Monday, September 30, 2002

You saw the movie 'High Noon'? he asks. Ha! As if. About time an editorial came out in the American press that says things that needed saying, and from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution no less. I had become resigned to only being able to find these sorts of views in the UK Observer or the UK Independent. Pax Americana. American capitalist colonialism. American imperialism. American empire. At a time when the better part of intellectual thinking has analyzed and picked apart in great detail the exploitation and cultural violence inflicted by colonial empires, our bone-headed government, in its infinite wisdom and president with a single brain cell operating have decided global empire is the greatest thing since sliced bread. God save us all from absolute power, corrupting absolutely. God save us from the gulag-totalitarian states of amerika. Don't listen to my dumb ass. The editorial below should be required reading. Miasma ajc.com | Opinion | Bush's real goal in Iraq [Daypop Top 40] The official story on Iraq has never made sense. The connection that the Bush administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al-Qaida has always seemed contrived and artificial. In fact, it was hard to believe that smart people in the Bush administration would start a major war based on such flimsy evidence. [...] In essence, it lays out a plan for permanent U.S. military and economic domination of every region on the globe, unfettered by international treaty or concern. And to make that plan a reality, it envisions a stark expansion of our global military presence. "The United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia," the document warns, "as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of U.S. troops." The report's repeated references to terrorism are misleading, however, because the approach of the new National Security Strategy was clearly not inspired by the events of Sept. 11. They can be found in much the same language in a report issued in September 2000 by the Project for the New American Century, a group of conservative interventionists outraged by the thought that the United States might be forfeiting its chance at a global empire. "At no time in history has the international security order been as conducive to American interests and ideals," the report said. stated two years ago. "The challenge of this coming century is to preserve and enhance this 'American peace.' " 10:44:48 PM    Comment [] Madison Avenue and your brain Why sometimes rhetorical analysis won't be enough for rhetorical self defense. Madison Avenue and your brain. New advances in neuroscience are explaining why people just do it, exactly as they're told to, when that commercial comes on. [Salon.com] [...] Several decades into the era of consumer capitalism, the whiz kids on Madison Avenue have learned fairly well how to attach psychic puppet strings to our minds, but they have never really known why (or often whether) their tricks worked. Enter the age of neuroscience. As investigators plumb ever deeper into the strange dynamics of the brain, they are shedding new light on many domains of human behavior, including mental illness, violence, cooperation, addiction, eating and even aesthetics. [...] Take the case of the hunger-struck couch potato. A recent brain-imaging study sheds light on the mechanism that makes the mere presence of food alluring. When people were allowed to see and smell their favorite chow, a deep-lying brain structure called the dorsal striatum was activated and the subjects reported feeling hungrier. Notably, this neural circuit was different from the pleasure pathways that are tickled when people actually get to eat. "The dorsal striatum is being linked to addiction formation and to things that you learn and do almost uncontrollably," says Nora Volkow, the neuroscientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory who led the study. "When it's active, it creates a very strong drive to consume food. This is a reason why [fast food] advertisements are so compelling, and why we are having an epidemic of obesity in this country." [...] How deep these new ideas will penetrate into civic policy and individual self-conception (as, for example, the psychoanalytic revolution did a century ago) will be interesting to watch. It will be interesting to see, for instance, whether the activist-planned lawsuits to hold the fast-food industry accountable for supersizing America's collective waistline (and medical bill) will prevail. While neuroscience provides a plausible foundation for the case that the industry's marketing practices will inevitably net consumers en masse into excess consumption, society may never be ready to let individuals off the hook for taking the bait. Or, as it did in the suits against Big Tobacco -- where the science of addiction was a central issue -- it might. 9:23:45 PM    Comment [] Dreaming of Glass I Can't Own OK, so I bad-mouth zooms and never got over not being able to afford a Nikkor 300mm 2.8 in the '80s. Now I want the big glass 400, but if I were getting zoom glass, one of these would be nice. Sigh. I don't shoot sports anymore anyway. Don't know what my problem is. A 105mm F2 like I used to use at work in Arkansas would suit for stuff I do these days. Miasma Sigma introduce three new big zoom lenses. Photokina 2002: In addition to the huge interest surrounding the SD-9 Digital SLR Sigma has also introduced three new big zoom lenses at the Photokina show. These are the APO 80 - 400 mm F4.5 - 5.6 ES OS, APO... [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)] 8:48:06 PM    Comment []

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