Richard Dawkins’ thoughts on Rick Perry, and by extension on a frighteningly large American political class
A politician’s attitude to evolution is perhaps not directly important in itself. It can have unfortunate consequences on education and science policy but, compared to Perry’s and the Tea Party’s pronouncements on other topics such as economics, taxation, history and sexual politics, their ignorance of evolutionary science might be overlooked. Except that a politician’s attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where scientific opinion is genuinely divided, there is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Thanks to Darwin, we now understand why we are here and why we are the way we are. You cannot be ignorant of evolution and be a cultivated and adequate citizen of today.
I think I found a Dawkins article Andrew can get behind?
‘In this study, all they had to do was introduce competition for resources and summer camp became Lord of the Flies’
Some of the Eagles boys discovered the Rattlers’ flag standing unguarded on the baseball field. They discussed what to do and decided it should be ripped from the ground. Once they had it, a possession of the enemy, a symbol of their tribe, they decided to burn it. They then put its scorched remains back in place and sang Taps. Later, the Rattlers saw the atrocity and organized a raid in which they stole the Eagles’ flag and burned it as payback. When the Eagles discovered the revenge burning, the leader issued a challenge – a face off. The two leaders then met with their followers watching and prepared to fight, but the scientists intervened. That night, the Rattlers dressed in war paint and raided the Eagles’ cabins, turning over beds and tearing apart mosquito netting. The staff again intervened when the two groups started circling and gathering rocks. The next day, the Rattlers painted one of the Eagle boy’s stolen blue jeans with insults and paraded it in front of the enemy’s camp like a flag. The Eagles waited until the Rattlers were eating and conducted a retaliatory raid and then ran back to their cabin to set up defenses. They filled socks with rocks and waited. The camp staff, once again, intervened and convinced the Rattlers not to counterattack. The raids continued, and the interventions too, and eventually the Rattlers stole the Eagles knives and medals. The Eagles, determined to retrieve them, formed an organized war party with assigned roles and planned tactical maneuvers. The two groups finally fought in open combat. The scientists broke up the fights. Fearing the two tribes might murder someone, they moved the groups’ camps away from each other.
The story of two groups of boys, under the supervision of psychologists, left to fend for themselves, in Oklahoma’s Robber’s Cave State Park in the 1950s.
(via Aaron Cohen at kottke, and the browser)
Mike Leigh’s Meantime (1983)
Meantime is a 1983 film directed by Mike Leigh, produced by Central Television for Channel 4. It was shown at the London Film Festival in 1983 and on Channel 4 a few weeks later, on 1 December. According to the critic Michael Coveney: “The sapping, debilitating and demeaning state of unemployment, the futile sense of waste, has not been more poignantly, or poetically, expressed in any other film of the period.”
Chris Marker OVERNIGHT (2011)
I would agree with those who judge this a minor contribution to Chris Marker‘s oeuvre, but I still find it interesting, especially as it has appeared so swiftly after the events interpreted (England’s recent wave of riots).
It was almost as if there was a secret world of pronouns that existed outside our awareness
COOK: What are some of the more unusual “texts” you have applied this technique to?
PENNEBAKER: Some of the more unusual texts have been my own. There is something almost creepy about analyzing your own emails, letters of recommendation, web pages, and natural conversations.
COOK: And what have you found?
PENNEBAKER: One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status. The effects were quite robust and, naturally, I wanted to test this on myself. I always assumed that I was a warm, egalitarian kind of guy who treated people pretty much the same.
I was the same as everyone else. When undergraduates wrote me, their emails were littered with I, me, and my. My response, although quite friendly, was remarkably detached — hardly an I-word graced the page. And then I analyzed my emails to the dean of my college. My emails looked like an I-word salad; his emails back to me were practically I-word free.
One of half a dozen subjects discussed in an interview with James Pennebaker, chair of the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, on his work with the hidden world of pronouns.
(thanks, Andrew)
Telex — ‘A radical new approach to thwarting Internet censorship would essentially turn the whole web into a proxy server’
Telex is a proof of concept that would harness multiple servers outside restrictive countries that would make it harder, or impossible, for governments to block access to specific websites.
“This has the potential to shift the arms race regarding censorship to be in favor of free and open communication,” said J. Alex Halderman, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at U-M and one of Telex’s developers.
“The Internet has the ability to catalyze change by empowering people through information and communication services. Repressive governments have responded by aggressively filtering it. If we can find ways to keep those channels open, we can give more people the ability to take part in free speech and access to information.”
Chris Burden, Metropolis II
You may recall the kinetic sculpture Metropolis II by Chris Burden. The work, which took four years to complete, features 1,500 Hot Wheels diecast cars and a host of electric trains all bustling around a matrix of steel and plastic. If that sounds like a snapshot of your morning commute, you’re not alone.
Burden recently sat down with directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman for a quick chat on what’s behind Metropolis II and what it means to the artist. Those of you in Southern California may be able to see the exhibit in person at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the fall of 2011.
Jason’s been tracking Chris Burden projects for a while now.
pregnancy tourism for a master race
In the film, the lady tells us how she isn’t the first, and “definitely not the last” to travel this far to have an Aryan child, one who, she imagined, would grow up grateful for the gift of racially superior intelligence. She speaks of an organised system behind such pregnancy tourism, but refuses to elaborate. “It’s not wrong, what I’m doing,” she says, “I’m paying for what I want.”
The movie is called Achtung Baby: In Search of Purity, and is about German women travelling to Indian villages to get knocked up by men they believe are the last of the pure Aryans.
(via the browser)
quote out of context
The tension, as I see it, is that if free will is a myth then it’s not clear why we should have an ethical goal of changing people as little as possible.
an interesting subplot to the horror in Norway
Norwegians tend to see “acts of extreme violence … as aberrant events, not symptoms of national decay,” Time Magazine’s William Lee Adams reported last year. Norwegian prison guards undergo two years of training, “don’t carry guns … and call prisoners by their first names and play sports and eat meals with them,” Adams reported.
That approach — and its underlying premise that people who commit crimes are troubled who should be given a second chance and prepared to live again amongst society — can perhaps be credited with Norway’s extremely low prison-recidivism rate — only about 20 percent of those imprisoned in Norway commit a repeat crime that sends them back to prison. Recidivism figures in the United States and the United Kingdom, by contrast, are much higher — 50 to 60 percent.
This in the context of the maximum prison sentence being 21 years in Norway, especially in light of the recent atrocity.
Don’t Forget the Motor City Lawndale
I was looking at pictures of Detroit (from my Flickr friend Jan Normandale and from the archives of the Reuther Library at Wayne State University), and now I have to stop looking for a while.
I’ve visited Detroit a couple of times, and in truth there’s a lot I like about it, but I can’t think about it anymore. This afternoon I’m recollecting a blisteringly hot afternoon in Chicago, late July, when I thought to avoid the expressway and take a parallel route down Roosevelt Road to where I was going.
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Cults
Grace and I just returned this week from vacationing in Michigan and visiting family. While we were back, religion was brought up often, as Bible-Belters are wont to do in such an environment. In one of the more interesting conversations I had with my mother-in-law, I wondered aloud to her whether the belief systems of modern cults were really so far fetched, compared to their more established Abrahamic counterparts. One has to wonder whether those reading the centuries-diluted accounts of Jim Jones a thousand years from now wouldn’t wonder whether he was, indeed, more than a man after all.
Does anyone remember the Jonestown massacre? I’d really like to understand how the collective American psyche grappled with that experience.
(Video: “Go Outside,” Cults)
we hope you will expand your horizons with us
Andrew forwarded a post from Colin Marshall on The Tree of Life, and audience reactions to it. What caught my attention was the graphic he linked from a Connecticut theater warning its patrons about the movie they were about to see. I’m pleased the theater did it, but I’m not sure what to say about it beyond that. We live in interesting times. And I don’t think that’s a curse.
Thanks, Andrew.
It Gets Even Worse
From a recent NYT editorial:
If you thought the do-it-yourself anti-immigrant schemes couldn’t get any more repellent, you were wrong. New laws in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina are following — and in some ways outdoing — Arizona’s attempt to engineer the mass expulsion of the undocumented, no matter the damage to the Constitution, public safety, local economies and immigrant families.
The laws vary in their details but share a common strategy: to make it impossible for people without papers to live without fear.
Las Reinas Chulas: “Que Suave Patria”
Please don’t turn aside take a look even if no hablas español (not even dumbass texan spanish).
¡Las Reinas Chulas reglan!
Dozens of plastic foam heads rain onto the stage. Four drug traffickers in fringed jackets and sparkly pink cowboy hats bat them into the audience with toy AK-47s. All the while, the cast croons, “Let them slit our throats, let them pack us up . . . let them not ask any questions, let them not investigate.”
This is cabaret, Mexico style. Las Reinas Chulas, or the Beautiful Queens, parody drug violence in a show the women first produced in 2005 and that still fills nightclubs around Mexico, including a performance in the tourist town of Taxco this weekend.
dear clusterflock
When was the last time you saw someone in a movie, before you knew who they were, and thought, this person will be a star?
Re-winding A Clockwork Orange
Ed and Mike and a few others and I drove to Houston to see A Clockwork Orange when it looked as though it would not be shown In Dallas.
Watching Clockwork that afternoon was one of the most painful aesthetic experiences I’ve endured. And Kubrick’s film remains one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen.
Can(nes) of Worms
Lars von Trier made a monkey of himself this past week and no lie. Yeah yeah sure sure, he was indulging in low-key Scandihoovian humor. It just wasn’t funny. “Where’s my rubber chicken?”
But for the Cannes festival’s board of directors to issue the equivalent of a restraining order? C’mon, people. You just opened a can of wriggly worms.
The spirit of Hunter Thompson lives.
Y’all may have read this by now, but if you haven’t, here ’tis: Ali Arikan’s Slant review of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, titled “A Fountain of Maggots.”
Not scabrous in the over-the-top vein of the Doctor, but shot through and through with a saevo indignatio that Thompson (and Jonathan Swift) would have found simpatico.
I scarcely know what quotation to pull, so how about this?
I used to ridicule people who got worked up about a film (“It’s only a movie, Ingrid,” etc.), and think the grand scheme of life is much more important than two and a bit hours lost in the pursuit of entertainment. But, recently, I have started to change my mind. Everything matters. Every moment counts. Your actions can affect the very being of someone halfway across the world: the butterfly effect and all that stuff. So, to pigeonhole this film into the “yet another piece of shit from the summer” category is a disservice to the human race. I realize I am pseudo-intellectualising this to the nth degree, but it’s true, nonetheless. I saw the first Pirates of the Caribbean film during a particularly bleak period of my life in Balham, South London. It made me happy and joyful and proud to be a member of our species. Smiles all around. So, if we can celebrate fluff when it’s handled well, if we can champion it, if we can, fuck it, beatify it, then it’s our duty to ourselves (and in fact the filmmakers), to call it out when it fails. When my fellow brethren are watching the new Terrence Malick or the new Lynne Ramsay, I have to actually pay for this shit, and then pull my punches, and go through the motions, and be content? Well, fuck that. Fuck that with fucking bells on.
Adam Curtis, It Felt Like a Kiss
Sheila suggested I check out documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis’s found footage montage, It Felt Like a Kiss. A collaboration between Curtis and improvised theater company Punchdrunk, I’m not quite sure what the immersive experience would have been like, but I have rounded up the various pieces of it available on YouTube, and if you are interested — you’ll only need to watch a few minutes to know if it’s right for you — you can take a look.
Here is what the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker had to say:
One particular segment, set to River Deep, Mountain High, feels like being repeatedly stung on the mind by a hallucinogenic jellyfish while inhaling huge clouds of history through a pipe. The marriage of Phil Spector’s wall of sound and Curtis’s wall of images is so perfect, so strange and striking, it jangled around my head for hours afterward. And I only saw it in a tiny window on an Apple Mac, in a corner of Curtis’s tape-strewn “lair” at BBC Television Centre. God knows what it’ll be like on a big screen as part of a live-action, funhouse-style experience. It’ll probably kill people.
National Jukebox
The National Jukebox debuts, featuring more than 10,000 78rpm disc sides issued by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1900 and 1925.
Precession of the Equinoxes
The thing that caused everyone to freak out because their astrological signs had changed is one of the more fascinating stories in the history of intellectual evolution. That thing is called precession of the equinoxes, and precession is one of those phenomena that is simultaneously invisible and obvious, observable and hidden.
Let’s start with the technicalities and move to the history of it.
In astronomy, axial precession is a gravity-induced, slow and continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body’s rotational axis. In particular, it refers to the gradual shift in the orientation of Earth’s axis of rotation, which, like a wobbling top, traces out a pair of cones joined at their apices in a cycle of approximately 26,000 years. The term “precession” typically refers only to this largest secular motion; other changes in the alignment of Earth’s axis — nutation and polar motion — are much smaller in magnitude.
So, precession is essentially the planetary equivalent of the wobble in a top as it spins.
If you carve the horizon into twelve roughly equivalent sections, each year, at the equinoxes, the sun will appear to rise in one and set in its opposite. Because of the wobble in the axis of the earth, the section of the sky the sun appears to rise and set in will shift very slowly over a period of roughly 2,160 years. This is the basis of astrology, as various civilizations applied meaning to the constellations they saw in each section. More interestingly, I think, our tracking of it appears to be the basis of astronomy.
To begin to notice that tracking takes time. To fully understand the cycle, and be able to project it forwards and backwards, to mark the passage of time in the relative movement of the stars, would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years — observation, measurement, notation. Once a culture had an awareness of that pattern, no matter on what scale, it could begin to find a place for itself, and make a story out of it, and because we are human, of course, that is what we did.
If you are interested in this subject, and are comfortable with an approach equal parts academic and poetic, you might enjoy Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechen’s Hamlet’s Mill. It shows glimpses of precession’s possible influence throughout the history of art, an astronomical code for our place in the universe embedded in language.
from the comments
The factory bit struck a chord with me. We bemoan the lost heavy industries, coal and cars and such, yet those jobs were repetitive, too. If fast food jobs paid a living wage, with adequate sick time and a sense of employee pride, then couldn’t we recapture a bit of what was lost in the globalization of the past 30 years?
Of course, there’s an entirely different nutritional and social argument to be made against fast food. But until all of America returns to local markets, eating seasonal produce and reconnecting with the cycles of nature, perhaps incremental improvements to fast food are the best we can hope for. Nate Appleman, celebrated chef of San Francisco’s A16 restaurant and a noted nose-to-tail dining advocate, is now at the Chipotle corporate R&D kitchen, allegedly working on ways to make the finished product mesh better with the realities of sustainable farming.
On an unrelated note, Glen Bell apparently referred to his signature product as tay-cos.
He’s dead.
A very fine, unintentional summary of the conversation we had at clusterflockstock when we heard the news:
I’m not a psychiatrist or an apologist for stupidity, but I have to think the two things are related.
This guy — this son-of-a-bitch who murdered thousands of people here ten years ago and helped murder many more all around the world — has us so twisted up that we do not know how to feel about him, or ourselves, at all.
And our inability to come together, and to talk about that, which was already latent in the way our media work, and all the more amplified by what ten years of this twisting and torturing, and being twisted into torture and then lying about torture, only makes it worse.
I hope we can exorcise this man, his damage, and the damage he helped incite us to, from our lives. I have to hope that we have enough strength left in our democracy to do that. I have to have faith that the future will be better than today. And I have to have charity enough to forgive — to feel something more than anger or irony or judgment, and to just finally give those things away.
Dick Cavett Interviews Lance Loud (circa 1973)
Rick spoke of Lance Loud, made famous by An American Family, a cinema vérité series shot in 1971 and broadcast by PBS in early 1973. Here is Dick Cavett interviewing Lance not long after the series aired.
