short notes:
will brady's ruminations
will brady's ruminations
2004-06-19
POP CULTURE || MILITARY
The Army has New Clothes |
From Stars and Stripes via V-2 and American Dynamics
¶ 09:47 0 comments 
The Army has New Clothes |
2004-06-18
LIFE AS A VISUAL ARTIST || TECHNOLOGY
Thanks to Steve from whom I borrowed most of text | Requires Flash 6 or Quicktime | takes 20 minutes to download at 56k |
Behind the scenes building a car | This'll take awhile | There are no computer graphics or digital tricks in the film | Everything you see really happened in real time exactly as you see it | The film took 606 takes. On the first 605 takes, something, usually very minor, didn't work | They would then have to set the whole thing up again | The crew spent weeks shooting night and day | The film cost six million dollars and took three months to complete, including engineering the sequence | It is two minutes long |
There are six and only six handmade Accords in the world | To the horror of Honda engineers, the film-makers disassembled two of them to make the film | Everything you see in the film (aside from the walls, floor, ramp, and complete Honda Accord) are parts from those two cars | The voice-over is Garrison Keillor | When the ad was shown to Honda executives, they liked it and commented on how amazing computer graphics have gotten | They fell off their chairs when they found out it was for real | Oh! And about those funky windshield wipers, on the new Accords, the windshield wipers have water sensors and are designed to start doing their thing automatically as soon as they become wet | It looks a bit weird in the commercial | Just one-second of computer generation is used to link the two halves-when an exhaust pipe rolls across the floor | At one point, three tires roll uphill because inside they have been weighted with bolts and screws |
This is not an endorsement for Honda | If anything it's a plug for the Rube Goldberg inspiration behind the production and how the ad was made | ¶ 04:45 0 comments
Thanks to Steve from whom I borrowed most of text | Requires Flash 6 or Quicktime | takes 20 minutes to download at 56k |
Behind the scenes building a car | This'll take awhile | There are no computer graphics or digital tricks in the film | Everything you see really happened in real time exactly as you see it | The film took 606 takes. On the first 605 takes, something, usually very minor, didn't work | They would then have to set the whole thing up again | The crew spent weeks shooting night and day | The film cost six million dollars and took three months to complete, including engineering the sequence | It is two minutes long |
There are six and only six handmade Accords in the world | To the horror of Honda engineers, the film-makers disassembled two of them to make the film | Everything you see in the film (aside from the walls, floor, ramp, and complete Honda Accord) are parts from those two cars | The voice-over is Garrison Keillor | When the ad was shown to Honda executives, they liked it and commented on how amazing computer graphics have gotten | They fell off their chairs when they found out it was for real | Oh! And about those funky windshield wipers, on the new Accords, the windshield wipers have water sensors and are designed to start doing their thing automatically as soon as they become wet | It looks a bit weird in the commercial | Just one-second of computer generation is used to link the two halves-when an exhaust pipe rolls across the floor | At one point, three tires roll uphill because inside they have been weighted with bolts and screws |
This is not an endorsement for Honda | If anything it's a plug for the Rube Goldberg inspiration behind the production and how the ad was made | ¶ 04:45 0 comments
2004-06-17
IRAQ QUAGMIRE
"Look into Torture in Iraq" | That's the call from Amnesty International, which called yesterday for appointment of a Special Counsel "...to investigate the torture and ill-treatment of prisoners in United States custody, citing leaked memoranda from the Departments of Justice and Defense as evidence that the independence of current investigations is critically compromised.
"Amnesty International believes the special counsel should oversee a comprehensive investigation of the torture scandal, including all identified and 'secret' detention facilities operated or accessed by the US, and should also include a determination whether administration officials bear criminal liability for torture or inhuman treatment of prisoners..."
There's more... ¶ 22:20 0 comments
"Look into Torture in Iraq" | That's the call from Amnesty International, which called yesterday for appointment of a Special Counsel "...to investigate the torture and ill-treatment of prisoners in United States custody, citing leaked memoranda from the Departments of Justice and Defense as evidence that the independence of current investigations is critically compromised.
"Amnesty International believes the special counsel should oversee a comprehensive investigation of the torture scandal, including all identified and 'secret' detention facilities operated or accessed by the US, and should also include a determination whether administration officials bear criminal liability for torture or inhuman treatment of prisoners..."
There's more... ¶ 22:20 0 comments
MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES
"Recovery" is not a "treatment modality" | For at least three decades [longer, if you go back to Clifford Beers] advocates, ex-patients and dispassionate observers have repeatedly argued that people can and often do, "recover" from long lasting disabling, debilitating conditions and experiences |
At the same time, the idea was scoffed and dismissed by high ranking clinicians and administrators, citing [still] the ghosts of Kraepelin and Beuler as the rationale for why such an idea was untenable | "People don't recover from 'mental illness' | Their lives are lost and so is any hope for them doing much better" the clinical careerists would steadfastly maintain |
Little or no thought was given to asking patients in mental hospitals what might be their wishs, hopes, dreams, or aspirations to acheive | Administrators spoke of "bed spaces," "treatment modalities" and "managed care." They asked drug companies when "the next miracle drug cure" would get people out of institutions and back on the streets |
The standard response to those who had different ideas, was to first ignore them, keep them from the decision making process and to demean and invalidate the critical voice that offered options |
Now, times have changed | Budget constraints sources called for innovation and "outcomes" | Major funding sources satrted telling them that "recovery is good"! | Gradually, those same clinicians and bureaucrats who walk past patients without seeing them took up the call |
However, while the language has been embraced, other obstacles remain | "Clients" get wheedled and cajoled to large group meetings and say the process is "patient driven" | Abusive staff and practices continue unabated | Known wrongs that take place fail to get "substantiated" when only patients witness those wrongs |
How can this be? That bureaucrat driving his new custom SUV to the workplace while the patient gets penalized by Title 19 with "spend-downs" on maybe less than $500 a month | Patient driven huh! |
Folks, you don't have a clue |
Admittedly, the samples mentioned oversimplify the problems inherent in social injustice and lack regard for people with mental illnesses | Administrators, Nurse Educators and other who shape professinal opinion are still no different than the society at large | But my point would be the same no matter what quick capsule glimpse got noted |
Recovery is not a treatment modality | The reasons people can and do recover are many and multifarious | But they come as much [or more] from within | "Recovery" may or may not include taking meds | For John Nash [the subject of the film A Beautiful Mind] they by and large did NOT, no matter what the film said |
"Recovery" may or may not include assistance from mental health programs | In the case of survivors in the Vermont Longitudinal Study in 1987, for a goodly number it was in spite of what services the "system" provided |
Recovery is a process | It involves learning to live with complex and inexplicable phenomena [that many may call delusional], of freedom from unrealistic pressures to "get over" that phenomena within discrete time frame, and of being considered, cared for and loved as a fellow human being by others | Simple as that |
How much more difficult this is to achieve in a society and culture that does not value those souls who are not immediately responsive to time-motion-study lifestyles | So challenging to those who drive efficient bureaucrats to distraction with abstruse, and often unexplainable questions | In the long run, it may call for dramatic and complete changes in cultural attitudes and norms, not something so easy to implement when it isn't even discussed |
So...if you, the fashionably dressed mental health careerist can grasp this, then next time you wish to speak to someone -anyone, even one of your professional colleagues- about "Recovery" for people with living dramatic, even severe, cognitive / perceptual dissonance, then do so only after you actually drop your important paperwork and pre-occupation with meetings and give someone the time, energy and effort to sit with and actually get to know some of those persons who walk past you daily, but of whom you only know by diagnosis | Incidentially, it's a whole lot cheaper than funding the psycho-pharmeceutical companies, just takes longer to see results |
Now that would be a step toward recovery |
Some resources: Clifford Beers' A Mind That Found Itself, National Empowerment Center, MindFreedom, Mary Ellen Copeland's Self-help Strategies
Pix Credits: 1- Jan Horn, Sulaco; 2- pines and palms; 3- www.ne.jp/asahi/ stellar/scenes/finepix/ ¶ 07:55 1 comments
"Recovery" is not a "treatment modality" | For at least three decades [longer, if you go back to Clifford Beers] advocates, ex-patients and dispassionate observers have repeatedly argued that people can and often do, "recover" from long lasting disabling, debilitating conditions and experiences |
At the same time, the idea was scoffed and dismissed by high ranking clinicians and administrators, citing [still] the ghosts of Kraepelin and Beuler as the rationale for why such an idea was untenable | "People don't recover from 'mental illness' | Their lives are lost and so is any hope for them doing much better" the clinical careerists would steadfastly maintain |
Little or no thought was given to asking patients in mental hospitals what might be their wishs, hopes, dreams, or aspirations to acheive | Administrators spoke of "bed spaces," "treatment modalities" and "managed care." They asked drug companies when "the next miracle drug cure" would get people out of institutions and back on the streets |
The standard response to those who had different ideas, was to first ignore them, keep them from the decision making process and to demean and invalidate the critical voice that offered options |
Now, times have changed | Budget constraints sources called for innovation and "outcomes" | Major funding sources satrted telling them that "recovery is good"! | Gradually, those same clinicians and bureaucrats who walk past patients without seeing them took up the call |
However, while the language has been embraced, other obstacles remain | "Clients" get wheedled and cajoled to large group meetings and say the process is "patient driven" | Abusive staff and practices continue unabated | Known wrongs that take place fail to get "substantiated" when only patients witness those wrongs |
How can this be? That bureaucrat driving his new custom SUV to the workplace while the patient gets penalized by Title 19 with "spend-downs" on maybe less than $500 a month | Patient driven huh! |
Folks, you don't have a clue |
Admittedly, the samples mentioned oversimplify the problems inherent in social injustice and lack regard for people with mental illnesses | Administrators, Nurse Educators and other who shape professinal opinion are still no different than the society at large | But my point would be the same no matter what quick capsule glimpse got noted |
Recovery is not a treatment modality | The reasons people can and do recover are many and multifarious | But they come as much [or more] from within | "Recovery" may or may not include taking meds | For John Nash [the subject of the film A Beautiful Mind] they by and large did NOT, no matter what the film said |
"Recovery" may or may not include assistance from mental health programs | In the case of survivors in the Vermont Longitudinal Study in 1987, for a goodly number it was in spite of what services the "system" provided |
Recovery is a process | It involves learning to live with complex and inexplicable phenomena [that many may call delusional], of freedom from unrealistic pressures to "get over" that phenomena within discrete time frame, and of being considered, cared for and loved as a fellow human being by others | Simple as that |
How much more difficult this is to achieve in a society and culture that does not value those souls who are not immediately responsive to time-motion-study lifestyles | So challenging to those who drive efficient bureaucrats to distraction with abstruse, and often unexplainable questions | In the long run, it may call for dramatic and complete changes in cultural attitudes and norms, not something so easy to implement when it isn't even discussed |
So...if you, the fashionably dressed mental health careerist can grasp this, then next time you wish to speak to someone -anyone, even one of your professional colleagues- about "Recovery" for people with living dramatic, even severe, cognitive / perceptual dissonance, then do so only after you actually drop your important paperwork and pre-occupation with meetings and give someone the time, energy and effort to sit with and actually get to know some of those persons who walk past you daily, but of whom you only know by diagnosis | Incidentially, it's a whole lot cheaper than funding the psycho-pharmeceutical companies, just takes longer to see results |
Now that would be a step toward recovery |
Some resources: Clifford Beers' A Mind That Found Itself, National Empowerment Center, MindFreedom, Mary Ellen Copeland's Self-help Strategies
Pix Credits: 1- Jan Horn, Sulaco; 2- pines and palms; 3- www.ne.jp/asahi/ stellar/scenes/finepix/ ¶ 07:55 1 comments
2004-06-16
TOO MUCH STUFF
pack rat fever | I've doubled the amount of physical storage space I rent, mostly to hold on to the old books and vinyl I've saved over the years | This is my shame | Not that I continue to keep things I don't regularly use, but that I have books locked away in storage and not enough room to keep them all on hand |
Say what you shall about the "paperless society" there really is no such thing, and there continue to be problematic aspects about it's implementation |
So I keep my books | Proudly | ¶ 09:48 0 comments
pack rat fever | I've doubled the amount of physical storage space I rent, mostly to hold on to the old books and vinyl I've saved over the years | This is my shame | Not that I continue to keep things I don't regularly use, but that I have books locked away in storage and not enough room to keep them all on hand |
Say what you shall about the "paperless society" there really is no such thing, and there continue to be problematic aspects about it's implementation |
So I keep my books | Proudly | ¶ 09:48 0 comments
SURVEILLANCE || 21st CENTURL FEUDALISM
Thanks to Liz Michaels for the following |
Show me your Papers! | Food for thought | Not sure I agree with the sentiments expressed on the back of this guy's shirt [see pix on left] But it give's one pause |
I'm no pacifist, mind you | And I know I've been in conversations where others -in frustration- have expressed extreme sentiments | But this approach doesn't seem, to me, ultimately, to work | We still have to figure out solutions together |
Maybe Ann Coulter finds this the proper approach to life [at least in the way she'd advocate changing her opponent's minds] But she's a hateful coward whom I strongly doubt has any interest or inclination to person the front lines herself [I'd sa "man" the front lines, but though I believe she has cujones.... ah, I just don't want to quibble on the fine points]
But obstreperous pundits is not the point here | The pix was posted to a group as a response to another poster's frustration about [and suspicion of] an increased obsession with everyone having ID cards | Itself a scary phenom |
For the next step is some supercilious bureaucrat asking [and expecting automatic compliance] to the question "May I see your papers?" and [...increased agitation on the official's part] "Give me your papers, creep! or you are under arrest!"
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
Thanks to Liz Michaels for the following |
Show me your Papers! | Food for thought | Not sure I agree with the sentiments expressed on the back of this guy's shirt [see pix on left] But it give's one pause |
I'm no pacifist, mind you | And I know I've been in conversations where others -in frustration- have expressed extreme sentiments | But this approach doesn't seem, to me, ultimately, to work | We still have to figure out solutions together |
Maybe Ann Coulter finds this the proper approach to life [at least in the way she'd advocate changing her opponent's minds] But she's a hateful coward whom I strongly doubt has any interest or inclination to person the front lines herself [I'd sa "man" the front lines, but though I believe she has cujones.... ah, I just don't want to quibble on the fine points]
But obstreperous pundits is not the point here | The pix was posted to a group as a response to another poster's frustration about [and suspicion of] an increased obsession with everyone having ID cards | Itself a scary phenom |
For the next step is some supercilious bureaucrat asking [and expecting automatic compliance] to the question "May I see your papers?" and [...increased agitation on the official's part] "Give me your papers, creep! or you are under arrest!"
Officer Dove's Brown Shirt | pix credit: papersplease.org | © 2004 --^
¶ 00:08 0 comments
2004-06-14
IRAQ QUAGMIRE
Chicken Hawks | Those brave men and women who, though completely lacking persnal experience themselves, fiercely advocate going to war, as long as somebody else is getting shot at | From the New Hampshire Gazette, who encourages others to write in with other documentable militaristic cowards and hypocrites |
¶ 00:08 0 comments
Chicken Hawks | Those brave men and women who, though completely lacking persnal experience themselves, fiercely advocate going to war, as long as somebody else is getting shot at | From the New Hampshire Gazette, who encourages others to write in with other documentable militaristic cowards and hypocrites |
¶ 00:08 0 comments
2004-06-13
LIFE AS A VISUAL ARTIST || TRAVEL/MONTREAL
Montreal redux | The copywriters at some ad agency had fun dong this advert for McDonald's | The larger mural on the wall has been there at least two years [as I recall] though without the catchy rabbit-toothed mouth on the billboard beneath it |
We walked a lot during the trip, nothing new, we usually do that | Went west along Sherbrooke | Saw a store with skimpy underwear going for $100/usd [the clerks were very friendly, but wouldn't you be if somebody bought skivvies from you at that price?], then over to the Bourse, Victoria Square to Old Montreal and back to the Hotel Governeur Place DuPuis |
At some point, we traveled along Rue Ste Cathrine, where I caught these two t-shirts next to one another | Though I snapped the pix, the storekeep, [swarthy, mustachieod, middle eastern] came rushing outfront yelling "copyright! copyright!" though I was more interested in the image for the unexpected juxtaposition | Besides, we got the picture anyway | Afterwards, I wondered if maybe he was concerned about having the marijuana bong in the window photographed | I suppose I'll never know |
¶ 23:20 0 comments
Montreal redux | The copywriters at some ad agency had fun dong this advert for McDonald's | The larger mural on the wall has been there at least two years [as I recall] though without the catchy rabbit-toothed mouth on the billboard beneath it |
We walked a lot during the trip, nothing new, we usually do that | Went west along Sherbrooke | Saw a store with skimpy underwear going for $100/usd [the clerks were very friendly, but wouldn't you be if somebody bought skivvies from you at that price?], then over to the Bourse, Victoria Square to Old Montreal and back to the Hotel Governeur Place DuPuis |
At some point, we traveled along Rue Ste Cathrine, where I caught these two t-shirts next to one another | Though I snapped the pix, the storekeep, [swarthy, mustachieod, middle eastern] came rushing outfront yelling "copyright! copyright!" though I was more interested in the image for the unexpected juxtaposition | Besides, we got the picture anyway | Afterwards, I wondered if maybe he was concerned about having the marijuana bong in the window photographed | I suppose I'll never know |
¶ 23:20 0 comments
NON-TRADITONAL FAMILIES
gay wedding bell blues? | Now New York State comes out saying bans on same-sex marriages are unconstitutional | Matter of time, I suppose | Miscegination laws can only remain in effect for so long | The link is to a Reuters wire story | ¶ 23:09 0 comments
gay wedding bell blues? | Now New York State comes out saying bans on same-sex marriages are unconstitutional | Matter of time, I suppose | Miscegination laws can only remain in effect for so long | The link is to a Reuters wire story | ¶ 23:09 0 comments
ARCHEOLOGY || ANCIENT CULTURES || TECHNOLOGY
The Archeologist is a finds | No it isn't the X-Files telling you about ET coming to a terraced plateau in the Amazon jungle | But Clark Erickson is no typical archaeologist, and that's who has been making large strides in his fieldwork about the cultures that were there long before Columbus and Pizzaro came to claim the western hemisphere for the Pope and other 15th and 16th Century EuroTrash |
Using tools perhaps unfamiliar to fellow earth diggers, Erickson analyzes aerial photo maps for signs of habitation | The results, combined with actual on-site fieldwork has him coming to unusual conclusions about the Amazon Basin | Namely, he has come to believe that much of the Bolivian Amazon basin was terraformed two as long ago as 100 BC and cultivated to maybe 1100 A.D. | Would put a crimp in the Euro theories about noble savages and the like |
Me, I don't know what to think about this, though I have long believed it's modern man's increidble egotism [and lack of long range thinkng] that has us trained to first believe that the 20th and 21st centuries are the only times in human history that have engaged in complex technological feats |
Leaving aside the popular (and uncertain scientic methods of Eric von Daniken) this is in synch with the thoughts of others as well | Online, the folks at the Daily Grail spend much time theorizing on this very premise | A recent edition of New Scientist looks at jewelery made in 6th century China, noting they were made in a manner that required complex tooling machinery | Maybe the insturments were not powered by petrol products, but there certainly could have been technologically sophisticated machines much earlier than that to which we are now accustomed |
Ancient engineers could very well have built for humankind many such treasures, only to be lost because of the failure of foresight by the leaders of past ages [how little we have changed, eh?] | This said, I'm culling what I can from the internet, just so I can show it to my Shaman friend, Gerry Miller, who facilitates Tours through the Amazon to get his thoughts on the subject | ¶ 00:31 0 comments
pix credit: University of Pennsylvania News
The Archeologist is a finds | No it isn't the X-Files telling you about ET coming to a terraced plateau in the Amazon jungle | But Clark Erickson is no typical archaeologist, and that's who has been making large strides in his fieldwork about the cultures that were there long before Columbus and Pizzaro came to claim the western hemisphere for the Pope and other 15th and 16th Century EuroTrash |
Using tools perhaps unfamiliar to fellow earth diggers, Erickson analyzes aerial photo maps for signs of habitation | The results, combined with actual on-site fieldwork has him coming to unusual conclusions about the Amazon Basin | Namely, he has come to believe that much of the Bolivian Amazon basin was terraformed two as long ago as 100 BC and cultivated to maybe 1100 A.D. | Would put a crimp in the Euro theories about noble savages and the like |
Me, I don't know what to think about this, though I have long believed it's modern man's increidble egotism [and lack of long range thinkng] that has us trained to first believe that the 20th and 21st centuries are the only times in human history that have engaged in complex technological feats |
Leaving aside the popular (and uncertain scientic methods of Eric von Daniken) this is in synch with the thoughts of others as well | Online, the folks at the Daily Grail spend much time theorizing on this very premise | A recent edition of New Scientist looks at jewelery made in 6th century China, noting they were made in a manner that required complex tooling machinery | Maybe the insturments were not powered by petrol products, but there certainly could have been technologically sophisticated machines much earlier than that to which we are now accustomed |
Ancient engineers could very well have built for humankind many such treasures, only to be lost because of the failure of foresight by the leaders of past ages [how little we have changed, eh?] | This said, I'm culling what I can from the internet, just so I can show it to my Shaman friend, Gerry Miller, who facilitates Tours through the Amazon to get his thoughts on the subject | ¶ 00:31 0 comments
