Category: Arts and Culture

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Wow, this just stopped me cold

In July 2010 I posted a writeup of my family’s experience in Kauai, which I found physically and spiritually cleansing (linked below). Tonight, I received the following comment, and am just not sure how to respond. It’s a bit racist, and full of obviously gross generalizations. But there’s a part of me that understands where this is coming from – a heart that just wants the old ways back, wants Hawaii back.

“Your race is a pestilence to my people, our culture and OUR way of life. Your stench has been filling our nostrils since the arrival of your kind. Your exploitation, your perversion and your robbery of our history and our land makes me sick. IÊ»m glad you had a nice time galavanting around the land of my fathers and mothers, IÊ»m glad you had fun seeing our wonderful island in all its beauty and thinking you have a right to even look upon it. I shall remember your trip, and your pictures, and when you return, for scourge always does, you will get no respect, no hospitality from me or my ohana, who outnumber all the citizens of KauaÊ»i.”

Kauai 2010 | scot hacker’s foobar blog
It’s sometimes said that Kauai is the last remaining vestige of “the old Hawaii” or “the real Hawaii” – the last bastion of island life as it was before much of it was taken over by hotel chains a…

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The Fireplace Delusion

The Fireplace Delusion – Fascinating as a piece of science, and also as a metaphor for considering what we grapple with when contemplating religion.

Reshared post from +John Poteet

Normally I think Sam Harris is an asshole; except sometime he nails it.

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The Fireplace Delusion :
Sam Harris
Sam Harris, neuroscientist and author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape.

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Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory – It’s About Us

This American Life is pretty much always great, but this podcast – covering one man’s journey into the Chinese factories that make our tech products – affected me deeply.

Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory

Heartbreaking and fascinating, seriously worth 45 minutes of your life. Stories of extraordinarily long hours, child labor, and repetitive stress injuries that make our own seem like hangnails in comparison. Stories of people assembling parts as small as human hairs by hand for 16 hours at a stretch, stories of people working with their hands until their bones simply crumble (and they’re out of work for life). Stories of experiments with neurotoxins like hexane being done on unwitting human workers. It goes on and on.

But listen through to the last ten minutes, where the emotional impact, and the anger the story generates,  is sort of qualified by observations of economic realities in China: “Hundreds of thousands of Chinese choose the grimness of factory life over the grimness of the rice paddies.”

I remember when the suicide nets went up around the Foxconn factory, and the simplistic reactions people had to their existence. But some perspective helps – the truth is, China as a whole has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, while those rates are actually lower in factory cities like Chengdu than they are in the rest of the country. And Foxconn is doing the right thing by trying to prevent them – that’s a good thing, not an example of Foxconn simply accepting suicide as a cost of doing business.

But while Apple is  a sexy centerpoint for the story, it’s important to remember that this isn’t really a story about Apple – virtually every single technology product we buy, from DVD players to smartphones to game consoles to blenders, is made under similar conditions.

Actually, this isn’t even a story about the human cost of our enjoyment of technology. Virtually everything on the shelves at Walmart and Target is made in China. The clothes on your back, that car you drive… chances are high those things were made in conditions that are similar or worse than those at Foxconn. It’s not about Apple – it’s about us (ZDNet’s Larry Dignan does a good job widening the scope of the story in this post).

The popularity of this story is an opportunity for the west to reflect on the implications of its addiction to cheap products in general. We’ve grown into  a dangerous symbiotic relationship with China – we can’t shake the allure of cheap products, and they can’t shake the allure of jobs for their citizens. Your cheap jeans create jobs for peasants. And if we were somehow to bring those jobs back to the U.S., we would be throwing those peasants back into the poverty they’ve partially escaped in the past decade. Reality is messy.

Coupled with a recent NY Times piece covering the same topic, it’s been a hard week for Apple, who are scrambling to do spin control. But whether this is an Apple problem or a larger problem of our addiction to cheap goods, Apple could be stepping up as a leader in making a difference here. With the company’s insane bankroll, they could and should be doing more to affect manufacturing conditions.

What about you? Would you be willing to pay 50% more for an iPhone or an HP laptop if it meant you knew it was made in the U.S., under different conditions?

See also: Apple CEO Steve Cook Responds to Allegations

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R.I.P. Christopher Hitchens

I got to see Hitchens debate former J-School dean Orville Schell during the height of the Iraq war, and found him a puzzle, as one often does when you agree with exactly half of what someone really smart is saying.

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Christopher Hitchens Is Dead at 62 — Obituary

Mr. Hitchens wrote in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell and trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa.

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1.5 Million Twitter Users on “A Steve Jobs of Religion”

Came across what I thought was an interesting piece in the New York Times, Americans: Undecided About God?, about the rising percentage of Americans who declare their religious/spiritual affiliation as “None” but who still feel a personal need for the connectedness that organized religion brings. In it, the author (Eric Weiner) made the perhaps too-flip remark:

“We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone who can invent not a new religion but a new way of being religious.”

The article was about a lot of stuff, and the Steve Jobs reference was just an aside, an analogy. But that’s the bit I quoted in a Tweet …

not because I necessarily agreed or disagreed, but because I thought it was an intriguing thought. Nothing more, nothing less. What happened next was an interesting lesson in just how little attention people pay, and how ready people are to unload half-cocked thoughts, work from assumptions, and to have loud opinions without bothering to actually, you know, read. Because a few minutes later, Tim O’Reilly retweeted the quote to his 1.5 million followers, and the switchboard lit up.

I’ve stitched together a bunch of screenshots to show what the stream looked like, which is quite amazing (see below).
Continue reading “1.5 Million Twitter Users on “A Steve Jobs of Religion””

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Hallejuah

Stopped to watch a bearded guy playing a fantastic acoustic cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallejuah” (via Jeff Buckley). Really getting swept up in it, when a Muslim dude came by, realized it was prayer time, got down on his knees and started praying to the East, praising Allah. Thing was, he was just a few feet in front of a BART ticket machine, so it kind of looked like he was praying to a mechano. All very surreal and beautiful.

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Occupy San Francisco

Spent the first half of this beautiful Saturday helping teach digital media skills to journalists, the second half in the streets of San Francisco marching in solidarity with OccupySF protestors. Today there were more than 1500 “occupation” marches taking place in cities around the country (check out the meta-information site OccupyTogether for information on greed-opposition protests near you).

Give a damn

The movement is criticized for being unfocused, for making too many simultaneous statements. In a way, that’s true. But that’s also its power. People are mad about a lot of different things: The bank bailouts, tax shelters, joblessness, golden parachutes for executives, corporations treated legally as persons, starvation of school budgets, the mystery of allowing churches to not pay taxes, threats to Medicare, the unlimited power of The Fed and the wars it funds… but most of the complaints come down to one thing: The effect of greed on the economy and our lives.

Health care for all

So what’s my beef? Posted this on Google+ the other day:

I am not opposed to wealth and I am not opposed to capitalism. I am opposed to greed. Capitalism without checks in place gives way to greed, which is abuse of the capitalist system. When greed rules, people get hurt. Bankers were allowed to crash our economy in part because, in the system of checks and balances, checks were removed that allowed greed to rule. Unwise deregulation allows self-serving greed to run rampant. If you were to ask me “What does Occupy Wall Street want?” I would answer “We want to restore the regulations that prevent unchecked greed from destroying the level playing field.”

It was just amazing to feel the collective energy of these 5,000 people taking over 10 square blocks in San Francisco. In the 1960s, when people got pissed they took to the streets. There was a spirit of collective power that’s largely gone missing in the 2000s (protests against the Iraq war were anemic and rare compared to those against Vietnam). But this felt different. Felt like the start of a new awakening that people actually have had enough, and are ready to stop being steamrolled by greed. I don’t know where all of this is headed, but it’s incredibly satisfying to see a protest movement rising up to address this very broken system. Over time, the message will become more concise. And who knows, maybe something will actually get done.

Miles told me this morning “Protests are boring – they’re just a bunch of people carrying signs that say ‘Up with this’ and ‘Down with that.'” Not sure I was able to get through to him – it’s tough figuring out how to explain all of this to a child. But in the streets today, I felt like the message of the day was carried more by the huge variety of ideals expressed through signs, even more than (often simplistic) chants that spread through the crowd like floating bubbles. Took a lot of photos today, mostly of signage. Here’s a Flickr set from the day, mostly of signs.

Or view the slideshow full-screen.

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Disneyland/SoCal Road Trip, 2011

Just returned from a week traipsing up and down the California coast – combo family/friend road trip + first Disneyland pilgrimage for Miles and Amy. Beyond the awesomeness of spending quality time with my brother and an old friend, a few Cliff notes:

Atascadero Lake

As a boy in the early-mid 1970s, spent many summers swimming in Atascadero Lake, so was bummed to learn that it’s actually been closed to swimming since May ’85, mainly due to high levels of bird feces in the water (lots of ducks/geese for a small body of water, and very little fresh in/outflow). But with the loss of swimming as a central activity, a wonderful summertime lakeside community has vanished. Saw very few people hanging out, despite beautiful weather – something great’s been lost. Kind of hard to see why the city doesn’t mount a cleanup effort rather than lose this centerpiece of the central coast. On the other hand, I have to wonder exactly what I was exposed to as a boy…

Getty Museum

On the way to L.A., we spent a half day at the amazing Getty Museum, a slab of architectural miracle perched high on the hills above Los Angeles, packed with classics. Honestly, their collection wasn’t exactly up our alley, but we dug the exhibition of Cuban photography covering the pre- and post-revolution periods. Mostly just an incredible place to spend a day.

Polar bear head Also whiled away an afternoon on State St. in Santa Barbara – a great example of a community thriving around a highly walkable downtown area full of funky shops, artists, great restaurants, vintage shops, and music stores. Caught it during a farmer’s market in full swing, which made it even better. Had a two-martini seafood feast on the pier with an old friend, making up for lost time. Bummed to see the old Hotel California shuttered – in the 1970s, Dad was a railroad engineer and would put my brother and I on the Amtrak with him to Santa Barbara, where we’d stay overnight at the California, then eat at Sambo’s and return home the next day. The Hotel California may or may not have been the subject of the Eagles song of the same name, depending on who you ask. Seeing it closed just didn’t seem right.

That leaves Disney, equal parts magical/amazing and disappointing. Last time I visited was as a young boy, probably around six or seven years old. So much has changed in the meantime, but so much remains. Can’t fault the park for evolving, but it’s hard to stomach the parts that have changed for the worse. One of my favorite attractions was always the submarine voyage, where you learned a ton about undersea life (Dad was a professional scuba diver, so for us, it was like a glimpse into his amazing/secret world). The apex of the ride was always the part where the submarine was attacked by a giant animatronic squid. Sadly, what you get now are a bunch of underwater digital projections of clips from the Disney/Pixar movie Finding Nemo, which left us disembarking from the sub scratching our heads. What’s the point? Fun fact: Once upon a time, Disney employed young maidens as live mermaids, to just sit on rocks in the sub lagoon flopping their tails. They stopped doing that after a few years because real live young gentlemen kept swimming out to hang with them.

Submarines

Also gone is the Bear Country Jamboree (are you kidding me?), and the Adventure Through Inner Space, which simulated the experience of having your body shrunk down to the size of an atom. The good news is, Inner Space has been replaced with Star Tours, a most excellent 3-D seat shaker with witty dialog and excellent presentation. Pirates of the Caribbean is mercifully untouched, except for the introduction of not one but three animatronic Jack Sparrows. Freaky thing is, the Sparrow robots are 30 years more modern than all the rest in that ride, and the first one leaves you pretty well convinced they’ve parked real actors in there… until you realize he’s more than a bit repetitive. Important thing is, the spirit of the ride is untouched.

Small World

As always, one of the most amazing things about Disneyland is how sparkling everything is. Despite thousands of people milling around at all times, the streets and the rides are all spotless, cleaned relentlessly. All of the employees (sorry, “the cast”) are super friendly, and the introduction of the Fast Pass system means you don’t have to stand in lines for 45 minutes anymore if you do a bit of planning. And they still put on a fab fireworks show every single night (on top of the over-the-top Fantasmic show on the river, as well as the new World of Color spectacle at California Adventure, where we spent a second day).

Pretty much a glorious road trip, start to finish. Now if they could just do something about traffic on Southern California highways, which was miserable in both directions between LA and Ventura.

Two Flickr sets (see slideshows for full-screen), or non-slideshow for captions):

Disneyland 2011

Santa Barbara, etc.