(via Swedish seventies neoretrofuturism: the paintings of Simon Stålenhag – Boing Boing)
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Today it is politically effective, and socially acceptable, to deny scientific fact – Adam Frank http://t.co/N0kntLxR3Q #denialism
— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) August 22, 2013
Adam Frank levels a strong polemic against denialism — those that deny scientific findings that have been overwhelmingly supported by the evidence — like human evolution and anthropogenic climate change.
Adam Frank, Welcome to the Age of Denial
In 1982, polls showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God had created human beings in their present form. Thirty years later, the fraction of the population who are creationists is 46 percent.
In 1989, when “climate change” had just entered the public lexicon, 63 percent of Americans understood it was a problem. Almost 25 years later, that proportion is actually a bit lower, at 58 percent.
The timeline of these polls defines my career in science. In 1982 I was an undergraduate physics major. In 1989 I was a graduate student. My dream was that, in a quarter-century, I would be a professor of astrophysics, introducing a new generation of students to the powerful yet delicate craft of scientific research.
Much of that dream has come true. Yet instead of sending my students into a world that celebrates the latest science has to offer, I am delivering them into a society ambivalent, even skeptical, about the fruits of science.
[…]
Today, however, it is politically effective, and socially acceptable, to deny scientific fact. Narrowly defined, “creationism” was a minor current in American thinking for much of the 20th century. But in the years since I was a student, a well-funded effort has skillfully rebranded that ideology as “creation science” and pushed it into classrooms across the country. Though transparently unscientific, denying evolution has become a litmus test for some conservative politicians, even at the highest levels.
Meanwhile, climate deniers, taking pages from the creationists’ PR playbook, have manufactured doubt about fundamental issues in climate science that were decided scientifically decades ago. And anti-vaccine campaigners brandish a few long-discredited studies to make unproven claims about links between autism and vaccination.
Denialism has lead to a policy gridlock around mitigating climate change, when our only hope have become worse hurricanes and increased drought to shake the disbelievers out of the propaganda trance they’re in.
Welcome to the postnormal, where the postmodern era’s voodoo versions of economics, climate science, and business management are deeply embedded in the discourse about our future, and it will likely take us a generation or longer to rewire our society, and defuse the IED that the deniers constructed out of everyday bits of discourse.
(via stoweboyd)
HERE BE DRAGONS: THE UNSTABLE LANDSCAPES OF GPS (by Will Gowland)
The world is now concealed and manipulated in ways that make answering the question of where am I an impossibility. Glitches in the big and fragile infrastructures of Global Positioning systems mean we are sometimes both here and there, as a pulsing blue dot locates us to within 500metres. What are the implications of a navigational system based solely on the virtual?
Will, in our Department of Landscape Glitches has jammed the GPS networks and revealed an alternative virtual topography, a territorial architecture of spoofed cartography. It is an emerging landscape that operates and exits in two parallel worlds, the physical and the virtual.
Imaginary protest icebergs drift through the autonomously navigated oil shipping lanes. We get lost in a wilderness of illegal signal jamming formations and we glimpse the faint flicker of covert militarised GPS territories, super stable under a secret sky of black satellites.
Some are landscapes of misdirection, others are navigational markers guiding one safely through unstable terrain. We now put our faith in a digital territory that is just as unknown and fallible as the physical.
(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
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Another video from my favourite dashboard cam in the solar system.
Now, a fact:
The two moons were long thought to be asteroids that got captured in Mars’ orbit. However, some scientists believe they are actually chunks of Mars itself that broke off as the result of an ancient cosmic collision.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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So any journalist passing through London’s Heathrow has now been warned: do not take any documents with you. Britain is now a police state when it comes to journalists, just like Russia is.
Read more "So any journalist passing through London’s Heathrow has now been warned: do not take any documents with you. Britain is now a police state when it comes to journalists, just like Russia is."So any journalist passing through Londonâs Heathrow has now been warned: do not take any documents with you. Britain is now a police state when it comes to journalists, just like Russia is.
In this respect, I can say this to David Cameron. Thank you for clearing the air on these matters of surveillance. You have now demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that these anti-terror provisions are capable of rank abuse. Unless some other facts emerge, there is really no difference in kind between you and Vladimir Putin. You have used police powers granted for anti-terrorism and deployed them to target and intimidate journalists deemed enemies of the state.
You have proven that these laws can be hideously abused. Which means they must be repealed. You have broken the trust that enables any such legislation to survive in a democracy. By so doing, you have attacked British democracy itself. What on earth do you have to say for yourself? And were you, in any way, encouraged by the US administration to do such a thing?
âIf a system is ripe for abuse, history tells us the only question is not if such abuse will occur, but when.â
I am hoping against hope that this profound and clear abuse of power will wake up a critical mass of people, but since most of our modern âjournalistsâ identify with the rich and powerful instead of the rest of us, Iâm not especially optimistic.
Read moreAcknowledging those points of weakness, however, Pacific Rim is very progressive in portraying unconventional versions of typical action heroines/heroes.
Let’s begin with Mako Mori. Mako (played by the fabulous Rinko Kikuchi) is the main character of the film. You might be asking– “wait, isn’t Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) the main character?” Well, yes and no. Raleigh is the protagonist whose perspective we follow throughout much of the narrative, but Mako is the main character. She is the the crux of the story, the one we cheer for, the one whose story we learn and troubles we care about. Raleigh is our point of reference, but Mako is what binds the rest of the characters in the story together. So we’ve got a female main character of color who is incredibly smart, observant, capable (she can beat up Raleigh in a one-on-one match and also manage an entire Jaeger restoration program), determined, and passionate, who goes on a Campbellian heroic journey.…
Raleigh (despite the white-bread action-man appearance) is also a structurally-interesting character in his own way because he displays something very unconventional for an all-American action movie tough guy– emotional intelligence… The fact that he is not portrayed as any less of “a man” for being emotionally available and interpersonally cognizant is worth mentioning. He easily could have been written as a dark and brooding figure: he’s got a tragic backstory and the weight of the world on his shoulders, but everything he does is an outward, extroverted motion to try and do something good for the world. Whether that “good” is battling Kaiju or helping Mako make her wish to become a Jaeger pilot a reality (or punching Chuck Hansen in the face) is another story.
On the topic of Mako and Raleigh, their relationship is one of the few representations of a close, emotionally-intimate male-female friendship that never turns physical. Upon first watching the film all the way through, I was continually waiting for him to kiss her and the music to get sweeping and explosions to go off in the sky behind their heads.
It never happened.
…
Pacific Rim is smart because it’s self-aware, particularly with regards to how it treats the characters on-screen.
I could go on about other, smaller facets that carry representative weight (for example, the importance of Stacker Pentecost’s working-class British accent making the grand proclamation “We’re cancellin’ the apocalypse!”, or the loving interracial non-nuclear family unit formed by Mako and Pentecost), but I think the last important takeaway I should mention is the overall message of the film.
***Defeating Kaiju is not a one-man job.***
Within the Hong Kong Shatterdome there is a constant collective presence– the mechanics maintaining the Jaegers, the scientists researching furiously, the technicians in LOCCENT monitoring every happening. Even prior to Raleigh’s arrival in Hong Kong we get a sense of the global scale of the situation and how it affects peoples’ lives though the workers building the wall, or the worldwide news reports, or the civilians who find Raleigh almost-dead on the beach. The focal point of the story is a collective one as told through the experience of Mako and Raleigh, who just happen to be at the center of it… What makes this film particularly emotionally nuanced is how much attention it gives to the people who enable the heroes/heroines to do their grandiose world-saving.
In this way the message of Pacific Rim‘s story is communal: cooperation, aid, appreciation for the efforts of others.
The Verge: Where does science fiction publishing stand now? Bruce Sterling: I think it’s basically dissolving, really. It’s like asking what about journalism? There’s a lot of stuff going on right now that calls itself journalism but that doesn’t really fit into the old-school definition of journalism at all. It’s like advertising, it’s quite like […]
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The Committee to Nuke Elysium 