Before they had Les Pauls

Nathaniel Sichel, 1843-1907. German artist.

It comes out here

Sunday I worked on the set-up for a salesforce.com convention. The product was, I guess, a cloud based sales something or another. You set up a FB style interface and all your orders, derived from a social networking thing-a ma-bob, flow through a totally secure cloud application, then it zooms around here, does an interactive jiggery-do, and comes out there. To keep everyone's mind on the pitch, Stevie Wonder has a set, Will I Am hosts the party, and the hall was equipped with more Barcos, moving lights, and general whoop-de then I've seen outside a Pink Floyd show. Wi-fi antennas were flown throughout the hall. In addition to their customary use, they streamed a reflection of what was on the stage overlaid with sales graphix and talking points. If some lady with a big hat obscures the projection in front, you can glance down at your laptop to get the juice. I guess I'm showing my age, but I can remember when we had factories and farms and we built things. Now, in the future, we make money by taking in each other's laundry, and big money by providing a cloud app for keeping track of it. The bug in the code, of course, is having to depend on others for the detergent, the washing machine, and the clothes.

The two stories I'm following as I write this are 1) Julian Assange arrested. It seems that about twenty minutes after Forbes announced that WikiLeaks had some dirt on a large American Bank, the muttering about State Security turned into a full-throated roar calling for a non-judicial execution. Of course the timing is only circumstantial and it's really about the Italian Prime Minister's embarrassment over the wording of a single cable. 2) Uncle BomBom has reached another comprimise. The other side wasn't even in the hall, yet he blinked anyway. I guess he needs to stockpile his powder for something, you know, down the road. Then he'll show 'em what for, you bet-cha. Or not. Maybe it's different in the rarified atmosphere of an elite policy maker, but here in prole-world you can only promise, explain, and do damage control for so long, then you need to do the job or loose it. Now for this week's link dump.

On the power to lead;

• Mental Prisoner of the Congress: ....he could say “I’m against cutting Medicare reimbursement rates, but only if it’s paid for.” Repeat that enough times and suddenly it becomes congress’ problem. Congress wants an AMT patch? Fine, then congress needs to pay for it. There are lots of things the President can’t do in the legislative process, but refusing to sign deficit-increasing bills is something he definitely can do.
• Will the GOP Raise the Debt Ceiling: It’s one thing to win an election with a lot of incendiary rhetoric. It’s another thing to actually get things done. And it appears that the new members of the GOP are determined to make obstructionism their bread and butter.

On the power of the people:

• Porno Scanners and Perpetual War: It’s finally coming into focus, and it’s not even a difficult equation to grasp. It goes like this: take a country in the grips of an expanding national security state and sooner or later your “safety” will mean your humiliation, your degradation. And by the way, it will mean the degradation of your country, too.
• State's Rights: At present, the only way for states to contest a federal law or regulation is to bring a constitutional challenge in federal court or seek an amendment to the Constitution,” the pair wrote. “A state repeal power provides a targeted way to reverse particular congressional acts and administrative regulations without relying on federal judges or permanently amending the text of the Constitution to correct a specific abuse.

On certain segments of the people and a sudden shrinking of ... numbers during the recent cold snap:

• Overexposed: The exact genesis of this movement is hazy, but most agree it had something to do with the city opening a high-visibility plaza at Castro and Market last year. Among the lunchers, retirees, and shoppers, naked men showed up, too: A construction supervisor named Barry appeared in his fedora and flip-flops — and nothing else. (kinda safe for work)

The kind of thinking that gets you branded as a crazy until it turns out you were right:

• WikiLeaks as Psyop: .. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s speculation that the latest WikiLeaks dump might have been selected to further a foreign agenda. I haven’t seen any evidence that would lead me to think that, but it’s a possibility that has to be considered. The possibility that a domestic interest or intelligence agency could engineer a leak should also be entertained. Manufacturing paper trails is one of the things that “community” does best, after all.

Some writting that caught my eye:

• The Teleology of Vodka: I would not willingly offend the whole Alexander Nevsky choir or five fifths of its audience, but it needs saying that the true end of vodka is not a glass. Vodka, properly speaking, is not really a drink. So used it is more like an excuse—or a carrying device, much as a cigarette is a carrying device for nicotine. For although vodka may please the brain and the bloodstream, it can never fully satisfy the nose or the tongue—and will quite often offend the one and make offensive the other.

A bit of biology news that's getting shunted aside in the Christmas rush:

• NASA finds arsenic based life form: When cooking up the stuff of life, you can’t just substitute margarine for butter. Or so scientists thought. But now researchers have coaxed a microbe to build itself with arsenic in the place of phosphorus, an unprecedented substitution of one of the six essential ingredients of life. The bacterium appears to have incorporated a form of arsenic into its cellular machinery, and even its DNA, scientists report online Dec. 2 in Science.

A bit of history:

• Merchant Capital: If we now look back on European history from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century, this assessment seems badly wrong as an historical observation. Merchants and their companies played key roles in the establishment of a world trading system; they actively facilitated the race for colonies by the European powers; and often they played a quasi-military role in suppressing resistance by locals in distant parts of the world.

Which leads to:

• Brookings Institute (pdf): The upshot: The past two decades have seen lower-income metro areas in the global East and South “close the gap” with higher-income metros in Europe and the United States, and the worldwide economic upheaval has only accelerated the shift in growth toward metros in those rising regions of the world. Note: Austin, the highest American city on the list, is # 40, San Francisco is # 133.

Fun with the Legal Industry

A doctor in Miami is suing a restaurant for not explaining to him the proper method of eating an artichoke. He ate the entire thing, and developed bowel obstruction from the indigestible leaves. The restaurant asks "Are we going to have to post warnings on our menu they shouldn't eat the bones in our barbecue ribs?"

Both image and link from Tywkiwdbi

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Added later:A Texas Roadhouse and its TP dispenser

Having Been There Myself

Swedish photographer Håkan Dahlström made this shot of one of San Francisco's steeper hills, turning his camera so that the road (and not the houses) were at level.

Via: BoingBoing

Gastroporn Redux

For breakfast, I usually have a cappuccino—espresso made in an Alessi pot and mixed with organic milk, which has been gently heated and hand-fluffed by my husband. I eat two slices of imported cheese—Dutch Parrano, the label says, “the hippest cheese in New York” (no joke)—on homemade bread with butter. I am what you might call a food snob. My nutritionist neighbor drinks a protein shake while her 5-year-old son eats quinoa porridge sweetened with applesauce and laced with kale flakes. She is what you might call a health nut. On a recent morning, my neighbor’s friend Alexandra Ferguson sipped politically correct Nicaraguan coffee in her comfy kitchen while her two young boys chose from among an assortment of organic cereals.

A cover article in this week's Newsweek purports to be about the class divide vis-à-vis food consumption, but in a sad way is really about the relationship of marketers and muddled thinking. The self adulation of some of the respondents, who's immoderation is redefined as respect for the planet and desire to nurture something or another, is one of the reasons that a certain class of twit isn't taken seriously by anyone outside of salespeople. (or in our case, the Mayor's office) The attitudinal baggage and cultural blindspot that accompanies a proposal to tax soda or any casse-croûte du jour, for the "health of our community", is just typical. (we know what‘s best for you)

Even the locavore hero Pollan agrees. “Essentially,” he says, “we have a system where wealthy farmers feed the poor crap and poor farmers feed the wealthy high-quality food.”

This being said, the new Congress is going to start work on the next farm bill. Between the traditional hot air (family farms, golden waves of grain, the real America) and the ceremonial larding of the pork, not to mention the sausage making in the back room, I suspect we'll be singing new boss, same as the old boss. Last time around, I remember a story about a well known newsreader / commentator who received big bucks for the Angora wool produced by the sheep on his hobby farm. (national security - military helmet liners) Monsanto, some folks on the Upper East side, and Archer Daniels Midland should be up for a chunk too. Personally I think the biggest food problem concerns whatever hallucinogen they're adulterating the water with in Washington.

• Quick cooking note for the above nutritionist neighbor: Put the kale flakes in the soup, not your kid’s cereal.

Somebody is Cranky

(ó) a dheaide! None of that circumlocution round here.

Close Enough for Government Work

As it turns out, we had $70,000,000.00 just sitting around, so we gave it to Pakistan to help the country defend themselves from the Taliban Air Force. Maybe it's a codeword for a black-op, maybe it's a nuanced diplomatic deal, probably it's a powder my nose arrangement. Working for a living was obviously the wrong career choice.