white fright

Huffington Post contributor, John Ridley, offered a funny, provocative piece the other day, "The unbearable whiteness of anti-intellectualism."  Despite the economic down-turn, the honey-pot for exploiting the fears of white people is bottomless and apparently no limits either to the credibility of distractions.  Stoking such irrational fears sells fall-out shelters, pharmaceuticals and newspapers, as well as financing wars and political campaigns.  The spate of shock-and-awe US headlines are endless: political indiscretions of a teen-age witch, mad-hatter's tea party, chimera influenza, rubbish-bins that snitch if one does not recycle, and don't forget the bed-bugs, roving terror threats and vague warnings never to be off-guard.   I am sure it is not a phenomena peculiar to Americans but I do believe that they have elevated the art form. 

Meanwhile, more pressing, tangible and less phobic concerns are ignored, like the American government trying to hide the true scope of its indebtedness like a guest on a day-time talk show that's appealing to this same fear base, or sacrificing one's privacy in the name of someone else's estimation of security, and abusing the natural environment.  Scare-mongering is not a helpful tactic, and rather a race to the bottom that appeals to and enhances those latent feelings of panic that exacerbates small differences.  

l'ecran magique

Available from Headcase, purveyors of many things weird and wonderful, is this iPad sleeve in the form of a classic Etch-A-Sketch, which was originally a French invention which had its premiere at the International Nürnberg Toy Fair in 1959.  This is pretty cool and is a perfect match, although a violent shaking is probably not to be recommended.

aqua teen hunger force

Comparisons of genetically modified organisms to Dr. Frankenstein is a bit of an insult, since he did not go to mad scientist school for all those years to be called Mr. Frankenstein, and he reanimated a human cadaver, not a vegetable or a fish, and he brought his monster to life without gene manipulation nonsense. There is a debate over the American Food and Drug Administration's being poised to endorse the sale of genetically altered salmon as fit for aquaculture and fit for human consumption. This move seems very ill advised--to dabble with Mother Nature--especially at the behest of business people and fisher-folk. Animal husbandry has taken thousands of years of selective breeding to produce contemporary livestock and stabbing straight to an animal's DNA is a big presumption.  Europe is right to proceed with extreme caution and skepticism on this front.  There is a significant portion of any creature's genetic code that researchers have dismissed as redundant or hitchhiking, and tinkering with the chemicals that give this salmon the ability to mature faster may mean that its shelf-life is severely reduced, prone to food poisoning, or that its immune system is not so hardy. The gene responsible for fast growth could compromise safety by making venomous fish or hyper-intelligent fish who are more vocal about being eaten. And what if these GM salmon interbreed with natural populations? Salmon may lose their ability to navigate fresh- and salt-waters, the wild populations could get sick, or things could turn out like the Secret of NIMH.

meme

As thousands of Germans are choosing to opt out of Google’s roving eye, though it does not seem as dystopic as some mad, fascist Orwellian world-view, there are some concomitant actions in Germany and the European Union that are taking a circumspect and long view at the virtual frontier.
Ahead of a summit on data protection and consumer rights, politicians are calling for means, no self-regulated and left to the industry, to cover one’s internet tracks, especially those footprints left unintentionally and exploited by marketers or in digital photographs that record one’s location and that has a persistence of memory on the web. Surely, such government safeguards cannot satisfy everyone, and some argue that governmental efforts would be better spent on protecting consumers from disreputable internet service providers and other underwriters of fraud, but it is an excellent example of government predicting and adapting to technology, rather than reacting to it within an insufficient legal framework. Furthermore, the crowning achievement, at least in prospective circulation, comes from a working group in Strasbourg in the form of an “internet treaty,” similar to the line in the sand drawn with international cooperation over the ownership of the Antarctic or outer space.

This proposal aims to keep the internet globally open and neutral, curbing government influence over content or allowing deals that would make the internet two-tiered, given speed and preference to paid, premium content. This seems especially important as US, Canadian and other governments seek to assert regulatory control, censor and spoon-feed back to the world public what it already has created, sometimes out of desperation to cut deals in favour of big business or to realize and retain more tax revenues from internet activities.