From The Real-Life ‘24’ of Summer 2008 by Frank Rich:

We know what a criminal White House looks like from “The Final Days,” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s classic account of Richard Nixon’s unraveling. The cauldron of lies, paranoia and illegal surveillance boiled over, until it was finally every man for himself as desperate courtiers scrambled to save their reputations and, in a few patriotic instances, their country…

(dark comedy about Nixon’s confidantes waiting for him to be taken down but Bush’s going straight to press)

…Nixon parallels take us only so far, however. “The Dark Side” is scarier than “The Final Days” because these final days aren’t over yet and because the stakes are much higher. Watergate was all about a paranoid president’s narcissistic determination to cling to power at any cost. In Ms. Mayer’s portrayal of the Bush White House, the president is a secondary, even passive, figure, and the motives invoked by Mr. Cheney to restore Nixon-style executive powers are theoretically selfless. Possessed by the ticking-bomb scenarios of television’s “24,” all they want to do is protect America from further terrorist strikes.

So what if they cut corners, the administration’s last defenders argue. While prissy lawyers insist on habeas corpus and court-issued wiretap warrants, the rest of us are being kept safe by the Cheney posse.

(cue spooky music and exit to strains of torture, lies and the destruction of our nation’s moral compass)

The photo is Trapped by Lincolnian and is part of his Abstracts set. I liked the old postboxes too.

I think it’s pretty critical that the future have jellyfish airships.

You can also click to YouTube to watch in high quality.

Thanks Dr. Fong!

(and J.B.S. Haldane)

Through Wired I learned of Trevor Paglen and his photography of “black satellites”. Paglen has an exhibit at UC-Berkley, where they explain something about him:

Paglen’s nearly constant subject is the “black world” of the United States government, and through research and visualization he attempts to outline the edges and folds of this hidden world of military and intelligence activities. Whether photographing secret military bases from fifty miles away, or imaging spy satellites in the heavens from earth, Paglen’s photographs embody the limits of visibility, imposed both by the realities of physical distance and by informational obfuscation, that keep us as citizens from seeing and knowing these subjects on our own.

If you head over to paglen.com you can see all kinds of Things That Maybe Should Not Be Seen including code names, limit telephotography and his book I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Black World and an interview with Paglen from The Colbert Report. There’s also a link to a New York Times review of his book that includes a slideshow of the patches. Here’s a couple excerpts:

…The classified budget of the Defense Department, concealed from the public in all but outline, has nearly doubled in the Bush years, to $32 billion. That is more than the combined budgets of the Food and Drug Administration, the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

…“Oderint Dum Metuant,” reads a patch for an Air Force program that mines spy satellite images for battlefield intelligence, according to Mr. Paglen, who identifies the saying as from Caligula, the first-century Roman emperor famed for his depravity. It translates “Let them hate so long as they fear.”

…What sparked his interest, Mr. Paglen recalled, were Vice President Dick Cheney’s remarks as the Pentagon and World Trade Center smoldered. On “Meet the Press,” he said the nation would engage its “dark side” to find the attackers and justice. “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows,” Mr. Cheney said. “It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

Huge black budgets, US military units taking their mottos from one of the most terrifying figures in history and a growing shadow government … not the cheeriest things to contemplate.

Well, this is just goofy:

Sleeveface.com defines sleevefacing as one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion.

Flickr is apparently not entirely unaware of Sleevefacing, as the LP Portraits group, Sleevefacing group and Flickr sleeveface slideshow demonstrate. 

The photo is all of me by unsure shot, and she’s definitely brought out a new side of Willie!

It’s part of her Sampler set … though I’m kind of partial to the Matchbox Pinhole collection.

Lifehacker dished a link to this Talk of the Nation feature How to Be a Productive Procrastinator with and Dr. Timothy A. Pychyl of the Department of Psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and author of the blog Don’t Delay at Psychology Today and “structured procrastinator” John Perry who claims to have discovered a way to “convert procrastinators into effective human beings” and uses their bad habit. He writes:

…The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.

Dr. Pychyl has some thoughts about this. I think that I have begun to grope towards doing something similar. My work in webdesign/new media/marketing/blogging/Michigan obsessing/whatever the heck it is that I do for a living seems to rely on an awful lot of tasks. These all seem to be able to bleed time from things I mentally classify as more important. 

Perry some pretty funny (and insightful) essays that I read while procrastinating on a number of other more urgent tasks like A Plea for the Horizontally Organized and Laptops and Lab Manuals.

The photo is Goodbye, Cubicle Land by pairadocs, who is apparently saying goodbye to cubicle land on Monday. His blog says he’s cleverly disguised as an adult. I don’t know about that but he does build a mean model.

I’m gonna procrastinate celebrate Nature Photography Day now.

blah, blah, blah, blah, this.

It’s all very terrible and wrong and what about generations unborn … and then I wonder: is it so terribly wrong to want (and take) more than you can afford?

The photo is The birds and the fleece by Kevin Steele. You should go get more of Kevin Steele.

The ties that bind:

1. Google for “google calendar palm pilot“.
2. See that the writer is a Michigan resident.
3. Find “Iraq Withdrawal Date: 12,800” (by Election08 and the Public Service Administration) in one of his posts where he wrote:

Lessig points out, this is “the beauty of political remix“

Last week I read A feature in Wired that after some who-said-what video about McCain staff apparently violating 527 group rules explained that:

The video footage came courtesy of the Democratic National Committee, which late last year launched a project called FlipperTV. The project collects amateur video footage from campaign events as they unfold and makes it available to everyone on the internet to browse through and to edit for themselves.

The idea, according to the DNC at the time, was to “allow activists and voters to download video to their computers, edit it to create new user-generated video, and judge the candidates’ flip-flips and exaggerations for themselves.”

…David All, a Republican Web 2.0 media and communications consultant in Washington, DC, says that he first blogged about the idea of crowdsourcing online video footage long before the DNC launched its FlipperTV project …”It’s a common-sense crowdsourcing idea,” All said of the FlipperTV project. “It’s simple stuff you’d do on a modern campaign to contrast a candidate’s positions.”

How cool! Both major political parties working to create viral propaganda machines and even working with groups that exist solely to support or attack candidates. It’s like war, only on TV and the internet.

The 2008 elections are going to be something to watch, that’s for sure.

“And during the few moments that we have left, we want to talk right down to
earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand.”
~Malcolm “X” El Hajj Malik El Shabazz

dETROITfunk has reeled out a kickin post: Cult of Personality. I think you should check it out.

Video extra: Cult of Personality from Living Colour. I can’t embed that one, so here’s another:

myspace.com/livingcolourmusic

I was emailing someone to tell them not to worry when a big site like Flickr or YouTube loses a bunch of media, that despite the fact that those sites are massive and complex systems, there’s a lot of smart people there who spend all their time figuring out how the systems work and how to improve and fix them.

Then it struck me that 200 years ago, those very same “best & brightest” were working to discover the undiscovered and better understand the immensity of Creation.

Suddenly the comforting thought wasn’t all that comforting.

Time to get busy folks.

One of Michigan’s famous rabble-rousers, Michael Moore, says My Vote’s for Obama (if I could vote). He calls on Pennsylvanians to cast a vote on his behalf of a Michiganian who has been disenfranchised by the miscalculation of our state Democratic party and the intractability of the national party.

There are those who say Obama isn’t ready, or he’s voted wrong on this or that. But that’s looking at the trees and not the forest. What we are witnessing is not just a candidate but a profound, massive public movement for change. My endorsement is more for Obama The Movement than it is for Obama the candidate.

That is not to take anything away from this exceptional man. But what’s going on is bigger than him at this point, and that’s a good thing for the country. Because, when he wins in November, that Obama Movement is going to have to stay alert and active. Corporate America is not going to give up their hold on our government just because we say so. President Obama is going to need a nation of millions to stand behind him.

Michael’s words really echo my feelings about the whole process. Obama (like everyone) is far from perfect. I believe that he will, however, bring a change to the way Americans think about government and help us begin that long and difficult process of taking responsibility for the governance and future of our nation.

So please, Pennsylvania, cast a vote for Obama for me if you’re undecided … and while you’re at it, could you tell your 76ers to lighten up on my Pistons?

About the Photo: The photo is Barack Obama - Santa Fe Art District by seetwist. It’s part of his Free Art set and he seems to have made a vocation of documenting and preserving graffiti.