Saturday, August 12, 2006

Good Question

SF Signal: Is SF Too Geeky?

Dave Itzkoff, SF reviewer for The New York Times, recently listed his favorite SF books. But he is also making waves with some comments about the SF genre he makes in his review of David Marusek's Counting Heads. "HERE'S a question I don't expect to come anywhere close to answering by the end of this column: Why does contemporary science fiction have to be so geeky?"


Cause it always has been. Sheesh when I went to school the geeks wore glasses, pocket protectors and carried slide rulers to the daily chess club meeting. And they read sci-fi. I know I was one.


The Writers

Having Isaac Asimov at a Star Trek convention might seem odd. After all, Asimov may have been one of the grand old men of SF but he had no connection to the series at all. (He acted as a technical advisor to Space: 1999 around this time, which to True Believers was another strike against him.) On the other hand, he was local, he was willing and he was a hero to those of us who had discovered science fiction (and nonfiction) long before the Enterprise ever left dry dock. Best of all Asimov was one of the nicest people I've ever met, the kind of person who'd sit and sign autographs and trade jokes with the fans for hours on end. He was like that lovable uncle you always wanted but few of us get. (Apologies in advance to my uncles should they ever read this comment. You're wonderful and all but you're no Isaac Asimov!)

Harlan Ellison was once the angry young man of SF, the writer who had the nerve to write a script about drug dealing on the Enterprise called The City On The Edge Of Forever. Ellison had a reputation, probably deserved, of being touchy and unapproachable at conventions. Which is funny, because the few times I've met him I have found him exactly the opposite. He even agreed to pose with a friend of mine for a picture, which sadly didn't turn out. And whatever else you think about him, the man can surely write.


Also See:

Science Fiction



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Humanitarian Relief = Terrorist Funding

Instead of searching bank accounts in North America perhaps those fighting the so called war on terror should be checking into Muslim trusts in Pakistan.

Quake money' sent to Pak used to finance UK plane bombing plot

Money sent to Pakistan for quake rehabilitation was used to fund the Heathrow bomb attack plot that was foiled by British authorities following inputs from their Pakistani counterparts, if an investigation by a leading Pakistani daily is to be believed.

According to The Daily Times, the Muslim Charity of UK remitted a huge amount of money to three individuals in three different bank accounts in Mirpur, Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) in December last year as earthquake relief.

But the money in the three accounts in Saudi Pak Bank, Standard Chartered and Habib Bank Ltd was solely for the purpose of financing the foiled bomb plot, the paper said.

According to the report, two of the recipients are British citizens of Kashmir.



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Enron E Texts Wiped

Ok conspiracy freaks this ones for you. It's Deja Vu, this is like the missing minutes off the Nixon tapes.

The company handling electronic document production in the Enron civil suits says a software bug may have erased text in e-mails produced for discovery in the case over an 18-month span.

Software Bug my ass. This is what happens when you outsourcee/privatize your email and IT services.

Applied Discovery Inc., a Bellevue, Wash.–based division of LexisNexis, says one client has reported a problem so far. And lawyers handling the Enron litigation said it was too early to predict the potential impact. But several of the lawyers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that if the problem was widespread and had corrupted the discovery process, it could cost tens of millions of dollars to fix and could foul up both pending and settled Enron litigation.

Convienant that. No alleged bribery was reported.



Alsop See:

Enron



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Privatization Reform in India

He appears at first to be a compasionate captialist, but then he lets the cat out of the bag.
Reforms have not benefited poor: Narayana Murthy

Bangalore, Aug 12: Software icon N R Narayana Murthy, who has often termed Infosys a shining example of economic reforms initiated in 1991, said economic liberalisation has not touched the poor and makes no sense unless it addressed their basic needs.

"I keep telling my colleague Nandan (Nilekani, CEO of Infosys) that it's funny in this country that we can buy whatever...BMWs...we can have 800 channels on TV...All of that," the Chairman and Chief Mentor of Infosys said.

"But the real progress in India has not taken place simply because the reforms have not touched the poor people," he said at a book release function here today.

"Unless you address the basic needs of the poorest of the poor, which are decent primary and secondary education, decent health care and decent nutrition...All of this (reforms) makes no sense".

"Unless, we completely delicense the primary and secondary education, unless we create an environment where more and more investment get into primary health care, I don't think we can truly claim to have embraced reforms".


There ya go privatization is a failure in India because they have not privatized education and health care. Like the WTO, World Bank, and IMF this compasionate capitalist sees only one solution to poverty, increasing privatization. Which of course by the real world example of Bolivia was and is a complete failure.

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The Navvies

The Navvies were traveling labourers who built the Great Lakes Canals, the railroads and the mines in Canada and England. They were exploited by the upper classes in body and spirit even after death. This is an excerpt from an online biography of the Navvies. Those in Canada were Irish labourers, Catholics whose bosses were Orangemen. In England they came from the North, Scotland and Ireland. They were the epitome of the English proletarianized peasantry.
In Canada they are celebrated in song by Gordon Lightfoot with his Great Canadian Railway Triology.




Navvies built canals, railways, dams and then pipe tracks, the big nineteenth century sea-port docks, and the Manchester Ship Canal.

Navvying began suddenly in 1763 in the Bridgewater Canal: it ended around 1943, after a twenty-year fade-out. Along with the rest of Britain there was a kind of kink in the navvy's history in the 1870s when things began changing, generally for the better.

At first they were just skilled earth shifters digging canals at prodigious speed. Later they were skilled in tunnelling, mining, timbering — skilled enough to set up as one-man contractors employing local unskilled labourers to shift their muck. You could set a gang of prime navvies down in an untouched valley, they said of themselves, and they'd build you a dam without aid of an engineer. At times they slotted into the pay scales at twice a common labourer's wages, though they never equalled apprenticed craftsmen like masons.

It is easy for the urbanised and pensionable to romanticise them. They seem free, fearless above the humdrum conventions of shopkeepers, clerks, factory workers, vicars, and the legally wed. Perhaps we glamorise cowboys, blue-water sailors and the hell-bent navvy for the same reasons. In reality, isolation was the biggest thing in a navvy's life. They were perpetual outsiders: a people apart. Sub-working class. Sub-the-bottommost-heap of English working society. Sub-all, almost.

Navvies Navvies

Left: Railway Navvies. Right: Navvies, 1890s

Click on thumbnails for larger images.

The navvy never called a spade a spade, always a bloody shovel. Everything he shovelled he called muck. Earth, blasted rock, clay, all were generically and indiscriminately muck. With the muck he created new landscapes and changed old societies. It was mass transformation by muscle and shovel.

To do so navvies worked in geographical and social isolation; crude, muck-caked men on a helix spiralling down from prejudice [4/5] to more isolation, isolation to more prejudice. Eighty per cent were English, most of their work was in England, yet they lived like aliens in their own country, often outside its laws, usually outside its national sense of community. They were their own country's non-belongers. They belonged to themselves only tenuously. Mostly they lived apart in navvy settlements. New habits of life, thought, dress, speech, and a tightening of the ring against outsiders came out of their isolation. Their own countrymen were terrified of them, and despised them. Heavy drinking was normal, death by alcohol common. Drink was a common cause of riot, along with an unhesitating hatred for their own Irish minority. Their accident and death rates were higher than any other group in Britain, including colliers, including soldiers fighting nineteenth-century wars. Often they were nameless, known to each other only at second-hand by nickname. They were a homeless, wandering itinerant people belonging nowhere except to the island as a whole.

They survived the Great War as a separate community, but not for long. Nawying was killed by a lack of large scale public works (worsened by the Slump), by bureaucracy and by the petrol engine. Probably in that order. By the mid-1950s they were quietly ending as a recognisable separate community. Individuals did live and work on. Their descendants still do (at their height, just before the Great War, there may have been as many as a hundred and seventy thousand of them).



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Selling Harper's Middle East Policy

Liberal MP Wajid Khan is going to try and sell Harpers Middle East policy to those in the Middle East and to Canadians. Good thing he has experience. Middle East advisor has experience in sales

Like the PM's Emerson deal this one has the Liberals all in a tither . Interestingly neither the Blogging Tories nor the Liberalbloggers have made much of a fuss over this.

Perhaps because, as at least one Liberalblogger admits , it is a very smooth move by Harper. While gaining Jewish Liberals with his unconditional support for Israel, Harper mollifies Arab and Muslim Canadians with a special envoy who is a Liberal.

Khan of course is espousing a Lieberman type of bi-partisanship. And why shouldn't a Liberal promote Harpers foreign adventurism, it originated with them in the first place.

For Liberal MP's to criticize the Harpocrites over Afghanistan or heck the evacutation of Lebanon, is the hieght of hypocrisy.

They would like us to forget that the Liberals voted with the government to support the Harpocrites. And to forget the two week waiting period before the dithering Liberals launched DART to help the survivors of the the Indonesian Tusanami.


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Friday, August 11, 2006

Circumsion Reduces AIDS

Circumcision promoted
Removing the foreskin is thought to harden the glans (head) of the penis, making it less permeable to viruses. Research carried out in 2005 showed the transmission of HIV from women to men during sex was reduced by 60 per cent if the men were circumcised.

There you see circumcision is good for something. Now just lay back and take it like a man.

This is something the Vatican could get behind, and never have to mention AIDS and condoms together again. They could preach circumcision is good for your soul and your health. Oh they do that already don't they, well no they don't.

Historically it was Jews who were circumcised the church only tolerated the practice.

And some 'old' catholics still don't. Just ask Mel.


Gibson "needs to be welcomed into the Jewish community with a public circumcision". ..

I tried, I tried. Really, I did. But I just couldn't resist just one cheap shot at Mel's expense. Heck everyone else is doing it.....and if they jumped off a cliff....yeah I know but I could'nt resist this one.




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Coming of Age


Arising out of pulp fiction for the masses Science Fiction is now fully out of the literary ghetto.

It has now been claimed by the U.S. Government as a cultural artifact of America.
Society, Science Enriched by Science Fiction

Does this then make SciFi an official State Literature?

If so there might be some competition in that regard.
The St. Sputnik Project: Modern Russian Sci-Fi - Online Resources ...


Also See:

LEM RIP


Heinlein

Andre Norton RIP

Octavia Butler RIP

Lagrange 5

And Then They Built An Ark

Another Character Generator

Good Morning Dave

New Age Libertarian Manifesto

Gothic Capitalism Redux


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Oriental Origins of Post-modernism

What is post-modernism? Well it orginates in Modernist art of the decadence; in the Fin de Siecle of the 19th century.

Post modernism supercedes modernism with the invasion of the dialectical concisouness of Imperialism/Anti-Imperialism when the post WWII colonial/colonized world enters the space of capitalist decadence and speaks.

It is the dialectical result of the West's fascination with and creation of Orientalism which results in modernism and thus post-modernism;
the authentic Oriental voice's revenge.


POSTMODERNISM / FIN DE SIECLE
It is interesting to reread Ihab Hassan in this regard. Hassan's first book, after all, was called The Literature of Silence (1967), and made the case for a "new literature" written in the wake of Dachau and Hiroshima, a literature whose "total rejection of Western history and civilization" leads either to the apocalyptic violence and obscenity of a Henry Miller or a Norman Mailer or the silence, randomness, and indeterminacy of Samuel Beckett or John Cage. By 1971, Hassan referred to this "change in Modernism" as Postmodernism and drew up the first of his famous lists or tables, a table made up of binary oppositions :

Modernism

Postmodernism

1. Urbanism 1. The Global Village (McLuhan), Spaceship Earth (Fuller), the City as Cosmos--Science Fiction. Anarchy and fragmentation.
2. Technologism
2. Runaway technology. New media, art forms. Boundless dispersal by media. The computer as substitute consciousness or extension of consciousness.
3. Elitism 3. Antielitism, antiauthoritarianism. Diffusion of the ego. Participation. Community. Anarchy.
4. Irony 4. Radical play. Entropy of meaning. Comedy of the absurd. Black Humor. Camp.
5. Abstraction 5. New Concreteness. Found Object. Conceptual Art.
6. Primitivism 6. Beat and Hip. Rock Culture. Dionysian Ego.
7. Eroticism 7. The New Sexuality. Homosexuality , Feminism, Lesbianism. Comic pornography. Repeal of Censorship
8. Antinomianism 8. Antinomianism. 8. Counterculture. Beyond alienation. Counter. Beyond Law. Non Serviam. Western "ways." Zen, Buddhism, Hinduism the occult, apocalypticism.
9. Experimentalism 9. Open form, discontinuity, improvisation, Formal innovation. New language. Antiformalism. Indeterminacy. Aleatory Structure. Minimalism. Intermedia.


Postmodernism, Etc.: An Interview with Ihab Hassan

Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | Preface to Orientalism

Orientalism
A website devoted to the controversies surrounding Orientalism and Western representations of Islam and the Arabs. Located at www.orientalism.org.


A symphony of civilizations

China's re-emergence - there is no "China rise", but only China's restoration to its historical position - is already having considerable impact on the global village. Understandably, observers and analysts discuss the nature of Beijing's behavior on the international scene. Will China behave like an empire trying to dominate and extend a pax Sinica, or act as a cooperative force working for a foedus pacificum, a league of peace, to use Immanuel Kant's expression (Perpetual Peace, 1795)?


Lolita and Beyond

Epistemically I am trying to see how this mutation of Orientalism to Area Studies to active privatization of knowledge production (pretty much on the model of the privatization of certain aspects of the US military, such as intelligence gathering and torturing people) actually works. Meanwhile, I am also trying to keep a record of who is saying and doing what in these terrible times—for these criminal comprador intellectuals will have to be held historically accountable for what they now say and do.

What lies beneath

The legacy of Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism, in which he argued that the west possesses a monopoly on how "Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture" are viewed, was the subject of debate at the British Museum. Historian and novelist Robert Irwin kicked off by attacking what he decribed as Said's falsification of the past and poor understanding of Arabic, and argued that his "revolutionary" assertions were in fact part of longstanding Muslim and Marxist critiques.

A Marxist Critique of 'Third World

. [We] could start with a radically different premise: namely the proposition that we live not in three [or more] worlds but in one; that this world includes the experiences of colonialism and imperialism on both sides of [the] global divide; that societies in formations of backward capitalism are as much constituted by the division of classes as are societies in the advanced capitalist countries; that socialism . . . is simply the name of a resistance that saturates the globe today, as capitalism itself does; that the different parts of the capitalist system are to be known not in terms of a binary opposition but as a contradictory unity-with differences, yes, but also with profound overlaps.

The world [is] united not by liberalist ideology [or humanistic universalism] but by the global operation of a single mode of production, namely the capitalist one, and the global resistance to this mode, a resistance which is itself unevenly developed in different parts of the globe.


Tribute to India in world’s oldest caves

There is an Indian chamber in the Jenolan caves, which are said to be the world's oldest discovered open caves, according to cave-dating research published by Australian geologists.

“In the early 20th century, orientalism was a big theme in western societies, especially in the British Empire. Early cave explorers called it the Orient cave because of the red colour. It contains the Indian Chamber, Persian Chamber and the Egyptian Colllanade.

It was discovered in 1904,” explains Dr Armstrong Osborne, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney.

A five-year study has shown that the limestone caves, which each year attract thousands of tourists, including Indian visitors, date back more than 340 million years.

Napoleon on the Nile at the Dahesh Museum of Art

Initiated under the patronage of the young General Napoleon Bonaparte as he invaded Egypt in 1798, and completed in 1829 during the reign of King Charles X, the Description was among the most significant, and certainly the most tangible, consequences of the French military’s occupation of Egypt (1798-1801). Not only did it form the foundation for the modern discipline of Egyptology, but its large and magnificent plate illustrations influenced the course of "Egyptomania" and “Orientalism” in western fine and decorative arts for two centuries.


Gallic grandeur

Where Brown really excels is in the description of Flaubert's voyage to Italy and Egypt (1849-51) with his close friend Maxime du Camp and a heap of photographic equipment. Flaubert was, like many of his contemporaries, hooked on orientalism, which included an early version of sexual tourism as well as an astonished revelling in what is now mostly lost, although even then the railway and western trousers were already creeping in (Flaubert travelled by rail as early as 1843, but favoured Turkish robes). Brown emphasises Flaubert's excellent horsemanship, and the image of him galloping across moonlit African plains makes it easier to understand why he spent so much of his life recreating not just a banal Normandy, but a lost and splendid antiquity, most memorably in his novel of Carthaginian magnificence and cruelty, Salammbo (1862).

Collection of Orientalist Imagery Reveals Roots of American Views ...

The imagery has long been appropriated for use in American film posters, cigarette packs, pulp fiction and popular music: scantily clad harem girls, tyrannical despots and turbaned mystics have personified an imagined Middle East in the popular culture.

Hundreds of objects reflecting that imagined realm has just wrapped up its first run at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Seducing America: Selling the Middle Eastern Mystique," an exhibit of Middle Eastern-inspired ephemera, is about to be launched as an extensive on-line data base complete with music samples, selected film clips and a comprehensive assortment of "Middle Eastern Americana". There are artifacts such as sheet music, souvenirs, book jackets and consumer goods, many bearing Middle Eastern insignias, and the accompanying advertisements which range from the crass to the cartoonish.

Objects included comic books from the 1930s, pulp fiction book covers with titles such as "Desert Madness" and "Spicy Adventures," video games such as "The Prince of Persia," vintage sheet music for songs including "The Sheik of Araby" and "Rebecca Came Back from Mecca," photos of topless women on the covers of CDs, fierce warriors on the covers of DVDs, "Turkish" tobacco products, Egyptomania films, and various and sundry consumer items such as Palmolive beauty products, Ben Hur flour, Sheik condoms - and a couple of Shriner fezzes.

Noble Dreams Wicked Pleasures Orientalism in America, 1870-1930

Indeed, one of the fascinations with Orientalism is how nicely it blends into other artistic styles of the 19th Century such as Pre-Raphaelism and Art Nouveau as well as the Aesthetic Movement. Orientalism, Pre-Raphaelism and Art Nouveau are various manifestations of lush, richly embued, symbolic decorative aesthetics, often tinged if not overwhelmed by a sense of history and prior historic periods. The Aesthetic Movement, of course, emerged from these influences to produce a "modern" style based on them.

In his excellent essay, Oleg Grabar finds the "roots" of American Orientalism in "the Protestant search for the space of the biblical revelations," European aristocratic taste, popular culture in freemasonry and other fraternal organizations, and "the spirit of skeptical curiosity and adventure.


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Also See:

Bureaucratic Collectivist Capitalism

Ibn Khaldun 14th Century Arab Libertarian

My Favorite Muslim

The Need for Arab Anarchism

Peter Drucker RIP

Breaking Out Of The Cultural Burka

Muslims Discovered America

Anti Islamism Manifesto

Two Excellent Sources For Islamic Studies

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Compassionate Capitalism


It seems some Blogging Tories just don't understand compasionate capitalism. To them generousity and business don't go hand in hand or else they would understand the following axioms;

a) rock & roll is a business
b) rock & roll musicians are businessmen
c) business is capitalism
d) rock stars are capitalists.

Since the time of the Beatles Apple Corp. and the Moody Blues Inc., this has been the case.

Bono gets richer still

Bono buys piece of capitalist rag

So why all the fuss, if Bono buys into Forbes magazine, while lobbying to end poverty. What? Did you forget Kellog, Hershey, Owen, and yes Engels. They were compasionate capitalists, social reformers. Heck what Bono is doing is no different than Gates.

AIDS Funding: Gates Steps Up as Rich Countries Step Back

In fact the intelligent business man recognizes philanthropy is good for business and social stature. Which is why the robber barons of the fin de siecle during the Guilded Age in America invented it. To give back to the community some of their ill gotten gain. Oh and it's good for a tax break.

As the old adage goes one needs to make money to spend money, or was it visa versa. Bono is spending and investing his money well, and putting it where his mouth is. He is using his capital for social good. Ironic he should be criticized for doing the right thing as a hip capitalist by the right.

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