The most terrifying thing I have ever read. The idle tragedy of aging alone and impoverished: 

I am an old man in his sixtieth year. I have entered that decade of life which destroys the last illusion and beyond which lies death, swift or lingering, actuarial or real. I am also poor, incontrovertibly, humiliatingly poor, for the first time in my life… I am divorced and living alone in an alien city of 800,000 strangers. My aging body betrays me day by day; the ground I am losing now I lose forever.

From The Atlantic Monthly, 1977

Walden. 

First watch this:

The read this Open Letter to Julian Assange from Reporters Without Borders:

Dear Mr. Assange,

Reporters Without Borders, an international press freedom organisation, regrets the incredible irresponsibility you showed when posting your article “Afghan War Diary 2004 - 2010” on the Wikileaks website on 25 July together with 92,000 leaked documents disclosing the names of Afghans who have provided information to the international military coalition that has been in Afghanistan since 2001.

Wikileaks has in the past played a useful role by making information available to the US and international public that exposed serious violations of human rights and civil liberties which the Bush administration committed in the name of its war against terror. Last April’s publication of a video of the killing of two employees of the Reuters news agency and other civilians by US military personnel in Baghdad in July 2007 was clearly in the public interest and we supported this initiative. It was a response to the Obama administration’s U-turn on implementation of the Freedom of Information Act. The White House broke its word in May 2009, when it defied a court order and refused to release photos of the mistreatment of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But revealing the identity of hundreds of people who collaborated with the coalition in Afghanistan is highly dangerous. It would not be hard for the Taliban and other armed groups to use these documents to draw up a list of people for targeting in deadly revenge attacks.

Defending yourself, you said that it was about “ending the war in Afghanistan.” You also argued that: “Principled leaking has changed the course of history for the better; it can alter the course of history in the present; it can lead us to a better future.” However, the US government has been under significant pressure for some time as regards the advisability of its military presence in Afghanistan, not just since your article’s publication. We are not convinced that your wish to “end the war in Afghanistan” will be so easily granted and meanwhile, you have unintentionally provided supposedly democratic governments with good grounds for putting the Internet under closer surveillance.

It is true that you said that “a further 15,000 potentially sensitive reports” were excluded from the 25 July mass posting, that they were being “reviewed further” and that some of them would be released “once it was deemed safe to do so.”

Nonetheless, indiscriminately publishing 92,000 classified reports reflects a real problem of methodology and, therefore, of credibility. Journalistic work involves the selection of information. The argument with which you defend yourself, namely that Wikileaks is not made up of journalists, is not convincing. Wikileaks is an information outlet and, as such, is subject to the same rules of publishing responsibility as any other media.

Reporters Without Borders has for years been campaigning for a federal “shield law” protecting sources, one that would apply not only to the traditional media but also to the new Internet media without exception. This is why we condemn all forms of harassment of Wikileaks contributors or informants – such as the recent arrest of Wikileaks researcher Jacob Appelbaum – by government agencies and immigration officials. We also condemn the charges brought against US army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, who is suspected of leaking the video of the Baghdad killings. However, you cannot claim to enjoy the protection of sources while at the same time, when it suits you, denying that you are a news media.

The precedent you have set leaves all those people throughout the world who risk their freedom and sometimes their lives for the sake of online information even more exposed to reprisals. Such imprudence endangers your own sources and, beyond that, the future of the Internet as an information medium. A total of 116 netizens are currently in prison in a dozen countries because of the comments they posted online. Can you image the same situation in the country of the First Amendment?

Wikileaks must provide a more detailed explanation of its actions and must not repeat the same mistake. This will mean a new departure and new methods.

We look forward to your reply,

Sincerely,

Jean-François Julliard
Reporters Without Borders secretary-general

Clothilde Le Coz
Reporters Without Borders representative in Washington DC

Thoughts?

Is this really where we have come: that the fate of our precious coastlines and the waters off our coasts are in the hands of a single foreign-based company?

Read David Gergen’s short opinion piece. 

My favorite paragraph about a man with anterograde and retrograde amnesia (can’t make new memories or remember a chunk of his old ones):

“On a typical morning, EP wakes up, has breakfast, and returns to bed to listen to the radio. But back in bed, it’s not always clear whether he’s just had breakfast or just woken up. Often he’ll have breakfast again, and return to bed to listen to some more radio. Some mornings he’ll have breakfast a third time. He watches TV, which can be very exciting from second to second, though shows with a clear beginning, middle, and end can pose a problem. He prefers the History Channel, or anything about World War II. He takes walks around the neighborhood, usually several times before lunch, and sometimes for as long as three-quarters of an hour. He sits in the yard. He reads the newspaper, which one can only imagine must feel like stepping out of a time machine. Bush who? Iraq what? Computers when? By the time EP gets to the end of a headline, he’s usually forgotten how it began. Most of the time, after reading the weather, he just doodles on the paper, drawing mustaches on the photographs or tracing his spoon. When he sees home prices in the real estate section, he invariably announces his shock.”

My anger and hatred towards the child-touching priests of the catholic church are beyond words, so I’ll just use Matt Taibbi’s. 

I plan on becoming an avid listener who poses (or doubles) as an avid reader. I’ve always been more auditory than visual and my retention and recall rate is much higher with aural stimuli than visual or tactile ones. I love the idea of reading (who doesn’t?), but I’ve never been one to sit and read for an extended period of time. Everyone knows the benefits and joys of reading, but there are a few things I hate about reading:

1. My eyes get tired and I fall asleep


2. It is a sedentary activity


3. It is time-consuming


4. It requires too much visual focus and concentration


5. It is boring

I’ve concluded that audiobooks are the way to go for me most of the time. I will still buy books and read in the traditional sense - especially if I happen to enjoy an author’s literary style; since one of the major advantages of traditional reading is the improvement of one’s own writing style and technique. But overall, the content osmosis that takes place by reading or listening should be based on one’s learning style and preference. It’s time we got rid of learning style elitism and prejudice anyway.

The final word should go to blind folks who rely on tactile and aural learning exclusively - they may be blind, but they still read, do they not?

Check this fascinating three-part expose on the church of Scientology

Part 1: The Truth Rundown

Part 2: Death in Slow Motion

Part 3: Ecclesiastical Justice

Brilliant article in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell on Power-Law distribution and homelessness. Thought-provoking at it’s worst, life-changing at best.  Must read: “Million-Dollar Murray”

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”452” caption=”Thomas Bangalter - .5 Daft Punk”][/caption]

Do you think one of the reasons Daft Punk decided to become robots was because one of the dudes looks like this? Dude looks like a chemistry T.A.
The Susan Boyle effect consumes music and since life reflects art (or viceversa, I suppose), strong cases could be made for job interviews to be done by phone. Wait, someone already though about this here: Susan Boyle: A Lesson in Talent Management

I don’t find Susan Boyle to be all that compelling, ugly women make great music all the time (e.g. Janis Joplin, Patti Smith) and there are countless fugly male musicians who do the same. Boyle is a mediocre musical theater singer at best… I hear broadway may need a new lead to play quasimodo… ok, that was mean. But it’s always interesting to see how people react when we become aware of our own personal prejudices.

From Jeffrey Hart’s Blog on TheDailyBeast:
Ian Wilson is a well-informed scholar on regarding the facts regarding the Shroud of Turin, and in his 1979 book, The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ, he brought together the evidence and the conclusions reached by many other experts in this field (“Sindonologists”). It seems to me, difficult to believe though it may be, that this ancient linen cloth is in fact the shroud Jesus was wrapped in before he was placed in the tomb. Here I will summarize the argument of Mr. Wilson’s book:

1. Pollen does not decay. And ancient pollen in the linen cloth indicates the origin of this linen cloth in Jerusalem and also traces its journey from Jerusalem from the Middle East through Europe. It is almost impossible that forgery could accomplish this.

2. The body was laid on the cloth and the remainder of the cloth folded over the body to produce front and back images of the man.

3. A startling fact: The image of the man on the Shroud turns out to be aphotographic negative. When photographed it became a positive. Again, this seems to rule out an ancient forgery, that is, long before the invention of photography.

4. In most modern representations of the Crucifixion, the nails are shown as going through the palms. But as this image shows, the nails actually went through an aperture in the wrists. Had the nails gone through the palms, they would not have sustained body weight and would have torn through the flesh, the body falling from the cross. Execution required that the man die on the cross from lack of oxygen as he repeatedly tried to raise his body on the nails in order to breathe. Execution was slow.

5. Wounds on the back of the body indicate flogging by the Roman flagrum—metal weights attached to leather cords wielded by a wooden handle.

6. Had the image been painted on the cloth by a forger, the paint traces of the pigment would have remained on the surface. The color here penetrates the cloth evenly from one side to another. Note: In this, it is more like a scorch.

7. An objection: The Romans executed many men this way. Indeed, two criminals were executed that day along with Jesus. Could this shroud be that of another similarly executed man? It’s very unlikely. Crucifixion was disgraceful and an expression of contempt for the criminal. It is unlikely that the family or friends of a man of that sort would have wrapped his body in an expensive linen cloth—or that such a cloth would have been saved later on and made its way from the Middle East across Europe. Representations of Jesus in art reflect a knowledge of the Shroud by European artists.

8. Ian Wilson concludes that the image on the cloth is a “paranormal” phenomenon. That is, not made by hands. But how?

9. Speculation: The scorch might have been made by radioactivity attendant upon the resurrection. Whether or not it is pertinent, the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe produced measurable radiation that determines that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old. If the scorch on the Shroud is the result of radiation, it could have been radiation that reconstituted the dead body. But that is merely speculation.

10. Ian Wilson’s book appeared in 1978. In 1988, carbon 14 tests were conducted indicating a medieval date for the Shroud. But that result is controversial and almost certainly wrong, for reasons cited above. In fact, along its journey to Turin, the Shroud was in a church that was the scene of a fire, and that could have corrupted the carbon dating.”

Read this: The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist

Dude leads a band of thieves through 10 layers of vault security, they snag $100M in loose diamonds and jewels.
Dude sent to jail based on circumstantial evidence but cops still can’t find the loot or figure out how he did it.
Dude stays silent about the heist for 6 years and finally tells all.
Dude pulled off the “Heist of the Century.”

[caption id=”” align=”aligncenter” width=”441” caption=”Dude is Crazy”][/caption]

[caption id=”” align=”aligncenter” width=”441” caption=”More than 100 of the 189 safe-deposit boxes busted open in subterranean chamber”][/caption]

I’ve concluded everything is served by brevity.
I used to take pride in my minimum-length-requirement-demolishing BS-writing, but twitter and Zinsser have taught me otherwise. An economy of words exposes fully developed thoughts. One could argue this is analogous to minimalist visual art and/or music. Consider Videotape:



Read the Zinsser excerpt - it is brilliant.