general

Where did the conventional Washington wisdoms emerge that (i) government planning is bad and (ii) inflicting pain on the lower classes (austerity) is a sad economic necessity? We're not talking here about Soviet 5 year plans but the rather more successful Roosevelt policies of social insurance, regulating finance, etc.

Writer Philip Pilkington traces the horror of planning, any planning to economist turned propagandist Friedrich Hayek, a darling of the libertarian right. Hayek argued that central planning led to German fascism when in fact it was WWI reparations that caused hyperinflation and the austerity measures imposed by the Weimar government (rolling back central aid mechanisms) that led to mass pain and Hitler's rise. Pilkington quotes Mark Ames on how the story changed:

Von Hayek and his fellow Austrian aristocrats who were forced to flee from the fruits of their economic programs, did a complete revision of history and retold that same story as if the very opposite of reality had happened. Once they were safely in England and America, sponsored and funded by oligarch grants, hacks like von Mises and von Hayek started pushing a revisionist history of the collapse of Weimar Germany blaming not their austerity measures, but rather big-spending liberals who were allegedly in charge of Germany’s last government.

According to Pilkington, Hayek's ideas were discredited as economics so after the 1930s he turned to politics, attracting others who shared his delusions about planning evils vs the value of the "free market." Despite the success of the Roosevelt-era social programs these ideologues have been so effective as propagandists that you are considered nuts in Washington now if you don't mouth truisms such as "deficits are bad" and "the safety net is broken." The herd mentality among our thought leaders and their susceptibility to Ayn Randian nonsense is quite an amazing thing to witness.

Rhizome.org has a few days left in its fundraiser. I just donated and recommend that you do the same!
Notions of "net art" and "new media" change over time and we have nothing like a consensus on whether these even exist. Still, the idea of a digital commons where this can be hashed out has merit.
Rhizome's relationship with a museum (the NewMu in NYC) adds a provocative element to the mix: the possibility of institutional legitimacy or illegitimacy makes people genuinely angry, whereas in most digital situations the appearance of democratized crowdsourcing gives every decision a layer of cottage cheese affability.
My own writing about Rhizome was described last year by an AFC attack ninja as venomous when at the most it was mildly critical (it's all available for perusing if you want to have a venom hunt). The same ninja said my writing about Rhizome impeded Rafael Rozendaal's career!
The escalation of mild to venomous and the potential for artist career destruction would not even be considered if the attack ninja hadn't perceived something to be at stake in writing about Rhizome. This may be a strange and roundabout logic in support of donating but it's worth dollars and cents to me.

[It should also be noted that the administrator into whom I injected the contents of my venom sacs has since left the organization, no doubt limping from the effects of the deadly poison.]

Journalist Andrew Sullivan plans to go solo and offer his writing by subscription on the Web; he claims to have already raised $400,000 from readers. A key component to the success of his business model will be public amnesia, says Mark Ames, in a lengthy compendium of Sullivan's egregious writing and editorial missteps over the years.* The worst of these were attacks on antiwar voices in the aftermath of 9/11. People who turned out to be right were branded "fifth columnists" by Sullivan. As Ames dramatically phrases it:

Like a lot of imbeciles, Andrew Sullivan reacted to September 11 as if it was a test of Andrew Sullivan's mettle, starring Andrew Sullivan as the protagonist in an epic battle between good and evil, with the fate of mankind hanging in the balance: Red Dawn meets Revelations by way of [NAME OF TOM CLANCY BOOK POPULAR AMONG BELTWAY WAFFENDWEEBS]... Lots of pompous cliches, and flapping flags in the wind...

And:

No account of Andrew Sullivan’s journalism record can be complete without recalling his role as one of the most vicious and cowardly henchmen policing critics of Bush’s wars after September 11, at the peak of the terror hysteria, beginning in late 2001, through the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. When it counted most, and when baiting critics had a frightening, deadly power to it, Andrew Sullivan took advantage of that weapon like no one in the blogosphere. It was only later, after the Iraq invasion and after the damage had worked its way through the domestic cultural veins, and after tens of thousands of lives were gone — and more importantly for Sully’s calculations, after the Bush wars started going bad, and his ability to plausibly persecute "decadent left" critics vanished, replaced by a desperate need to defend the war cause rather than offend its critics — that the new, libertarian Andrew Sullivan war critic emerged.

I remember - I hate the guy. And within a year his subscription model will tank and he'll be seeking another media perch for his horrible opinions. The true sadist thrives on institutional support.

*Update: I de-linked Ames' essay after his publisher, NSFW Corporation, put all their content behind a paywall. The old bait and switcheroo.

Update, Jan. 2015: NSFW tanked and Ames posted the essay again on his current platform, Pando Daily. The occasion is Sullivan's "retirement" from blogging. Yay!

Nice that someone assembled all on one page the many grotesque attempts to simulate the human form with computers.

The tone of the "TV Tropes" WIKI is "isn't this great, it's so horrible." A few examples:

--Speaking of Burger King, oh god..EAT LIKE SNAKE. For those who don't want to open yet another browser tab...it features a man slithering about in a snakelike fashion then UNHINGING HIS JAW to swallow a burger whole.

--Evil Dead Orville. (Orville Redenbacher popcorn.) Someone had the bright idea to use a real actor for his body, and to computer generate his head...

--An Evian ad featured babies breakdancing to the Sugarhill Gang. Some found it cute, many found it incredibly creepy. The babies are CGI and look human except for a few disturbing features.

--A commercial for Swedish Kavli had a baby who starts to dance after tasting their food. When the baby's body switches from real to CGI, its arms are noticeably thinner! The dance moves only made it more freaky, which is probably why this didn't run for long.

The page has links to YouTube and other ad sources. Most of them work, surprisingly.

3 million people have viewed Robert Lustig's lecture "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" on YouTube. He argues in opposition to the nutritional consensus that "a calorie is a calorie," explaining that sugar calories are handled differently by the body and are more likely to end up as fat. The majority of fructose (or sucrose -- more on this below) ends up being processed by the liver, the same way alcohol is. Fructose only occurs in nature in combination with large amounts of (nutritionally beneficial) fiber -- when refined out to a pure form, the body treats it as a poison, and Lustig's argument is that's how we should be treating it on a cultural level. Instead we allow profiteers to keep upping our consumption of it, even in the face of a staggering epidemic of obesity.

According to an article sympathetic to Lustig, he's been challenged on some of his facts, but the article doesn't say what they are so more reading is needed (will keep you posted). Assuming he's mostly right, his lecture is a scary compendium of ways we've allowed diet to go off the rails. We knew they were putting sugar in everything but... infant formula? The same amount of sugar as a soft drink? Sports drinks used to be piss-tasting stuff with electrolytes and food coloring until the soft drink companies started marketing it to kids (in the early '90s) by adding gobs of high-fructose corn syrup. And who knew how insidious a certain leading (as in No. 1) soft drink company was, marketing a beverage with caffeine that makes you pee, salt that makes you thirsty, and sugar to hide the salt?

For purposes of his argument about metabolism, Lustig treats all refined sweeteners as equally bad, whether sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, or even fruit juice. He doesn't mention this example but one of the major OJ distributors claims on its packaging that you are getting two servings of fruit in each carton. Without the fiber of say, an orange, the beverage is worthless as a fruit serving -- check that, it isn't just empty calories, it's toxic calories masquerading as nutritious.