disturbing way to pass the time...

world clock

in 2008 so far there are 2.3 million people is US prisons, 993 cases of leprosy, 140 thousand suicides, 63 thousand injuries from falls, and 4,352 species no longer with us.

1984

do not fuck with these guys.  and do not let their toothy grins conceal their hatred for freedom of press. a lawyer representing their swiss banking institution, bank julius baer, managed to shut down the website Wikileaks.org.  the whole concept of the site was to provide a first amendment safe haven for whistle-blowers to anonymously upload controversial documents.   the charges brought by the bank involved "stolen" documents relating to tax evasion and offshore assets, ultimately convincing a california judge to order the immediate suspension of the entire Wikileaks site.  Wikileaks has posted the entire frustrating email correspondence here on their unaffected foreign servers:   Wikileaks & BJB

keep on rockin' in the free world! 

start packing peanut butter & jelly

143 million pounds of beef has been recalled by the USDA. This undercover video explains why... Adding to this travesty is the fact that this company is the second largest provider to the National School Lunch program that stocks school cafeterias around the country.  Hard to believe this is the current state of affairs in a nation as wealthy as ours.

cracking the code of culture

An excerpt:

I escaped there [to the discipline of anthropology], and was confronted immediately by one problem - there were lots of rules of marriage all over the world which looked absolutely meaningless, and it was all the more irriatating because, if they were meaningless, then there should be different rules for each people, though nevertheless the number of rules could be more or less finite.  So, if the same absurdity was found to reappear over and over again, and another kind of absurdity also to reappear, then this was something which was not absolutely absurd; otherwise it would not reappear.

Such was my first orientation, to try to find an order behind this apparent disorder.  And when after working on the kinship systems and marriage rules, I turned my attention, also by chance and not at all on purpose, toward mythology, the problem was exactly the same.  Mythical stories are, or seem, arbitrary, meaningless, absurd, yet nevertheless they seem to reappear all over the world.  A 'fanciful' creation of the mind in one place would be unique - you would not find the same creation in a completely different place.  My problem was trying to find out if there was some kind of order behind this apparent disorder - that's all.  And I do not claim that there are conclusions to be drawn.

banksy art

in madrid, we randomly stumbled into an amazing book store.  they seemed to specialize solely in art and technology books.  i grabbed a book off the shelf and discovered banksy.  these particular examples all come from the occupied territories (palestinian side). google him.

cars are fat.

trippy triptych

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Hieronymus Bosch

cory and i are back from madrid after a fairly grueling 18+ hours of travel. on the way into philly there was some serious turbulence and we saw at least one girl run to the bathroom to toss her cookies.  cory was kind enough to offer up her bizarre water cuppie (served in a pudding package) that came with our vegetarian meals.  the week in madrid was incredibly busy and provocative.  it was a unique experience to witness firsthand the inner working and politics of an official UN conference.  the result is a 30 page Madrid Action Plan that will be disseminated by UNESCO outlining the metrics and directions for biosphere reserves over the next six years.  

most meetings took the form of an uber-democratic town hall meeting format, with an open mic period for anyone to provide input (even in the main auditorium events with approximately 800 attendees).    i was particularly struck by some of the bizarre comments coming from ArabMAB (the arab regional group of reserves).  i was shocked to hear the opening comments from the representative of Qatar who suggested that oil extraction and mining is synonymous with the principles biosphere reserves.  do i smell oil money?? just to confirm i'm no conspiracy theorist, he whispered briefly at the end of his presentation that shell corporation funded all of his research.  ha!  

during the ICC (intergovernmental coordinating committee) one fellow from egypt expressed outrage at the informal format of the meetings.  when the biannual ICC elections began he revealed that he had a letter from the highest levels of the Egyptian government mandating that he be elected as President of the ICC. the entire room went up in laughter.  he proceeded to take the mic and nominate himself for every available position, despite being repeatedly told that this is a violation of the ICC bylaws.  ultimately, the rep from the Congo was elected is what seems to have been a predetermined process as he received unanimous support.  i was a bit disillusioned by this scripted process and actually respected the egyptian and also a vietnamese rep who managed to stir things up a little bit.  there is so much more to say about the week long conference, but i don't think i have the patience to write it all down.

cory and i managed to find some amazing veggie restaurants and bars.  we went to a place called gruta 77, a local venue that has live shows EVERY day. we saw two bands the night before leaving, one of with was very good - Katemöss.  it was basically the spanish version of death from above 1979.  we went to the Prado museum and saw the above painting amongst many others. bosch and goya were my favorite. goya went through a very dark phase (i imagine related to the proliferation of the black plague?) and produced a series of frightening, predominately black-colored paintings depicting maniacal hordes of people. consider that the garden of earthly delights (above) by bosco was painted in 1500! as my friend gustavo says (in mildly broken english), "i cannot believe he was not on fire for this".  check out a higher resolution version if you can find it and i think you will see what he means.

yikes

john and mike discuss their sexual exploits (mccain claiming he can work magic with just one of his thumbs) at a recent republican debate in an attempt to capture some of the young voters that always seem to evade the GOP.

¡vamos a madrid!

i spent the day scrambling to take care of a million things in preparation for the upcoming week in madrid.  i have a position this semester as the research assistant to chuck redman, the director of SOS.   we have been looking at the Man and the Biosphere UNESCO program that started in 1972, trying to put forth a compelling argument for the phoenix metropolitan region to join the program.  this of course will require a new set of guidelines pertaining to urban areas, as the current network of biospheres consists mostly of relatively isolated "pristine" ecosystems (or at least those with very few permanent human inhabitants).  some very amazing cities are interested including new york, new orleans, cape town south africa, helsinki, rome, and others.  the conference promises to be very interesting and i am quite humbled to be attending a united nations event.  you can peruse the schedule of events here:  3rd World Conference of Biosphere Reserves . 

does privacy exist anymore?

it is hard to comprehend the implications that modern technology will have on our right to privacy.