searching for the ineffable
My friend Daneel suggested that, since NaNoWriMo is here, and since a picture is worth a thousand words, it might be fun to post fifty photos all taken in November, on some topic or not.
Behold, I have begun. (Here’s the Atom feed for the tag, if you’d rather.)
Auspicious, that I only discovered Wikiversity today: voting that will determine whether the project will go ahead will end at midnight UTC!
The purpose of the Wikiversity project, which will ultimately reside at www.wikiversity.org, is to build an electronic institution of learning that will be used to test the limits of the wiki model both for developing electronic learning resources as well as for teaching and for conducting research and publishing results (within a policy framework developed by the community).
More information is at the link above. The idea needs work and much development and goodwill, but is promising. I’d be excited to participate, that’s for sure.
Please take a moment to create* a (free) new account and vote if you’re even remotely interested in this; they need a two-thirds majority to launch the beta. At the time of this writing it’s 197 Yes to 83 No, which is encouraging but awfully close.
*The interface for creating a new account is a bit misleading. Just fill in the username and password (and email, if you want) fields, and click on “Create new account.”
Harper’s has published “Bluebirds over Baghdad” – a great, short read that puts our current villainy there in some perspective.
This sort of news doesn’t usually make it out to the general public; it stays in the crowd to which it pertains, people just don’t tend to hear about it unless they’re actively searching. If you’re an unconnected party, especially if you’re an academic, please spread the word.
On August 20th, a 90-strong SWAT team raided an electronic music event – a rave – that was legitimately taking place an hour’s drive from Salt Lake City in Utah. They brutally beat people, pointed guns at their foreheads, drew Tasers. They proudly announced having confiscated many drugs, their largest drug “bust” being the stash of stuff that contracted security had confiscated from partygoers. There was at least one helicopter. There were dogs, and at least one person is claimed to have been attacked by a police dog.
Drug Policy Alliance article: According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah County detectives wanted to “get their point across that such activity was not welcome in their area”… Since when are police officially sanctioned to do anything but uphold the law?
Another article by the Daily Herald in Provo:
Recently released documents show Utah County Sheriff Jim Tracy made plans to break up an August party in Spanish Fork Canyon days before he had officers raid the event.
The pages of documents, including police reports and memos from officers involved to co-workers and the sheriff’s office, indicated Tracy knew about the party as early as Aug. 18, two days before it happened, and contacted other law enforcement agencies for assistance in shutting down the event.
Several days after the raid, the Daily Herald sent a request to Utah County under the state Government Records Access Management Act for any documents relating to tactical planning received or sent by the Utah County Sheriff’s Office. Chris Yannelli, an attorney in the Utah County Attorney’s Office, told the newspaper at the time the documents didn’t exist.
But those documents do exist…
Utah County Departmental News release about the rave bust: “A 17 year old female from West Jordan, found by officers, had overdosed on ecstasy. She was treated and released to her parents.”
Another report stated that the young woman was “close to overdosing on Ecstasy”, whatever that means. Which Ecstasy? MDMA? GHB, sometimes referred to as “liquid ecstasy” and with markedly different effects? an unknown substance? Let’s assume MDMA, the most common. What are the symptoms of “overdosing” – hell, what are the effects considered to be within normal range for people taking a drug? What are the negative effects? Was she hospitalized? (No.) Her pulse was said to have been 176; hell, if she was on “Ecstasy” and saw SWAT all around her, I can see how she’d have an elevated heart rate. That last link above reports palpitations nowhere near as high as the report stated. We’re talking a difference of 85-100 beats per minute.
Salon has a great article on this, here. It’s free if you watch a short ad. They do present both sides of the story.
The ACLU got involved in a suit against the sherriff: a federal judge asked to prevent future raids on electronic music events. The ruling was in the sherriff’s favor.
Finally, here’s a two-minute video (.mov viewable with Quicktime, 15.76MB) shot by an attendee (I’ve put it on my own site just in case it ever gets taken off elsewhere). The police claim there was no brutality.
I’ve received an unexpected gift from a stranger. It totally floored me.
It began innocently, with a blog comment. Joe, you see, wrote this post about the Moscow Cats Theatre performances going on right now in New York.
Omigod, Kuklachev and his cats!!1! I grew up watching them on television. The clown’s art has a special place in Russian hearts: the circus still comes to town, indeed lives permanently in most major cities, and clowns are a huge part of that. The skits are generally mimed, or nearly; it’s all physical comedy, but not all of it is slapstick. They make you think, they tug on your heart strings.
I’m getting all nostalgic here. If you want to know more about Russian clowns, this article in The Moscow Times is a pretty good start.
Anyway, so I react to this effect in a comment to Joe’s post. Go see them if you can!, I wrote, I’d sure be there in a heartbeat if I had the money.
A couple of days later, a letter arrives from Charlottesville. I’m all confused; I was just recently in Charlottesville for the digital tools summit, and don’t remember meeting someone by the name on the return-address stamp. I open it, and out comes a color printout of the poster for the show and another one with the Ticketmaster blurb. And money to cover a ticket.
Well, holy shit.
Ethan and I were so excited about the prospect of going (we can swing another ticket, and no way I was gonna see this without showing him a part of my childhood) that we talked some of my family into going with us. So at the end of December, when my mom flies into New York for New Year’s with my brother-and-family and us, we’ll all be going. The two of us, and my brother, and my sister-in-law, and my nephew (who is going to LOVE this), and my mom, for whom this is possibly more nostalgic than it is for me.
Thank you, Joe. You’ve brought me back some beautiful memories from the old country.
current mood: pretty damn thankful
She died yesterday. She was 92.
Thank you for your courage and lack of sensationalism. Long live your memory; may it remind us what’s really important.
All I have for a company is a URL. The whois information on the domain name gives me a company name. They’ve registered the domain through Domains By Proxy in Arizona, and their info is mostly private, although the domain server names are different from both the company name and DBP and so may help. I want to find out whether they’re legit, and whether they might have anything to do with (drumroll) SPAMMERS. Is there any publically available information that might help me with this?
Heh. I think I’ve finally gotten so fed up with the misinformed propagandistic drug-war polemic that I’m becoming a self-appointed spokesperson for correct information. [Article is not mine; two of the many comments are.]
Not that I’ll get it right every time. But, damn. When academics stop thinking and start implicitly equating a glass of wine with alcoholism, it’s a sad scene.
Although this isn’t new: just this morning E. and I were talking about scientific nomenclature. So much of it is legacy code, based on incorrect assumptions. As just one example based on Ethan’s current coursework, different algae are often grouped together by being named the same thing. Another example is “inorganic carbon,” another name for carbon dioxide, most of which is – well – organic. The thing is, even when we realize our mistake the language stays the same. For HUNDREDS OF YEARS. This is actively damaging, because we end up teaching and learning incorrect information, and then have to unlearn it, which is very difficult to do. Language defines and constantly mediates our world for us, and so learning why our naming practices are incorrect requires reorganizing a world view.
…to make me post again. I’ve been meaning to post other things as well, but blogging has fallen by the wayside. again.
From Rob Kampia at the Marijuana Policy Project, a policy reform organization lobbying for medical pot laws:
On October 7, Steven Tuck, a California medical marijuana patient who fled to Canada to avoid going to jail after being raided for growing his own marijuana, was snatched from a hospital by Canadian authorities, driven to the border with a urinary catheter still attached, and turned over to U.S. authorities for prosecution. He was held in jail for five days without medical treatment and without having his catheter removed.
He was released from a Seattle jail to seek medical care last Thursday, but when his treatment is over, he must return to California to face a federal marijuana charge.
Tuck, an Army veteran, used marijuana to treat the chronic pain stemming from a 1987 parachute accident in the Army. Is this how our government rewards its veterans?
Well? Is it?
May their god damn the powers that be to their respective visions of hell. And while we’re at it, Canada, wtf? YOU ARE NOT THE FIFTY-FIRST STATE. Tell them to go fuck off. Or have you finally lost your spine?
If you’re as galled at this as I am, or even a little, please spread it far and wide as a personal favor to me. More about the case is here.
Was pointed to a site for a song by Ian Rhett who is trying to raise money to do a[nother] political music video. There are many such endeavors on the net, but this one particularly struck me. (If you haven’t heard it, click on the “didn’t know i was unamerican” – it’s a Flash video.)
The kids with a daisy may be a reference to this ad (direct link to a streaming Quicktime movie) by Lyndon B. Johnson, who won that election and went on to escalate the Vietnam war more than any other president. Thanks to mindlace for the reference, and to earth for the pointer to Rhett’s site.
