degree of universality about them to exist at all. You can't make it up as you go along. You can't maintain different or shifting sets of rules. Only basic fairness or at end nothing at all.

If you believe you must break a law or norm for an objective you regard as critical be prepared to pay the existing penalty. Especially if you were wrong or complete in your assessment your the situation. That your personnel view point did not include the totality of truth and experience. Passion is an admirable and necessary condition for action, and I do not doubt its complete hold on those who have it. But its benefits do not always include being right.

You do not get to sweep the laws away on grounds of passion or expediency to take oneself off to Megara or Boetia. The Laws remain and wait for you in Athens. You either respect that or you are lawless and capable of only injury.

Adherance to the laws a measure of an individuals true convictions. They are the matrix of the world as you found it, and the frame by which you formed your judgments. The laws (standing in for the Law here); are best understood as neither civil code nor statute, but the idea of a jurisprudence. resolution, and an order to things.

Sunday, 30 March 2014 21:49 EST #

Living in the Past

Occasionally I get an idea that isn't quite enough to write about and it languishes until I pair it up with some other random idea and kick it out the door. A post of disparate things. Today it is a 1916 Navy Dept. Annual Reports, plus buses.

The annual reports I came across a couple of years ago while copy cataloging them into Mckeldin library where I work, the report that sparked this may have been the 1916 1917 or 1918 report Annual report of the Secretary of the Navy. Book, 1916. University of Maryland, College Park. I did a number of them. Our dean is desperately trying to move our library into the digital age -- all digital if possible, and yet I'm adding one hundred year old paper copy at the behest of catalog management. I love every part of that last sentence.

Among the lists of who made rank that year and what ships were launched, there was a small section on what building projects the Navy had undertook. In this section was a description of a handful of buildings put up on the Anacostia Navy Annex. This is the part of the Navy Yard across the Anacostia still know as the Navy annex or Bolling Air Force base today in its western portion. The description of these buildings was detailed even lavish. The materials and manner of construction. The number of people to be housed military activity supported. The latrine that would need to be provided for these personnel and its process of construction according to established principles. Across a century the pride of engineering, the thoroughness of engineering, showed through.

This was the age of standards I reflected. The age of Fire Codes and Sanitation systems. Sparked frankly by the great rebuilding of many American cities after the wooden and hap-hazard versions of them burnt down in the last half of the 19th century Great Boston Fire of 1872 - Wikipedia. Slowly with every fire and every new tenement block that went up things changed, lessons were minded and rules applied. Fire escapes alleys iron beams not laid directly on wooden ones. Water fresh and of adequate pressure to put out fires. It was an age of architects and engineers.

This was an age of material and spatial expansion. The new efficiencies of cities led to their greatly increased extent: up outwards and in density. Progress equaled tall cities, this was the symbol of civilization. There was an attendant increase also in the roads that wound through and between these cities, and the vehicles that passed through them. Such as (to give one example) the trolley cars of St.Louis my great grandfather drove through the first quarter of the twentieth century.

In a time of capricious and underpowered gasoline engines trolley cars offered much. Mostly they allowed a cities industrial workforce to live in sub-urban environments at the edge of cities. People could be relied upon to handle that last mile problem between home and work, on their own. Possibly explains why there is no grand tradition of urban tracked goods delivery.

Today I consider only the Humble Transit Bus. Honed and practical a beauty of utility. Because I ride one of those. When I'm not riding the bike to work, This has not; though, been a bike friendly winter and I've plenty of opportunity to reflect on the bus. I also have decades observed of the many makes and variants used by the University of Maryland Bus system Shuttle UM. Currently it is the the Gillig 36' low floor Gillig Corporation - Wikipedia. This Gillig is a fine spacious bus. Mostly what I mean by this is that it is much easier to get on and off of than past generations of bus. No tunnel entrance no clanking midbus wheelchair lift - that's built into the buses entry platform

Gillig shuttle bus of the University of Maryland in front of the Adele Stamp Student Union /pb

The low-floor bus design seems to have come about when bus designers realized all buses did not need to be stuck on top of a truck chassis. Other US bus manufacturers like Champion Blue Bird, and Thomas (part of Chrysler now) offer their own versions of the modern bus. There are a lot of bus makers across the World List of buses - Wikipedia.

Beyond the bus itself what has made the UM Shuttle a successful institution is the system of routes stops user counts and GPS tracked schedules all feeding into a central system.

An example of a more uneven implementation is in this article of a bus system operating In HCMC (Saigon) In photos buses a nightmare on ho chi minh city streets - tuoi tre news. Culturally Saigon's streets are in a transition between pedestrians and scooters moving freely in vast slow waves and motor traffic moving at speed in lanes. Large vehicles such as the modern buses they have brought in are not able to implement the procedures that allow for an effective transit system -- full stops at a curb in a specific location at a predicable time.

If I had to choose one class of vehicle to represent modern transportation, the idea of transient progress in modern transportation I would choose the bus as the measure. Not cars or trucks certainly not pick-up trucks. The bus, public people-mover a device outside of advertising or desire.

Buses almost without exception barely register with popular culture. The Replacements did write a song "Kiss me on the Bus", the director Jose Padilha made the film Bus 174 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:. Two very different takes on the bus.

For me the Joy of public transportation is evenly mixed with its frustrations. I have only it and my bicycle. Often I initially feel that you just can't there from here, but there is almost always a way between train, trolley or bus. Measured on a scale of comfort cuteness and ubiquity. DC already submerged in a mass rail and bus transit system they can't meet the upkeep of will shortly be starting a new trolley car line, along the H street corridor. I'll be there ride it when it does, because -- trolley cars.

It's all one to the APTA the America Public Transportation Association which covers all types of public transportation (itself a member of UITP. While not the prestige infrastructure which is a urban rail line or subways, buses are the mode gorilla, with passenger trips 15% over heavy rail, still 5% over all rail combined Heavy and light rail plus interurban commuter)[table 6, figure 4 2013 Public Transportation Fact Book].

The problem is buses are not terribly efficient. In the Wikipedia article on Energy efficiency in transportation there is a table for US passenger transportation (source US Transportation Data Book 30th ed). Bus energy use measured in BTUs per passenger mile is twice that of rail (4,242/2,516 BTUs) and greater than that of cars (3,538 BTUs) as well. Table 2-12 is comparable in the Transportation Energy Data Book - Oak Ridge National Laboratory (links for large pdfs are to the download page not the item itself). Bus transportation's greatest efficiency is when most impinging; full capacity, and operating a rush hour route with limited stops. Placing a premium on a non claustrophobic balanced open interior design -- one of the things I like about the Gillig buses.

Another thing that sets buses back is operating with diesel engines in urban traffic. Here the promise of new technologies offers hope of greater energy efficiency. A portion of the ShuttleUM fleet is already operating the LNG variant powerplant that Gillig offers. Overall Alternative fuel use is 36% in US Buses (table 6.2 2013 Transport Energy databook).

Another potential avenue of efficiency is the concept of Bus rapid transit. This abandons the easy and pedestrian comfort of curb-side pick-up and involved time tables and treats buses more like subways or light rail with dedicated lanes and stations -- generally in a street's median -- where embarking and alighting would take place along with financial transactions.

Trying to bring this all together compared to the slow unheralded evolution of the bus there's been in other areas a plateauing of progress. Progress in that particular turn of the nineteenth in the twentieth century manner I began by speaking of. I hesitate to speak of a lack of forward thinking, since superficially we seem to be about nothing but forward thinking. Increasingly; though, we are living in the past. In an edifice constructed with more care than we exercise and exhibit in much of what we do today. To turn an old phrase around What's past is no longer prolog.

There is a vague disparagement of the ideal of thoroughness in the air. The will to do things slow and right, For the futures sake. There is rather the expectation that things can be made quickly and cheaply relying on some economy of scale. Something that could be termed the Manufacturing mirage delusion. An industrial hubris.

On one side standards on the other affordability. Vision is narrowed to the near term and the immediate. A large portion of the electorate has declared.eternal enmity to further taxation. An act that reduces the carefully planned and nurtured infrastructure of this nation, for which we placed no insignificant burden on ourselves to a thing of no agency. A part of the natural world to take for granted. It is however, a intertwined thing between the built edifices of buildings highways airports and utilities that make our civil environment and the rules and expectation developed for them. It is not permanent. Only a significant reoccurring input of resources keeps it together. This at the moment is not happening The highway repair fund is going broke | Marketplace.org. Infrastructure, a facet of future planning, is part of what is lost when the quality of government declines.

There is a disparagement (outside of professional engineering circles) of the hard and expensive work of maintaining standards. The sort of private affective pride seen in that forgotten engineer at the Navy yard a century ago. There are two senses of standard in use here: the instructional detail codified, and the idea that things ought to proceed from rational principles and experience.

Efficacy is what obtains. If something can be built or used with out the acknowledgement of financing the maintenance of the submerged part of the iceberg which are the standards of construction. If regulation is recast as interference with innovation to detriment of robustness and broad benefit to humanity. Then our world will shortly before long begin to dissolve in entropy.

Thursday, 20 March 2014 21:52 EST #

Polarizing Express

Back in the fall during that season when the government was shutdown; shut down like that hotel in the Shining the Monkey Cage blog (newly attached to that well-known big city newspaper the Washington Post) had some posts casting doubt on whether political polarization really exists. Specifically Sides was contending with the view that polarization was caused by any of the usual suspects -- Gerrymandering ie radical redistricting or any large or small scale sorting of the American populace; in a way that would radically affect voting patterns. These caveats aside the general thrust seemed to me that polarization to a degree was more conjured mirage than permanent changed reality, was a representational early post on this theme by some guest bloggers. I think that he may have gotten some pushback on that, desire at least for further consideration because beginning the new year Monkey Cage has opened a large and continuing discussion series on polarization of American politics. And it is a beautiful thing. Also in case anybody asks: yes I am recycling the title of a Psych episode for this post. But I was also thinking of Savoy Brown's "Train to Nowhere" at the same time.

Those that say that there is no pervasive polarization fall into to main camps. Those who hold that essentially it's a media illusion Americans aren’t polarized, just better sorted.. And those who view that what we take for polarization is merely non-Unique long-term political cycles Our politics may be polarized; But that’s nothing new..

On the side of; Yes there is non trivial polarization in our current politics. The discussion turns on whether it is situated manly in our representatives and their institutions: Polarization we can live with.  Partisan warfare is the problem or within us and in our culture The real extremists are American voters, not politicians..

The Monkey Cage blog does have a page filtering on the tag "polarization" where all the pieces written for this series can be found and it is worth reading them all. I picked out a half dozen or so that I especially liked and thought bound the political "science" consideration of this topic well.

First on the Structural / Demographic in origin side of the ledger. How ideological activists constructed our polarized politics. This piece argues that "The Liberal conservative conflict, in its modern form, is relatively new." Political competition has always been present and intense, but the issues of our current battles have taken decades to form and for the ideologue partisans of these issues to form the parties around them and regiment them to fight these battles. Conservatives especially for weeding the republican party of any holding views even slightly sympathetic to the social-justice/welfare regulatory state. That moment has now arrived.

Attendant to this the "Conflict extension" is now nearly complete every factor of modern life that has the ability to be affected by a political decision has a claim for it by one side or the other. Contention is no longer displaced on to one or two key issues allowing most civil matters to be largely unpoliticized Our politics is polarized on more issues than ever before.

As such the long standing centrism of most Americans is fading as elite polarization attracts and entices medium information voters with claims of reasonableness to extreme and uncompromising positions a. How politically moderate are Americans?  Less than it seems..

Jeff Stonecash in The two key factors behind our polarized politics points to the Great Realignment (the 1960s onward transition that brought white southerners to the Republican party). That dropped both a number of issues associated with race relations into "sharp focus" Second was the debate over "what and how much government should do." Increasing inequality has sharpened this still more. The middle class is substantially eroding, the larger portion of the population becoming an institutional poor. Against this democrats seek to arrange an extensive system of support programs to provide a social safety net and keep the pathways to a middle class open. Conservatives already view the tax structure that accomplishes this as anti-individualistic, redistributive, and dependency creating. Both have a considerable sense of entitlement in their views made policy.

Other articles written for the series tend more towards view that what we see is more Political or institutional power struggle in nature

The post American politics is more competitive than ever.  That’s making partisanship worse. takes the view that the recent political era is one of unprecedented evenness of political competition. Generally in American history one party or the other has a clear enough upper hand and therefore things generally gets done their way. Now with frequently "switching national majorities" national institutions are also caught against the possibilities of total directions switches significantly raising the stakes of every election, every legislative vote, every act and statement. Every thing is shoveled into fire pit of advantage.

As "partisan and ideological identities grow stronger and more aligned" so do bias and prejudice against people and viewpoints not of our own tribe. And superficial affinity for opinions among our own group take hold Party polarization is making us more prejudiced.

"Humans tend to over estimate the distinctiveness of rival groups." Matt Levendusky and Neil Malhotra say in The media make us think we’re more polarized than we really are Labeling and discussions of disparate groups by the media reinforces this false perception. In reaction to this voters who tend towards moderate views, become more moderate in their own views, negatively viewing the eschewing of compromise and consensus in others (mostly those holding opposing views). Those never moderate to begin are further stratified to the extreme. A study reported in Ars Techinica indicates that this divisiveness is genuinely corrosive to relationships in social networks The long-term effects of ugly political discussions on Facebook | Ars Technica:.

What's at stake is the critical question. As one of the articles early noted it is the trend towards winner-takes-all-politics that exacerbates the tenacity of modern politics. It is viewed perversely by politicians and the electorate alike that every election remakes the nation to its core. And in a nation that has a civil war or two in its past I would hesitate to chalk it up to merely a tempest in a tea-cup.

One of the things I got from a Roman literature class I took once upon a time, is that at the point when a proconsul or praetor, a provincial governor returning to Rome, or any politician ending his term protections. Catilline, for example, and is forced into legal battles for his legacy. In which he or his opponent either prevails or is irreversibly doomed. Things generally will get worse before they get better.

The twentieth century was one of tremendous fortune for the United states particularly the post war years of the second half. Yet the societal program of those years produced no consensus on the way forward -- the way to do things. There is a lack of faith, belief of efficacy, trust of fairness however perceived in the solutions of others.

This brings me around to a notion I call the Claw-back. My thinking here, while not beginning or ending with, revolves around the book It didn't happen here by Seymour Lipset. I read this about ten years ago, and have mentioned it on these pages before. The subtitle is "Why socialism failed in the United States." The short answer is that after market failures in the first half of the twentieth century, elites -- reigning corporate and financial power centers became alarmed and took action. They backed (or did not actively block) government programs of social welfare and credit. They allowed a expanded middle class and allowed it to prosper. But always, in the back of their minds; at their expense. Over the last generation; however it began to strike some as making sense to take back as the fear for their status and rule subsided.

This in many ways is the lasting legacy of the Reagan Revolution. The mix of fantasy and nostalgia, the desire for unobstructed gain, for clear demarcations of status and, yes, class stratification. The leveling terms of the the great society, new deal, all of the progressive era are to be pulled down and dismantled by program and institution. The very warp and woof of the modern era, that extends beyond raw technology are ideas to be rolled away to get back to some idealized reified America.

At the same time the world at large is a vastly different place than in the second half of the twentieth century the United States will never again have as free a hand to establish markets and terms of trade virtually without competition. The financial world abandons narrow notions of nationalism. The world of ordinary beings not as much.

Within the citizenry of the United States demographic shifts of a tectonic nature are changing the terms of politics and rule. White hegemony is giving way and not gently. The shift that brought southern conservatives to the Republican party bought it one sure generation of rule, but likely not two. American politics divides significantly on this How race and religion have polarized American voters.. And to a clear degree this polarization is white driven and from the enclaves of privilege How better educated whites are driving political polarization..

Until something meaningful comes out of this period of radical disagreement. Another concept of "being American." A joint agreement in the nations zeitgeist, or general will on how good a nation we want to be, how much a leader among nations. A true extension of full rights to all; regardless of race color creed and sexual orientation. The former something that frankly continues to challenge outside of talk. The latter not accepted at all. As well immigration issues; who is American, who can work in America. This is the problem of a semi internal proletariat very deliberately established in the workforce.

Until these issues are substantially resolved future will worse not better in all regards.

Saturday, 25 Feburary 2014 15:03 EST #

Right Quay, Wrong Century

I have another story from my Navy days in hand, well after the jump. It is a USS Ranger story. More specifically a Subic story as it takes place in Subic Bay, Republic of the Philippines. It is not a RVAH 7 story, which I wanted to write when I first decided it was time for another sea story. I will have to set those in Key West (Naval Air Station Key West, Boca Chica Key) if I want to tell a story grounded in the squadron.

USS Oklahoma (CG 5) dockside Yakuska August 1979. How did all these '70's cars get in this picture? | photo p.bushmiller

Nor is it a Pentagon story, where frankly I spend the greater share of my time in the Navy, a little over two full years. There I worked in a small shop called the CNO's Situation Room for Current Intelligence. There was no sense of adventure to those years, no new worlds. America in five flat sides. Do I even have any stories from those days? I can think of a few, I suppose I ought to take notes on these, but leave further consideration of those years for later.

The picture here is the one on the roll right before the one of the USS Ranger I picked to accompany the main story, taken a few minutes before. The ship is the USS Oklahoma (CG 5) (CL 91). A ship that came through time to have its picture taken that day. It was the last remaining Cleveland class light cruiser from WWII still active in the fleet. Even then it was only months from being decommissioned (My unit RVAH 7 was decommissioned before it). Both pictures are actually from the fleet Quay in Yakuska, Japan rather than Subic, PI. You blog with the pictures you have, not the ones you want. Besides one quai is very much like any other quay. On to the main story.

On the Quay at Subic

Sunday, 26 Jan 2014 17:05 EST #

Like an ordinary Zeppelin, but heavier

Once again, a list of songs from the previous year that made an impression on me. My list, differing from most, centers around "new to me" rather than new to the year, listening to me is a process of discovery. The list is culled from a notepad (s) I keep by my desk while working.

All music - pop music at least - feeds off past practice. It is a critical element in what gives music meaning. Perhaps this means pop music has a compromised aesthetic. In that it may require these associations in mind to give it functional meaning and allow it to be enjoyed in full.

This only leads one, aesthetically speaking, into the murky waters of category aesthetics vs. faceted endeavor. Which I remember only dimly from undergraduate philosophy classes. Something about Gotthold Lessing, a statue of Laocoon & sons (or was it Mumford & sons), and not wanting to drag a story into something that should be contemplated on the basis of form alone. I accept that pop music is not a fine art but a mongrel breed deriving its power from its multiplicity.

Besides, that pure forms sort of thinking is what sets people talking of how minor chords come to us from the sphere of blue persuasions (other chords, I guess, coming from various other crystal spheres) and I am going nowhere near that rabbit hole.

While I'm at it I might as well take a swipe at any intrinsic quality of music against its cultural context. A few days ago I played some Led Zeppelin for my 12 year old nephew, just because he didn't know what a Led Zeppelin was. "Like an ordinary Zeppelin", I told him, "but heavier." He listened and thanked me for sharing -- he was very polite about it. Clearly; though, it didn't do much for him. Stairway to Heaven, boy howdy, my generation was just all over that one. When I thought about it, listening to it again, Stairway, in many ways is slow and obvious. It needed its precise moment in time to be what it was.

This years list

1. Ferguson Tractor "12 O'clock High" 7" MTA (1969). The Ferguson Tractor - Garage Hangover Bay area fuzz psych from the late sixties. Band is named after the songwriter and presumably the British tractor company. The Ferguson Tractor - 12 O'Clock High - YouTube
2. CS Yeh "Starts with a look" Transitions (2011). CS Yeh - Transitions | Music Review | Tiny Mix Tapes One C. Spencer Yeh from Brooklyn also of Burning Star Core. Label De Stijl has another song of his up on sound cloud which doesn't grab me as much. CS Yeh : Whose Life by destijlrecs on SoundCloud
3. Yo La Tengo "Ohm" (Resisting the Flow) Fade (2013). Yo La Tengo | Music Biography, Credits and Discography | AllMusic. Listening to the line "Resisting the flow" I had the sudden epiphany "Oh so thats why they named the song "Ohm"." Love this, classify under autosuggestion.
4. Thee Oh Cees "Minatuar" Floating Coffin (2013). Thee Oh Sees Discography at Discogs Unfortunately they announced in December the band is taking a break though they have a record coming out, Thee Oh Sees, Deans of the S.F. Rock Scene, Are Going on Indefinite Hiatus.
5. Amon Duul "Archangels Thunderbird" 7" (1970). Amon Duul - Wikipedia Properly Amon Duul ii, they came out of Amon Duul the German sixties commune collective. Regarded as the founding act of what eventually became known as the "krautrock" movement. This early stuff is somewhat similar to Pink Faires (Never never land) or Hawkwind (Silver Machine) (Orgone Accumulator) and for good reason. Amon Duul II - Archangel Thunderbird - YouTube
6. Weekend (Slumberland records) "Oubliette", "Rosaries" Jinx (2013). Weekend | Music Biography, Credits and Discography | AllMusic. Weekend has that lovely processed guitar sound of modern rhythm psych where you feel you're riding some infinite wave yet, like charlie, you don't surf. This is a band on a label slumberland records run by a friend from college (we dj'd at WMUC together) I knew the label (following them on twitter) was on just an amazing roll this year. See also Joanna Gruesome (Cardiff) Black Hearted Brother (ex slowdive).
7. Billy Nayer Show "Love Smiles" American Astronaut (1991). Billy Nayer Show - Wikipedia Relevant clip from the movie: Billy Nayer Show - Love Smiles. I came across this one because out of curiosity I watched a movie called the American Astronaut on Netflix. This song and scene also known as "the Dance Contest" comes just after another song "Hey boy Hey boy" (which features Ned Sublette). Cory McAbee the animating genius behind the Billy Nayer Show (which features no-one named Billy Nayer) is in both scenes, but then he is the title character and also made the movie. He is not singing "Love smiles" which is the actor Bill Buell, bartender of the saloon on the astroid Ceres. At some point soon I'll have to come back and write a whole post on Cory McAbee.
8. Xenia Rubinos "Hair receding" Magic Trix (2013). Xenia Rubinos: Magic Trix | Album Reviews | Pitchfork If I could pick only one song to tell people about this year, this one would be it. This one! Xenia Rubinos - Hair Receding (Official Video)
9. Kandia Crazy Horse "Congo Square" Stampede (2013). Kandia Crazy Horse | Discography | AllMusic / She did a long and fascinating interview on Duane Herriot's show (WFMU 12-3 wed) in the fall of last year, but the songs of hers he played didn't move me especially. An hour or so later, on the next, show Irwin played a song that made me think "This is what I wanted her to sound like" and it was her.
10. Parquet Courts "Stoned and Starving" Light Up Gold (2013). Parquet Courts | Biography | AllMusic: Garage-y but crafted pop punk, you know I love it. Brooklyn via Denton. Is there some highway that runs straight between these two towns that I don't know about? Doesn't go through DC.
11. Frank Tovey "Only Doing your Job" Worried men in second-hand suits (1992). # Frank Tovey. I knew of the lp Tyranny and the Hired Hand, and that he had done more records with the Pyros subsequently. This is lovely song and I think they was just hitting their stride here. I don't know why he shut the band down after this. In 2001 at age 45 he resurrected his Fad Gadget act with a band half his age, and died of a heart attack soon after. There is some kinda rock and roll lesson in there somewhere. Frank Tovey & The Pyros - Only Doing Your Job - YouTube
12. William DeVaughn "Be Thankful for what you've got" 7" (1972). William DeVaughn - Wikipedia This song just has an awesome vibe. Curtis Mayfield covers this as well, did quite well by it (fair enough). So did DeVaughn for that matter. Eventually; though, he went back to being a federal government draftsman. Go figure? william de vaughn- be thankful for what you got (original)

Thursday, 16 Jan 2014 22:59 EST #

Underwater Moonlight

If you arrived here from Atomized Jr. or in some similar fashion you might be asking what happened? Why I have spun out so many weblogs named Atomized... I have whipped up an explainer of sorts to try to provide an answer. This, Atomized MKii, is in most ways simply an updated version of the original Atomized that I set up more than a decade ago. Which I've preserved, it being so much a product of its time. Strictly Atomized MKii was born three years ago, on the first occasion that Atomized Jr. stopped functioning.

Atomized Jr. was the Radio Userland web log I ran for the years in between. I passed the Radio Userland software on through three of the four generations of Apple laptops I've owned. I ran it when the universities server began to require secure FTP connections which necessitated switching its upstream target to to Userland's hosting space (which created the redundant .radio-weblogs/117291) and building the terpconnect site out of the backup folder using Fetch or Fugu. When Userland went under in 2010 the upstreaming server disappeared and the back up folder wouldn't build. This stymied me for several weeks until a former Userland programmer (Jake Savin) wrote me that changing a line in a xml doc in the Userland folder would cause the program to upstream to a folder my own hard drive. I was back in business, until the software living now on my old computer (which still has the carbon emulation layer), just stopped working altogether in mid December.

The original Atomized which I began in 1999, but settled down into its final form a year later covers the dates 1999-2001. Atomized Jr. covers the dates 2001-2013. Atomized MKii hopefully will carry forward 2013- . In library cataloging world which I work in this would be covered, I suppose, by one or more marc 780 tags. E.g.: Supercedes in part: Atomized. Continues: Atomized Jr.

What is this we have here? Well, first it's entirely handmade by me in glorious html 4.1. Its made out of an assortment of tables templates and CSS. Its simple, primitive, it's old school - like a painted porch. It doesn't validate in xHTML.

It's also not definitively a web-log, lacking some core attributes. There are not individual pages for each post. No RSS either. This is easily enough done, but see above. You need individual post URL to make an RSS feed work. I suppose I could pin named-anchors to each post to give them their own unit URL (I may try that, it could work). Lastly there is no functioning comments system. This is something I would like to have but is too complex to provide on my own. Towards this end; however, I have placed my Twitter feed widget on the page, and a simple web form for a longer comment if you need it.

But but Wordpress is free, and Tumblr, TypePad, I hear some of you saying. These are available off the shelf products that do just this and do it well. Even Dave Winer (he of Radio Userland) has something new cooking Fargo. Well, I suppose its an echo of that DIY zeitgeist that swept through the punk rock era of my youth. Doing it yourself is the ethos, it is the vocation.

Where I see this going lies in rebuilding the good. The look feel & widgets that I felt worked for what I was trying to do. With a nod to current aesthetics. I want a web outlet that gives me the ability to post in long and short form. I find what I write carefully, of whatever length, eventually gets read. What I write quickly, carelessly doesn't. Part of that is learning not to waste the time of the reader (in another context one of S.R. Ranganathan's dictums).

As I was finishing up the draft of this I came across a post written just today by David Weinberger, one of the foundation bloggers, an insightful retrospective titled What blogging was There is that sense that essentially the phenomenon is over even as it persists for some. Atomized Jr. was conceived in part as an outlet for what my Government and Politics major and early interest in reporting never got me to. That job, that career. Only some topics inspire; though, through even a brief piece of writing. Sometimes with process it comes together, sometimes not. I find it nettlesome to hold opinions about things I know little about, and never learned the perfected information disseminating techniques of modern journalism.

I think with this iteration of Atomized I would like to increase move towards narrative form. Things that are more story-telling in nature. Narrative essays, or fiction. Fiction, needless to say, is tricky. Not only do you need to have an ear for how people really talk to each other, how desire erupts into action and consequence, Like a ship being prepared for a voyage, fiction needs everything integral to its resolution identified and stored within it.

Mostly I don't see that I gave up wanting to write just because I pay my rent being a copy cataloger. I will work to write as effectively as those fortunate to be paid for it. But as Robyn Hitchcock once put it "Gotta let this Hen out."

Thursday, 09 January 2014 09:09 EST #