Justice is a fiction

As long as corporations rule with impunity, and the government puts

the burden of corrupt businesses losses on the public, and
the rich and powerful are not held accountable
there is no justice.

The only question is just how much can you get away with (depending on how filthy rich you are)? The answer is TOO MUCH.

Justice is a fiction. Random at best, and certainly not blind.

Andrew Sullivan comments on the governments release yesterday of Bush Administration "torture" memos here and here.

Check out Salons round up on the issue by Glenn Greenwald, Mark Benjamin, and Alex Koppelman

Benjamin sums up the sad predictable reality:
"Without a rigorous investigation into the alleged efficacy of U.S. torture, we’ll never know. A torture commission would have looked into this very issue. With Obama's blessing, Congress could try to appoint a nonpartisan group of experts to carefully evaluate whether the torture program was an effective way to gather valuable intelligence or, as interrogators suspect, simply made desperate prisoners say whatever they had to say to make the pain stop, yielding a few gems among a flow of muck. But Obama hasn’t advocated a commission or any other vehicle to look into that, and today seems disinclined to do anything other than move on."

READ MOTHER JONES

Mother Jones March/April 2009

In this issue:

Spoiled: Organic and local is so 2008: the real future of food
By Paul Roberts

Michael Pollan Fixes Dinner: Michael Pollan on feeding everyone (not just foodies)
By Clara Jeffery

Veg-O-Might: Can you get ripped without meat?
By Jon Mooallem

Slash and Burn: Why biofuels are the rainforest's worst enemy
By Heather Rogers

La La LA

The East Side of Los Angeles on a Sunday Day from clark vogeler on Vimeo.

Saw this on Andrew Sullivan's blog the Daily Dish, and since I live right around most of these places I am reposting it here.
I love my neighborhood!

At the interesection of EVENT and MEMORY... a stange attractor

At certain moments everything seems to stop and hang in suspended animation.

everything around becomes disorienting

as if in a dream

or after some cataclysm

What treasures lie in these moments

when we find ourselves in unfamiliar territory

Do you ask yourself "How did I get here?"

or do you relish those moments as some kind of glimpse into the infinite...

or as a reflection of the responsibilities that bind and complicate our lives.

Are we driven to escape ourselves, or do we accept the endless seeking?

I recently ran across a new(ish) collection of Gregory Crewdson photos. I have long admired his work, but was particularly moved by some of these new images. (samples above). Text threads are my own thoughts.

Crewdson says of his own work in an interview with SITE:
"...although the work is influenced by film, I'm very struck by the still image, and I'm interested in the limitations of a photograph in terms of its narrative capacity to have an image that's frozen in time, and there's no before or after."

and this from an interview with npr:
"The images, he says, come to him while swimming. He teaches at Yale University, and has a studio in New York; in the city, he swims in a pool. But Crewdson says he prefers to swim outside, in lakes and rivers. The world beyond the shore, he says, offers very little time for imagination, to get lost in unconscious thoughts -- he finds that time in the water."

Another description from Whitecube:
"Gregory Crewdson works within a photographic tradition that combines the documentary style of William Eggleston and Walker Evans with the dream-like vision of filmmakers such as Stephen Spielberg and David Lynch. Crewdson’s method is equally filmic, building elaborate sets to take pictures of extraordinary detail and narrative portent. 
When he was ten, Crewdson’s father, a psychoanalyst, took him to see a Diane Arbus exhibition at MoMA, an early aesthetic experience that informed his decision to become a photographer. Work includes the Natural Wonder series, dioramas created by the artist with insects, animals and body parts in small-town settings both mundane and menacing. Recent series include Twilight and Beneath the Roses, everyday scenes with charged, surreal moods that hint at the longings and malaise of suburban America. These pictures are like incomplete sentences, with little reference to prior events or what may follow. The artist has referred the 'limitations of a photograph in terms of narrative capacity to have an image that is frozen in time, (where) there's no before or after' and has turned that restriction into a unique strength."

GOP leads the DEVOlution: Anti-Tax-Tea-Parties!

Fox and friends?

LA Times sums up all the Anti-Obama tax day protests: Insanity.

Andrew Sullivan nails it.
"If you favor no bailouts, then say so. If you want to see the banking system collapse, then say so. If you think the recession demands no fiscal stimulus, then say so. If you favor big cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, social security and defense, then say so. I keep waiting for Reynolds to tell us what these protests are for; and he can only spin what they they are against."

"All protests against spending that do not tell us how to reduce it are fatuous pieces of theater, not constructive acts of politics. And until the right is able to make a constructive and specific argument about how they intend to reduce spending and debt and borrowing, they deserve to be dismissed as performance artists in a desperate search for coherence in an age that has left them bewilderingly behind."

also, check out this Slate piece on conservative hypocrisy about Obama's proposal to limit charitable tax deductions for the rich.

Book Designer: Coralie Bickford-Smith

Beautiful book designs by Coralie Bickford-Smith

read more about this wonderful designer at designrelated.com and at the Penguin books blog.

Et Tu Obama?

Justice for all?

Glenn Greenwald's column today on the emerging progressive consensus on Obama's executive power and secrecy abuses is another sad reminder of the failure of government to serve the people instead of any administrations own ambitions and interests.

What is the Obama administration thinking?

You're welcome, America!

No life preserver? SLACKER! You're not working hard enough!

New opinion in today's Christian Science Monitor offers more sad evidence of our new corrected status in the world.

Crippled by debt, a collapsed economy, two complex and open-ended wars, a nation of outdated and degraded infrastructure, out-of-control health and education costs—the world is finally looking beyond the influence of the US, which will be digging it's way out of this mess for years to come.

Don't miss "Examined Life"

I recently got to see an advance screening of Examined Life. It is wonderful! Don't miss this excellent and thought provoking new film by Astra Taylor released through Zeitgeist films!
The film opens May 1 in theaters. Watch the trailer here.

In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today’s most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas. Examined Life reveals philosophy’s power to transform the way we see the world around us and imagine our place in it.

Featuring Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwarne Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Sunaura Taylor, and the indomitable Cornel West.

While all of the philosophers in the film are very interesting my favorite is Cornel West.
To my ear West has the most impressive and resonant voice. In addition to being a philosopher he is also an influential writer, educator, and activist.
"To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.
"Chekhov, Coltrane, and Democracy: Interview by David Lionel Smith." in The Cornel West Reader (1998)"

He speaks like a poet. Even the cadence voice reflects the rhythmic complexity of Jazz music and the Blues. It is his powerful voice that opens and closes the film.
Cornel West is a national treasure.

All the philosophers in the film strive to enlighten us by reminding us that we are all connected, and only in embracing our connectedness can we unity and solve the many problems that face our society.


Check out this interview with Astra Taylor IFC.COM

More thoughts on Examined Life later....

Hush

I'm exhausted with all the crazy rhetoric in media now... why do we hear the voices of the most divisive from the fringe? Beck and Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Coulter, etc.
9 out of 10 conservative "voices" sound to me like extremists.

Why do some many people listen to such drivel?

Laurie Ochoa Editor in chief, LA Weekly offers a few choice words on GOP spokes-hole Rush Limbaugh....

"He's an electronic opiate for the masses. For Limbaugh's audience is not a happy lot. They are completely convinced that an unholy coalition of liberals, homos, feminazis and overly entitled minorities are responsible for the mess of their own tiny, dead-end lives."

"...he's a perfect mouthpiece for the most elite portions of our society. He's a virile defender of wealth, privilege and greed."

from an opinion piece in today's LA Times.

I have to wonder where are the reasonable moderate conservatives and wouldn't they like their party back? Isn't it time for a real conversation about how to stabilize the county, rather than empty talk that further polarizes us?