We're all going to die #2

Helpful news from the Department of Homeland Security today of a non-specific threat to the US mainland this summer. John Ashcroft has also chimed in with the news that the face of Al-Qaeda is changing; terrorists now move around with their families to avoid detection, and try to pass themselves off as European-looking.

While the US media follows the script and panics, Wall Street has been a bit more sanguine. The market's response to the threat of imminent doom has been:
1. a rally in companies providing security services and
2. slight peaks in companies providing surveillance cameras.
3. that's it.
The consumer policing business has never had it so good.

These are a few of my favourite things

Chris reminds us that in the world of social scientists, British sociologists are generally considered the shabbiest. This prompts me to consider just how far I've come; although I'm British, am a sociologist, and routinely wear crimpolene, in a former life I was a mathematician.

Ah the memories. The splendid Keith Hannabus and Frances Kirwan did their best to teach me algebra and analysis, despite the fact that I was drunk and wouldn't learn.

That said, I woke up this morning with this algebraic ditty in my head, to the tune of These Are a Few of My Favourite Things:

Matrices, Integers, Rationals and Reals,
Polynomials and all their Ideals,
Real valued functions and similiar things,
These are a few of my favourite rings.

This is the bit where mathematicians giggle. Everyone else will undoubtedly find the joke funny after reading a brief introduction to rings.

Memento mori

A number of people have thought to deploy Susan Sontag's thoughts on photography to think about Abu Ghraib, including Sontag herself in Sunday's New York Times.

I'm not entirely happy with the interpretations I've read so far, and am penning something that will soon appear at the Voice of the Turtle. One of the better commentaries, though, is to be found in a soon-to-be published piece by Eric Cheyfitz, in which there's a painful reminder of the genealogy of trophy photos of abused people of colour.

In a fantastic online exhibition, James Allen narrates us through a collection of lynching postcards from the book Without Sanctuary. Not for the faint of heart, but essential viewing, especially now.

Everything you wanted to know about Paul Wolfowitz

Today's review of Fahrenheit 9/11 in the New York Times offers this tantalising morsel:

A particularly unappetizing spectacle in "Fahrenheit 9/11" is provided by Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of both the administration's Iraqi fixation and its doctrine of "preventive" war. We watch him stick his comb in his mouth until it is wet with spit, after which he runs it through his hair.

You can learn more about Cde Wolfowitz, and his friends, through the invaluable webs spun by the folk at Political Friendster.

Oiled ripped male bodies? Indian!

A few days ago, I wrote about some of the good things that the US owes to South Asia and the diaspora. The list was incomplete. Two additions, both of which I owe to the splendid Anirvan Chatterjee, are ethical online book-buying and The Chippendales. To quote Anirvan's fine resource on this:

Somen Banerjee was born in Bombay, India in 1947--the year India gained independence from colonial British rule. He was a fourth generation printer. While he later went by his nickname "Steve," he retained his name "Somen," even after immigration; perhaps the coincidence of his given name (in Bengali, pronounced as "show-men") did not escape him....In 1975, Steve used a small investment to buy a failing Los Angeles rock and roll bar called Destiny II. He worked to turn it into a disco with jazz and street-dance performers. Four years later, inspired by word of a Canadian male strip club, Steve renamed the club "Chippendales," and along with female mud wrestling, he launched a "Male Exotic Dance Night for Ladies Only" it was the first American troupe of its kind.

By the early 1980s, Chippendales was the best known of the several hundred male strip clubs in America. Steve drove the business to amazing heights with his professionalism and marketing skills. By the late 1980s, the Chippendales were almost a household name. Over a million copies of their calendar were sold every year. Touring profits exceeded $25,000 per week, and at its height, Steve controlled an $8 million a year business.

Steve was known to be a family man...

Read on here.

Best Headline Ever

Over at Mischievous Constructions, I read of a hunt for the best headline for a review of Troy which, incidentally, I didn't like less than some people didn't like it.

Here's a tangent. Yesterday's Financial Times had an important back-page article on inequality among the super rich. The gist of it involves Paul Allen, Microsoft employee #2, and the envy inspired in his already-comfortably-wealthy colleagues by his fondness for private ships:

Mr Allen refuses to discuss his boats. But industry observers estimate that he paid at least $200m for Octopus [his own private liner] and will have to spend millions more every year just to keep it afloat. According to one person who was given a guided tour last week, filling the fuel tank alone costs about $250,000.

The headline: "Gulf widens between the haves and the have-yachts".

Cosmic relief

It's a grey day for the food system, and I've got the blues. The World Health Organization has oozed its way around the carbohydrate industry with a fairly fluffy set of admonitions to the food industry not to sell candy to kids because it makes them fat. Naughty food industry, bad food industry.

I can already hear the snickers.

The UN system is not in my good books in any case, because of its appalling capitulation to the genetically modified food lobby. Exhibit A: Wednesday's announcement by the Food and Agricultural Organization of its lightly caveated embrace of the technological quick fix. To top it all, Monsanto won suit against Percy Schmeiser, a Canadian farmer whose crops have been contaminated by Monsanto's GM murk. It's so dispiriting that I can't even bring myself to recount my amusing Schmeiser anecdote. It'll have to wait.

I've found some succour in A General Theory of Rubbish [Via Chris], which has won a place in the blogroll for its fine writing, for its sharing the Good News about The Voice of the Turtle ,and for introducing me to God.

The General Theory of Rubbish naturally reminded me of religion, and I headed to the Ship of Fools' virtual church. I tried to get in to speak to someone, but there was no room at the inn. Luckily, there's an anonymous option, where you can wander the church as a spectral presence, looking at icons, overhearing things, experiencing the sampled echo of a real church just like in the Pet Shop Boys' It's a Sin, but where you can never actually make any real changes to your environment. It's uncannily like the real C of E.

Brain Circulation

At the same Gracenet dinner that I met Paul, I learned a thing or two from the visiting speaker, AnnaLee Saxenian. The brain-drain of high-skill technology graduates from China and India to Silicon Valley is only half the story. The brains also go back home, taking their newfound ideas with them. Saxenian writes of "brain circulation", the trans-Pacific process of cross-fertilization, through which Silicon Valley gets socially networked to urban centres throughout Asia.

Compelling evidence that Asia is being Californianised can be found at this new site, which seeks to establish and document India's standing in the ranks of countries whose citizens have been abducted by aliens.

Seems a bit pointless, though. Everyone knows, and any of my family will attest, that UFOs have been visiting India since before Europeans could write. Ask a Hindu. Not only do the ancient Vedas speak of visits by aliens but they also lay out, in attenuated form, the basis for superstring theory, genetic modification, sidereal engineering, time travel and microwave ovens.

Awww

Three cheers for Massachusetts.

We're all going to die

I've just met a lovely man who works for the US Geological Survey. Given his profession, it's unfortunate that the best way I can think of describing him is "down to earth". Still, he had some interesting news for those of us living, as I do, in the Bay Area. We're all going to die.

California is a state fascinated by its own future demise. Hollywood routinely offs itself, taking the rest of Los Angeles with it, and over the past two years, I've watched San Francisco flood, fry, and get stomped all over by a big green man. These cinematic flights of fancy are, of course, displacements from the very real earthquake - the Big One - waiting to shake the Bay Area to bits. There's a very good map in which our future and our local fault lines are laid bare. And with the map comes a prediction.

The folk at the USGS tell us that the probability that an earthquake greater than the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, which registered 6.7 on the Richter scale, will hit the Bay Area in the next 30 years is about 2/3. What's interesting about this is not the probability, but the time scale. Thirty years seems a little arbitrary. But Paul, my new seismologist friend, shared the thinking behind this choice of time frame: "Thirty years is the length of a mortgage, and we wanted a time reference that was meaningful to people."

There are baroque dissertations to be written about this - time's elasticity before capital, the social construction of impending doom, the presumptive home ownership of the USGS' audience, etc etc etc.

For now, my main concern is to finish this post as quickly as I can.

You never can tell.

Found on a scrap of paper in a University of Cape Town filing cabinet, ca 1998

There have been many painful things happening at UCT. One of the most painful was the destruction of the jobs of hundreds of workers. When it wrote about this, the University Paper agreed that there was pain. But the only pain it mentioned was the pain of the Vice Chancellor [Mamphela Ramphele - partner of the late Steve Biko, key figure in the Black Consciousness movement, now a director at the World Bank], the person who insisted on that destruction. Showing that she was a ruthless manager won her some admirers and created new opportunities for her. But the Paper also told us about the workers who were being retrenched.

It did not say a word about their pain. Instead it created a beautiful picture of new opportunities for them. They would get packages, training, redeployment opportunities at UCT, the chance to open small businesses. Maybe there were honest people at UCT and outside who believed the lies of the Paper. After all, this is meant to be a University which deals with knowledge and truth.

But we are asking those honest people now: what can you see with your own eyes. We can see what has happened with the Vice Chancellor. She is living now with her pain and being paid millions to spread the message of destruction that comes from the World Bank. Probably, she can survive with that pain quite well. But what about the workers whose pain the Paper did not mention, only their wonderful new opportunities?

Some of you did not open your eyes. None of you opened your mouths. Maybe some of you have heard the workers at UCT singing: What have we done. What have we done. We ask you now. What have you done. What have you done. Are you proud of your support for the destruction of people's lives? Are your proud of your silence?

Via Shereen.

In Memoriam

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, co-editor of the excellent This Bridge Called My Back, author of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, and queer rights activist, died on Saturday.

Liquor

Talking of liquor stores, the Reddy family of Berkeley, a cabal of exploiters of various stripes, have been denied a liquor license in their shop because of "moral turpitude". Splendid.

Update

Um, if you've not heard of the Reddys, here's something to whet the appetite.

Red Guard on the Microphone

The past couple of days have been fairly musical. I've long noticed that the one place that I can reliably hear morose music is my local Albertson's. The musical loop goes something like this: Annie Lennox's Why slows things down, and is followed by Nora Jones' Don't Know Why, which cools things down a bit more, and then hands over to 10cc's I'm Not in Love, which brings us inevitably to Mike and the Mechanic's The Living Years and then back to Annie Lennox. This onslaught of low-grade Weltschmerz makes grocery shopping miserable. Of course, as with every facet of the corporate retail experience, one person's misery is another's pile of cash. The music is designed to create a solitary and self-indulgent sensory bubble. It's a bubble in which you're encouraged to wallow. Inside the bubble, it smells of donuts, and it has Annie Lennox reminding you of that crappy breakup/tragic moment/melodramatic appeal to the heavens that you thought you'd long forgotten. The solution to all this is at hand, of course - make your choice of anything from the chilled plenitude of the supermarket shelves.

On Saturday, I was prompted to find out whose big idea this was, who it was who told the corporations to set up retail space so that the act of purchase is simultaneously an education in the virtues of retail therapy. The reason for the sudden interest in the 'atmospherics of shopping' was a fantastic brunch I went to yesterday, a benefit for West Oakland's Peoples Grocery. The Peoples' Grocery is wonderful bit of resistance to the marginalization of people of colour in urban America. West Oakland, with a population of 24,000 people had one supermarket and 36 liquor stores, three of which sold groceries in 1996. Next door, in Emeryville (home of Pixar - to give you a sense), the population of 7,000 has three grocery stores, and the smallest smattering of liquor stores.

Prices in liquor stores are 30-50% higher than in supermarkets partly because of the terms on which small retailers buy them, and partly because there's a great deal of scalping going on. It doesn't take much to see that redlining is alive and well in America - the population of West Oakland is predominantly people of colour, while Emeryville much whiter. (Incidentally, I found it hard to get disaggregated data on this, beyond noting that according to the 2000 US census, 125,000 of Oakland's 399,000 population is white, compared to 3,000 white in Emeryville's 6,900 population, data from here. Inequalities within city limits don't show up on the official data I've seen - better figures gratefully received).

At the brunch, a local woman - whose name is on a piece of paper that I've lost - told the four hundred people in the Tailor Memorial Church that she'd been pregnant when the grocery's mobile market started out. She was concerned about the health of her baby, and wanted to eat properly. Hard to do, being as she didn't have a car, and being as you need to be rich to shop at Whole Foods (aka Whole Pay Check). The bit that I got excited about, though, was that she was first drawn to the Peoples' Grocery mobile market truck by its jumping sound system. The food inside wasn't bad either, apparently. Cheap, provided from local farmers, organic, and actually available in West Oakland.

It's great that good food is available cheaply in West Oakland. But more important is also a change in the culture of getting the food. No tear-jerking credit-card-bending mind-numbing muzak, but some damn good hip hop, and a bunch of people having fun. Read more about the Peoples' Grocery here, contact them via info_at_peoplesgrocery.org and if you can possibly support them, please do.

The music connection continued throughout the day. After the benefit, I went to a rally for the hunger strikers in downtown Oakland. It is day five of their strike. More here. As I was waiting for the rally to start, I heard a rap with this refrain:

This little piggy is a target
Cuz this little piggy raids homes
This little piggy shouldn't start shit
The Red Guard is on the microphone.

On returning home, I found the answer to the "who's to blame for crap music in supermarkets" question, in the pages of The Journal of Consumer research - an interesting place to spend just a little time. Papers with titles like "Product Aesthetics Centrality Scale" vie with "A Role for Poetry in Consumer Research", for example. The music question, though, is helpfully covered in a review by Ronald Milliman snappily entitled "The Influence of Background Music on the Behavior of Restaurant Patrons". Permalink via JSTOR to Ronald Milliman's review of the atmospherics of restaurants here.

Uncommunicative action

I've a long track record of being dressed funny. My mother enjoyed trussing me in earthy corduroy, tight dungarees, and cotton prints and, although I atoned by wearing nothing but black polyester for six adolescent months, I still feel that my mum's fashion experiments are responsible for my vulnerability to the Green Party, and my fondness for herbal tea.

Today I had a bit of a flashback. I was at a protest at the Berkeley Commencement, in support of Prof Ignacio Chapela, and in condemnation of the University Chancellor. Ignacio has been a professor of soil biology at Berkeley for eight years, and was up, last year, for tenure. His case is unimpeachable. His department wants him. External reviewers admire him. His students think he's great. He's a great educator, academic and activist. There's a problem, though. Like many of his colleagues, Ignacio has been troubled by the encroachment of large corporate interests, particularly biotechnology interests, onto the Berkeley campus. Unlike many of his colleagues, he has spoken out about it. Nothing but external pressure from the likes of Novartis ('partner' in a $25m agreement with Berkeley), and a particularly craven Chancellor, Robert Berdahl, can explain the track of this very odd tenure decision. There's more on this here and here.

Back to fashion, though. At the protest, I found myself wearing an Edward Tuftian nightmare. Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is, incidentally, required reading for anyone with eyes. One of Tufte's main concerns is the withering of our collective visual imagination, a demise that has been expedited by Microsoft's instant-eye-candy-generating software. In fairness, this isn't the fault of Bill Gates - one could hardly credit him with the innovation. I remember Harvard Graphics being one of the first bits of software to take the intelligence out of data presentation. Microsoft just copied the idea and crippled the company. And the issue of crappy representation isn't a problem limited to Powerpoint; it's endemic to any software that encourages the assumption that the ease with which visual information can be generated translates into a similar ease with which the information will be digested.

Point is, though, that I was wearing a spreadsheet.

Or rather, a spreadsheet and a graph, on a large, person-sized sandwich board. On one side, a list of dates at which different tenure letters were sent, and whether they were supportive (most were) of Ignacio's tenure. On the other side of the sandwich board was a graph subdivided into categories of folk who approved or disapproved of Ignacio's tenure. You couldn't see exactly what it all meant, and there wasn't space to put a legend on the sandwichboard, so you had to ask the person wearing it, me, what each shade of grey stood for.

As it happens, I was wearing a paper bag over my head, with a picture of the chancellor on it. There were small cutouts for eyeholes, which proved useful in avoiding bumping into things. The absence of a mouth-hole, however, meant that questions about what the graph meant were met with a helpful "mmm, fmmmmefrrr" sound from the effigy of Robert Berdahl.

The protesters inside the Commencement ceremony had a better time of it. They managed to embarrass the Chancellor, hand out a good many 're-wired' commencement programs, and garnered a bit of media attention too.

The Nature of the Job

Mark Steel's thoughts in yesterday's Independent on representation and torture are splendid.

So maybe someone should work out whether there's a pattern here. If it was discovered that every week a dustman had locked a couple of residents in a wheelie-bin and administered electric shocks to their rectum, local authorities might ponder whether the problem wasn't just the individuals but something in the nature of the job.

Read them in full here.

Dynasties

While the US wets itself with the prospect of another election catastrophe, US voters should be looking to the world's largest democracy for inspiration. It would seem that the Indian public have responded to BJP's fundamentalism with savvy and wit. Both the BJP and the Congress (I) party have shown themselves unfit for anything but compradorism. The voters have shown their disapproval of the BJP and Congress by voting for a range of third parties. The markets have shown their disapproval of public opinion by whaling on the Rupee, and the Bombay stock exchange is down a couple of per cent. But with the full results still a long way off, and with plenty of time for the world's largest pool of computer engineers to play with the electronic voting machines, we won't know the results for days, if ever.

Best thing about the polls, other than the humiliation of the zealots - and the BJP is really worse than Congress (I) - has been the punditry. It seems that most Indians think that dynasties are a good thing. There's so much to celebrate in this poll that I'm tempted to leave it there. And I will. Except to remark that my favourite internet dynasty is the Brooke-Crawley clan. The Virtual Stoa, the Virtual Tophet, and Mischievous Constructions are three of the best written blogs out there. Michael Brooke's blog and robot_alarm_clock's Smart or Happy are the newest additions to the blogroll. Hail!

On Food Aid

I see Norm Geras has posted the Daily Telegraph's latest invective against Robert Mugabe. Despite strong opinions to the contrary by those members of the World Food Programme who are able to get into the field, the Zimbabwean government has claimed that it has enough food to feed its people, and won't be needing anyone else's thank you very much.

Of course, the man and his regime are nasty and vicious (Mugabe, that is, not Norm). Mugabe has set upon "his people" before, too. The Matabeleland killings in the 1980s were a heady mixture of civil war, jackbooted party politics, and ethnic cleansing. But there's more to Zimbabwe's go-it-alone announcement than common-or-garden callousness, and there are two things about Mugabe's current policy that interest me:

1. In the announcement lies something of an admission that there's enough food in the country to feed everyone. This is consonant with what we know about post-WWII famines; the food is usually in the country where folk are starving, but the poor lack the means to buy it. So they starve. Beating famine is a matter of beating the market into submission. To put it bluntly, for famine to be avoided, Mugabe needs to socialise food. This would be splendid. But given the vastly inequitable and unjust way that he's gone about tending to land, we can already see that the famine is going to be a mechanism for consolidating his junta. It's hardly an improvement that, instead of a few food speculators, the fate of hungry Zimbabweans lies in the hands of Mugabe's politburo.

2. The aid agencies and Mugabe disagree about hunger. I recall last year that aid agencies had, quietly, to climb down from their proclamations of imminent disaster in Africa. This is not to say that chronic hunger does not exist in Southern Africa, or to suggest that it deserves less than the pitiful level of attention it currently receives. It is, however, to ask a question or two about the claims that international aid agencies have to make in order for them to be taken seriously. Crying wolf about imminent hunger disasters comes at the cost of decrying chronic, but not acute, hunger. And the aid agencies that do it make it harder for those who would rather fight chronic hunger through politics than the acute hunger through aid trucks. Worse yet, free food messes with domestic farming economies, crushing the local farmers who have managed to make it through the famine, and setting up structures so that imported food can continue to supplant locally produced food after the worst excesses of shortage are past. If it weren't for the lousy ZANU-PF track record, I'd be almost pleased about all this.

Mushrooms!

Not enough folk in my favourite political arm of the blogosphere seem to cook their own food. This is a shame, especially when there's stuff like this around. Props to Ryan's cousin Michael. This is good food especially, I've found, if you've many of the ingredients required sitting untouched on your shelves, are about to move house, and need to get rid of them in a hurry.

It also tastes pretty damn good.

Bitter Grapes

My mates over at PANNA, the Pesticide Action Network, North America, have just released this fine report. Their findings on those hurt by pesticides aren't hugely surprising but, as we've seen with other news, it's amazing what a bit of human colour can do to dry announcements of procedure. And colour there is here in abundance. PANNA have found out that people of colour in California, and Mexican Americans in particular, are hammered by the agricultural chemicals in their communities. No prizes for guessing why Mexican American communities are exposed to higher levels of agricultural pesticides, by the way. PANNA have used the government's own data to paint a harrowing picture (again, sound familiar?). Children aged 6-12 in the Center for Disease Control study on which the report is based had levels of exposure to a particular neuro-toxic chemical at four times the threshold limit. The question is: will the media interest in this lead to anything but mild slaps on the wrist for the corporations involved?

There's an interesting connection between this race/toxins story, the White House, and the politics of protest. In the early 1990s, students at Stanford protested precisely this problem. Their point of departure was the exposure of communities of colour to toxins in the growing of grapes in California. The students connected it to wider issues of representation for Mexican Americans in the academy and in Palo Alto, and the sacking of a Vice Provost. The students went on hunger strike in support of their cause. Condoleeza Rice, then Provost, dealt with the protest with characteristic panache and sensitivity. On a Friday afternoon, Dr Rice went to the students with a text authored by the Stanford Administration. At 5.30pm, she glanced at her watch, the story goes, and then offered words to the effect of "Right, I'm off home. See you Monday." She turned on a heel and walked away. The students co-signed the administration's agreement by Saturday. Read more about The Grapes of Rice here .

Hunger for learning

Serious blogging begins in earnest today with the fight for a Port-a-Potty. In today's inbox I find this:

The Hunger Strike for Education is under attack by the City of Oakland. After making their 70 mile march to Sacramento, a group of committed teachers, students, parents and community leaders have begun a hunger strike in Oakland's Frank Ogawa Plaza (14th and Broadway at the 12th Street BART Station) to demand, as the 50 year anniversary of Brown v Board approaches, that the State of California provide adequate and equitable education for its children.

The City of Oakland has decided to fight these entirely unreasonable demands by removing the portable toilet brought by the hunger strikers, and by sending Oakland's finest to rescue the First Amendment from possible use by dissidents, through constant demands that the protesters keep moving throughout the night. These two attempts to regulate the movements of the people are, of course, despicable.

Below, a list of city employees we should be emailing. I'm thinking here not only of my email-harvesting-for-the-purposes-of-sending-billows-of-spam audience, but also of those outraged by the City's behaviour. This is Oakland, people. Home of the Black Panthers. Help the City remember by registering your disapproval with:

citymanager@oaklandnet.com, jb@jerrybrown.org, nnadel@oaklandnet.com, cityochang@aol.com,
dbrooks@oaklandnet.com, dwan@oaklandnet.com, lreid@oaklandnet.com, jquan@oaklandnet.com, cityclerk@oaklandnet.com, officeofthemayor@oaklandnet.com, jbrunner@oaklandnet.com, idelafuente@oaklandnet.com

Let them know what you think of their persecution of protestors. And that you want them to be spending money on books, not cops.

The first of at least three posts

I've seen the houseproud diligence with which others maintain their cyber spaces, and I've come to one conclusion: this blog isn't going to bother with a honeymoon period. I'm aiming for fairly instant dilapidation.