well worth paying attention to

What else is there to say?

Daron Acemoglu (MIT), Georgy Egorov (Northwestern), and Konstantin Sonin (CEPR): A Political Theory of Populism. Mathias O. Royce (SMC): The Rise and Propagation of Political Right-Wing Extremism: The Identification and Assessment of Common Sovereign Economic and Socio-Demographic Determinants. From Edge, who gets to keep secrets? The question of secrecy in the information age is clearly a deep social (and mathematical) problem, and well worth paying attention to. Kathryn Schulz on 2010: The year in mistakes. Five years in, gauging impact of Gates grants. Putting the "American business model" in its place: The key to understanding why market economies have outperformed planned societies is not recognition of the ubiquity of greed, but understanding of the power of disciplined pluralism. A review of The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives by Gilbert Achcar. Cartoonist Darryl Cunningham investigates climate change. The deep pain of awkward silences: Remarks that stop the conversation cold at social gatherings can instantly elicit deep-seated feelings of exclusion. From NYRB, Ahmed Rashid on the way out of Afghanistan. The American Wikileaks Hacker: Jacob Appelbaum fight repressive regimes around the world — including his own. Rachel Botsman says we're "wired to share" — and shows how websites like Zipcar and Swaptree are changing the rules of human behavior.

Denis Dutton, the author, philosopher, and founding editor of the pioneering web digest Arts & Letters Daily, is dead at age 66.

via bookforum.com

Posted via email from Mountainair NM

Dec 8, #reverb10

...the prompt is Beautifully different. "Think about what makes you different and what you do that lights people up. Reflect on all the things that make you different - you'll find they're what make you beautiful."

this machine designed by Max Factor measures the beauty of a woman's face but looks like a scene from 

Frankenstein meets Hellraiser. Aother article gives a different view of this instrument of torture beauty.

Post-modern has its uses after all. The only way I see to do this one is with an image, just the right image ~ ironic, snarky, hilarious, perhaps even gross. Neither Wiki entries on beauty nor lists of "notable" quotes on beauty will cut it for this one. There's always going Derridada with différance ~ essay Différance translated by Alan Bass + notes . Apply as you will. Or not.

 I'm old. Life is Beautiful. Sometimes ... Deconstruct that!

#reverb10, day 7/Dec 7...

Prompt: Community. Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?

This prompt has all the earmarks of a saccharine overdose in the making. Time to free write to turn over sweetened lemonade into zest from fresh lemons, silk purses into sows ears by free associating "community." Who does not belong to many communities? Sometimes too many communities; some are, if not faux, ersatz, counterfeit, then superficial. If not superficial then limited. A taxonomy of communities might run from all inclusive superficial to limited (functional/ situational) inclusive to exclusive. Then there is classification by function or location, perhaps even Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal classifications. There are obvious overlaps. 

Function or purpose: family, neighborhood, age cohort, voluntary associations, common interests or community of interests (professional, avocational), team, workplace, causes, projects, campaigns. 

Location, IRL (in real life) or virtual (cyberspace): neighborhood, apartment building, office, school, playground, public space, semi public space, private space, social media circles or groups, discussion lists. 

Poets's Basement: Ford, Yankevich and Orloski

Commentary seems superfluous here: 3 poems + a call for submissions from a possibly unexpected source. Consider though social protest in oral tradition ~ ballads, songs, oral and print poetry. Slam poetry, samizdat, broadsheets, Shelley's Mask of Anarchy (which became the anthem of the British Labor Party). Brecht, anonymous romances (ballads) from the Spanish Civil War and after.

Weekend Edition
December 3 -5, 2010

The Long Unemployed
by FRANK FORD

are pressed to become messiahs
for ordinary soap or the like.

Friends and relatives gain cupboards
groaning with the crap. Hey it's all
disguised charity. Better straightforward
thirties with rent parties where players
threw a buck or two in a hat
and proceeded to drink a bathtub
of gin and lose a spouse and gain
another's for the nonce. In screaming
over the roar, some excoriated Capitalism, but
the gin made the vile monster not worth spit. 

Frank Ford lives in Cocoa Beach and witnesses space-bound rockets from his
front window. He feels that one day we'll reach aliens, and shoot or bribe them--more of such nonsense can be glimpsed at http://motleycrisp.blogspot.com/

Dec 6: #reverb10

Prompt: Make. 

Make it short, make it so, make my day. Maker, hechicero, hacedor, factotum. Faire, hacer, machen, מאַכן, dhéanamh, gwneud, καταστήσει, fer, fazer, facer, fè, fare. Dolce far niente. Make time, make room, make money, make music, make dinner, make a mess. Forget the nimble fingered clever crafty stuff. Not my craft and I'm not blogging a recipe, not sharing my personal gumbo recipe with anybody. Fait accompli. 

What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?

Dec1: #reverb10:

Prompt for December 1 - One Word. Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you? Confused yet? More about #reverb10 until I get around to posting an explanation ~ this is all very spur of the moment, on impulse. I'm trying to resist the impulse for signing up under more than one nom de blog and theming them.


Concordance. Harmony, putting things in order, mostly coming to terms, but not quite acceptance, not yet and certainly not total acquiescence or subservience.


According to Wikipedia, Concordance can mean:

• Concordance (publishing), a list of words used in a body of work, with their immediate contexts
• Concordance (genetics), the presence of the same trait in both members of a pair of twins (or set of individuals)
• Concordance (medicine), involvement of patients in decision-making to improve patient compliance with medical advice
• Agreement (linguistics), a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase.
• Concordance system, in Swiss politics, the presence of all major parties in the Federal Council
• Concordance database, tailored to legal applications, distributed by LexisNexis
• Lambda-CDM model of big-bang cosmology
• Link concordance, a relation between mathematical links in knot theory
• Inter-rater reliability, in statistics, the degree to which multiple measurements of the same thing are similar
• Concordance correlation coefficient, in statistics, a measurement of the agreement between two variables

 That should do for now and on so many levels, some (cosmology, math, statistics) I'd have to know more about. Concordance suggests connotative relations too: Concordat, concord, concordant. [Middle English concordaunt, from Old French concordant, from Latin concordns, concordant-, present participle of concordre, to agree, from concors, concord-, agreeing; see concord.]


Do I really have to pick a word for 2011 now?  I'll take "multiliteracies," bearing in mind that I could just as easily switch them out, "multiliteracies" for 2010 and "concordance" for 2011. Does that mean there a connection? Do you see it? Good, explain it to me when you get a chance.