Pedantic libertarian is pedantic

In true capitalist fashion, this guy abuses Hans Rosling's beautiful gapminder.com animated statistical charts in a dubious attempt to support his reactionary rebranding as "market empowerment" of the first-world capitalist exploitation of people in developing countries.

What Davies fails to grasp, or (likely) attempts to conceal, is this crucial fact:

Life expectancy in countries throughout the globe would likely have risen at a similar rate regardless of a lack of any so-called "market empowerment". It certainly would have risen at a noticeably more stable rate without the dramatic roller-coaster dips and drops seen in Hans Rosling's animated charts (that are so casually hijacked in this theatrically-produced, yet low-rent, obviously bought-and-paid-for, capitalist apologism video from the YouTube LearnLiberty user channel).

Such adjustments and swings represent huge tolls on human lives and well-being, since they are only represented here in the aggregate. Do you have any idea what sort of death and despair are indicated by these handful of years' worth of negative deltas? We're talking thousands of people who suffered an undoubtably brutal demise (starvation, war/mass-murder, disease) in each of those dots (likely hundreds of millions in sum) that are being repeatedly yanked backwards and downwards on that innocuous-looking chart.

Those plunges have in fact been caused almost exclusively by exploitative colonial powers expanding their empires into foreign cultures, or by depressions caused by corrupt first-world financiers and ravenous industrial barons. It is a matter of historical theory whether the Two World Wars could have been avoided entirely had colonialism been restrained by the establishment of true liberal democracies earlier than the late 17th century. But it is very likely -- every single other conflict in history has a clear and direct line that can be drawn from it to some predatory and gluttonous capitalist colonial empire.

The only disasters to human civilization that even come close to the unfolding global catastrophes that are European Colonialism and Western Capitalism -- were plagues. (I only neglect to include Nazism, Fascism, Stalinism, and Maoism in this category because they have been resoundingly subdued by the dramatic imperial triumph of Capitalist Power.) But even most epidemics of influenza and cholera can be attributed to the uniquely capitalist/feudalist socio-political causes of industrialization and agriculturalization.

Adam Curtis' The Trap

Adam Curtis is a producer, writer, and documentarian. He is British, and he works for the BBC.

In 2007, Curtis produced a series of programmes called The Trap — What Happened to our Dream of Freedom for the BBC Two Television Network.

The series includes contributing interviews with a number of economists, writers, psychiatrists, philosophers, and political scientists.

These include John Nash, Friedrich von Hayek, Isaiah Berlin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Enthoven, Alexander Haig, and Madsen Pirie.

The videos incorporate newsreel footage from the Cold War decades, the Reagan-Thatcher Eras, and the 1990s and 2000s. It does so to dramatic effect, mixing soundtrack music from various movies particularly, movies by John Carpenter. It also makes use of dramatic typeface in the titles of segments. One critic has even suggested that Curtis' work is "propagandist", presumably because of his employment of the dramatic typefaces and music found in his films.

The series seeks to shed some light on the sense of entrapment, ensnarement, imprisonment that many people seem to have in this day and age. The modern dilemma -- all this freedom, and yet, millions of Americans are being treated for depression. Millions are obese. Millions of people report having feelings of purposelessness. And so on. Some people attribute these feelings to a number of causes, including technology, urban over-population, widening generation gaps, divisive politics, increasing economic class disparity, etc.

According to Curtis, all of these explanations can be seen as symptoms of a greater problem -- the notion that our freedom is defined by the pursuit of our desires.

Curtis explains how out of the nuclear strategies of the cold war, along with a fundamental shift of academic psychiatry into empiricism, the notion was formed that the individual -- as modeled by the economic theories of John Nash and adapted by military strategists -- is nothing more than a self-interested autonomous desire-fulfilling machine. This notion became the pivot for a new political revolution that supplants the old methods of societal control with a sort of irrevocable auto-pilot.

He goes on to demonstrate how this model became a self-fulfilling prophesy through the feedback reinforcement of modern marketing, media, and a corporatist-warped version of democratic politics -- ultimately trapping our society in ever more rigid and stratified constraints imposed presumably without explicit intention by not only our leaders, but by our own collective decisions and actions.

It's a remarkably in-depth attempt to analyze and explain the historical context of our modern dilemma. I like this series because it has multiple facets, and ties in many seemingly separate threads in our recent history to make a somewhat coherent whole.

It explains many things, including this paper on economic class disparity by Piketty and Saez.

Our national credit ponzi scheme since 2000? Just a symptom of this sort of thinking on Ayn Rand steroids (and by that I mean to say, the Randian market stimulant/intoxicant/performance enhancer known as Alan Greenspan).

I find it interesting that in Curtis' worldview, Reaganism and Thatcherism are just outgrowths of the deeper set of perverted ideas about what actually makes up a human being.

Amanda Palmer's Cat Stevens cover Twitter flash-gig video

Techdirt has a write-up about a flash-gig that Amanda Palmer did one day after a user suggested that she learn the Cat Stevens song, "If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out".

She just told her followers on Twitter to meet up with her at the beach to listen to some songs. So a bunch of people showed up and someone happened to bring a video camera, and recorded this:


[ YouTube, via ]

Jenny Lewis at Coachella 2009

Here's a little video I took on my Canon PowerShot SD790 IS digital camera at Coachella on Saturday night.

I &hearts Jenny Lewis.

The songs are "Silver Lining" (a Rilo Kiley song) and the title track from her latest solo album, Acid Tongue.

[ YouTube Link ]

Conan O'Brien's favorite clip from Late Night

Laughing that hard makes me get a little teary-eyed.
[ via //beconfused ]

Red Video

Red Digital is a camera maker that specializes in high quality professional cameras. In 2007 they released their camera, Red One which is capable of recording at resolutions up to 2048 horizontal by 1152 vertical pixels at 120 frames per second, directly to flash or hard disk.

Here's an example of some of the video that can be recorded using the camera. The footage is slowed down and the effect along with music by the Icelandic band Bang Gang is pretty hypnotizing.

skate - shot on red #1347 - 120 fps from www.theglobules.com on Vimeo.

Kutiman Thru-You playlist on YouTube

Kutiman's website is so popular right now that none of my friends are actually getting to see the videos. Update: So Kutiman is posting them all on his YouTube at this very moment.

Here's a playlist of all the music videos for Kutiman's Thru-You project:


Track 5 is my favorite because the girl Kutiman samples vocals from, Sarah, has such a beautiful tone to her voice, and her original song is actually pretty damn good. Track 3 - I'm New features perhaps the coolest freestyle rap I have seen in a long time.

[ via #coredevs, btw, ftw! ]

Kutiman mixes YouTube

Kutiman mixes YouTube



There have been many amazing videos on YouTube that use video mixing to produce awesome results, like this acapella video mix cover of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" by François Macré.

Not quite the same thing, but still amusing is the Family Guy sketch, "The Four Peters".


But Kutiman simply takes the cake by composing original songs using actual YouTube videos for audio/visual samples. Wow. Wow!

[ Link ]

Radiohead and the Grammys

Apparently I missed the Grammy Awards yesterday. (A Sunday! What was I doing?) Honestly, I had no clue. I never watch it anyway. And their website sucks.

But things might have been different if I had only known I was going to miss this:


Also, Bill Chapin has cool stuff to say about Radiohead.

Update: The Grammys filed a copyright claim with Google/YouTube and had Radiohead's performance pulled. I've re-upped it here, and I'm sure Radiohead would be fine with that.

Delicious bookmark resurrection #3: The Danish Poet

Narrated by Liv Ullman is the story of a Danish poet who decides to vacation in Norway to cure his writer's block and winds up meeting the love of his life who is unfortunately betrothed to another man.

Enjoy.

Delicious bookmark resurrection #2: The Big Chart

The Big Chart is an introduction to the topic of recent developments in counter-inuitive comparison which was discussed at the Dwell on Design conference in 2007.

Now, when someone says, "You can't compare apples and oranges" you can tell them, "Oh yes you can."

Okay, how about this comparison: 20 minutes of your life vs. watching this video

Perhaps no contest.

Delicious bookmark resurrection #1: Imagining the Tenth Dimension

An oldie, but a goodie, is this video that attempts to explain the concept of extra dimensions. From the website http://www.tenthdimension.com/:
Random bonus: The Hierarchy of Beards. That's why I've given up ever trying to seriously grow a beard. If your beard doesn't look like one of those, you can't pull it off and you probably look like crap.
Update: That other video was putting dumb Google ads in the video based on my blog content. That meant it was advertising for stuff I don't want to see advertised.

Ecolanguage for economics and ecology

Lee Arnold has a rather boring yet brilliant and graphically clear series of videos on a range of topics including economics and ecology on YouTube. Arnold has developed a system of communicating complex concepts using simple symbols called ecolanguage.

Here is Arnold's presentation of ecolanguage on YouTube.

Arnold's YouTube channel is a great place to start if you want to quickly get a basic understanding on topics such as these:

• Plants and Animals (An elementary example of a topic in ecolanguage.)
• The Origin of Banking
• The Bush Tax Cuts

By the way, Lee Arnold is a plumber who lives in Los Angeles. It is too bad this plumber's ideas weren't the ones being circulated on the national media political scene during the Presidential election race.

The Presets

Looking around, it was difficult to find a better online video introduction to The Presets than this one. Enjoy.
The Presets - Ormand Hall Live from Sey Something on Vimeo.

Shoes thrown at Bush

Wow. Just wow. Bush was giving a press conference about how everything's going better in Iraq and some Iraqi journalist chunks his shoes at our President while yelling, "It is the farewell kiss, you dog." Apparently that is the worst insult the guy could think of.



This is probably the best angle on the takedown of the assailant:


But honestly...


[ Link ]

Fat Freddy's Drop - Cay's Crays

No, he's not singing, "The Skank be the rock in my life".

He's singing, "The skank beat rockin' my life".

You may have just learned a new piece of valuable musical trivia.

Thought-provoking video on the banking system

Sometime last year I came across this series of videos on YouTube about how banks making loans, not government-printed currency, creates most of the money in the United States economy. At the time, I thought, "This is hard to believe, but it makes sense. This is just some communist outfit propaganda, though, right? How can it be that the government is seemingly so far removed from actual control of the money supply?" The YouTube version was bookmarked and forgotten in my Firefox browser. (My delicious account is desperately long overdue for syncing.)

These past few months though, when US banks started begging "us tax-payers" for bailout money, reminded me of the ideas in the video. Thanks to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing and someone named Chris (?) for the link.

Stuff in this video gets a bit complicated but it is well-worth the effort to endure all 47 minutes.



[ Link ]

Update! Here is a web page that lists the references for the quotes that Paul Grignon has used in his Money as Debt video.

Clerkenwell and The Real Tuesday Weld

Beat-boxing, duck-stepping, cuckoo birds. Good stuff. The Real Tuesday Weld is pretty fun music.

Bathtime in Clerkenwell


Last Time In Clerkenwell


(@davewiner reminded me about this via twitter.)

[ Link ]

Alien-like Squid With "Elbows" Filmed at Drilling Site

Kelly Hearn for National Geographic News reported on this on Monday. Why is it that sci-fi aliens often look so similar to this squid thingie? Did a science fiction writer at one time see one of these things, from then on influencing how sci-fi aliens appear in movies and comic books?



[ Link ]

Processing, The Flashbulb, iTunes, and Benn Jordan

This dope album by The Flashbulb is pretty good. It is mostly instrumental songs. After watching this amazing video that some guys did using processing for Java I did a search on completetorrent.com.

In the album directory with the mp3s was this little file, Please_read.html. So I opened it in Firefox. You should too.

I have no words to express how happy it made me to read those words.