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1. 1. In atheist argumentation, the elevation of science to a good-in-itself, when it should never be a for-itself phenomenon, is profoundly disturbing.While the creationist’s evasion of evolution is bordering on delusional, many atheists who flog the dead evolutionary horse have a distorted view of science themselves. Science is not an ethos; it is a method.According to philosopher of science, Karl Popper, as a method science requires both verifiability and falsifiability.While I think verifiability itself is sufficient in many cases, Mr. Popper contends that falsifiability is of the essence of the method.As such, because evolution as a theory cannot be falsified in its macro-incarnations (the pop-sci dictum that we come from fishes), macroevolution evades the truth claim of the null hypothesis, and as such is not science according to Mr. Popper’s strict definition.It can, however, be verified and falsified in micro-incarnations, such as the famous moths in industrial English towns whose colour darkened and then lightened in a few generations, an adaptive camouflage according to the levels of pollution, which were sky-high by the end of the nineteenth centuries and substantially reduced through the seventies, following the cultural shift inaugurated in part by Rachel Carson’s environmental consciousness-raising classic Silent Spring.The way atheists wield distortions of evolutionary theory like weapons is distinctly unpalatable. The tendency of them to offer science as the appropriate substitute for religion is potentially dangerous in the sense that science unhampered by humanist values (which often find their origin in religion itself) has led to horrors such as the Nazi experiments, and the Japanese Manchurian human experiments, to say nothing of the atomic bomb itself.
2. 2. The stacked-deck fallacy is a structural characteristic of atheist arguments about the tendency of religion to generate conflict.That is, they point to religion as a root cause of war, which takes a very naïve view of history. That The Crusades, for example, were instigated by Christians against Muslims and vice versa is a popular bit of evidence they like to use, especially in the wake of 9/11 and the threat to the West represented by jihadist manifestations of Islam.Other motives for such conflicts, such as control over extremely strategic areas for global trade (such as Spain, Morocco, and the Middle East) are either summarily ignored or dismissed. Furthermore, the religious inspiration of figures such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who has spent his life trying to heal the racial rift in South Africa and above all create peace and fellow-feeling, is conveniently ignored.That is, atheists often fail to take account of the religious inspiration taken by people who do great things for humanity, specifically with regards to creating peace rather than war.Their refusal to consider evidence that contradicts their argument is profoundly unscientific, a paradox considering their elevation of science as the appropriate replacement to religion.
Pasek left a newspaper full of rice for the neighbourhood pigeons to peck at. His neighbour, Srinvatti, an East Indian grocer, loathed the pigeons because they shit all over the sidewalk in front of his store. Pasek understood the situation; every time Srinvatti went out and saw the cooing mass, he would swear loudly, and lately he had taken to jumping up and down on the spot and chasing the birds away with a broom.
Pasek felt only the slightest bit of remorse after the first fit that Srinvatti threw, after which he regarded his neighbour’s perturbation with an ironic smile. He didn’t continue feeding the pigeons out of spite; he merely enjoyed the sounds of their cooing close-by as he worked. That, and he was aware that birds often fell dependent on those that fed them, like the geese in the park who stayed the winter when people started feeding them, but died when the feeding sessions were discontinued.
As he went back into the store to do the daily inventory, the familiar swell of bird contentment accompanied him. He heard Srinvatti come out and start cursing his name, knowing that if he went outside right now, Srinvatti would smile his biggest “Hey neighbour, how goes it today?” smile without batting an eyelid.
He heard the invective stop suddenly. A moment later, Srinvatti redoubled his efforts to shoo the birds away with a torrent of oaths and by the swishing he heard, Pasek presumed the broom had been fetched. Pasek firmly strode to his own front door, infuriated with Srinvatti. Srinvatti had done the same thing for years, and it had never gotten under his skin like this before. Now his skin trilled and crawled with indignity. He opened his door abruptly, barely missing Srinvatti's stooped, bulky frame. Srinvatti's loose-fitting red pants swirled around the purple and irridescent vermilion speckled pigeons, erupting higgledy-piggledy in half-flights all around him. Srinvatti swung around, his body bolt erect, and he stared sullenly at Pasek like a child caught lighting a newspaper on fire.
“Ach, why you always shoo birds away?” “Dese piles of shit, it drives dee customers away. No one wants to step through bird shit when they’re shopping for nice sound.” “Well I have store here too, and who could mind such creatures?” “My customers complain. Customers always right.” “Why don’t you come tell me you not like me to feed the pigeons?”
The corner of Srinvatti's mouth lifted in an uncertain, barely controlled sneer, but he didn’t answer. Pasek sensed that Srinvatti enjoyed madly sweeping away the small flock on some level. It never occurred to him to tell his neighbour the fondness he had for the birds.
Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite. The sheer volume of news dedicated to the deaths of these celebrities would sink the titanic easily. Oh right, the newspaper is dead; everyone gets their news in the immaterial world of the interweb. My laptop weighs like eight pounds. After carrying it around on my back for a year, I stopped because I was getting neck and back pains. Not so immaterial after all, eh? More to the point, what does this recent obsession with not just celebrity, but recently dead celebrity say about our hyper-mediated culture?
Michael Jackson’s death overloaded the internet, stretching its gargantuan bandwidth to the limit. Last week, 5 of the top 5, and 7 of the top 10 selling albums in Toronto were by Michael Jackson. The day he died, at least that many of twitter’s famous trending topics were dedicated to the man, the myth, the legend. The resurgent popularity of Michael Jackson pedophilia jokes aside, the outpouring of grief and love for one of the people who helped shatter the race barrier in popular music was astounding and nigh-impossible to avoid or ignore. I refuse to dispute his importance, or his talent.
Freud might say in one of his casual moments that celebrities are the externalized ideal egos of the masses. We project what we want for ourselves onto these porcelain deities to remind ourselves that our dreams our possible, achievable. Like latter-day Pygmalions, we animate celebrities with our own hopes, fears, anxieties, and desires. After this magic spell is cast, we mimic their style, hoping for a piece of their fame and glamour in our own comparatively drab lives, as the popularity of Farrah Fawcett’s Charlie’s Angels hairdo attests to. When they slip, we revel in their misfortune out of spite, envy, and ultimately because it is not us falling so dramatically. If they recover, we are reminded of the strength of the human spirit, and vicariously it gives us strength for our own personal struggles.
Yet they are not uniformly ideal egos, as the widespread derision of Michael Jackson before he died attests to, excepting of course his hordes of loyal fans. Alas, some of his fans participated in the derision as well. Or consider Brittney Spears, a perfect negative role model; we can comfort ourselves with our paltry little lives because of the deforming effects of celebrity that seem so apparent after tales of her doomed relationship with K-fed and the subsequent custody brouhaha, or after tales of Gary Coleman’s meteoric descent from household imago to security guard. Ideal egos and scapegoats for our own underachievement, perhaps?
The obsession with their deaths can range from cashing in (note the rogue venders hawking Jackson T-shirts in the streets), the will-to-immortalize our ideal egos, or another occasion to celebrate, simple and plain. However, the pre-emption of living celebrities by the dead recently, the eclipse of the vital by the moribund, suggests something a little more sinister. In the death of our ideal ego, do we perhaps recognize a piece of ourselves dying? Michael Jackson died before his comeback; before he died he tried auctioning off some of his belongings to raise money for debts in Las Vegas. The bids for his gloves remained low: $100-$500. Farrah Fawcett died after a excruciating bout of cancer; no comeback lurked around the corner for her. But we still have episodes of Charlie’s Angels on retro tv stations and the Thriller LP continues to pump out Jackson’s sublime falsetto punctuations in clubs and homes. But we have invested these porcelain deities with our displaced humanity, and gone they are. Is this a wake-up call, an invocation of carpe diem, or rather the pathological avoidance of our own mortality through the ongoing immortalization of our ideal egos? Or perhaps it is the death drive usurping the pleasure principle in and through the commodification of celebrity itself, disarticulated from the living and breathing beings that produce it.
Thank you to my readers: the best readers on the internet! It's been a while since I've done this, so let me remind you to click the google ads occasionally. It only takes a few seconds, and gives me a few pennies to compensate me for the work I put into this blog. I would like to salute my readers in Toronto in particular: it is a welcome change that most of my readers are now from the city where I live!
So there were two people on the hill. A man and a woman. The man looked about ready to grab the woman's arm in a gesture of desire. But the navy blue dress she wore spilled out on the floor like a bloody puddle, and it was the same colour that backgrounded the blue-eyed interrogation room. A dove crashed into the double-sided glass. But the hill was burnt, see. It was burnt to a crisp. It hid all entities in its worm-holes, evacuated. There were people flying acrobatic kites and drawing geometry in the sky. I figure there was already geometry in the sky, but you know, I didn't think about it 'til I seen them kites there. But settle down, I'm tryin' a tell you a story. And all the memories of the people on the hill, they all butted proverbial heads, and all kinds of interference patterns emerged into their shared web of experience. Waves cancel out waves and such.
The desiring man walked down the hill, and if I was there, I might have heard him say to her, and trust, this is what I imagine is consistent with his character, and not what he said, because I wasn't there, after all. He might have said "there's a tree I know in this park; I've seen it once about four years ago when I was here" water splashes out of statuary turtles, into fountains, grace "and this tree is hollow" wind picks up vinyl kite in acceleration followed by upswings in voice volume, flapping "It was eaten out by a fungus, which symbiotically helped it deal better with wind in storms."
Indeed, its leaves were green, but you could crawl right in it. He set out down the bike path snaking down the back of the hill. Twenty minutes later, we smoked a cigarette inside this self-same tree. Almost burned it right down.
The United Steelworkers have partnered with the organization Environmental Defence to help initiate Ontario's Toxin Reduction Act, the first of its kind in Canada. The act provides incentives for municipalities looking to reduce their ecological footprints, specifically with regards to sewage, as well as providing lists of safer alternatives to companies that handle toxic chemicals.
As well, the Act requires that businesses employing at least ten people and handling at least 10, 000 kg of specified substances implement stringent measures to track the movement of these substances through the production, and distribution cycle. Companies are asked to come up with pollution prevention programs.
The two organizations have banded together in an initiative called Blue Green Canada, a combination of the previous "blue-collar" jobs with the new "green-collar" sector of the economy. The initiative seeks to create jobs, and both organizations argue that this Act will create green jobs to implement its various measures. They also laud the Act as a good protective measure of human health in the workplace.
While some of the measures instituted by the Act are voluntary, it follows on the heels of similar legislation passed in Massachusetts, which has reported successful results. There is also the potential here for partnerships between Blue Green and the post-secondary sector in order to place recent BSc graduates who might have sufficient expertise in neutralizing the threats of certain toxins or skirting the use of toxic substances altogether. The government could provide further incentives to reduce people's exposure to toxins and mitigate pollution by earmarking research funds for projects that specifically aim to develop non-toxic alternatives to the use of toxins, specifically with regards to chemistry and biology.
This novel initiative shows that unions are heeding the rapid changes in the economy and taking steps not only to protect current workers but to proactively create work, rather than clinging to older models of production.
When I was growing up in the small city of Guelph Ontario, I was surrounded by inspiring artists, musicians, and an extremely progressive and innovative environmental activist community. Guelph was one of the first cities to achieve a three-tiered recycling program (wet, dry, non-recyclable) in North America, and it fostered a vibrant organic food movement, especially considering the University there is one of the premiere agricultural science schools in the world. When I was attending University there (for English, mind you, not agro-science), I enrolled in an organic food delivery service that delivered organic, local (when in season) produce to my doorstep. It was, however, fairly expensive. And I was a student, and thus somewhat underfunded. I figured that the extra money was worth it for supporting local farmers and the sustainability aspect of the production.
Guelph, however, is also characterized by a stout middle-class moralism that is unfortunately part and parcel of its counter-culture. Growing up there with a working-class background was not always easy. Class prejudice was, and I suspect still is, alive and well in quixotic Guelph as it is in many cities. That said, I reflected on the food that class marginal people receive through the food bank, to which I admittedly had to resort to survive sometimes. It was usually not of the highest nutritional value, and the produce was especially lackluster. It is fairly common knowledge that pesticides are carcinogenic, and vegetables are essential to a healthy lifestyle. I realized that in the commodity culture that we inhabit the label organic quickly became a marketable commodity with an often inaccessible price tag. I saw the need for some kind of grassroots organization between organic food producers, food banks, and the government (which would hopefully help with subsidization).
I tried to start such an organization that joined the arts community with the organic farming community in 1998. I remember even making preliminary contacts with the folks at the United Way. In hindsight, I think a lack of perseverance and practical skills on my part, combined with a social environment that willfully denied the class implications of poisonous food because of local pride hindered the organization from finding its legs. Perhaps ahead of its time, and out of place, this idea did not fully germinate. My interests shifted, as they often do, and I relegated this venture to the dustbin, slightly discouraged.
Fast forward to the present. An initiative has started in Montreal that addresses these very issues! It is called good food box, and it is being implemented by Moisson, Canada’s largest foodbank, who help to provide food and essential products to 112 000 people in Montreal. It buys produce in bulk from local farmers and distributors, and makes high-quality fruits and vegetables accessible to people in the lower-income brackets. Johanne ThJroux, who is Executive Director of Moisson Montreal, says “Because of the current economic crisis, many families have had to reduce that portion of their budget allotted to food. Families such as these are now able to ensure healthy nutrition through an accessible program which works hand in hand with local farmers in order to offer fresh fruit and vegetables at reduced prices.” But it is about more than food, as Theroux maintains: “Good Food Box therefore offers Montrealers the possibility to break out of their isolation and create community bonds. The program is being developed in Laval and on the South Shore and our objective is to distribute 40 000 boxes in 34 boroughs before 2011.”
People who register for this program are eligible to receive three different sizes of food box, depending on the needs of the family. The large box is $16, the medium box is $10, and the small box is $7. The boxes supply families with 5 daily portions of produce per person for one week according to the standards established by Canada’s Food Guide along with information and recipes for the produce. For more information, visit this website:
This program has been assisted by Centraid of Greater Montreal, the Marcelle and Jean Coutu Foundation, and the Bombardier Aerospace Employee Fund. While it is rewarding to see my vision validated, and to know that Moisson is doing the important work of supplying those in need with healthy food, I think a more aggressive fundraising program could have eliminated the price altogether. Healthy food is a right, and by offering poor quality food for free while simultaneously offering healthy food for a price (no matter how affordable), you put it into the category of privilege
@joshstuart I think smitherman should just resign period. He helped McGuinty with the erosion of workers rights re: York strike. #cdnpoliabout 9 hours agofrom web
is impressed by the ingenuity of Kenyan women re: sex strike to make gov't function.about 9 hours agofrom web
thinks when politicians think of themselves as something other than media for the execution of their constituents' will, democracy fails.about 19 hours agofrom web
is making a deal with the pigs: don't give me the flu, and I won't kill you and eat you.6:21 PM Apr 29thfrom web
Air conditioning is not rocket science. Drill a few damn holes in the ground 100m deep that "share the air" with the basement.10:51 AM Apr 29thfrom web
Marathon_JohnI am now convinced running shoe companies are screwing us over by making our feet weak and lazy. Less is more!menos de 5 segundos agofrom web
ktcatJust saw a sign on a women's restroom door that read, "Wet floor." I wondered why you'd want to do that. It seems unhygenic.less than 5 seconds agofrom TwitterBerry
Net Neutrality, Democracy, and the Death of the Death of News
The ailing economy has wrought havoc with media both as a business and as an institution.Every day, year, or even decade seems to bring a new metaphorical death:the death of communism, the end of history, the end of ideology, the death of television, the death of news.If we look closely at what was happening in the media industries in Canada leading up to the recession, we notice two opposing trends that have not been sufficiently reconciled.First there were major mergers of media conglomerates and secondly audiences changed their consumption habits.Many people now use the internet as their main source of news, rather than simply a supplement to their previous news consumption habits.
This has led to decreased advertizing revenues in the hard copy of newspapers, and because services like TiVo allow you to record television, watch it at your convenience, and even to skip the commercials, which is the primary source of revenue for so many media. But many of the world’s most valuable media companies make no money for years, until their cultural capital becomes so concentrated that their value jumps into the stratosphere, Google being the prime example. The Toronto Star recently cut 40 employees from their advertizing sales staff.Why on earth would they do that when advertizing accounts for nearly 80% of their income?
Granted, no one is buying advertizing space in newspapers.Does that mean you cut staff that you could simply retrain to become savvy with various forms of online advertizing?Perhaps it is not so easy.Perhaps your advertizing staff needs to have a whole new, radically different skill set.Rather than person-to-person congeniality and the ability to close, perhaps they need to take some lessons on new media.Or perhaps take some hints from the film and recently the tv industries in order to learn how to use product placement in their content to generate income.Surely, they do this now, what with all the references to blackberries, iPods, and cellphones in news stories.Are the news companies neglecting to actually collect the paycheque for doing it, though? Certainly, this creates some ethical quandaries regarding objectivity and some conflicts of interest as well.The question must, however, be posed.What is more important: the existence of an institution that has long served the public interest by acting as a government and corporate watchdog, or a dogmatic adherence to professional practices that are failing?
Instead of seeing a transgression in the practice of product placement, perhaps news companies should see an opportunity.By conducting investigative journalism to research businesses before soliciting them for product placement in content, news companies can generate content when they encounter questionable business practices, and when they encounter exemplary business practices, they can follow through with product placement with a clean conscience.Killing two birds with one stone, they serve the public interest by exposing shady businesses while simultaneously pursuing promotional revenue.
Far more pernicious than product placement, and for ideological reasons more acceptable, is the increasing concentration of ownership of media.In Canada, monopolies were granted to companies who invested in telecommunications infrastructure because otherwise, such infrastructure would not have been built because of obstacles to achieving the economies of scale necessary to operate such networks.This infrastructure was essential to nation-building*.However, the phenomenon of convergence has for all intents and purposes eviscerated diversity in the news.Now, rather than hire trained professionals to produce news content, reformatting has become pivotal.CTVGlobeMedia, which owns a newspaper, a bunch of television stations, some publishing companies, some radio stations, and a large share of one of the most profitable content franchises in television (CSI), now hires reformatters to simply reorganize news data to fit in another medium.In other words, a reformatter will take a news story from a television news show and repackage it for distribution in a newspaper, all owned by the same parent company.Amongst all the discourse about the democratization of content production heralded by the internet, the fact remains that those that benefit materially, that is, earn an income from such production, remain in a minority.Indeed, many even pay to produce and distribute such content.So concurrent with increasing audience fragmentation brought about by the 500 channel television spectrum, blogging, et cetera, there is the elimination of diversity in the “official” news industry.This dynamic is one of the central paradoxes of contemporary communications, and it is at the source of this “crisis” of media.
Furthermore, the partnerships forming between internet service providers and big players on the internet that supply content platforms has rendered the dangerous and inherently undemocratic practice of streamlining web traffic to major web sites.In other words, the huge internet companies such as yahoo, AOL, MSN etc. are trying to broker deals with ISPs that would render the speeds of data transfer on their sites much higher than that of smaller sites.If such deals come to pass, all this celebration of the inherently democratic character of the internet is for naught, and moreover, it is even outright deceptive and manipulative.This is where government needs to intervene to prevent such deals from happening, deals that would have a cumulative effect of bottlenecking internet traffic through the busiest hubs, thereby concentrating wealth, knowledge, perspectives.
For example, imagine you are trying to find independent perspectives on Canada’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan.Should such aforementioned deals between ISPs and internet conglomerates go down, an NGO site that has relatively independent information on the war would load slowly.You would become frustrated and move on.As we all know from experience, no matter how fast things get, unless you have the latest equipment, they never seem fast enough.There is nothing more irritating than watching the data transfer bar in the lower right hand corner of your screen crawlingto the right.When you move on, you come upon news on the msn platform that loads instantaneously.Perhaps msn has a deal to develop informational networks in Afghanistan.They have a vested interest in certain portrayals.Hence, because of such deals, the objectivity of news would come under direct attack.The concept of net neutrality, which advocates equal speeds for all websites and critiques the attempted deals between internet content platforms and service providers, is one of the most salient issues in communications today.Pressure needs to be applied to governments to protect the internet from manipulative practices such as these, as they inherently endanger the very democratic elements of the internet that people sing from the rooftops.
* the portion of this article about telecommunications monopolies in Canada granted for the sake of nation-building was taken from Lectures by Professor David Skinner in his Introductions to Communications course at York University
Yeah, I dated him. His pockets held dryer-hardened Receipts, some foreign change, Water proof matches For when the world ends. I put them there when I hugged him From behind. Curve of intimacy: Warmth: buffer.
His day timer was empty But he was always busy, always Running late for some appointment But arriving early anyway.
He would hold his palms upward When frustrated, as if the answer To his vexation was a gravitous leaf That would alight upon his hand, And be read like tea grounds In the bottom of a cup.
Asthma lungs, chemical sensitivities, His jumbo-mumble lips Skewed repetition. And thus, people Scorned.
Seth saw him yesterday working in the bank. He had a smile on his face. The guy who never had anything Good to say and I remember he once Promised us he’d be prime minister Had a smile on his face.
The typewriter itself was not a revolutionary invention: it was the material interface between human subject and textual production that was revolutionary. The keyboard was the most important modular carry-over from the typewriter to the computer (and the cell phone!), and therefore, it is more important to the history of communications than the typewriter. Kittler, and McLuhan before him, are subdued by a synechdochial dyslexia, whereby they mistake the whole as a revolutionary innovation for the part that was more properly revolutionary. And, perhaps unfortunately, I mean revolutionary with regards to change: its apolitical meaning. In other words, this meaning indicates the revolution of technique has eclipsed the real revolution of socio-political reorganization and the liberation of human potential. The typewriter might have partially democratized print type production, but it was not the cybernetic module that really provided the interface between human and machine that the keyboard did until the intervention of the touch screen. Therefore, it is the keyboard that deserves the theoretical attention, NOT the typewriter.
Why Edison and not Tesla?
Here is where McLuhan was more on point than Kittler. He identified electrification as one of the key developments in modernity and technological history. Calling a stream of electrons a medium in itself was radically accurate. Who cares about the electric lightbulb when you have no means to distribute the very force that operates it? Tesla was the one who invented the transformer, and it was the single most important invention in the creation of technological modernity. I would contend that it was he, not Edison, who "invented invention," partially for the fact that Edison did not invent many of the things he is credited with. There is a popular misconception that because you patented something, you invented it. Any historian of film will tell you that the motion picture was the result of several different innovations combined, including George Eastman's Kodak celluloid filmstrip for photography. And it was Edison's assistant William Dickson who put in the lion's share of labour in developing the kinetoscope at Menlo Park. Edison really didn't have faith in the motion picture, either. He thought the public would soon tire of it as a novelty.
Furthermore, Kittler's focus on the Grammophone, the film, and the typewriter excludes a detailed consideration of radio, which as a medium has had a polemic history, but whose technology has been vital to many other developments like cell phones and wi-fi. Radio has shown a great capacity to build community, but unfortunately this community is often of the genocidal kind. The Nazis and the Hutus both used radio to spread hatred of Jews and Tutsis in Germany and Rwanda. Therefore, it seems a little puzzling to me why a work of medium theory and technological modernity would not include Marconi and and the other developers of radio in the mix. I realize that three is a nice number, and it is symmetrical to his analysis of media in terms of Lacan's sacred triangle of Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic, but radio is vital to the whole wireless phenomenon.
Fibre Optics and Computation
Kittler really flies high here. I really like his examination of fibre optics as a "bottleneck" for information networking, and his insights on Turing's theoretical contributions to the history of the computer are cogent. The notion of the simplest code for mathematical operations, binary code, or base 2, becoming the lingua franca of computation validates the central insight of non-linear mathematics that nigh-infinite complexity can easily be generated by the endless repetition and variation of simple signs. Leibniz, despite being lambasted by Voltaire in Candide for his concept of optimism, has been ultimately validated by his development of binary code. I don't think his optimism has been validated, however. Whoever concludes from simple, thorough observation that we live in the best of all possible worlds is probably sociopathic. Returning to Turing, we can be thankful that he visualized his universal discrete machine as using binary code (hole, absence of hole: signifying 0 and 1) rather than Base 26, which would have approximated the English alphabet!
On a related note, Did ticker tape give birth to the computer?
