Work in progress on my way home
The Place Diagram
PPS Project for Public Space, 2003
Imagine that the center circle on the diagram is a specific place that you know: a street corner, a playground, a plaza outside a building. You can evaluate that place according to four criteria in the red ring. In the ring outside these main criteria are a number of intuitive or qualitative aspects by which to judge a place; the next outer ring shows the quantitative aspects that can be measured by statistics or research.
But as the war ground on, the rules tightened more. In practice, photographing a dead American soldier — under any circumstances — was out of the question. Any journalist hoping to photograph a wounded soldier needed his permission. It’s not hard to see the absurdity in the wounded-soldier rule: It was difficult to get a soldier’s permission before he had suffered his injury, and nearly impossible after. What soldier would sign a document giving someone the right to photograph him in the event of, say, his limbs being blown off? The result: images of dead and wounded Americans all but disappeared from the news pages in the United States. You will read the frustrations of the photographers in the pages ahead. But whatever the motivations behind the military’s restrictions — to spare the families of the fallen some pain, for instance — their effect was to cast a sanitized gloss over the war in Iraq, and to help deprive the American people of a fuller knowledge of the realities of the war that their fellow citizens were fighting. In a country whose bedrock principles hold that war can be waged only by consent of the people, such restrictions were troubling indeed.
Beat Your Meat: New Law Lets Factory Farmers Choke Their Chicks in Private
Industrial agriculture executives and lawmakers have responded swiftly to undercover investigations like this one, but not in the ways you might expect. Rather than improving animal welfare, enhancing criminal penalties, or increasing oversight of the industry, there’s a national campaign to criminalize anyone who brings these abuses to light under the guise of protecting the farmers and their food supply from animal- and environment-loving “terrorists.”
Two papal elections, two different worlds. From the Today Show of all places.
Correction: Apparently this is comparing apples to oranges, since the top funeral was taken at Pope John Paul’s funeral. Whoops.
Tupperwolf: Wealth, risk, and stuff
Please, if you are rich, stop explaining the idea of freedom from stuff as if it’s a trick that even you have somehow mastered.
The only way to own very little and be safe is to be rich.
Microsoft is said to be the second-largest employer of anthropologists in the world, behind only the U.S. government.
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Ben Doernberg
