Obsidian Wings

Island of the Blue Dolphins open thread

by liberal japonicus

It's not Friday, but a little early for everyone. 

I don't know if anyone knows the book Island of the Blue Dolphins, but it was a book I remember reading as a kid. The book is based on a true story, and as it turns out, a researcher may have found the cave of the real life woman described in the story. 

Stormy Weather

by Doctor Science

We're battened down pretty well against Sandy. Jim MacDonald at Making Light provided a helpful guide: How to Batten a Hatch.

Food prepped and ready, water and lights handy, blankets piled. I spent much of yesterday cooking: roast pork, spanakopita, today I'll make tomato sauce. We figure we can all cuddle up and read The Lord of the Rings aloud for *days* if need be. But some of the pictures on #sandy are already pretty damn scary, and the storm hasn't actually hit yet.

Direct Youtube link
It was hard to pick between Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Etta James, Dinah Washington, Donna Hightower -- but this version from the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald was finally my choice.

And then, to wake yourself up:

Direct Youtube link

The Nicholas Brothers' tap number from the movie Stormy Weather. Man, every tendon near my knees screams in fear when I see this ... no wonder Fred Astaire admired them so.

Now they're playing Natural disaster photo cliché bingo at Making Light.

Update before I even posted: the seawall is breached on Brigantine Island.

North end seawall of Brigantine has been breached.

Substantial flooding blocks exit from island. STAY IN HOME.

MOVE property to highest levels in home.

Brigantine Police warn of dramatically rising water, during high tide & full moon later today.

I feel sick thinking about it.

I hope all of you are safe and sheltered, and that we all have only adventures to talk about later, not tragedies.

Andreas Achenbach, Storm on the Dutch Coast. Found via an aggregator site; supposedly at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne, Germany, but they have no online catalogue.

Strikingly similar to some of the pictures showing up on #sandy. How many of the answers to Natural Disaster Photo Cliché Bingo are in the Romantic tradition: some, or all? Discuss.

Your sick of talking about drones, so let's talk about feminism post

by liberal japonicus

Sapient's guest post still seems to be giving off heat, but as that slowly dies down, we need something else, I suppose. So below the fold (cause there's a video down there too), some things to keep the home fires burning.

What globalization looks like: Halloween in China

by Doctor Science

The Atlantic’s James Fallows got to tour and take pictures inside notorious Chinese manufacturer Foxconn.

This is the Foxconn "campus" in the Longhua area of Shenzhen, north of Hong Kong. Some 220,000 people work there; about a quarter of them live on site; and several thousand new employees are recruited, trained, and brought onto staff each week, because turnover at Foxconn and many of these Chinese manufacturing centers is so high. Foxconn has been controversial over the years because of allegations of sweatshop operation and of militaristic surveillance and discipline, plus a wave of worker suicides in 2010.

The only restriction imposed on Fallows was that he couldn’t photograph or mention any logos on products being made there. In general, he says

I am always surprised by things in China, but this day was at the more-surprising-than-usual end of the spectrum.

One of his photos from the recruiting area:

This is not directly connected to recruiting, but it was in the same general area of the site. It's an outlet for eFeihu, or "Flying Tiger," a Foxconn-run e-commerce company. The people inside, Foxconn workers on break, were checking out various phones and cameras. Weirdo touch: the orange and black decorations are cut-paper images of jack-o-lanterns, and the white things hanging from the ceiling are cut-paper Halloween skeletons.

So why does a Chinese workplace have exactly the sort of cheapo Halloween decorations I might expect to see in an American workplace right now? Were they supposed to commemorate -- or replace -- the Double Ninth Festival, which was about to take place when Fallows visited? Are other Western holidays starting to seep into China, and *why*?!?

LJ, are you seeing Halloween decorations in Japan? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Japanese took up Halloween – the combination of cosplay and candy seems tailor-made for them.

Chrysanthemum wine, a tradition for the Double Ninth Festival. I found this picture via Google Image search, but can't find a version that indicates the artist, period, etc. I'd be very grateful to anyone who can translate the writing enough to tell me anything about the picture.

an ownership society

by russell

This is a short and sweet post, mostly just in the interest of putting something out there for discussion.  My personal stance on the topic will most likely be obvious, and so likely requires little elaboration.

So, here ya go.

The "ownership society" was a common slogan during the Bush years.  But, somehow, we never quite arrived there.

What would it actually look like to have a society organized around broad-based ownership of productive enterprises?

Perhaps these folks can show us how it's done.

Enjoy!

I'll tumblr 4 ya

by Doctor Science

I just started using Tumblr: doctorscienceknows.tumblr.com. Mostly I'm using it for keeping track of images: when I'm working on an Obsidian Wings post, I tend to flip through lots of images, save a few, then forget where I got them from. No more of that! she said optimistically.

Demon Tumbling Downstairs, by Erica Van Horn. Part of Yale University Library exhibition The Book Remembers Everything.

To make her Illuminated Books, the artist purchased inexpensive books at a used bookstore in Paris, until the booksellers discovered what she was doing with them—wiring them together and rendering them unreadable—and refused to sell her any more.

I can't say I blame them, really ...

Feel free to follow me, or to talk about Tumblr and Kids These Days, The Wacky Things They Do (on My Lawn, or otherwise). Don't worry, I'm still not on Twitter -- I can't think in 140 character quanta.

Those too young to automatically start singing the title can get the idea by watching Culture Club's video. Ah, the 80s. Even at the time I didn't actually like this song -- there's something about the tonal softness that makes me feel as though I have cotton candy in my ears -- but it's still infectious.

Your friday guest post - "Leadership" in Libya

a guest post by sapient 

[note: When Sapient suggested that we discuss an article about the situation in Libya, I invited him to send in a guest post. I'd be more than happy to make this a continuing series, so if you have something that you want to get up, send it to me at libjpn  overyonderat gmail]

Before the murders of four Americans in Benghazi were even confirmed, MItt Romney was using the incident as a political talking point to blame President Obama for an alleged "failure of leadership."

Just to state the some of the early moments of my own awareness, I saw articles and heard radio reports something like this one describing demonstrations in Cairo and Benghazi, by people who were apparently enraged at Americans about a film believed to have been made by (it turns out) a Coptic-American, bank fraud ex-convict, who created an irreverent depiction of the prophet Mohammed. (This filmmaker was on probation, barred from using the Internet, and is now in jail.)

Republicans complain that the Banghazi murders were a "terrorist attack" that should have been anticipated and prevented. (Of course, the President called the incident an "act of terror" early on, but Republicans, as exemplified by the famous Romney debate gaffe, first ignored that fact, and now dispute that Obama was using the words appropriately as a term of art.) Darrell Issa (probable arsonist) has conducted an investigation, during which he accused the Obama administration of failing to provide sufficient security to the diplomats in Libya, and misleading the public about the facts surrounding the murders (this, despite the Republican reduction in funding for diplomatic security). The charge of misrepresentation to the public is largely based on the fact that Susan Rice appeared on Sunday talk shows stating that the intelligence they had so far was that there was a riot caused by the anti-Islamic film, that was then hijacked by Islamist extremists.

A good timeline of events is here.

One of the suspected ringleaders of the Benghazi killings was recently seen hanging out at a luxury hotel describing the scene, and still saying that the killings began as a peaceful protest against the video.

In the aftermath of the second Presidential debate, many in the media are talking about the "questions" surrounding the events in Benghazi, seemingly bolstering the Republican argument that the Obama administration has something to answer for regarding its presentation of the facts to the public. (Listen to this for example.

It seems likely that there are classified pieces to what was going on in Benghazi, as well as the current investigation of the murders. Whether the administration has a duty to be blabbing everything in real time, before the information is all in, is the real question. The fact that Republicans are turning this into an opportunity for something to say about foreign policy (since they have so little to criticize) isn't helping either the cause of justice or security in Libya.

Also, I find the Republican call for "leadership" a bit frightening. The way they try to "lead" other countries involves lots of bombs, soldiers and guns. How should we provide "leadership"?

Welcome to the future

by Doctor Science

ALPHA CENTAURI HAS A PLANET! Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy put it in all caps, and I don't blame him one bit.

ALPHA CENTAURI B HAS A PLANET.

European Southern Observatory artist's impression.

The planet (currently euphoniously called "Alpha Centauri Bb") is only a hair larger than Terra: 1.13 Earth masses. Alas, like many known exoplanets it is *way* closer to its star than we would find comfy: 0.04 AU, only 6 million km (4M miles). You can read the full paper[pdf] for more details.

BUT. It has a planet. It's likely to have more planets. We could get there. The fiction is no doubt all Jossed, but that's what science is for. Getting new ideas is what both science *and* fiction are for.

The Alien Derelict, digital painting by Daniel Lovas. A mysterious wrecked spaceship is visited by the inhabitants of Xalli, a planet circling Alpha Centauri A.

Jefferson's myth of yeoman America

by Doctor Science

In Chrystia Freeland's NY Times piece on The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent, she says:

In the early 19th century, the United States was one of the most egalitarian societies on the planet. “We have no paupers,” Thomas Jefferson boasted in an 1814 letter. “The great mass of our population is of laborers; our rich, who can live without labor, either manual or professional, being few, and of moderate wealth. Most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich and the competent such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families.”

It's a pretty picture, and completely untrue.

In the 1810 census, 16% of the US population were slaves. In Jefferson's home state of Virginia, 40% of the people were slaves. Yes, Jefferson was right that "[t]he great mass of our population is of laborers" -- but he was telling himself a story about "most" of them possessing property, cultivating their own lands, etc. He could only write -- and think -- this way by being willfully blind about the people he saw around him every day. And remember, the slaves that he pretended weren't there included his relatives, and quite possibly his children.

"None So Blind", part of a series of collages and paintings on old TV trays by Seattle artist Deborah F. Lawrence.

Freeland shares this delusion when she writes that "in the early 19th century, the United States was one of the most egalitarian societies on the planet". I'd even say that Freeland's delusion is wider than Jefferson's, because he had no way to know about as many "societies on the planet" as she should.

The bit that I've quoted from Freeland is nonsense, and it makes me really leery of the book she's plugging: Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else . It doesn't help that her piece doesn't mention Chris Hayes' Twilight of the Elites, and that she quotes Peter Orszag -- a guy who really brings out my inner Madame Defarge, even though I can't knit. For him, though, I'll learn.

I've got Freeland's book on hold at the library, and shall report back after I've had a chance to read it.

Illustration by "Phiz" (Hablot Knight Browne) for Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. The Defarges' wine shop, with Madame knitting all patient-like. I particularly like this version of Madame because she looks so prettily innocuous. This is what happens when you overlook people ...

I got this clear version of the image from a post on A Knitter Named Vengeance , about the tricoteuses who were the first to rebel in what became the French Revolution.

w00t!

About time too.

Whether or not America's politicians can find a way to sidestep the brutal automatic military cuts of sequestration, the era of rising Western spending on weapons and wars is over. link

Discuss.