http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/ OliviaB's recent URL reviews on StumbleUpon en-us Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:26:07 -0800 Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:57:34 -0800 http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/ http://cdn.stumble-upon.com/images/logo_su_36x36.png Sat, 07 Nov 2009 18:52:03 -0800 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/1hf1uw/2st.jp/kmrimg/l2/6.html/t:4af6728fd91a0;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37444870/

I'm still laid low with the flu
and this Japanese painter's washed-out work
- a magic pastel pill tree ? -
- a representation of my own scattered mind? -
somehow does the trick at present,
though when I'm well it will probably drive me nuts.

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/2st.jp/kmrimg/l2/6.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:42:28 -0800 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/2WOMOx/instaputz.blogspot.com/2009/11/hick-tours-sticks.html/t:4af6728fd91a0;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37463111/










~









palin redux




"It's going to be the most postmodern experience of all time

watching a woman who can't write speaking to people who don't read

about her memoir that someone else wrote for her."








y t

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/instaputz.blogspot.com/2009/11/hick-tours-sticks.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:41:36 -0800 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/9UcmE9/www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-america-is-performing-its-familiar-role-of-propping-up-a-dictator-1814194.html/t:4af6728fd91a0;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37463735/

~





"Could there be a more accurate description of the Obama-Brown message of congratulations to the fraudulently elected Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan? First the Palestinians held fair elections in 2006, voted for Hamas and were brutally punished for it - they still are - and then the Iranians held fraudulent elections in June which put back the weird Mahmoud Ahmadinejad whom everyone outside Iran (and a lot inside) regard as a dictator. But now we have the venal, corrupt, sectarian Karzai in power after a poll far more ambitiously rigged than the Iranian version, and - yup, we love him dearly and accept his totally fraudulent election."

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-america-is-performing-its-familiar-role-of-propping-up-a-dictator-1814194.html Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:03:51 -0800 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/1lNkzs/www.edge.org/3rd_culture/schirrmacher09/schirrmacher09_index.html/t:4af6728fd91a0;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37438980/

a few snips from
this great talk.
top image from here

the age of the informavore




It's the question: what is important, what is not important, what is important to know? Is this information important? Can we still decide what is important? And it starts with this absolutely normal, everyday news. But now you encounter, at least in Europe, a lot of people who think, what in my life is important, what isn't important, what is the information of my life. And some of them say, well, it's in Facebook. And others say, well, it's on my blog. And, apparently, for many people it's very hard to say it's somewhere in my life, in my lived life.





~





"And so what interests me is that we are, because we have the Internet, now entering a phase where Darwinian structures, where Darwinian dynamics, Darwinian selection, apparently attacks ideas themselves: what to remember, what not to remember, which idea is stronger, which idea is weaker."



Gerd Gigerenzer, to whom I talked and who I find a fascinating thinker, put it in such a way that thinking itself somehow leaves the brain and uses a platform outside of the human body. And that's the Internet and it's the cloud. And very soon we will have the brain in the cloud. And this raises the question of the importance of thoughts. For centuries, what was important for me was decided in my brain. But now, apparently, it will be decided somewhere else.







evolution images via the greate with thanks.

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.edge.org/3rd_culture/schirrmacher09/schirrmacher09_index.html Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:32:28 -0800 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/Ajdhin/www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/gallery/cartoon14.html/t:4af6728fd91a0;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37382294/

I love the cat one.

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/gallery/cartoon14.html Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:51:04 -0800 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/AFHz5e/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7010202.stm/t:4af6728fd91a0;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/28397267/ a repost
Corot painting via the scrumptious libero with thanks.
burma campaign news and links! excellent resource. Thanks Mizz T.

















I keep thinking about the people of Burma,

the silenced population and activists and monks

suffering daily under a brutal dictatorship,

invisible now that so many protestors

are imprisoned or killed.

Please spare them a thought,

and if it's your thing, a prayer,

and if there's any opportunity to help them,

seize it.

Thanks.


~
















~~~









some buddhist goodies, audio and video











~~~

















calligraphy for Breath/Spirit
by Kaz at Brushmind.






~








Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7010202.stm Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:03:50 -0800 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/1DFWI3/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dshi_Yoshida/t:4af6728fd91a0;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37380484/










Toshi Yoshida was an artist of great breadth and vision. Known primarily for his woodblock prints,

he was also a remarkable painter and illustrator. His style cannot be easily summarized, because he

was constantly innovating and pushing the boundaries of the woodblock medium. His work ranges from

realistic landscapes to imaginative abstract designs to detailed portraits of animals in their environments.

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%2525C5%25258Dshi_Yoshida Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:15:31 -0800 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/7BAK5O/www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/europe/04levistrauss.html?_r=1/t:4af6728fd91a0;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37379510/

Vale, Claude,
and thanks for all the great ideas.



















Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called "primitive man" and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and '70s, has died at 100.

"He was France's greatest scientist," said writer Jean d'Ormesson, fellow member of the Academie Francaise which brings together the elite of the country's intellectual establishment.

He argued that linguistics, communications and mathematical logic could be used to reveal fundamental social systems.

He was also big on music and myth, arguing that, with the fading of myths power in the modern West, music had taken on myth's function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.

But Mr. Levi-Strauss rejected Rousseau's idea that humankind's problems derive from society's distortions of nature. In Mr. Levi-Strauss' view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature's raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.

This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity's mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.

For Mr. Levi-Strauss, for example, every culture's mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing "binary" concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.

This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.

Mr. Levi-Strauss's "structural" approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society's practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside. (He began 'Tristes Tropiques' with the statement "I hate traveling and explorers.")

To his mind, as he wrote in 'The Raw and the Cooked' ,translated from 'Le Cru et le Cuit' (1964), he had taken oeethnographic research in the direction of psychology, logic, and philosophy.

In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977 (published asMyth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture'), Mr. Levi-Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed. He cited a report that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather became exceedingly cold, a priest would summon all those who had been born feet first, or who had a harelip, or who were twins. They were accused of being responsible for the weather and were ordered to repent, to correct the aberrations. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins? more at the link.///link via the great shitao with thanx.

interview with L-S /// the anthropology of levi strauss












~

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/europe/04levistrauss.html%253F_r%253D1 Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:17:37 -0800 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/2yVEqE/www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/11/kleptocapitalism-and-how-to-fight-it.html/t:4af6728fd91a0;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37363928/


klepto capitalism -
great coinage, great essay, provocative solution.

kelpto capitalism





It is not a question of merit, talent, fairness, or income disparity; it is a question of theft.

Corporate executives are raiding their companies' coffers, and the victims are you and me.

What we have in the United States is no longer capitalism but klepto-capitalism:

a system where publicly traded corporations are run not to produce value for shareholders but to provide loot for a new class of corporate mega-thieves.

How do we stop this rampant pilfering, particularly in an era of American politics when at least half the nation's political class is averse to government intervention in the economy?

By being as greedy and as smart as the thieves.






~

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/11/kleptocapitalism-and-how-to-fight-it.html Sat, 31 Oct 2009 03:22:26 -0700 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/1ZVtK3/www.smh.com.au/environment/toll-rises-as-sea-life-feed-at-oil-spill-20091030-hprl.html/t:4af6728fd91a0;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37289747/

Thanks to the great advena
for posting this outrageous story.
Part of the outrage is that the government
keeps saying everything is hunky dory.
Comment from advena's page. image andrew brandou.














It is unbelievable how little coverage this ongoing tragedy has been getting. After seeing the scale of the oil slick, which is spread over 4223square kilometres, Dr Watson told the Herald: ''I am amazed at how little Australia really cares about this. This is a huge oil slick.'' The well in the Montara oil field has been leaking 400 barrels of oil a day, by the company's estimate, since August 21 after an accident at the site. The leak is now entering its 10th week and the company conceded on Thursday it was unlikely to be contained for several more weeks."







~

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.smh.com.au/environment/toll-rises-as-sea-life-feed-at-oil-spill-20091030-hprl.html