Addendum ...

MARK Morford, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, gets the mood about right ... or as one of the comments at the end of the column put it, we're the United States of Whinemerica.

Friday, January 29, 2010

"inner galaxies.1.01" (encaustic, 12" x 12") 2010

IT seems human beings took up farming — not to eat but to drink.

Quoting ...

"IF you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of to musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than with truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless. The combination of (digital) hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising."

— By Jaron Lanier, from "You Are Not a Gadget" (Knopf), in Harper's. Lanier popularized the term "virtual reality."

Wednesday, February 27, 2010

"inner galaxies.0.02" (encaustic, 14" x 14") 2010

A little something for those government-hating libertarians.

Monday, February 25, 2010

COVERING Haiti: When the Media Is (sic) the Disaster, an essay by writer/reporter Rebecca Solnit. A quotation:

Personal gain is the last thing most people are thinking about in the aftermath of a disaster. In that phase, the survivors are almost invariably more altruistic and less attached to their own property, less concerned with the long-term questions of acquisition, status, wealth, and security, than just about anyone not in such situations imagines possible. (The best accounts from Haiti of how people with next to nothing have patiently tried to share the little they have and support those in even worse shape than them only emphasize this disaster reality.) Crime often drops in the wake of a disaster.

The media are another matter. They tend to arrive obsessed with property (and the headlines that assaults on property can make). Media outlets often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction on the part of the armed authorities. Or sometimes the journalists on the ground do a good job and the editors back in their safe offices cook up the crazy photo captions and the wrongheaded interpretations and emphases.

They also deploy the word panic wrongly. Panic among ordinary people in crisis is profoundly uncommon. The media will call a crowd of people running from certain death a panicking mob, even though running is the only sensible thing to do. In Haiti, they continue to report that food is being withheld from distribution for fear of “stampedes.” Do they think Haitians are cattle?

The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control -- the American military calls it “security” -- rather than relief. A British-accented voiceover on CNN calls people sprinting to where supplies are being dumped from a helicopter a "stampede" and adds that this delivery “risks sparking chaos.” The chaos already exists, and you can’t blame it on these people desperate for food and water. Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they’re unworthy and untrustworthy.

Addendum ...

OK, you don't want some government bureaucrat meddling with your healthcare, right?

Well, you Tea Party folk are gonna just love having more and more insurance company bureaucrats telling your doc and hospital what they can or cannot do.