The World is Violently Unwell

Take one quick look at global news, and you'll see pretty quickly that London isn't the only area in the world right now going through some genuinely turbulent and floor-shaking insurrection. Rebellions, protests, demonstrations, revolts, and any number of other nouns most news agencies will ignore in place of the pejorative and dismissive "riot" are occurring on nearly every continent, much of it coming from a exceptionally disenfranchised youth culture who is appropriately, understandably, and justly upset with what has become of the market-driven neoliberal policies which have resulted roundly in failure, widespread cuts to vital infrastructural measures, and dizzying poverty and wealth-gaps. At this very moment, the ground underneath all of our feet feels particularly brittle and unsteady, not because of the threat of some kind of foreign "terrorism", but because of the domestic policies that have been in place collecting dust and quietly bringing ruin to our countries, our cities, our lives, hopes, and every single dream. While Tottenham's frustrations spread through London, Chile right now is undergoing a massive student-led movement involving a number of varied demonstrations--"Mass suicide by education" protests in which students scream and clamor before lying down in the street, "dead"; "passion for education" clusters in which whole streets are clogged by students kissing and making out; hunger strikes and more--in protest of the country's floundering educational system. What they're specifically seeking a plebiscitary process to increase the funding and the level of quality of the public schools, and ultimately that for which they're asking is a overhauling to the framework of the whole education system, including increased state participation in secondary education and a moratorium placed on educational profiteering. An August 11th poll demonstrated the an almost overwhelming 72% of the Chilean population approved of the student movement, a level of endorsement I believe you'd be hard-pressed to find in American polls if our frustrated students went ahead and engaged in the same insurgent behavior, which they have every good and solid reason to do. The Atlantic just put out a tremendous and elucidatory--and emotional--series of photos taken from the protests. They make your heart hurt. I'll drop a couple below but check out the whole lot of them; they're intensely visual. I firmly believe that we're, as a world, as a whole global populace, approaching a breaking point, a fiscal breaking point, a societal breaking point, a human breaking point. We are seriously in need of some kind of transportive, transformative succor or medication or resolve--something analgesic. People are frustrated and in pain; they're afraid and alone. They feel abandoned and ignored by the policymakers and the governments who have toyed with them for years as if those underneath them were made of this kind of superplastic material who could bend and twist and be pulled apart without eruption, and guaranteeing them their best interests were in mind. This has all been slowly fomenting, I'd say, for thirty or forty years. The world will change or people will make it change by bringing it to its knees; the world will listen or the people will rip its ears out. These aren't the first rebellions and, unfortunately, it's likely they won't be the last. Think of Spain's 15-M or the Arab Spring going on. These aren't capricious uprisings, but rather they come from an incredibly disgruntled society sick of political jargoneering and mealymouthed status quo-keeping charlatans and orators who differ from religious orders only in their uniforms or lack thereof. To be clear, what I don't mean to imply is a kind of logical, philosophical, or ideological concinnity or a similarly realized underpinning for each and all of these outbursts. They are occurring for their own bevy of reasons worthy of study and rational, unbiased attempts at understanding. What is similar, though, is the frustration, the hopelessness, and the anger, which is there, and which has been there for who knows how long, and which is manifesting itself through similar but different modes of rancorous expression, expression and rabid activity we would be wise not to write off as unjustified or nihilistic or greedy. For the record, most of the students seen in the pictures are covering their faces not to protect their identity but to keep them safely blocked-off from the toxic tear gas. All photos are credit to the Atlantic and Alan Taylor. The spirit of this social energy is captured in these photos and should be seen by as many people as possible. In one of the photographs, the grafitti-tagged words "Chile Lucras Con Todo" can be seen, what looks like, stencil-printed onto a building wall. Translation: Chile, you do everything for profit. Sound familiar? It should for a depressing and uncountable number of countries where suffocating systemic implementations have laid waste to entire groups and subsets of "nonessential" people, who neither provide much revenue for the country nor are they large enough for politicians to spend time pandering to. 

The Art of Science (And How Oil Kills)

Nick Bax's optical trap, a wound up laser beam able to hold microscopic particles stable in three dimensions.

Every year Princeton University holds its Art of Science awards, and MSNBC's Science and Technology department has posted some of the award-winning images, most if not all of which are pretty damn wondrous. The above image, Bax's laser beam, is in actuality a failure of what he was trying to do. He was attempting to get the beam to appear as round and cylindrical as possible, but what he wound up with was this gunmetal gray embossed, ripple-effected cardiod surrounded by molecular-life-looking silica beads. Failure has never looked so beautiful, so hopeful. 

A spherical object submerged in viscous silicon oil and the striated flow patterns caused by this; Princeton's Shelley Chan, Josue Sznitman and Alexander Smits.
This might be one of the more splendidly disturbing--and timely, given what's going on in the southeast--images. Silicon oil is 5,000 times more viscid than water, and though that may result in some stunning patternistic imagery here (think of extremely tiny interlayers of chromospheric gas) but one can't help but be reminded and think immediately of the oil spill off the Gulf. You can visually see here, in a kind of clarity and depth not often seen, just how thick this stuff is by looking at the flow pattern and the miniscule layers formed after something as small and tiny as a sphere puts a tincture in, not even it's middle, but just the oil's surface. Imagine, for instance, a brown pelican submerged in this; or rather, imagine your own head plunged beneath this surface (which might be an arguably just comeuppance for a few of these promulgators of oil). Stepping down now from the moral soapbox, aesthetically, I love the gradation moving from yellow to red to blue, three of my favorite colors especially when thrown together. 

For my favorite out of the sixteen award winners, though, it's a toss amongst the two pictures above and this last dazzling muralesque color-emulsion right below, which almost manages to look like some recently-unearthed drippy Fauvist piece or maybe even an early print of Picasso's. There's even small shades of a certain Dutchman's Starry Night in there, or just his skies in general. A total, sheer pleasure, this one right here.

Magnetic reconnection converts magnetic energy into particle energy, with the magnetic field being confined to the small red islands and the high energy particles as yellow sperm-like squiggles swimming around the blobs. It's astrophysics stuff, but it looks almost identical to biological structures and the same bursts of energy found there. Princeton's Lorenzo Sironi and Anatoly Spitkovsky.

Check out the rest of the images here; they're all pretty arresting.

Born Free

M.I.A does it again. Long known for incorporating sociological and political themes and well-written, introspection-heavy lyrics into her otherwise buoyantly surging, driving, and melodic pop music, the first single and video pulled from the UK genre-smasher takes all that to new levels. The video below is, without a doubt, not safe for work unless you're into that field. Otherwise, the song itself is spotlessly clean. 

Obviously the video provokes more questions than it answers, as all good art should. Without going into a whole bunch of biographical information on M.I.A (whose real name is Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam and whose family's native country is the politically-fractured Sri Lanka, in which she spent some of her youth), the song and the video alone place its crosshairs on what seems to be an all-too-human tendency to erect barricades between fellow homo sapiens, to not only purposefully but cruelly delineate lines of normalcy and otherness between ourselves as an entire race of people. To say "we are right" and "that is wrong." The use of redheads as the symbol for this otherness is wry as well as terrifying. Of course all sorts of examples come to mind when watching the video: the Shoa, American slavery, genocides in South America, in early North America, Columbus' entire life, the Tamil struggle in M.I.A's own native Sri Lanka, present day Darfur. Even the Japanese-American internment here in the US. Few countries have been immune to this. The list of genocides and similarly-based oppression is, sadly, as long as time itself. Even Ireland, amongst Catholics and Protestants, the need to demarcate between acceptable and unacceptable--whatever that may end up being--seems integral. And yes, you can be sure that there are direct parallels to the recent immigration law passed in Arizona in which failure to carry identification is now a crime and those "suspected" of being in the country illegally are fair game to be arrested, detained. I'm not sure what kind of criteria is going to be used to constitute the basis of this round-up policy but it sure as shit doesn't sound empirical. How does an official decide someone "looks" like an illegal immigrant? 

So the question I've heard is what are we, then, to make of M.I.A.'s deliberately graphic video? What answers does the video provide? None. It's exposing. This is the prime difference between politics and art. Politics attempts to profess sagacity on topics whether it has this or not, a hardheaded surety which can often lead to violent acts such as this; art, on the other hand, asks questions, investigates, takes a camera with which it peers into the dark and murky unknown and attempts not to solve the confusion but show it, let those haunting questions and the accompanying images linger--because if they are done right they do all the work. There's a certain absurdity here, horrifying no less, but an absurdity that dominates, which makes the actions of these soldiers all the more terrifying. And still, it's an absurdity that doesn't seem so far. A ridiculousness that we seemed predisposed to laugh at in theory but somehow know we are every bit capable of such monstrosity unless we get on our feet and keep it from happening. 

These Dance Moves Seem Familiar

The choreography was written many, many years ago and still, to this day, American politics humor everyone watching with the same hackneyed, ungraceful, and uneventful dance. Streets in and around Washington, DC are veritably burgeoning with staid men and women born miraculously devoid of any personality dressed in their business suits circumnavigating the same tired steps of an American two-step that everybody knows and everybody dreads. 

Darren Hutchinson, from Salon,  wrote a great piece, citing even the satirical Onion's spot-on depiction of unravelling events, that puts a few things in perspective and even illuminates how there was, at one point, a good and honest chance for and a desire from citizens for major health care reform.

To quote Hutchinson: "Although voters held and continue to hold favorable opinions regarding healthcare reform, the mainstream news media has generally portrayed the public plan in very ominous terms. Also, conservatives have shamelessly distorted the terms of healthcare reform in order to scare voters -- particularly seniors.

Earlier this year, tense debates and even violence broke out at "town hall" meetings held to discuss healthcare reform. Moderate Democrats vowed to derail measures that included a public option. Liberals vowed to kill measures that did not include a public plan option. And it has become increasingly clear that Republicans will not vote for anything that the Democrats propose -- other than bills to augment war spending. More often than not, mainstream media outlets have examined the political "drama" surrounding healthcare reform instead of providing facts that would allow voters to assess the merits of the various proposals.

In the middle of this theatrical performance, the Obama Administration went into hibernation. During the month of August, the president -- who campaigned with an almost unprecedented level of high energy -- virtually disappeared from the radar screen while the media and conservatives distorted Democratic healthcare reform proposals. Obama, however, returned from his vacation to Martha's Vineyard and delivered a speech, during which he lauded and embraced a public plan option. Since that speech, however, Obama has not forcefully advocated the creation of a public plan."

At this point, though, if anyone expects or even expected there to be any major improvements or staggering shifts in healthcare I want to either congratulate you on your unflinching optimism or scoff at your boundless reserve of naivete. The compromises being made for political purposes are sad and unfortunate; worse, they're predictable.  Things are as status quo as they've always been: the single payer system went unmentioned from the very beginning and the public option was constantly misrepresented, demonized, and brandished with such weak support even from its touters that one has to wonder how much anyone in Washington actually gave a damn about it in the first place and how much it was just political tool of enticement for the democrats. My guess would be the democrats knew from the very beginning they weren't going to be able to pass what they said they wanted; if that's the case, they should have begun with the single payer system first in negotiations and not the public option. It's simple used-car salesmanship: if you know you can't sell them at your first proposal, present something out there, highball them. Instead they went weak-kneed and offered a scrawny plea for public option, which is without consideration being blackballed by folks like Lieberman and pussyfooted around by Rahm Emanuel's centrist bullshit. As always, the winner here with any new health care reform that does end up passing will be the health insurance industry. Who else? Just as I finished writing this, I saw a recent development where Reid announces his confidence in a revised bill with the support of Bob Nelson, a moderate democrat who had been on the fence; and still, they're vague on details and I have to gloomily speculate in what malformed condition this monstrously butchered bill will come to us in. A friend of mine said that once Emanuel was solidified within the current administration, Obama was severely handicapped. At the time, I wasn't so convinced; now, I'm not sure he wasn't painfully accurate.

One has to wonder how anyone will ever be able to change the way Washington does its business with the degree of smarm we have in there, most of whom show no sign other than impending death of ever leaving.  

Transportation Woes

So not only does France at large thrash the United States in terms of transportation options available, they also make it look much more enchanting. They, and many other European nations (Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, this is a dead horse I'm kicking) use this attractive lawn track to bring more greenery into the town or city these trains and trams traverse daily, which can do away with some of those unsightly elevated rails chewed away by rust and weather that crop up off the ground; not to mention it can provide opportunities for rapscallions to mow fun shapes and patterns into the tract, as pictured above. This certainly isn't a major issue in terms of nascent transportation planning, but this is demonstrative of that fact that other places around the world care more about widespread, nationwide integration for quick, reliable, and afforable transportation than these Disunited States. As excited as I am for the passed, proposed, and hoped-for future transportation plans drawn for San Francisco and California ( Transbay Terminal to become city-changing, major Union Stationesque hub of intermodal transport featuring at least seven transit providers, high speed Japan-style bullet trains from SF to SD just under 4 hours and for a bargain of $70), there's so much still to be done without even bothering to consider the worrying thought that some of this, as history here has proven, might not ever be accomplished with all the sadly expected political onanism that's bound to come in tow. 

I yearn for a day when I don't have to contemplate eventually emigrating. Or I yearn for the day when I finally do emigrate; that way whenever my name appears in print they'll call me an exile or use that fancy, so-very Nabokovian "émigré."

Contradictions in California

Some aspects of transit in California will soon be vanishing. They're making major cuts to some of the transit funds, which will send repercussive reverberations all throughout the transit systems up and down the state. These will range in their spectrum and dynamic, but the gist of it is there will be increased costs for are modes of ridership, as well as cut, diminished, curtailed, and basically ignored routes, times of operation and frequency for some if not many stops and destinations. They, of course, claim these will mostly be felt on nights and weekends and, again, mostly in areas of low-ridership. 

My first reaction to this is one of dismay. I'm not surprised that the state is making cuts in certain areas. What causes me confusion, and to be truthful resentment, are the areas wherein these cuts are being made. We're already hacking away at our public educational systems, which aren't the most superlative in the world to begin with. But with transit, something that has always been viewed as a boon to the environment, to rider and vehicular safety by way of lightening the traffic load on freeways and city streets alike, and not to mention being a cheaper way for commuters to get around, to cut some of these routes, the very same routes, keep in mind, that our politicians and our pundits are encouraging us to take. In point of fact, as California residents we are constantly being encouraged to use mass transit as much as possible in order to cut down on carbon emissions, which is a practice I agree wholeheartedly with and do almost exclusively. 

But, I'm sorry, but there's a chasm in logic here. You can't encourage people to do one thing while at the same time making it undesirable for them to do so. Well, you can, but then you simply can't expect them to go ahead and take your advice as anything but abusive and contradictory and as little but the empty political jargon of a class of people who don't need mass transportation like so many American citizens do.

The problem that it seems we have in America is we can't quite seem to decide what kind of nation we want to be. We love our cars. We love our highways. Yet at the same time we hate our traffic and we loathe having to shell out sizable chunks of our paychecks to simply keep our cars running. Thus the medium, one would think, would be to use automobiles as little as possible and only when necessary and to use mass transit for more practical purposes. However, if we want the majority of people who can and are in position to use mass transit more and almost exclusively, then we've got to make it a desirable choice for them; raising costs and cutting routes, times, schedules, and stops altogether is not going to accomplish that. Further, if we want everyone to use mass transit than we've got to be making moves to extend transit systems and routes, not cutting them. 

FAST

A recent article in San Diego's CityBeat lays out one man's plan for a vast, comprehensive, and most importantly, efficient transit system that would integrate with and overhaul what already exists - tentatively, he calls it the FAST. The system he's designing is one unlike any in our country and draws most comparison's to Brisbane's in Australia, a fully-functioning and widely-used transit system whose increased ridership fares almost cover the costs that went into it, whereas here in America most ridership fares barely cover 1/3 of the costs inlaid, thus forcing them to rely on government subsidies. While there may indeed be claims that Brisbane's system isn't quite as perfect as the article makes it out to be, the argument seems rather clear that Brisbane's system is working much better than many of those that have been attempted here on domestic soil. 

I don't quite know what it'll take to get these things going. For whatever reason America has never been able to get the mass transit ball rolling. All across the globe other countries have gone way ahead and tore on an emblazoned path that far surpasses anything we've been able to do here in America, save for a few select cities like New York, Washington, Boston, and San Francisco, all of which have their fair share of shortcomings, as is always to be expected. But here in San Diego, who likes to boast of being the first city to utilize the electric light-rail system way back in the eighties, remains stuck there, in the eighties, in eighties logic, in anachronistic thinking of people moving. What we have here, and what other cities like Los Angeles, and I'm sure many others have, are a number of pet projects, little ideas for transit but none of which connect into a comprehensive system that can move people from all tangental regions around. What we have are a number of small transit systems that meet at many points of disconnection. What have are plenty well-intentioned, nearly successful failures.

Obviously a teetering, nay, a crumbling economy does not seemingly pair well with cities launching wide-ranging transit plans. Or does it? The more people riding transit, the better. My only hope is that in the future, that some time in my lifetime, I'll be able too see a country willing as a whole to adopt a doctrine of mass transit. Who doesn't like being driven around? Who doesn't like sitting down and catching up with the news or a book whilst being carried to wherever it is that the day takes you? Who enjoys traffic? Who enjoys paying for parking? Or for gas? Or constant repairs? Or shitty drivers? 

The projects will, of course, not be easy. Since our cities have been designed, year after year, with the idea in mind that we are Driving Americans who love freeways, beltways, open roads, and tons and tons of streets to wind on down,  implementing transit lines requires either going underground, going above ground a la monorail, or completely shutting down whole quadrants of city blocks in order to lay down lines, none of which is particularly easy or cost-free. It does, on the other hand, require some level of functional employment, so there is a bright side. 

What desperately needs to be done is these projects need to be framed in the proper light. So often what happens is before these projects really get going and before the public gets any genuine whiff of what these programs will involve, who it will benefit and in what ways, they are denigrated and cast in a poor light by the political representatives they've elected to office, who go on to tell their constituents that this program is bad, wasteful, and does not have the public in mind. But if you were to ask these people, I predict, if they had a fully-functioning transit system that could take them from a station close to home to their workplace and back every day of the week would they use it, they'd probably say yes. If you were to honestly approach them and ask them if they had a transit system that could carry them during a busy holiday season from their home to downtown to take care of some shopping instead of driving around endlessly looking for parking, would they use it, I again think they'd say yes. 

What the public does not need is its political representatives telling them what's best for them before they've had a chance to really look at it and make a critical decision based off of their own reason. What the public desperately needs is its political representatives to shut their fucking mouths every now and then and listen to its public. If any one thing is clear, it's that people want better, quicker, cheaper, and more efficient ways for getting around and, most importantly, getting to work. I think America owes it to its citizens to give them a mode of transportation that works, the same way it owes us a government that doesn't dissuade us from the real issues at hand by way of lame rhetoric.