Month: May 2013

S.H.O.P.P.I.N.G

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The striking paintings of Wal-Marts we featured this morning are not alone. Michelle Muldrow targets, among other supermarkets, Target. She calls these photographs paintings “Cathedrals of Desire.” Cathedrals used to function as a way to transcend desire into love, the worldly into the unworldly. Now these new consumer cathedrals make the worldly sacred and turn desire into a virtue.

I have to say that Target in particular engenders in me an instant version of what some hyper-lefty Germans called Konsumterrorismus: a total panic caused by the option of limitless shopping. (The definition is not undisputed). In my case, this phobia is compounded by the lighting – especially in Target. Aaron took me there once and I could not really get past the doorway. It was just horrifying. If I go to Hell, I will not have my ankles licked by fire. And I will not be lit from below. I will be subjected to giant, constant, overhead fluorescent lighting – what Michael Cunningham once called less lighting than the “banishment of all darkness.”

That gets it right, I think. All darkness must be banished to promote and encourage the purchase of things. This is what a huge amount of our culture now rests upon: the purchase of things. I guess you have to banish the literal darkness to disguise the shallow yet impenetrable darkness our shopping civilization represents.

The NYT’s Winning Formula

Their recent numbers were disappointing – because ad revenue for the company as a whole is down 11 percent over last year. But digital subscriptions are coming to the newspaper’s rescue and now account for a majority of the subscribers. It has 1.1 million digital subscribers, alongside 731,000 print subscribers. That has given the paper a gain in circulation of 18 percent in one year – a terrific result. And all the newspapers surviving are doing so by meters or some version of paywalls.

Now compare the NYT with the Washington Post. They used to be comparable papers (I remember a time when I preferred the Post). Now: not so much. The WaPo’s circ is down 6.5 percent, and it has only 42,000 digital subscribers – a mere four percent of the NYT’s. Its total circulation is now a quarter of the NYT’s. Even the Dish – a micro-media-company – now has a solid 25,000 digital subscribers. It’s a new world, innit?

Ask Josh Fox Anything: Is Fracking A Necessary Evil?

The writer/director of Gasland and Gasland II replies:

Meanwhile, Claire Thompson passes along some news from California:

On Monday, the state Assembly’s Natural Resources Committee approved no fewer than three bills calling for a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing until its environmental and health effects are thoroughly studied by the state. Meanwhile, another bill pending in the state Senate would allow fracking to continue for now but would impose a moratorium if the state fails to complete a comprehensive review by January 2015. …

It’s not just [environmentalists] who want to keep their state frack-free. California’s powerful agricultural interests are also calling for more regulation and oversight, given the threat this water-intensive and water-polluting process poses to crops. And considering the growing evidence that fracking can cause earthquakes, every citizen of this already seismically unstable state has reason to be concerned. The state’s fracking fight is centered around the Monterey Shale in Southern California, which holds two-thirds of the country’s estimated oil reserves. Production there had been dwindling until the recent rise of fracking and horizontal drilling made hard-to-reach reserves accessible, and now oil companies are chomping at the bit.

Gasland II just premiered at Tribeca and will air on HBO this summer. Ask Anything archive here.

Marriage Equality Goes Local

Balko reports from Bisbee, Arizona, whose officials recently generated a firestorm by passing an ordinance permitting civil unions:

“Both Councilman Conners and I live in the ward with the highest LGBT population,” says Bisbee Mayor Adriana Badal. “And proportionally, Bisbee itself has one of the highest gay and lesbian populations in the state. We decided we wanted to do something real. Not a resolution, but something that carries the force of law.”

The problem is that in the U.S., most legal protections for marriage are codified at the state level. Conners and Badal knew they couldn’t grant rights to same-sex couples that the state wouldn’t enforce, but they did come up with an ordinance that granted as many legal protections as a small town could.

Bisbee, for example, owns a cemetery, so the ordinance granted the same interment rights to same-sex couples and their families that the town gives to heterosexual families. The ordinance also granted same-sex families the right to get family passes at the public swimming pool, the right to the same land-use permits, and — perhaps most significantly — visitation rights and power of attorney to make medical decisions at the local hospital. …

Within 12 hours of the ordinance passing, Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne raised concerns that Bisbee had usurped some of the state’s powers, and possibly violated a constitutional amendment passed in 2008 that defined marriage as “only a union of one man and one woman.” Horne threatened to sue to have the new policy overturned.

Tom Prezelski wonders why the issue has become such a concern to state legislators:

It would be welcome if folks at the Capitol were to look at Bisbee to see what they could do to make sure that such towns have the resources to address issues of economic development and to keep their streets paved. Even though these things are well within the purview of the Legislature, they are hardly a priority for our state’s leadership. Instead, we get this needless meddling in local affairs. … The chest-thumping from Arizona’s political leadership about freedom rings a bit hollow when it becomes clear that they have little respect for the freedom of folks in communities that look different than their own.

State and local officials were able to resolve the issue, however:

Lawyers working with the city council from the pro-gay marriage group Lambda Legal said the city will omit the “spouse” reference in favor of “family partnership” or “registered partnership.” Other references to rights prohibited under the state constitution will be dropped. Instead, the city will work with gays and lesbians to help them enter into civil contracts such as wills and healthcare proxies — already available to any citizen — when they apply for civil union status.

The compromise provides a template for other municipalities in the state seeking to offer some form of legal recognition for same-sex couples. Officials in Tempe, Ariz., said they are considering adopting a similar law in that city.

Did The Saudis Warn the US About Tsarnaev?

That’s what one unnamed Saudi official has told Britain’s Daily Mail. That does change the equation in terms of “stove-piping” since 9/11. But I would just note that this is in the Mail – not exactly a barometer of reliability – and that the piece contains its own caveat:

If true, the account will produce added pressure on the Homeland Security department and the White House to explain their collective inaction after similar warnings were offered about Tsarnaev by the Russian government. A DHS official denied, however, that the agency received any such warning from Saudi intelligence about Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

My italics. For more context on the Mail, see this hilarious video. Meantime, we’ll wait for confirmation.

Is Osama Alive Or Still Dead?

Mutually conflicting conspiracy theories often coexist:

[W]hile it has been known for some time that people who believe in one conspiracy theory are also likely to believe in other conspiracy theories, we would expect contradictory conspiracy theories to be negatively correlated.

Yet, this is not what psychologists Micheal Wood, Karen Douglas and Robbie Suton found in a recent study. Instead, the research team, based at the University of Kent in England, found that many participants believed in contradictory conspiracy theories. For example, the conspiracy-belief that Osama Bin Laden is still alive was positively correlated with the conspiracy-belief that he was already dead before the military raid took place. This makes little sense, logically: Bin Laden cannot be both dead and alive at the same time. An important conclusion that the authors draw from their analysis is that people don’t tend to believe in a conspiracy theory because of the specifics, but rather because of higher-order beliefs that support conspiracy-like thinking more generally. A popular example of such higher-order beliefs is a severe “distrust of authority.”

Undertreating Mental Illness

In the shadow of her own family history of schizophrenia, Mac McClelland investigates the neglect of mental health treatment across the US, “where the three largest de facto psychiatric facilities are jails.” In San Francisco’s impoverished Tenderloin neighborhood:

The majority of [community center director Cindy] Gyori’s clients are suffering afflictions like PTSD, anxiety, depression, and the associated addiction issues. That is: With treatment, they’re theoretically capable of recovery and (nonsubsidized) functioning. But Gyori’s staff is short, underpaid. New clients can’t be seen for initial risk assessment for a month. The city’s public-housing shortage is so severe that it closed the list to new applicants. “This society is set up to create Tenderloins,” she says.

“We’re dealing with the most stigmatized and misunderstood population. You can scream outside my window,” she says, turning her face in the direction of the guy screaming outside her window—something about “dinner”—”and I’m not gonna make assumptions that it’s your fault. As long as a person is disabled, and income is limited, you have to help them. Destigmatization is a big part of it.”

Sure.

When I leave the clinic, it is admittedly difficult not to judge the strung-out-looking fellow lunging through the crosswalk hollering a song about monkeys, the refrain of which is a monkey call, or the parties responsible for the two piles of human shit I sidestep in as many blocks. Though an estimated 1 in 5 families contains someone with a mental illness, even families of the mentally ill aren’t always sympathetic. “We have families who aren’t willing to work with us or do anything,” says my Aunt Terri’s caseworker, Eleanor. “Your family was so willing; everybody was there to do whatever.” But she’s certainly not talking about my great-grandmother, who pronounced Terri lazy, and not even so much my grandfather, who thought his daughter was a spoiled brat who just wanted attention. And she wasn’t talking about me, whose total uselessness in Terri’s transportation and other needs earned me the resentment of at least one cousin.