Sunday, November 6, 2011
Josie Charlwood
"Feel Good Inc" - Gorillaz Live Looped Cover - Josie Charlwood - BOSS RC-30
Electric Feel (MGMT Cover) - Josie Charlwood - BOSS RC-30 & TC-Helicon VoiceLive2
[ed. Two great songs, beautiful vocals and an amazing ability to multi-task.]
The Book of Revelation: Prophecy and Politics
[ed. If you're like me and have a hard time understanding the plot and context for a lot of biblical scripture (but are curious about what's actually happening), this is for you. An excellent history of Revelelations, told in narrative and art form in a Master Class lecture by Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University.]
by Elaine Pagels, Edge
The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible. It's the most controversial. It doesn't have any stories, moral teaching. It only has visions, dreams and nightmares. Not many people say they understand it, but for 2000 years, this book has been wildly popular. Why would anyone bother with a book that rationalists love to hate, I was thinking that from Epicurus to Richard Dawkins. Many people assume what I learned from my father, who converted from Presbyterianism to Darwin and became a biologist, that religion was nothing but a compensation for ignorance, and would soon die off. In fact, I thought I heard Steve imply this yesterday when you included in modernity, science, but not religion.
Anthropologists can find some redeeming value in creation myths when they see that they are condensed versions of cultural values. Sociologists from Weber to Durkheim have shown how certain elements of ancient western religion like the Torah and Jesus' revision of the Torah become structural elements of social codes, and so forth.
What do you make of Revelation? Here, there are no ideas. There's not a shred of socially redeeming ethical teaching, just fantastic visions of monsters, whores, angels battling demons. How do we account for the fact that ever since it was written, even today, the book has been enormously influential in western culture? (Although Jason Epstein, my editor, loves what I've been writing about it, he never misses a chance to take a swipe at the idiocy of people who actually read this book.)
I chose the book of Revelation as the toughest test case for the questions I've been asking myself. Why is religion still around, and not only among illiterates, exclusively, not at least? Why do people still engage in these folk tales and myths that are thousands of years old? And that's in their written form. Probably they were told for millions of years before that.
First thing I discovered is that controversy about this book is nothing new. Ever since it was written, Christians argued heatedly for and against it, when it barely squeezed into the Bible 300 years later. From the start, people who hated the book said a heretic wrote it. People who defended it claimed that it was written by one of the disciples of Jesus, which is obviously not the case.
I started with three questions. First, who wrote this book? And what was he thinking? Second, what other books of Revelation were written about the same time? How did this book, and only this one, get into the Bible? And what constitutes the appeal, whether you're talking psychologically, literarily, politically, of this book? So this is just a kind of mad dash through where those questions led me.
Now, just in case you haven't read it lately, I wanted to give you a kind of cliff notes version of the book's complex structure, along with some of the art it inspired, to show its cultural influence.
Read more:
by Elaine Pagels, Edge
The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible. It's the most controversial. It doesn't have any stories, moral teaching. It only has visions, dreams and nightmares. Not many people say they understand it, but for 2000 years, this book has been wildly popular. Why would anyone bother with a book that rationalists love to hate, I was thinking that from Epicurus to Richard Dawkins. Many people assume what I learned from my father, who converted from Presbyterianism to Darwin and became a biologist, that religion was nothing but a compensation for ignorance, and would soon die off. In fact, I thought I heard Steve imply this yesterday when you included in modernity, science, but not religion.
Anthropologists can find some redeeming value in creation myths when they see that they are condensed versions of cultural values. Sociologists from Weber to Durkheim have shown how certain elements of ancient western religion like the Torah and Jesus' revision of the Torah become structural elements of social codes, and so forth.What do you make of Revelation? Here, there are no ideas. There's not a shred of socially redeeming ethical teaching, just fantastic visions of monsters, whores, angels battling demons. How do we account for the fact that ever since it was written, even today, the book has been enormously influential in western culture? (Although Jason Epstein, my editor, loves what I've been writing about it, he never misses a chance to take a swipe at the idiocy of people who actually read this book.)
I chose the book of Revelation as the toughest test case for the questions I've been asking myself. Why is religion still around, and not only among illiterates, exclusively, not at least? Why do people still engage in these folk tales and myths that are thousands of years old? And that's in their written form. Probably they were told for millions of years before that.
First thing I discovered is that controversy about this book is nothing new. Ever since it was written, Christians argued heatedly for and against it, when it barely squeezed into the Bible 300 years later. From the start, people who hated the book said a heretic wrote it. People who defended it claimed that it was written by one of the disciples of Jesus, which is obviously not the case.
I started with three questions. First, who wrote this book? And what was he thinking? Second, what other books of Revelation were written about the same time? How did this book, and only this one, get into the Bible? And what constitutes the appeal, whether you're talking psychologically, literarily, politically, of this book? So this is just a kind of mad dash through where those questions led me.
Now, just in case you haven't read it lately, I wanted to give you a kind of cliff notes version of the book's complex structure, along with some of the art it inspired, to show its cultural influence.
Read more:
Samurai Skills
[ed. This certainly demonstrates how lethal a sword can be in the hands of a master.]
In this clip, a "modern samurai" called Isao Machii efficient slices a large variety of challenging objects in twain with his sword, including a round fired from a nearby pellet-gun. It's pretty astounding stuff.
via:
The Drone Mentality
by Glenn Greenwald, Salon
In a New York Times Op-Ed yesterday, international human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith describes a meeting he had in Pakistan with residents from the Afghan-Pakistani border region that has been relentlessly bombed by American drones; if I had one political wish this week, it would be that everyone who supports (or acquiesces to) President Obama’s wildly accelerated drone attacks would read this:
This is why it’s so imperative to do everything possible to shine a light on the victims of President Obama’s aggression in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere: ignoring the victims, rendering them invisible, is a crucial prerequisite to sustaining propaganda and maintaining support for this militarism (that’s the same reason John Brennan lied — yet again — by assuring Americans that there are no innocent victims of drone attacks). Many people want to hear nothing about these victims — like Tariq — because they don’t want to accept that the leader for whom they cheer and the drone attacks they support are regularly ending the lives of large numbers of innocent people, including children. They believe the fairy tale that the U.S. is only killing Terrorists and “militants” because they want to believe it (at this point, the word “militant” has no real definition other than: he or she who dies when a missile shot by a U.S. drone detonates). It’s a self-serving, self-protective form of self-delusion, and the more we hear about the dead teeangers left in the wake of this violence, the more difficult it is to maintain that delusion. That’s precisely why we hear so little about it.
Read more:
In a New York Times Op-Ed yesterday, international human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith describes a meeting he had in Pakistan with residents from the Afghan-Pakistani border region that has been relentlessly bombed by American drones; if I had one political wish this week, it would be that everyone who supports (or acquiesces to) President Obama’s wildly accelerated drone attacks would read this:
The meeting had been organized so that Pashtun tribal elders who lived along the Pakistani-Afghan frontier could meet with Westerners for the first time to offer their perspectives on the shadowy drone war being waged by the Central Intelligence Agency in their region. Twenty men came to air their views; some brought their young sons along to experience this rare interaction with Americans. In all, 60 villagers made the journey. . . .
On the night before the meeting, we had a dinner, to break the ice. During the meal, I met a boy named Tariq Aziz. He was 16. As we ate, the stern, bearded faces all around me slowly melted into smiles. Tariq smiled much sooner; he was too young to boast much facial hair, and too young to have learned to hate.
The next day, the jirga lasted several hours. I had a translator, but the gist of each man’s speech was clear. American drones would circle their homes all day before unleashing Hellfire missiles, often in the dark hours between midnight and dawn. Death lurked everywhere around them. . . .
On Monday, [Tariq] was killed by a C.I.A. drone strike, along with his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan. The two of them had been dispatched, with Tariq driving, to pick up their aunt and bring her home to the village of Norak, when their short lives were ended by a Hellfire missile.
My mistake had been to see the drone war in Waziristan in terms of abstract legal theory — as a blatantly illegal invasion of Pakistan’s sovereignty, akin to President Richard M. Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia in 1970.
But now, the issue has suddenly become very real and personal. Tariq was a good kid, and courageous. My warm hand recently touched his in friendship; yet, within three days, his would be cold in death, the rigor mortis inflicted by my government.
And Tariq’s extended family, so recently hoping to be our allies for peace, has now been ripped apart by an American missile — most likely making any effort we make at reconciliation futile. (...)Of course, nobody inside the U.S. Government is objecting on the ground that it is wrong to blow people up without having any knowledge of who they are and without any evidence they have done anything wrong. Rather, the internal dissent is grounded in the concern that these drone attacks undermine U.S. objectives by increasing anti-American sentiment in the region (there’s that primitive, inscrutable Muslim culture rearing its head again: they strangely seem to get very angry when foreign governments send sky robots over their countries and blow up their neighbors, teenagers and children). But whatever else is true, huge numbers of Americans — Democrats and Republicans alike — defend Obama’s massive escalation of drone attacks on the ground that he’s killing Terrorists even though they — and, according to the Wall Street Journal, Obama himself — usually don’t even know whose lives they’re snuffing out. Remember, though: we have to kill The Muslim Terrorists because they have no regard for human life.
This is why it’s so imperative to do everything possible to shine a light on the victims of President Obama’s aggression in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere: ignoring the victims, rendering them invisible, is a crucial prerequisite to sustaining propaganda and maintaining support for this militarism (that’s the same reason John Brennan lied — yet again — by assuring Americans that there are no innocent victims of drone attacks). Many people want to hear nothing about these victims — like Tariq — because they don’t want to accept that the leader for whom they cheer and the drone attacks they support are regularly ending the lives of large numbers of innocent people, including children. They believe the fairy tale that the U.S. is only killing Terrorists and “militants” because they want to believe it (at this point, the word “militant” has no real definition other than: he or she who dies when a missile shot by a U.S. drone detonates). It’s a self-serving, self-protective form of self-delusion, and the more we hear about the dead teeangers left in the wake of this violence, the more difficult it is to maintain that delusion. That’s precisely why we hear so little about it.
Read more:
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Try This At Home
ElBulli’s food is famous for its extravagance, artistry and complicated production. So, asks Adam Gopnik, what can we expect from chef Ferran Adrià ’s new cookbook?
A waiter at elBulli with one of Ferran Adrià ’s creations: peach liqueur bonbons and a spoon of peach liquid on a frozen stone
by Adam Gopnik, Prospect
Learn how to make your family’s dinner from Ferran Adrià ! It’s not unlike the notion of learning to write thank-you notes from James Joyce, not unlike taking ukulele lessons from Jimi Hendrix. It is not merely that the master who is to teach you defines a certain standard of excellence, but that he defines a style of extravagant excellence, rococo perfection—overcharge is so essential to the style that to miniaturise or domesticate it seems to betray its essential nature. A uke player who is taught to play with his teeth and set fire to his ukulele is, however excellent, in a certain sense not a ukulele player at all; he is not advancing the style so much as just playing the wrong instrument. Adrià is the author of that classic plat, lambs’ brains with sea urchins and sea grapes. How do you do this at home, and do you really want to?
Adrià is, of course, the chef and patron and resident and general Willy Wonka of elBulli, the now just closed Catalan temple of what is usually called “molecular gastronomy,” even if Adrià much prefers what he sees as the simpler name of “techno-emotional cuisine.” (Though when “techno-emotional” seems the simplest label that can be applied to something it can fairly be said that the thing being labelled must not be very simple.) A marriage of the extreme edge of French avant garde cuisine with techniques borrowed from the high-tech reaches of the food industry—sort of the offspring of Michel Guérard and a mad scientist—the principles of that cooking were not just rococo but recherché. New machines and new technology, liquid nitrogen and calcium carbonate, were used to turn food from its ordinary, some might say natural, forms into foams and gels and freeze-dried powders and pure smoke. A meal at elBulli might include—indeed, the one I ate there shortly before it closed did include—a tiramisu with tofu and green tea, a corn taco with parmesan ice cream and freeze-dried fraises, and Iberian ham with a ginger and caramel reduction.
As with Hendrix, though, the pyrotechnics and fireworks of Adrià ’s style were, from his point of view, merely a playful coating on what was meant to be admired as a magnificent virtuoso technique. And so the recipes and dishes in Adrià ’s The Family Meal (Phaidon) are plain—really plain, much plainer than almost any cooking you will find in any other recipe book by a famous cook, a catalogue of the recipes for the cheap simple meals that were served to the staff every night at 6pm, before the service began at elBulli. One realises that, if for the ukulele student lessons with Hendrix might seem too much, for Hendrix it might seem just right—a chance to show the real basis of his style, without the intrusions of a too-big amp and a too-wailing pedal, and without trying to please anyone who wants the guitar to flame, rather than just catch fire. (...)
His purpose, one senses, in offering these complete, three-course menus for ordinary weekday night dinners, illustrated with step-by-step, photo-romans style illustration, is not to spread his style but to justify his genius. The famous tricks are merely devices, he suggests, what matters for my kind of cooking is the mise en place, the habit of preparation. Adrià , with the eccentricity of genius, truly believes this: that what separates what he does from what you and I do is simply that he takes more trouble laying out his ingredients and keeping the plan in his head. (So Dante might have imagined that the difference between what he did and what you and I do was the ability to think of things in circles.) If you and I had the self-discipline to plan our meals and lay out our ingredients thoughtfully, Adrià sincerely believes, we could soon be making electric eel powder with goat-brain gels for our children.
Read more:
by Adam Gopnik, Prospect
Learn how to make your family’s dinner from Ferran Adrià ! It’s not unlike the notion of learning to write thank-you notes from James Joyce, not unlike taking ukulele lessons from Jimi Hendrix. It is not merely that the master who is to teach you defines a certain standard of excellence, but that he defines a style of extravagant excellence, rococo perfection—overcharge is so essential to the style that to miniaturise or domesticate it seems to betray its essential nature. A uke player who is taught to play with his teeth and set fire to his ukulele is, however excellent, in a certain sense not a ukulele player at all; he is not advancing the style so much as just playing the wrong instrument. Adrià is the author of that classic plat, lambs’ brains with sea urchins and sea grapes. How do you do this at home, and do you really want to?
Adrià is, of course, the chef and patron and resident and general Willy Wonka of elBulli, the now just closed Catalan temple of what is usually called “molecular gastronomy,” even if Adrià much prefers what he sees as the simpler name of “techno-emotional cuisine.” (Though when “techno-emotional” seems the simplest label that can be applied to something it can fairly be said that the thing being labelled must not be very simple.) A marriage of the extreme edge of French avant garde cuisine with techniques borrowed from the high-tech reaches of the food industry—sort of the offspring of Michel Guérard and a mad scientist—the principles of that cooking were not just rococo but recherché. New machines and new technology, liquid nitrogen and calcium carbonate, were used to turn food from its ordinary, some might say natural, forms into foams and gels and freeze-dried powders and pure smoke. A meal at elBulli might include—indeed, the one I ate there shortly before it closed did include—a tiramisu with tofu and green tea, a corn taco with parmesan ice cream and freeze-dried fraises, and Iberian ham with a ginger and caramel reduction.
As with Hendrix, though, the pyrotechnics and fireworks of Adrià ’s style were, from his point of view, merely a playful coating on what was meant to be admired as a magnificent virtuoso technique. And so the recipes and dishes in Adrià ’s The Family Meal (Phaidon) are plain—really plain, much plainer than almost any cooking you will find in any other recipe book by a famous cook, a catalogue of the recipes for the cheap simple meals that were served to the staff every night at 6pm, before the service began at elBulli. One realises that, if for the ukulele student lessons with Hendrix might seem too much, for Hendrix it might seem just right—a chance to show the real basis of his style, without the intrusions of a too-big amp and a too-wailing pedal, and without trying to please anyone who wants the guitar to flame, rather than just catch fire. (...)
His purpose, one senses, in offering these complete, three-course menus for ordinary weekday night dinners, illustrated with step-by-step, photo-romans style illustration, is not to spread his style but to justify his genius. The famous tricks are merely devices, he suggests, what matters for my kind of cooking is the mise en place, the habit of preparation. Adrià , with the eccentricity of genius, truly believes this: that what separates what he does from what you and I do is simply that he takes more trouble laying out his ingredients and keeping the plan in his head. (So Dante might have imagined that the difference between what he did and what you and I do was the ability to think of things in circles.) If you and I had the self-discipline to plan our meals and lay out our ingredients thoughtfully, Adrià sincerely believes, we could soon be making electric eel powder with goat-brain gels for our children.
Read more:
The Ongoing Appeal of this ‘Libel Against the Human Race’
by Tim Black, Spiked
The reason why such an army of present-day miserabilists are drawn to the gloomy reverend has far more to do with Malthus’s thorough-going social pessimism than his supposed laws of population growth.
Lisping, reclusive and reviled by the working class of his day, the Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) – the man behind the idea that the ‘lower orders of society’ breed too quickly – would probably be surprised by his current popularity. Because that’s what he is today: popular. Commentators, activists and academics positively fall over themselves in the rush to say, ‘you know what, that Malthus had a point. There are too many people and, what’s more, they are consuming far too much.’
Earlier this summer, a columnist for Time magazine was in no doubt as to the pastor’s relevance. The global population is ‘ever larger, ever hungrier’, he noted, ‘food prices are near historic highs’ and ‘every report of drought or flooding raises fears of global shortages’. ‘Taking a look around us today’, he continued, ‘it would be easy to conclude that Malthus was prescient’. Writing in the British weekly, the New Statesman, wildlife lover Sir David Attenborough was similarly convinced: ‘The fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth: there cannot be more people on this Earth than can be fed.’ Not to be outdone, the liberal-left’s favourite broadsheet, the Guardian, also suggested that Malthus may have been right after all: ‘[His] arguments were part of the inspiration for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and they have validity in the natural world. On the savannah, in the rainforests, and across the tundra, animal populations explode when times are good, and crash when food reserves are exhausted. Is homo sapiens an exception?’ The melancholy tone whispered its answer in the negative. Writing in the New York Times, Paul Krugman was less coy: ‘Malthus was right!’ shouted the headline.
Given the encomia that are currently coming the way of Malthus you may well wonder what exactly it was that he was meant to be right about. To find the answer to this it is worth actually taking a look at the work, first published in 1798, on which his supposed prescience is based: An Essay on the Principle of Population. It makes for surprising reading. (...)
‘The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind [eg, wars for resources] are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep of their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population.’
You can almost hear contemporary misery merchants trilling their approval. You’ve got wars for resources, you’ve got pandemics, you’ve got famine… Indeed, virtually every cataclysm, every End of Man is there, forecast in Malthus’s pulpit prose. No wonder environmentalists sidle up to Malthus’s corpse to whisper their approval: ‘You knew all along that nature would take its necessary revenge unless humans, breeding like rabbits, stopped consuming so damned much.’
But what’s strange about reading Malthus’s actual text is that the ‘imperious all-pervading law of nature’ he outlines – that nature will check population growth if humans don’t implement checks themselves – takes up just a few paragraphs of a work over 120 pages long. In fact, he barely bothers to justify his assertion that population grows geometrically while the means of subsistence expand arithmetically. His sole source for his relentless assertion about population growth seems to be ‘Dr [Richard] Price’s two volumes of Observations’, a 1776 treatise on civil liberty which featured factoids about population growth in the New England colonies during the seventeenth century – ‘when the power of population was left to exert itself with perfect freedom’. As for his assertions about the development of the means of subsistence, there are admittedly a few sketchy paragraphs on the transition between hunter-gather societies and agricultural ones. But beyond that, nothing.
That Malthus’s actual ‘theory of population’ is, by any standard, groundless at least explains why it was vitiated by subsequent history. Because, make no mistake, Malthus has never ceased to be wrong. Not only did population not expand to anything like the ‘geometric’ degree he outlined, but more importantly, the technological developments of the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century and the agricultural, ‘green’ revolution of the twentieth century showed that our ability to support a growing population can, as it were, leap forward. The ‘arithmetic’ rate at which we develop the means of subsistence proved to be what it always was – an arbitrary assertion.
Yet, the flimsy nature of Malthus’s supposed laws of population growth should not be surprising. Why would they be anything else? After all, Malthus was never really interested in producing a work of demography. Even the bits he does produce were ripped off, either from Giammaria Ortes (1713-1790) or from Richard Price’s (1723-1791) work, to which he refers at any point he needs something as solid as a fact. What Malthus really wanted to produce was a refutation of social reform, or worse still, revolution.
Take a look at the full title of his essay: An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr Godwin, M Condorcet, and Other Writers. His subject was not so much the principle of population growth – this Malthus was happy to take for granted, hence the scant attention he actually paid to justifying it. Rather, his real purpose was the extent to which a supposed law of population would confound those writers like Godwin and Condorcet who advocated social transformation. The theory, the so-called science, was always subservient to Malthus’s main objective of justifying the social order as it is. As Malthus himself wrote: ‘The principal argument of this Essay only goes to prove the necessity of a class of proprietors, and a class of labourers.’ Malthus was not pessimistic about the chances of improving society because of his theory of population – that is the wrong way round. His wilful social pessimism, where misery was the lot of the majority, inspired his theory of population.
A member of the landed gentry – although being the youngest son he was without an estate – Malthus did have every reason to feel insecure. In the towns and cities of late-eighteenth-century England, the industrial bourgeoisie was emerging, much to the anxiety of a bedraggled, landed aristocrat like Malthus. This is why Malthus rejects the labour theory of value developed by David Ricardo and Adam Smith in favour of land and agriculture as the only true source of value. And on what basis? Because ‘the healthy labours of agriculture’, as opposed to the ‘unhealthy occupations of manufacturing industry’, produce things people really, really need – or, if you prefer, the means to subsist. ‘It is with some view to the real utility of the produce’, Malthus cautions, ‘that we ought to extricate the productiveness and unproductiveness of different sorts of labour’. In fact, so keen was Malthus to justify the leisured existence of the landed aristocracy, and the decidedly unleisurely existence of all who till the fields for her, that he remarks with a stunning lack of prescience that: ‘By encouraging the industry of the towns more than the industry of the country, Europe may be said, perhaps, to have brought on a premature old age.’
Read more:
The reason why such an army of present-day miserabilists are drawn to the gloomy reverend has far more to do with Malthus’s thorough-going social pessimism than his supposed laws of population growth.
Lisping, reclusive and reviled by the working class of his day, the Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) – the man behind the idea that the ‘lower orders of society’ breed too quickly – would probably be surprised by his current popularity. Because that’s what he is today: popular. Commentators, activists and academics positively fall over themselves in the rush to say, ‘you know what, that Malthus had a point. There are too many people and, what’s more, they are consuming far too much.’Earlier this summer, a columnist for Time magazine was in no doubt as to the pastor’s relevance. The global population is ‘ever larger, ever hungrier’, he noted, ‘food prices are near historic highs’ and ‘every report of drought or flooding raises fears of global shortages’. ‘Taking a look around us today’, he continued, ‘it would be easy to conclude that Malthus was prescient’. Writing in the British weekly, the New Statesman, wildlife lover Sir David Attenborough was similarly convinced: ‘The fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth: there cannot be more people on this Earth than can be fed.’ Not to be outdone, the liberal-left’s favourite broadsheet, the Guardian, also suggested that Malthus may have been right after all: ‘[His] arguments were part of the inspiration for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and they have validity in the natural world. On the savannah, in the rainforests, and across the tundra, animal populations explode when times are good, and crash when food reserves are exhausted. Is homo sapiens an exception?’ The melancholy tone whispered its answer in the negative. Writing in the New York Times, Paul Krugman was less coy: ‘Malthus was right!’ shouted the headline.
Given the encomia that are currently coming the way of Malthus you may well wonder what exactly it was that he was meant to be right about. To find the answer to this it is worth actually taking a look at the work, first published in 1798, on which his supposed prescience is based: An Essay on the Principle of Population. It makes for surprising reading. (...)
‘The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind [eg, wars for resources] are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep of their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population.’
You can almost hear contemporary misery merchants trilling their approval. You’ve got wars for resources, you’ve got pandemics, you’ve got famine… Indeed, virtually every cataclysm, every End of Man is there, forecast in Malthus’s pulpit prose. No wonder environmentalists sidle up to Malthus’s corpse to whisper their approval: ‘You knew all along that nature would take its necessary revenge unless humans, breeding like rabbits, stopped consuming so damned much.’
But what’s strange about reading Malthus’s actual text is that the ‘imperious all-pervading law of nature’ he outlines – that nature will check population growth if humans don’t implement checks themselves – takes up just a few paragraphs of a work over 120 pages long. In fact, he barely bothers to justify his assertion that population grows geometrically while the means of subsistence expand arithmetically. His sole source for his relentless assertion about population growth seems to be ‘Dr [Richard] Price’s two volumes of Observations’, a 1776 treatise on civil liberty which featured factoids about population growth in the New England colonies during the seventeenth century – ‘when the power of population was left to exert itself with perfect freedom’. As for his assertions about the development of the means of subsistence, there are admittedly a few sketchy paragraphs on the transition between hunter-gather societies and agricultural ones. But beyond that, nothing.
That Malthus’s actual ‘theory of population’ is, by any standard, groundless at least explains why it was vitiated by subsequent history. Because, make no mistake, Malthus has never ceased to be wrong. Not only did population not expand to anything like the ‘geometric’ degree he outlined, but more importantly, the technological developments of the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century and the agricultural, ‘green’ revolution of the twentieth century showed that our ability to support a growing population can, as it were, leap forward. The ‘arithmetic’ rate at which we develop the means of subsistence proved to be what it always was – an arbitrary assertion.
Yet, the flimsy nature of Malthus’s supposed laws of population growth should not be surprising. Why would they be anything else? After all, Malthus was never really interested in producing a work of demography. Even the bits he does produce were ripped off, either from Giammaria Ortes (1713-1790) or from Richard Price’s (1723-1791) work, to which he refers at any point he needs something as solid as a fact. What Malthus really wanted to produce was a refutation of social reform, or worse still, revolution.
Take a look at the full title of his essay: An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr Godwin, M Condorcet, and Other Writers. His subject was not so much the principle of population growth – this Malthus was happy to take for granted, hence the scant attention he actually paid to justifying it. Rather, his real purpose was the extent to which a supposed law of population would confound those writers like Godwin and Condorcet who advocated social transformation. The theory, the so-called science, was always subservient to Malthus’s main objective of justifying the social order as it is. As Malthus himself wrote: ‘The principal argument of this Essay only goes to prove the necessity of a class of proprietors, and a class of labourers.’ Malthus was not pessimistic about the chances of improving society because of his theory of population – that is the wrong way round. His wilful social pessimism, where misery was the lot of the majority, inspired his theory of population.
A member of the landed gentry – although being the youngest son he was without an estate – Malthus did have every reason to feel insecure. In the towns and cities of late-eighteenth-century England, the industrial bourgeoisie was emerging, much to the anxiety of a bedraggled, landed aristocrat like Malthus. This is why Malthus rejects the labour theory of value developed by David Ricardo and Adam Smith in favour of land and agriculture as the only true source of value. And on what basis? Because ‘the healthy labours of agriculture’, as opposed to the ‘unhealthy occupations of manufacturing industry’, produce things people really, really need – or, if you prefer, the means to subsist. ‘It is with some view to the real utility of the produce’, Malthus cautions, ‘that we ought to extricate the productiveness and unproductiveness of different sorts of labour’. In fact, so keen was Malthus to justify the leisured existence of the landed aristocracy, and the decidedly unleisurely existence of all who till the fields for her, that he remarks with a stunning lack of prescience that: ‘By encouraging the industry of the towns more than the industry of the country, Europe may be said, perhaps, to have brought on a premature old age.’
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Murmuration
Two friends out in a canoe got to witness one of nature's more spectacular phenomena: a massive group of starlings (a "murmuration" for you Balderdash/Scrabble fiends) in fanciful flight above their heads.
Scientists aren't sure how flocking animals such as starlings and certain species of fish react in such amazing unison. As far as they can tell, the synchronization isn't based off a leader bird, but any individual's movement. Neighboring birds will take a cue, and the movement will ripple onward, creating the morphing shapes that grow and change in waves (rather than instantly across the flock). As for evolution's reason behind flocking behaviors, it comes down to strength in numbers: predators have a hard time focusing on an individual in a group of thousands.
via: Wylie Overstreet at GOOD
Friday, November 4, 2011
Friday Book Club: The Mosquito Coast
by John Leonard, NY Times (1982)
Wanting to be God makes you crazy. In Paul Theroux's astonishing new novel, Allie Fox - ''the last American'' - tries to invent his own godhood. He will straighten rivers, make ice out of fire and turn volcanos into hibachis. The original God, that ''dead boy with the spinning top,'' did not, after all, ''finish the job.'' We are reading about the Passion of Allie Fox as witnessed and recorded by his 13-year-old son, Charlie, who is hypnotized and terrified.
How much do I like this book? Let me count the ways:
(1) As a text on fathers and sons, it is wonderful. The family is the first ''creation.'' To sons, fathers are automatically gods, not only because they have violent opinions on everything from aerosol cheese spread to pelicans, but especially when they test our faith by forcing us to climb trees or the ''shrouds'' of a banana freighter during a Caribbean storm or the inside plumbing of a huge ''magnification'' of the ''entrails and vitals'' of the human body. Gods, of course, insist that their sons fail.
(2) As a book about growing up to critical intelligence, it devastates. Charlie watches his father from the asparagus farms of Massachusetts to the spider jungles of Honduras. He sees a ''sorcerer'' create a garden out of hardware and destroy it out of pride. He will understand that his father invents ''for his own sake,'' for personal comfort, and that he needs his son's approval, which, ultimately, Charlie will refuse.
(3) As a book of characters, it is unexcelled since Dickens was in business. Allie really is a genius with his tools; and his opinions, however extreme, are persuasive until they hurt. Charlie, before and after he becomes Holden Caulfield, acquaints us with the dangers of love. His mother, who has no other name, is evoked in a series of her own stony one-liners -against the tide of Allie's monologues - that stab the heart. The rest of the Fox children, sniveling Jerry and the twin girls, do their narrative duty with an admirable lack of fuss, and so does everybody else, including the ''mosquitoes,'' in this soured dream.
(4) As literary exhibitionism, it is as magical as Allie. Mr. Theroux writes as well about thermodynamics as he does about Central American weather. His geographies of mind and space are equally compelling. If he mentions a scarecrow or a scavenger early on, we can be sure that each will appear later on, decisively symbolic. Out of English, Spanish, Creole, Pidgin and various Indian dialects, he fashions a dazzling patois full of such pertinent puns as ''nighted stays'' and ''Jove as Wetness. '' Yes, he is showing off; if we could do it, we'd s how off, too.
(5) As an adventure story of ''the first family,'' it scares the socks off the feet. Sure, Mr. Theroux is being ironic about ''Robinson Crusoe'' and ''Swiss Family Robinson,'' not to mention ''Lord of the Flies.'' Allie, in fact, reminds me more of Lord Jim, John Galt, Henderson the Rain-King, Ahab and one of the crazier Buendias in ''One Hundred Years of Solitude.'' (Garcia Marquez, remember, had ice in his tropics.) But it delivers the bloody goods: journey, fear, revelation, manhood, apocalypse.
(6) As parable, allegory, myth, cryptogram on human improbability and metaphysical binge, addressing itself to creation theory, the ages of Stone and Bronze, capitalism, imperialism, science and technology, the postindustrial complex and the hubris of art, ''The Mosquito Coast'' - alas -tends to sag somewhere around the Industrial Revolution. This is not because the ideas aren't interesting, but because Mr. Theroux doesn't trust his readers. He explains and underlines, insisting on God, Prometheus, Faust, Frankenstein, Parsifal, Dr. Strangelove, the latest genetic engineer and the plumber who never arrives to fix the septic tank of the modern mind. He won't let us guess, and he should have. He is a typical father.
(7) Also, it is very funny, unlike fathers. Enough numbers. I've forgotten to say what happens. The Swiss Family Fox decamps to Honduras. Its children, uneasy about the village their father buys and ''improves'' with such machines as Fat Boy - think of Moloch, and the atom bomb at Los Alamos, and Pandora's Box as a ''worm tub'' - these children hide in what is called the ''Acre,'' where they reinvent nakedness, religion, schools, money and secrets. Because they are ''in touch with the seasons,'' they will save their father before they betray him.
Their father, that perpetual motion machine who won't even eat bananas because they make a ''monkey'' out of you, that engineer of love, that would-be God who is picky about his food and his bedroll and his children, that Jeremiah who reviles radio, television, flashlights, formal education and Toyotas - where did he get so smart? - builds a pyramid and digs a hole. He will improve on creation; he experiences guilt; his nerve fails, and nevertheless he speechifies, which may be why the real world tears out his tongue. Only happy ''going against the current'' - surely this is German Romanticism and therefore suspect -he is scavenged. And the scarecrow, unsurprisingly, is Christ.
Fancy with the metaphysics, Mr. Theroux invents a resistance to his own clever dance. Specific with his family romance, he enthralls. Generous in his ''geothermal'' dig, he bores a hole in the head. Grinning, he made me cry. Sly, he makes me wonder why he himself left Massachusetts for England.
via:
Original article via the NY Times
Wanting to be God makes you crazy. In Paul Theroux's astonishing new novel, Allie Fox - ''the last American'' - tries to invent his own godhood. He will straighten rivers, make ice out of fire and turn volcanos into hibachis. The original God, that ''dead boy with the spinning top,'' did not, after all, ''finish the job.'' We are reading about the Passion of Allie Fox as witnessed and recorded by his 13-year-old son, Charlie, who is hypnotized and terrified.
How much do I like this book? Let me count the ways: (1) As a text on fathers and sons, it is wonderful. The family is the first ''creation.'' To sons, fathers are automatically gods, not only because they have violent opinions on everything from aerosol cheese spread to pelicans, but especially when they test our faith by forcing us to climb trees or the ''shrouds'' of a banana freighter during a Caribbean storm or the inside plumbing of a huge ''magnification'' of the ''entrails and vitals'' of the human body. Gods, of course, insist that their sons fail.
(2) As a book about growing up to critical intelligence, it devastates. Charlie watches his father from the asparagus farms of Massachusetts to the spider jungles of Honduras. He sees a ''sorcerer'' create a garden out of hardware and destroy it out of pride. He will understand that his father invents ''for his own sake,'' for personal comfort, and that he needs his son's approval, which, ultimately, Charlie will refuse.
(3) As a book of characters, it is unexcelled since Dickens was in business. Allie really is a genius with his tools; and his opinions, however extreme, are persuasive until they hurt. Charlie, before and after he becomes Holden Caulfield, acquaints us with the dangers of love. His mother, who has no other name, is evoked in a series of her own stony one-liners -against the tide of Allie's monologues - that stab the heart. The rest of the Fox children, sniveling Jerry and the twin girls, do their narrative duty with an admirable lack of fuss, and so does everybody else, including the ''mosquitoes,'' in this soured dream.
(4) As literary exhibitionism, it is as magical as Allie. Mr. Theroux writes as well about thermodynamics as he does about Central American weather. His geographies of mind and space are equally compelling. If he mentions a scarecrow or a scavenger early on, we can be sure that each will appear later on, decisively symbolic. Out of English, Spanish, Creole, Pidgin and various Indian dialects, he fashions a dazzling patois full of such pertinent puns as ''nighted stays'' and ''Jove as Wetness. '' Yes, he is showing off; if we could do it, we'd s how off, too.
(5) As an adventure story of ''the first family,'' it scares the socks off the feet. Sure, Mr. Theroux is being ironic about ''Robinson Crusoe'' and ''Swiss Family Robinson,'' not to mention ''Lord of the Flies.'' Allie, in fact, reminds me more of Lord Jim, John Galt, Henderson the Rain-King, Ahab and one of the crazier Buendias in ''One Hundred Years of Solitude.'' (Garcia Marquez, remember, had ice in his tropics.) But it delivers the bloody goods: journey, fear, revelation, manhood, apocalypse.
(6) As parable, allegory, myth, cryptogram on human improbability and metaphysical binge, addressing itself to creation theory, the ages of Stone and Bronze, capitalism, imperialism, science and technology, the postindustrial complex and the hubris of art, ''The Mosquito Coast'' - alas -tends to sag somewhere around the Industrial Revolution. This is not because the ideas aren't interesting, but because Mr. Theroux doesn't trust his readers. He explains and underlines, insisting on God, Prometheus, Faust, Frankenstein, Parsifal, Dr. Strangelove, the latest genetic engineer and the plumber who never arrives to fix the septic tank of the modern mind. He won't let us guess, and he should have. He is a typical father.
(7) Also, it is very funny, unlike fathers. Enough numbers. I've forgotten to say what happens. The Swiss Family Fox decamps to Honduras. Its children, uneasy about the village their father buys and ''improves'' with such machines as Fat Boy - think of Moloch, and the atom bomb at Los Alamos, and Pandora's Box as a ''worm tub'' - these children hide in what is called the ''Acre,'' where they reinvent nakedness, religion, schools, money and secrets. Because they are ''in touch with the seasons,'' they will save their father before they betray him.
Their father, that perpetual motion machine who won't even eat bananas because they make a ''monkey'' out of you, that engineer of love, that would-be God who is picky about his food and his bedroll and his children, that Jeremiah who reviles radio, television, flashlights, formal education and Toyotas - where did he get so smart? - builds a pyramid and digs a hole. He will improve on creation; he experiences guilt; his nerve fails, and nevertheless he speechifies, which may be why the real world tears out his tongue. Only happy ''going against the current'' - surely this is German Romanticism and therefore suspect -he is scavenged. And the scarecrow, unsurprisingly, is Christ.
Fancy with the metaphysics, Mr. Theroux invents a resistance to his own clever dance. Specific with his family romance, he enthralls. Generous in his ''geothermal'' dig, he bores a hole in the head. Grinning, he made me cry. Sly, he makes me wonder why he himself left Massachusetts for England.
via:
Original article via the NY Times
Apple's Supply-Chain Secret? Hoard Lasers
by Adam Satariano and Peter Burrows, Businessweek
About five years ago, Apple design guru Jony Ive decided he wanted a new feature for the next MacBook: a small dot of green light above the screen, shining through the computer’s aluminum casing to indicate when its camera was on. The problem? It’s physically impossible to shine light through metal.
Ive called in a team of manufacturing and materials experts to figure out how to make the impossible possible, according to a former employee familiar with the development who requested anonymity to avoid irking Apple. The team discovered it could use a customized laser to poke holes in the aluminum small enough to be nearly invisible to the human eye but big enough to let light through.
Applying that solution at massive volume was a different matter. Apple needed lasers, and lots of them. The team of experts found a U.S. company that made laser equipment for microchip manufacturing which, after some tweaking, could do the job. Each machine typically goes for about $250,000. Apple convinced the seller to sign an exclusivity agreement and has since bought hundreds of them to make holes for the green lights that now shine on the company’s MacBook Airs, Trackpads, and wireless keyboards.
Most of Apple’s customers have probably never given that green light a second thought, but its creation speaks to a massive competitive advantage for Apple: Operations. This is the world of manufacturing, procurement, and logistics in which the new chief executive officer, Tim Cook, excelled, earning him the trust of Steve Jobs. According to more than a dozen interviews with former employees, executives at suppliers, and management experts familiar with the company’s operations, Apple has built a closed ecosystem where it exerts control over nearly every piece of the supply chain, from design to retail store. Because of its volume—and its occasional ruthlessness—Apple gets big discounts on parts, manufacturing capacity, and air freight. “Operations expertise is as big an asset for Apple as product innovation or marketing,” says Mike Fawkes, the former supply-chain chief at Hewlett-Packard and now a venture capitalist with VantagePoint Capital Partners. “They’ve taken operational excellence to a level never seen before.”
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Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer
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