New Club for Black and White Art!!! by
^altermind

"Black and White Photography: London
Tube Map"

NYT Profiles Creator of Black &
White and Fable

M&M's Candy Fades to Black and White
(Reuters)

Black and White Nintendo DS Ship in
Japan

Nintendo is launching the black and white versions of the Nintendo DS in Japan today, in case you're in the market for a slightly nicer looking model. I'm glad I have a DS, if for the first-party Nintendo games if nothing else (Advance Wars and Animal Crossing will take up plenty of my time) but I still can't help but look at my PSP sitting just beyond the DS and wonder what, exactly, it's going to take for Nintendo to recover from Sony's onslaught. It's going to take a lot more than colored DSes, for sure.

Black and White DS Systems Ship Today in Japan [Portagame]

Black and White Photography: London Tube
Map

nyclondon.com/blog/archives/2004/08/07/london_tube_map.blog
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kottke discovers black and white cookies

White Hat Seo `Verses` Black Hat Seo -
Interview and Discussion

Anti-virus industry: white knight or
black hat?

Novel, Computer-Assisted Method For
Colorization Of Black And White Scenes
Developed At Hebrew

THE GREEN
MOVEMENT: A MANIFESTO

The neocons seem to have identified some new and somewhat unlikely enemies. There is a whole movement to introduce conservative values into the education system, both by forcing teachers to feed creationist religious propaganda to schoolchildren, and by removing and reprimanding 'biased' university teachers who don't give equal grades to 'conservative answers' to assignments and exam questions. The Bush regime is stripping qualified scientists of responsibility and authority and replacing them with corporatist apologists and global warming deniers in the mold of the discredited and unqualified Davos poster-child, Bjorn Lomborg. And the proponents of the draconian Patriot Act are facing a fierce resistanc e from the nation's librarians. Teachers, scientists, engineers, technologists and librarians. They may not be the prototype of radicalism, but they do have something in common: They are all more knowledgeable than the mainstream population. This raises an interesting question: Does knowledge and learning make us more radical in our political, economic, social and environmental views? There is a long history of research indicating that the more we know, the more pessimistic we are. In his book Our Final Hour, England's Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees cites the authors of the 1950s Einstein-Russell manifesto as follows: None of the well-informed scientists say that the worst results from the nuclear threat are certain. The views of experts do not depend in any way on their politics or prejudices. They depend only, so far as our researches have revealed, on the extent of the particular expert's knowledge. We have found that the experts who know most are the most gloomy. So perhaps knowledge and learning make us pessimistic. Does that necessarily make us more radical? It seems to me it must. If the more we learn, the more negative our view of the future, surely that should make us more disenchanted and dissatisfied with the status quo, and more inclined to favour radical change to improve the outlook. But don't we get more conservative with age? I think what really happens is that we get more nostalgic as we get older. With our increasingly selective memories, we long for the 'good old days' -- which for my generation was an era of momentous change and social revolution. Nostalgia is not conservative, it's reactionary -- in opposition to recent changes we don't understand and desirous of 'changing back'. The most truly 'conservative' elements of our society (borne out by recent polls) are the middle-aged, and many of the most passionate and articulate advocates of radical change are over 60. Religious leaders almost everywhere in the world are opposed to a liberal education because it threatens their control over their followers. Knowledge and learning, when it is not rote, when it is not propagandized, opens us up to new ideas and alternatives. There is thus no conspiracy behind the liberal bent of universities, and the fact that campuses are the hotbeds of opposition to the status quo everywhere on the planet is not just coincidence -- these are places where knowledge and learning and challenges to established ideas are made most possible and encouraged, and the consequence of that learning is pessimism, dissatisfaction, and a powerful desire for change. The people I've met who work on the front lines of the media -- even the mainstream media -- are almost all pessimistic about the future and quite radical in their beliefs. What has happened is that they have been forced by conservative managers beholden to profit-obsessed corporatist owners to toe the line, to report what they're told. Not at all dissimilar to the fate of teachers. No surprise that the burnout rate in both professions is enormous! And to some extent the same process is going on in large corporations everywhere: The most knowledgeable people tend to be the least satisfied with corporatist risk-aversion, innovation-aversion, and indifference to impact on employees, the environment and the community. They're weeded out in most organizations in favour of sycophants and those who do what they're told without question. As a consequence we now have a growing, marginalized, disenfranchized, unemployed or underemployed, disaffected, knowledgeable and angry subculture, of which bloggers are the most obvious manifestation. The dot com bust added millions to our numbers, probably to the great relief of industry czars who were justifiably terrified that these non-conformists, by setting their own dress codes and other conditions for employment, could weaken their control and change the corporate agenda. So what? We have the knowledge, and the numbers, to take back this world from the neocons before it careens completely out of control, that's what. They have only wealth and power, and they have wielded it very effectively for thirty years. They have used their wealth to acquire the media, control the global economy, buy political power and influence, and hoard the planet's overtaxed resources. They have used their power to suppress citizen and consumer rights and liberal ideas, stifle and silence dissent, dumb down the citizen/consumer, and wage wars overt and covert around the globe. But their wealth depends on our acquiescence to a brutal, monopolistic and anti-democratic economic system that imposes wage slavery on everyone and crushes all alternative economic ideas under the guise of advancing globalization, 'free' trade, efficiency and 'free' markets. We are so beaten down by this neocon economic machine that most of us now believe we could not make ends meet running our own business. So we perpetuate this horrendous economic system by buying the crappy, overpriced junk made by slave labour that they churn out. And their power depends on our feelings of learned helplessness, our sense that corruption of political systems and politicians is inevitable, that the political system we have is the best we can hope for. We perpetuate this perverse political system by allowing the corrupt corporatist cabal to tell us what our alternatives are, who we can and should vote for, by letting them sell us political candidates like they sell us sneakers and breakfast cereals, by tolerating the gerrymandering of our constituencies, by allowing the media to ignore third parties, and by shying away from labels like 'liberal', 'radical' and 'revolutionary' with a meekness that would shame the brave and revolutionary founding fathers of any of our nations. Their wealth and power, and the pessimism that comes with our knowledge and learning have, together, cowed us into passivity and submission. In 1970, Charles Reich wrote, in The Greening of America: There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions and social structure are changing in consequence. It promises a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. Its ultimate creation will be a new and enduring wholeness and beauty -- a renewed relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land. Reich was wrong about the time-frame, but he may yet be right. The revolution he expected to see in the 1970s is overdue, and we could start it, today. He has the 'brand' right -- the revolution we need is all about greening: Cleansing, renewal, natural balance, and finding a better way to live. And the political party that uses this brand, the Green Party, is appropriately global and yet decentralized in scope, and has a multi-faceted phil osophy that is brilliant and collaborative in conception, inclusive in nature, and truly radical. What we need is much more than just a brand and a political party, though. What we need is a Green Movement. Today, the candidates and executives of the Green Party are preoccupied with getting elected, and in countries where that is feasible, that's fine. In every country, however, we in the Green Movement have more urgent tasks than glad-handing electors. Here's a first crack at an Agenda, a Manifesto for the Movement: Communicating, in person-to-person conversations, the fact that the Movement is not a marginal group of tree-huggers with a one-plank environmental platform, but a broad, global coalition of people with shared values that shape our views on all aspects of human behaviour and human endeavor and address all the critical issues of our time (these values are taken from the Global Greens' Charter): Respect for all life on Earth, and commitment to the renewal of the planet's biodiversity; Social Justice: an economic system that ensures the equitable distribution of social and natural resources, both locally and globally, to meet basic human needs unconditionally, and the elimination, globally, of poverty and illiteracy; Participatory Democracy: a political system that is democratic, with proportional representation, openness, transparency, and accountability; Nonviolence: a culture that achieves security for all through cooperation, sound economic and social development, environmental safety, and respect for human rights, rather than through military might, and which enforces disarmament, bans on weapon exports and proliferation to achieve peace; Sustainability: the reduction of resource consumption, population and resource inequity, through a shift to renewable resources, quality universally-accessible education and health care, economic security, redefining the purpose of corporations, fully costing non-renewable resources and polluting products, regulating speculation and enabling local self-reliance; Respect for Diversity: the rights of different cultures and minorities to freedom from discrimination, self-determination and sovereignty. Teaching these values, and related survival skills (environmental philosophy, critical thinking, creative thinking, collaborati on skills, self-reliance, conflict resolution, new business formation) to all young people, introducing these globally into core curricula. Recruiting new members for the Movement (starting with those brave teachers, scientists, engineers, technologists and librarians!), and Coordinating 'common cause' actions with other environmental, social and progressive organizations, and even religious groups, and generally building the Green Movement 'brand'. Taking political, social and economic actions to advance the Movement's causes, beyond getting elected. For example: Getting economic departments and the media to compute and publicize well-being measures like the Genuine Progress Indicator and the Gini index instead of GNP; Organizing, supporting and publicizing think-tanks and Wisdom of Crowds type surveys to find and qualify answers to the world's most intractable problems; Advancing the case for proportional representation; Coordinating and sustaining consumer boycotts; Coordinating international demonstrations and other social activism to deal with, and force elected officials to deal with, the most egregious violations of our values (e.g. global warming, the Darfur genocide, women's and aboriginal rights abuses, corporate atrocities like Union Carbide's poisoning of Bhopal and the Exxon Valdez eco-catastrophe, gerrymandering, land mines, and Geneva Convention violations). Sponsoring, supporting, visiting and joining Model Intentional Communities (MICs), exemplifying Radical Simplicity and otherwise setting an example by showing people a better way to live. Creating new, global media organizations, that will investigate and report abuses, atrocities and important but slowly-developing news that the mainstream media don't cover, and which will discuss and suggest actions that we can all take in response to the news. Building, supporting and networking Natural Enterprises, that adhere to the Movement's values and principles, until the older corporatist enterprises that exploit employees and consumers are starved out. That's the start of the Manifesto. It needs some work -- collaborative work. This organization won't have any employees or directors -- a Movement doesn't need leaders or direction, just a compelling and articulate vision, and good timing. Most of all we need some marketing expertise to help us launch this. Another website isn't going to do it. We need to create some buzz for it, get some major progressive organizations to stop competing with each other and sponsor it. The Movement isn't a new organization looking for your money and time. It's an umbrella, that progressive individuals and groups can belong to without giving up their own efforts and programs. It's bigger than all of us, the glue that holds all of us with progressive values and beliefs together. I'm going to start it off with a ChangeThis Manifesto next week. What else should we do? How did we do it in the 1960s? What should the movement's tagline be? We have the knowledge. If you add together all the victims of the neocons -- women, visible minorities, the poor, the unemployed, entrepreneurs, teachers, scientists, engineers, technologists, librarians, progressives of every stripe -- we have the numbers. We have a host of good causes, common causes. We have a sense of urgency. We have the Internet. That should be more than enough to launch a Movement. Is it just our pessimism, and the thought of having to fight an elite of unprecedented wealth and power, that is holding us back? The logo above, a green leaf formed into the letter G, is from the San Diego Green Party. Kudos to Google Desktop, which came to the rescue when nVu Composer somehow deleted this post instead of saving it -- Google Desktop had already saved a cache copy. Yet another reason to get this marvelous tool!

BUYING
GREEN

Last week I wrote about the need for botanic (meat-free, dairy-free, cruelty-free) products to go mainstream. There have been some interesting developments on this front: Organic vs. Local: Jim Minich, in an article Beyond Organic in Counterpunch, educates readers on the economics and trade-offs of organic food production which can include unsustainable farming methods, unfair labour practices, and expensive imported components. Minich concludes: "Consider how you might help create a food system that is both organic and local. Seek out a local farmers market or vegetable subscription service that provides a weekly bag of produce. Meet your local farmers this way. Encourage them to use organic methods and local sources of compost and other soil amendments. And seek out the small growers, who don't have to exploit labor to gather their harvests. If you enjoy quality food and a healthy planet, consider what you eat, where it was grown and how. Let's choose both organic and local if possible, so we can begin moving our food economy in ways that benefit our health and the Earth's." Thanks to Rajiv Bhushan for the link. One-Stop Green Shopping: In researching last week's article, I stumbled on the online Green Home Environmental Superstore, which sells a variety of green products, and provides an explanation of their product approval policy and a host of free information on how to make your home and your buying habits greener as well. Looks impressive: Anyone bought from them? Libertarian Green: Grist Magazine's Amanda Griscom Little in terviews John Mackey, the iconoclastic head of Whole Foods, one of the world's largest retailers of natural foods. Mackey is a foe of unions, a pragmatist and a significant distributor of meat products. But he is himself a vegan, refuses all dealings with factory farms, and believes in strict environmental regulations. He makes a compelling argument that by agreeing to sell humanely-raised animal products, he's reached a size that has saved a lot more animals, and exposed a lot more people to the need for cruelty-free products. Buy Only What You Need: In a new ChangeThis manifesto, Don't Buy This Shirt Unless You Need It, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard conveys a refreshing message: Buy Less. And, of course, he suggests what charity to support with the money you save. Thanks to Aleah Sato for the link. The certification labels shown at right were discussed in my earlier Good Stuff article.

The Velvet Underground's White Light
White Heat

White men bad; white dogs worse

We spent the weekend in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania with an anthropologist friend who has two 3-year-old bitches (Lab and Husky) and 4 acres of land on which Alex and Sammy could play with them.  One of the nice things about colleges located in areas where real estate is cheap is that the professors live close to the campus and are available to students for informal dinners and shared extracurricular activities.  Thus over the weekend we encountered a few other Gettysburg College professors.  I asked one of them whether faculty could bring their dogs to work.  She replied "The college's Affirmative Action lawyer, before she left, made up a lot of new rules.  One of them was that junior and senior faculty could not sleep together.  Another was to ban dogs in the buildings."

This is a good measure of how desperate PhDs are for jobs as college professors.  The college pays lower salaries, to people of the same age, as the public high school down the street.  The high school teachers were able to go to work at age 22 without suffering through a long period of starvation wages as graduate assistants.  The high school teachers are union members who ever have to worry about losing their job, compared to the college professors who live for 7 years in fear of being tossed out as a middle-aged has-been ("denied tenure" is the polite term for this event).  And now these poor souls are expected to get through their day without a dog at their side and without the possibility of an interlude with a more senior professor.

[Note to parents:  if you want to know why tuition prices have risen so fast, consider that a very small liberal arts school was paying a full-time lawyer to work on affirmative action; Walmart has a "Chief Diversity Officer" but they had $billions in revenue over which to spread the cost.]

White Light / White Heat

ergophizmiz.com/whitelightwhiteheat
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Sony's PSP: Available in Black, Black,
and Black

Looks like all those pastel PSPs Sony was showing at E3 were just a tease. According to an interview in Japanese game magazine Famitsu, Sony claims the various color PSPs were "just for reference. We plan to make the system black." I wouldn't worry too much, though. I'm sure if the PSP does well at all, color models will start showing up in no time at all.
Read [IGN via Portagame]

Chris Abraham: Evil Man in Black and His
Evil Black Suitcases Tackled by the Good
Guys

chrisabraham.com/2005/04/evil_man_in_bla.html
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BLACK
HUMOUR

No one who has read The Boondocks has a neutral opinion about its writer, Aaron McGruder. You either love him or hate him, or vacillate between the two extremes. The twenty-something radical leftie is working on a Simpsons-style animated series that will air, ironically, on Fox, probably next year, and as the New Yorker reported last month, he's managed to outrage almost everyone of every political stripe, including other cartoonists who say that he's gotten lazy (the strip is now drawn by Jennifer Seng, though McGruder still does the writing), and that he's relentless to the point of being tedious and unfunny. He is the most banned cartoonist in history, with many of the 300+ papers carrying the strip having cut it at one time or another. But as I think the above strip from last week shows, McGruder's biting wit has lost none of its edge, and demonstrates a fearlessness that goes beyond even what Doonsbury and Bloom County achieved.

To Liberate From the White House the
White House Press

Black. Duncan Black.

THINK
GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER'S
ONE
WORLD

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I'm opposed to unregulated 'free' trade, very worried about the extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations 'offshoring' jobs, using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and a great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community self-sufficiency. At the same time, I'm a strong supporter of the UN and other multi-lateral NGOs, and I believe that we each have a responsibility for the well-being of all the people and creatures of this world. Some readers have said this view is inconsistent, and I wasn't quite sure how to respond to such charges. Fortunately, Peter Singer, in his recent book on global ethics, One World: The Ethics of Globalization, has come to my rescue. Singer sees no inconsistency between strong local autonomy, community, and self-sufficient economies on the one hand, and global responsibility on the other. The book is based on the Dwight Terry lectures at Yale in 2000, but has been updated to incorporate reflection on the events of 9/11 and the appalling Bush social, environmental and economic record. I'll have more to say next week about Bush's fraudulent and despicable Earth Day media blitz, and the major media's shameless lack of critical evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been churning out this week on the environment -- newspeak of Orwellian proportions. The first part of Singer's book deals with environmental responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it -- immediate ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves autocratic governments). The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer adroitly tears apart the Economist's (and other neocons') naive assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic goods, while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment. Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer's prescription, since it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from their pockets to those of the world's poor. The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the International Court of Justice, and for the UN's continued hesitancy to accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is sanguine about the limitations and dangers of 'global government', but supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a 'protector of last resort', and including in its mandate the responsibility to supervise elections in all member nations. The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace, once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the reduction of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and freedoms. Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed: It is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global tyranny, unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is a challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration. I'd like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn't, we're in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to a drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less agile, more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope that "the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration", wherever they are, are up to the task.

To black hole, or not black hole, that
is the question

Seeing Green

VC gets green

Green Day CD-Rs

Strange but punk. Green Day and iTunes Music Store are releasing a special set of CD-Rs pre-imprinted with the logos from the original CDs, so that you can download their music from iTMS and burn it onto a proper disc - sound quality aside, no one would be the wiser.

Wouldn't it be nice if a band were to release their redbook CDs along with a blank CD-R for copying and giving to your friends? Just sort of a, "We don't mind if you want to make a copy or two. Thanks for purchasing." I'm not holding my breath (my blood atenuators do not require crude meatchanical motion).

Achetez, mixez, gravez... (French) [iPodGeneration]
Buy Green Day CD-Rs [GreenDayMusic]

Beyond the Green Zone

Jarvis suggests we read Iraqi bloggers (and provides a set of links to them). That's certainly good advice.

But it's also worth pointing out that Salon's coverage from Iraq was not "embedded" during the invasion and is not embedded in the Green Zone today. Our correspondent Philli p Robertson has been courageously, and independently, traveling the country, offering e yewitness accounts from the siege of Najaf and Kufa, escaping a thankfully brief detainment by Moqtada al-Sadr's Al-Mehdi Army, and providing another angle on the Abu Ghraib abuses.

Phillip is a fine writer and a great observer. If you want to read reporting that's not hunkered down behind the barricades, here it is.

Little Green Button

It's Easy Being Green

Green given deadline for M&S bid

Green-Fredricksen

Top green car motors into the UK

Black and White and Green All Over