And it’s FOR REAL.
Infographic Of The Day
It’s not your imagination, cable TV reality shows are getting more redneck by the day. This Venn diagram comes from this article at New York Magazine’s pop culture blog Vulture, where you can see the full-sized version of the diagram. I guess dwarves and people with lots of kids are out of vogue, since I don’t see any of those on the list.
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So Much For My Life As An International Jewel Thief
Yesterday, I had an experience I hadn’t entirely anticipated having at this stage of my life: I got fingerprinted by the Cambridge Police Department.
The biotech company where I work part-time is planning to start selling products that require them to have a particularly lethal neurotoxin on premises, as well as some other chemicals that can be used in the creation of narcotics. Those substances will be kept in a secure area, but anyone who has to have access to said area has had to go through a security clearance process that includes having fingerprints on file with the FBI’s bioterrorism unit. As one of the IT guys, I will have to have access to the Chamber Of Death, so off I went to the Cambridge PD at lunchtime. There, in a small room, a young woman firmly took each of my fingers, rolled them on an inkpad, and pressed them onto a pair of cards to be sent to the Feds.
I remarked to her that I was surprised that the process had not gone digital. Digital fingerprinting is actually pretty common these days. She informed me that they do, in fact, have a digital system in the booking area where arrestees are processed because it’s faster and easier, which is key when dealing with uncooperative people, but the traditional ink print is still preferred. The room where she fingerprinted me was only just around the corner from the front entrance of what is a fairly large building, so it must be a common enough procedure to do non-arrest-related prints.
As I alluded to above, I also had to have a basic criminal background check, the result of which is that I now have some clearance number from the FBI that I can use if I go to another job that requires such things. I assume the same holds true of the prints — once they’re on file I doubt they ever have to be done again. Now that I’m marked man, though, whatever madcap crime spree I may or may not have been planning will be all that easier to foil. Curses!
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At Least They’re Boneless
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Seeing Chicago By Rail
Salon, of all places, had a wonderful article last week featuring a slew of gorgeous posters designed for the various passenger rail lines that serviced Chicago and the region surrounding the city, as well as the Chicago Transit Authority. The posters are mostly from the 1920s, and they feature many Chicago landmarks, some of which are gone but not all. There are also nature scenes and other travel poster style images of such “exotic” destinations as the Ogden Dunes in Indiana and Benton Harbor, Michigan. Toward the bottom of the article, there are even some photographs of the actual posters “in the wild” at “L” stops in Evanston and Wilmette. Though the posters pre-date the iconic art of the WPA, it’s clear where some of the aesthetics for WPA-period travel posters comes from when you look at these.
Thanks to my old Northwestern University grad school classmate Nina Berry for pointing me to this link.
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Beijing Then And Now
Here’s a recent photo of Beijing from a Chinese blogger. It’s not quite as glamorous as some pictures of the city, but there’s no doubt that the Chinese government pushed through a huge amount of construction and urban renewal in the years leading up to the 2008 Olympics.
The blog “Poemas del Rio Wang” recently came across a cache of photos taken for LIFE magazine in 1946, just prior to the Chinese Revolution that may represent one of the few photographic records of what Beijing looked like for hundreds of years prior to its modernization. Almost nothing of Old Beijing remains other than the Forbidden City and other areas preserved as historical sites, which really isn’t all that uncommon for most major cities, except that there was a lot more photographic material from places like London or Paris or New York. There’s a lot of really wonderful things to see, so do visit the link.
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Year Of The Pizza Dragon
It may be the end of January but we are just a week into the New Year according to the Chinese lunar calendar. Not only is it the Year of the Dragon, there is a second astrological system traditional in China that is based on the five elements of fire, earth, water, metal and wood that overlays the 12-year cycle so that children born this year will be “Water Dragons”: not just lucky, but smart and judicious as well.
I, and my fellow 1963 babies, am a “Water Rabbit”, as described here:
Delicate and docile, Water Rabbits will pretty well go with the flow to avoid any conflict or argument. These situations hurt them and bother them because they are such sensitive creatures. They are usually sociable and relaxed, although sometimes they get withdrawn and introspective. They are supportive with family and friends as well as business partners and display an empathy that makes people flock to them for friendly advice and comfort. Sometimes, they can easily be taken advantage of because they are so generous with themselves and their emotions. So they have to be careful not to let their guards down so quickly.
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Capitalism Destroys Everything
“Well, it looks that way. You have to ask… How is it possible that the most dynamic, best capitalized, most high-tech economy in world history could not add a single dollar to the real wealth of the average working man over a 40 year period?”
Washington Post guest blogger Bill Bonner relates a conversation with a European diplomat wherein they discuss the long, slow decline of capitalism over the last 40 years.
One thing we can be certain of is that capitalism will end. Maybe not soon, but probably before too long; humanity has never before managed to craft an eternal social system, after all, and capitalism is a notably more precarious and volatile order than most of those that preceded it. The question, then, is what will come next. Rosa Luxemburg, reacting to the beginnings of World War I, cited a line from Engels: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”
Writing in the Winter 2012 issue of Jacobin Magazine, editor Peter Frase indulges in an exercise of imagination to consider four possible successor systems to global capitalism: communism, rentierism, socialism, and exterminism. They are, by his own admission, overly simplistic and deterministic, and unlikely to come to pass in the distilled forms he describes. Nevertheless, we are at least part of the way down the road toward a rentier society in this country and will go a great deal further if someone like Newt Gingrich has anything to say about it. And, if the past is any gauge, the living hell of exterminism is merely one ecological cataclysm away.
I have seen this graph all over the place lately, but the first place I saw it was on my friend Ben’s blog, so I’ll give him the linky-love. What this graph shows you is the elasticity of income — your ability to make more money than your parents — against degrees of income inequality, with the values of a bunch of industrialized nations plotted for comparison. Income inequality is lowest in the Scandinavian countries, but economic opportunity is also the highest (ooh, those damned European socialists!). Meanwhile, as Ben says, if you live in the U.S. or U.K., you’d better hope you have rich parents.
Speaking of those damned European socialists, Claude S. Fischer at “Made In America” considers the Euro-bashing from Mittens and Newtster and takes some of the same measurements that you see in the graph above, along with a few others, to paint a different picture of just how awful life must be for those poor beknighted Swedes and Frenchmen compared to Americans.
It seems to many today that the United States’ 30-year drift from a democracy to an ostensible corporatocracy has resulted in nothing but business-interest legislation and disparities of wealth so wide among the classes that it appears impossible for them to be rectified.
Here’s a post that ran at “Prose Before Hos” back in October, at the height of the Occupy movement, from political science student Savannah Cox that illustrates what Claude Fischer’s and Ben Hyde’s graphs are trying to quantify: the on-the-ground effects of the destructiveness of income inequality in the United States, aided and abetted by compliant politicians of both parties including Barack Obama. Her “ray of hope”: that some of the billionaires themselves, such as Warren Buffet and Mark Cuban, who have been willing to speak out against the iniquities.
Lastly, also from October 2011, here is an op-ed from Sam Smith, who edits Progressive Review.com, entitled “The Party’s Over”, which begins like this:
The party’s over. The national delusion that began 30 years ago with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan has run its course. Free trade, competition, innovation, entrepreneurship, market driven, bottom line, laissez faire, deregulation, privatization, mission statements, strategic plans, value added and all the other gibberish that was meant to save us has brought us to where we are today.
Three decades of sweet buzzwords and brutal economics fostered by a media that thought “free markets” were required by the Bill of Rights have left America broken, busted, and bitter.
No, it didn’t have to happen. After all, as John Maynard Keynes noted, “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.” We might have noticed. But our teachers in government, academia and the press largely went along with the most wickedest of men, girding their cause with false arguments and misleading logic. The rest didn’t have much time to think about it all; they were too busy taking tests or finding ways to make enough money to buy all the things they were told they had to have.
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Toons Of The World UNITE!
The Communist Manifesto as performed by Mickey Mouse, Felix The Cat, Mr. Peabody & Sherman, and many more of your favorite cartoon characters:
If you aren’t too distracted by the cartoons, this is an excellent distillation of the basic ideas Marx wrote in the Communist Maninfesto about the history of class struggle and the reductive nature of capitalism. Americans have been so thoroughly indoctrinated to immediately assume that communism is wrong, evil, or both that the simple truths of Marx’s analysis don’t even register with us. Maybe by explaining them with visual language that practically anyone can relate to, more people might grasp the seriousness of the death spiral capitalism has trapped us all in.
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The Occupation Lives On
The media lost interest in the Occupy movement as soon as they were chased out of Zuccotti Park, but that does not mean Occupy is done.
Over the weekend, Occupy Oakland protestors clashed with police, resulting in 300 arrests. The Oakland group has been particularly active, taking over abandoned property once they were forced to leave the public park where they were camped.
The Christian Science Monitor reports that groups in other cities are making preparations for more public actions in the spring, but in the meanwhile are engaged in activities such as the protest in New York last Thursday to block a foreclosure auction.
Despite the assertions from the right and from the media that Occupy “didn’t have a point”, they’ve genuinely had an impact on public discourse, and though these other actions are smaller in scope they are important in building toward a long-term role.