A few years back, I had a contracting job in downtown Minneapolis – which was, as it happens, a long-time wanna-have of mine.  I’ve always loved the hustle and thrum of downtown Minneapolis, and after my harrowing year of gross underemployment in 2003, it felt good to not only get back into working, but get back into it in a place that throbbed with energy.

And one of my favorite places in the city, especially for lunch-hour decompression while working a fairly tense set of projects, was Peavey Plaza – a sunken water-garden down in the teens on Nicollet Mall.  The Plaza features concerts and street fairs for most of the summer and, almost better, is a relatively placid oasis in the middle of Minneapolis’ throbbing financial district the rest of the time (frequent approaches by bums and panhandlers notwithstanding).

Rumors for years have held that the Plaza was in danger – so, on the one hand, it’s good to hear that people are taking note…:

The sunken-plaza park, on the Nicollet Mall between 11th and 12th streets, was named one of the “Ten Most Endangered Historic Places” by the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota earlier this year.

…and, on the other hand, disconcerting to hear the kind of note being taken:

Now, it’s been included on the list of 12 modern landscapes — “Marvels of Modernism” — that are in danger of being lost, as selected by the Cultural Landscape Foundation.

Ugh.

Oh, well.   “Modernist” label aside – I favor excising much “modernism” from our cities, and especially indiscriminate carpet-bombing of all Bauhaus architecture – I’m rooting for the Plaza.  Every little bit helps.

We text, email, phone and make purchases in an ever inter-connected world. As our point of accessing the internet has shifted from stationary PC’s to smaller and more mobile devices, The Matrix is matching what we are looking for with where we are at the time and rending the data in the new world of Collective Intelligence, the term now emerging to describe the data trail we all leave behind, knowingly, willingly, or not.

Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize.

…and the result? A plebe in the White House, but I digress.

Wireless and internet technologies afford consumers and businesses unprecedented freedom and productivity in the age of the Matrix. What are the consequences? Is it a fair trade?

But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.

Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology. “There are so many uses for this technology — from marketing to war fighting — that I can’t imagine it not pervading our lives in just the next few years,” says Steve Steinberg, a computer scientist who works for an investment firm in New York.

Alas, I know of few that would give up their Blackberry, the aforementioned President-Elect counted among them.

In the balance, the benefits will hopefully outweigh the perils. Some will be more obvious than others.

Assisting policymakers…

a few weeks ago, Google deployed an early-warning service for spotting flu trends, based on search queries for flu-related symptoms.

Day traders…

It could see, for example, that people who worked in the city’s financial district would tend to go to work early when the market was booming, but later when it was down.

It also noticed that middle-income people — as determined by ZIP code data — tended to order cabs more often just before market downturns.

…and bar hoppers.

The consumer application, Citysense, identifies entertainment hot spots in a city. It connects information from Yelp and Google about nightclubs and music clubs with data generated by tracking locations of anonymous cellphone users.

Moving forward into the past?

“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”

Like it or not, with the advent of an ever-growing array of sensory technologies, it will become difficult if not impossible to avoid the grasp of The Matrix.

Red, writing about her nephew:

Cashel and the three kids were playing down the hall and we could hear some ruckus going on. Justin went to check, came back and said, “It’s fine. They’re just playing Somali Pirates.”

2008 Grants Recipients Artist Initiative

Media arts

Number of grants: 12
Total dollars granted: $59,000

Mauricio Arango, Saint Paul
$5,000 — to produce a video essay dealing with the lives of the inhabitants of the town of San Jose de Apartado in northern Colombia…so I don’t have to get a job.

Peter B. Becker Nelson, Minneapolis
$6,000 — to purchase video equipment and create a new video work that explores themes of relationships, empathy, sexuality, and gender…so I don’t have to get a job.

Paul R. Danhauser, Minneapolis
$5,200 — for a two-dimensional animated short film called “Bitter and Crabby” that deals with cute cartoon characters who are confronted by real-world morality…so I don’t have to get a job.

Amber Ellison Walker, Minneapolis
$2,000 — to increase the post-production quality of her video work and the overall quality of her publicity materials, and to have her work seen by a broader audience…so she doesn’t have to get a job.

Timothy A. Fort, Inver Grove Heights
$6,000 — for the creation of a professional broadcast-quality video of his kinetic art for Internet and television distribution…so he doesn’t have to get a job.

Nathaniel H. Freeman, Minneapolis
$6,000 — for a sixteen-stage video installation that shows the opening scene of sixteen imagined narratives, all informed by the people and events of his northeast Minneapolis neighborhood…so they don’t have to get a job.

Heather R. Johnson, Minneapolis
$5,000 — for a documentary film, titled, “No Ugly Trees,” that explores women’s body and self-esteem issues…so I don’t have to get a job.

Daniel J. Lundquist, Bloomington
$5,000 — for creative time to finish hand coloring “Boris,” an animation about overcoming difficult circumstances to live a happy life…so I don’t have to get a job.

Kevin S. McKeever, Saint Paul
$800 — to produce duplicates of his documentary that examines one man’s success in helping inner-city youths rise above crime and violence, prepare and produce related publicity packets, and submit the film to festivals…so he doesn’t have to get a job.

Pamela Nice, Saint Paul
$6,000 — for funds to help film interviews in Twin Cities coffeehouses for her next documentary, “Desert in the Coffeehouse,” a film that asks what Minnesotans know about Arab and Muslim lives…so I don’t have to get a job in a coffeehouse.

James M. Vogel, Minneapolis
$6,000 — for funds to film an observational documentary about drug abuse…so I don’t have to get a job and actually pass a drug test.

Rosemary T. Williams, Saint Paul
$6,000 — to film the documentary “Futures,” which will document open call trading at the last few North American exchanges that have not switched to digital trading…so I don’t have to get an analog job in a digital world.

BACKGROUND:  Oops.  I thought I’d posted this on Friday.  I apparently did not.  And since this piece is intended to mock the story behind this post, it’s probably only fair that I actually post this, and pronto.  I apologize for any confusion, stress or altered worldviews due to this mixup on my staff’s part). 

———-

There are plenty of conservatives who scoff at the idea of art as a noble goal in and of itself – at the notion that art can be something other than decoration or background music.

I’m not one of them.

But I’ll say this; when art becomes a creature of subsidy – a hothouse flower that can only exist when the government foots the bill – then it’s dead.

Sisyphus at Nihilist in Golf Pants details the “winners” of Minnesota State Arts board subsidies – grants from a couple of hundred bucks up to $6,000.

There are the usual predictable howlers:

Peter B. Becker Nelson, Minneapolis
$6,000 — to purchase video equipment and create a new video work that explores themes of relationships, empathy, sexuality, and gender

Wonderful. The taxpayers of Minnesota are buying this guy video equipment to explore themes of relationships, empathy, sexuality, and gender – themes that would never be artistically explored without our tax dollars. Once Mr. Nelson is done with that, perhaps he will do a video version of his mustache series (a previous work where he drew mustaches on photographs of people).

…

John S. Jodzio, Minneapolis
$5,700 — to finish his short story collection, If You Lived Here, You’d Already Be Home
Finally, someone has written a short story collection based on the popular apartment rental sign!

Now, I’m not one of those guys who’s going to mock an “artist” for producing something that reeks of smug self-indulgence – art often reflects the artists, and an awful lot of artists are smug and self-indulgent, and that’s just fine.

And I’m not one of those people who thinks art needs to be “accessible”.

I do think, however, that art benefits greatly from the struggle to create it. And judging by the almost uniformly dismal quality of the “art” produced on the public nickel…:

Arlene Atwater, Duluth
$3,000 — for time to polish two new short stories, record them in her own voice on MP3 files embracing the new literary dimension of voice-only literature, and submit them to boundoff.com and Write On Radio, KFAI

…much of what we’re funding could use a little struggle.

The goal of art isn’t necessarily to last forever – but why do I suspect the “art” we’re funding has a shorter-than-average shelf-life?

As I noted the earlier in a piece I thought I’d posted Friday, but did not, Sisyphus at Nihilist In Golf Pants commented on the State Arts Board’s grants of taxpayer money to “promising” “Minnesota” artists and their art. 

Now, for years I’ve said that conservatives need to get engaged in the world of the arts; to stop ceding this utterly important aspect of the human condition to the grant-pimps, the pseudoacademic weenies – the left.  Conservatives need to make their presences felt in literature, music, theatre, film, multi-media, comedy (albeit I think we can, and must, continue to cede dance to the left, since I have no idea how to take a conservative swipe at that particular medium.  I’m open to suggestions). 

In this spirit, Sisyphus takes a game swat at proposing his own grant applications (and, it seems, granting them, if only fictionally):

1. $3,000 to purchase extra large glass basin and cases of light beer for composition of art work in which an entire year’s worth of Nick Coleman columns are submerged in the collective artists’ urine.

Sisyphus makes a fantastic effort at getting the ball rolling.  But we need to build on this to achieve more.

So here’s your assignment:  Read the State Arts Board’s list of grants.  And fill in your own applications in the comment section.  We’ll be taking applications for

• Music
• Photography
• Media arts/new media
• Poetry
• Prose
• Dance,
• Theater
• Two- and three-dimensional visual arts

Take your best shot.  The best?  Well, maybe we’ll just forward them to the SAB and see what happens. 

You never know.

The cause of our current financial system crisis, overarching government meddling and regulation, set in place by liberals, bolstered by the Clinton Administration and allowed to remain during the Bush Administration is not going away any time soon.

The Community Reinvestment Act is to blame for the financial crisis, but it so powerfully serves Democrats’ interests that they’ll do anything to protect it — including revising history.

But powerful Democrats in Washington want to protect the act — along with Fannie and Freddie — and spin the subprime scandal as the result of too little regulation, not too much.

“Repealing or weakening the CRA would be a mistake,” warns Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who argues that the CRA should be strengthened.

Dodd, the top recipient of Fannie donations and himself a beneficiary of a sweetheart mortgage brokered by a subprime lender, recently invited one of Clinton’s top enforcers of the CRA to testify.

Read the whole article for the facts.

Liberal Democrats caused this crisis, Liberal Republicans allowed it to remain, and the American people rewarded them by voting in an ever larger number of liberal politicians without the tools or the wherewithal to bring us out of this crisis. As usual, those that are responsible, productive and truly conservative will pay the price, and ultimately come to the rescue of our economy.

One of the more frustrating aspects of the Columbine shooting was the reports that the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department SWAT team waited for four hours before entering the school. They were worried about bombs; the police’s SOPs said, essentially, that it was better to leave the students and staff inside the building on their own than to risk police lives to a potential bomb threat.

It doesn’t impugn the courage of any officer, or the integrity of the Jeffco SD, to say that when in doubt, police procedure left the citizen on his or her own – but I can’t imagine the frustration and horror that the parents outside must have felt, as the hours ticked by, knowing their kids were inside the building, not knowing if they were alive or dead but knowing that there were a whole lot of cops in battle rattle waiting in the assembly area not rushing in to save them.

Of course the horrific toll among New York’s first responders on 9/11 showed that astounding bravery is a common trait among American cops and firefighters. When the “standard operating procedure” is to go in and do what they’ve been trained to do, the police, fire, paramedics and other first responders in the US – and, I suspect, most of the world – step up and do the job.

———-

But when I saw reports like this one from Mumbai – that the Mumbai police froze under fire from the terrorists during last week’s terror attacks – I thought about a couple of lessons that smart people learned from the wave of mass shootings in the US, among other places.

1. You can not count on the police to save you from even petty street crime, much less this sort of systematic assault.
2. When you leave both raw courage and standard procedure out of the equation, remember – the police aren’t soldiers. They are trained to uphold the law; to maintain control of situations where they generally have the advantage. Police do not train to fight pitched firefights against disciplined, motivated, military attackers – not even the SWAT teams.
3. The only places on earth that are truly remotely safe from this sort of assault are the places where terrorists know that death (to them) doesn’t necessarily wear a uniform and drive in a plainly-identifiable car; places where the civilian population aren’t soft targets, like sheep in a pen. Nearly every mass-shooting in the United States in recent years has happened in places where the civilian isn’t allowed to have the means to self-defense at hand; schools, malls that are posted “no guns“, New York subways, colleges that are “gun-free zones” and the like.

Indians – individual Indians, anyway – seem to be learning all of these lessons; Sebastian D’Souza, the photographer who got so many portfolio-worthy shots of the gunmen as they carried out their mayhem, famously wrote:

The gunmen were terrifyingly professional, making sure at least one of them was able to fire their rifle while the other reloaded. By the time he managed to capture the killer on camera, Mr D’Souza had already seen two gunmen calmly stroll across the station concourse shooting both civilians and policemen, many of whom, he said, were armed but did not fire back. “I first saw the gunmen outside the station,” Mr D’Souza said. “With their rucksacks and Western clothes they looked like backpackers, not terrorists, but they were very heavily armed and clearly knew how to use their rifles…

…

The militants returned inside the station and headed towards a rear exit towards Chowpatty Beach. Mr D’Souza added: “I told some policemen the gunmen had moved towards the rear of the station but they refused to follow them. What is the point if having policemen with guns if they refuse to use them? I only wish I had a gun rather than a camera.”

Mumbaiian blogger Amitabh Bachchan’s post on his reaction to the attack has been getting a lot of attention (emphases added); like a lot of Americans when faced with this sort of unreasoning malice, he’s taken a sensible precaution and drawn a metaphorical line in Mumbai’s beach sand:

My pain has been the sight and plight of my innocent and vulnerable and completely insecure countrymen, facing the wrath of this terror attack. And my anger has been at the ineptitude of the authorities that have been ordained to look after us. I have simply loved and endorsed the sentiments expressed by one of those that came on for comments on the Arnab reportage, Suhel Seth. They were strong, precise and most apt. And of course I have had the greatest pride in those from the forces that have and continue to fight for our freedom. Brilliant officers and police personnel have laid down their lives for us. I can only but salute them and respect their sincerity in the call of duty.

The response needs to be much more than symbolic:

I have been at the receiving end of a million calls and an equal number of sms’s the whole day to come live on TV or on the print media to express my views on the current situation and am being lured by words such as ’we need you to speak to express solidarity and for the people to maintain their calm’.

This is disgusting !! I will NOT do that. TELL ME AND ORDER ME INSTEAD THAT WE REQUIRE FOR EVERY INDIAN TO GET UP AND WALK INTO THE FACILITIES WHERE THE ACTION IS ON AND I WILL BE THE FIRST TO WALK. But, please do not ask me to come and make sloppy statements that will do nothing more than create viewer interest in said particular channel ! I respect what the media is doing in serving the nation with its continuous information bulletins and I admire the brave and diligent manner in which they have devoted themselves to the cause. But what they expect me do I find against my ethics and want to be excused from it…

…As an Indian, I need to live in my own land, on my own soil with dignity and without fear. And I need an assurance on that.

And at the end of the day, one person is responsible for that assurance:

I am ashamed to say this and not afraid to share this now with the rest of the cyber world, that last night, as the events of the terror attack unfolded in front of me I did something for the first time and one that I had hoped never ever to be in a situation to do.

Before retiring for the night, I pulled out my licensed .32 revolver, loaded it and put it under my pillow. For a very disturbed sleep.

The responses in his comment section and the Indian (and other) media have been the sort of thing that any American Second-Amendment activist is well used to hearing. Bachchan responded in a way that’d do any of us proud:

The act of pulling out my revolver is a symbolic metaphor, a figure of speech, to demonstrate my complete loss in faith in the system and in the governance, in providing me, a citizen of India, with my rightful sense of security. It is to demonstrate that now I shall have to personally look after my family and myself and not depend on the state. A state that is just so miserably incapable of protecting its citizens…

…For too long we have remained the servile submissive nation. There has been no strong adjective to describe our character.

I’d love to interview Mr. Bachchan on the NARN one of these weekends.

The lessons should be obvious:

1. Every citizen in a truly free society should have not only the right, but the means to ensure their own security.
2. Indeed, it should be considered a duty, alongside voting and jury duty, for every citizen in a free society to be competent, equipped and capable of defending him/herself and his/her family from whatever disorder threatens them.
3. No society that infringes those rights and responsibilities is really “free”, other than the “freedom” the coop of chickens enjoys as long as someone else keeps those foxes away.

Citizens in any “free society” should be a pack, not a herd or flock.

(Via Collins)

I was listening to Keri Miller’s “Midmorning” show on MPR last Friday. In the second hour, she was interviewing some sixties’ folk-scene retread (the program archive seems to have left the hour blank).

Miller asked – with a face that sounded straight (I’m paraphrasing very closely): “Now that Obama has been elected president, do you think American people are ready for the sacrifices he asked of them?”

I almost swerved into an oncoming car.

“WHAT SACRIFICES did he “ask” of the American people?” I yelled at the radio, not quite remembering that I didn’t have a mike in front of me. “When did Obama talk about sacrifice? He couldn’t even articulate the sacrifices he was going to “ask” the American people in the debates, for crying out loud? Five’ll getcha ten the typical Obama voter is thinking “Yippee! My mortgage and gas will get paid!”

Seirously – what “sacrifices” did The One “ask” of anyone?

There’s a genuine economic crisis out there.  I’ve lived through enough of them (barely, in a few cases) to know not to be excessively dismissive or sanguine about ’em; but for the grace of God, most of us are a couple of bad executive decisions or market breaks away from the unemployment line. 

And yet for all the media’s carping about the dismal state of the economy, “Black Friday” sales were up three percent from last year – a complete turnabout on the media’s pre-Thanksgiving drumbeat, which called for big drops in sales on the nation’s biggest shopping day.

John at Powerline has a theory about the media’s reflexive bleakness (emphasis added):

The financial crisis is real, and we are most likely in a recession. But the hysterical terms in which the economy is discussed are unwarranted and unhelpful. They are also, I think, politically motivated. Reporters and editors like the idea of a looming depression (or, failing that, an unusually severe recession) for a number of reasons. If it happens, it will be taken as refutation of the relatively conservative consensus that has influenced government policies since the early 1980s–a consensus under which a great many people have flourished, but not, notably, reporters and editors. And if it doesn’t happen, they will give the credit to Barack Obama and the more-liberal policies they expect from his administration. So for the left, hysteria over the economy is a win-win proposition. Not so for the rest of us.

Not to mention that it sells papers; hysteria gets people tuned in and/or buying those papers.

Or so the theory goes.

Oh, yeah – read the whole thing, naturally.

Michael Yon on the story of the year that the Mainstream Media will not report – Dthe outbreak of peace in Iraq:

When the war was on full-steam there was so much to report that it was impossible to keep track.  And now that peace is breaking out, it’s equally impossible to keep track of all the progress.  There’s still focus on the attacks, most of which are directed against Iraqis, not us.  And so this “mission” was more like an armed errand to remove some concrete barriers between neighborhoods.  

Naturally, read the whole – long – thing.