Christmas Bird Count - How many canaries are left?

Our birder friend, Dianne, (well, she does other things besides birding) emailed to invite us to the Christmas Bird Count today. The Audubon website explains:

The Christmas Bird Count (CBC) is an organized continent-wide survey that documents every bird seen on a given day from sunrise to sunset. Since the turn of the 20th century, the Christmas Bird Count has contributed to the knowledge base of wintering birds in North America. This information is also important to allow scientists to detect fluctuations and trends of birds over a period of years.

1986: Coal mine canaries made redundant

More than 200 canary birds are being phased out of Britain's mining pits, according to new plans by the government.

Modern technology is being favoured over the long-serving yellow feathered friend of the miner in detecting harmful gases which may be present underground.

The Downey Woodpecker was clear in the binoculars, but not so clear in the camera.




This moose was one of four we saw. If you click on the moose to enlarge it, you can see a white horizontal bar just to the right of her nose. That was part of the wing feather a magpie using the moose as a trampoline.


We do see birds all winter, particularly ravens and magpies which are big and plentiful all winter and their black plumage stands out against the snow. But the little birds flit around so quickly that they are hard to see. But when you ride around for four hours specifically looking for birds, you see a lot more.






When we were in China, I was watching all the birds on campus - an oasis of trees in the increasingly concrete city. Most of my students were surprised when I talked about the birds. First that I was interested in them, second that there were any on campus - they just didn't 'see' them. But coal miners used to take canaries down into the mines because they were affected much faster than people if the air went bad. The canaries were introduced into the mines in 1911 and were phased out in Britain in 1986 according to a BBC story.

Birds and other animals serve as environmental canaries on earth. The counts give at least a rough count of the number and location of birds in the United States. The changes from year to year help identify trends. For instance, today Dianne was upset with the 20 European Starlings we saw, bird not natural to Anchorage, that have been increasing in number steadily, and harmfully to other birds whose nests in tree holes they invade.

Dianne had a regular route for this part of east Anchorage and we saw quite a few birds. I was able to get some pictures of the larger birds (eagles and ravens) and this one unrecognizable picture of the downey woodpecker.



We also got some more exotic birds. Dianne wouldn't let us put them in the official count list, but she stopped long enough for me to take pictures of the flamingos, penguins (we saw one more before these) and the robin.

Outscourced and No Country for Old Men

You'd think after the film festival, I'd be ready for a movie break. But there was a movie about India at the Bear Tooth Monday night and Joan wanted to see a movie today so we went to the one with the most stars in the newspaper.

Outsourced


[I'm still have mixed feelings about videotaping films in the movies. When the Film Festival folks emailed me, I was wondering if they were going to complain about that, but not at all. Since movie reviewers on tv and the radio use clips from the movies they review, I should be able to do the same. I only use a tiny percentage, I don't give away anything that would spoil the movie, etc. But I also don't want my camera to disturb people around me. So if I don't get a seat away from others or I'm not surrounded by friends, I also tend not to take out my camera. Or if I get so absorbed in the movie I forget. Anyway, these two movies I took no pictures. So I'm using the Outsourced trailer. You can see more clips from the movie including the first 8 minutes of the movie at the official site.]

India is another universe. While I enjoyed 'being' in India watching Darjeeling Express, that movie was more focused on the three American brothers who used India as the backdrop for their reunion and bonding. Outsourced gives a more balanced view of both how the American call center guy from Seattle who is dropped suddenly into India feels, but also gives more of an India viewpoint as well. This is not a heavy film, but it gave a good sense of how it feels to be embraced by the world that is India - the smells, the huge crowds, the different rules for doing most everything - in a don't take yourself too seriously way. This guy made far more progress than I think possible in only three weeks, but that aside, it pulled me in that my critic hat fell off and I just enjoyed the movie.

No Country for Old Men

I don't like violent movies, but I was hearing more and more good buzz for this movie, and it was at a convenient time and place, so we went. I am drawn to psychopaths - because they are out there and we need to understand that and them - but this movie didn't give us any real clues about them. We saw one in action, but nothing that helps us understand why. Overall it was a very well made and gripping movie. Again, I was totally pulled into it. And I liked the fact that there was no Hollywood ending, in fact it was left open enough there could be a sequel.

I would note there are long blog discussions about some of the scenes in the movie and apparently a lot of head scratching about what actually happened in the movie. I didn't have that reaction. Not everything was perfectly clear, but neither is life. It wasn't unclear in that the Coen brothers did a poor job of making the movie. A good movie, like a good book, deserves a second look. But Nora Ephraim did write a funny review in the New Yorker, but I'd see the movie before I read the review.

Blog, Blog, Blog

Blogging stuff keeps piling up in my life. Here's two posts in one, first on ADN blogs and then on Quarterlife and Marshall Herskovitz.

Anchorage Daily News (ADN) wants bloggers
At the Alaska Apple Users Group meeting last night, Kathleen McCoy from the Anchorage Daily News announced the paper was soliciting local bloggers who cover a specialized topic - community council news, local horse news, etc. They already have 13 blogs that I counted here tonight from gardening and barhopping to hockey. I got to talk to her a little during the break. Seems as the print version - and the employee base - shrinks, the ADN is trying to fill the void by using the free labor of local bloggers. On the one hand, that's good in a number of ways. It means

• ordinary people are writing about what they're passionate about
• we'll get coverage with different perspectives
• there won't be anyone to force a certain look or perspective
• there will be more room for comments - and maybe individual bloggers can do a better job of monitoring the nastiness of some of the current ADN blogs
• featured blogs will get more attention than they might otherwise
  

But on the negative side it means:

• the inconsistent quality we see online in general
• corporate exploitation of community public citizens - they aren't likely to share any ad revenue and they are cutting staff and replacing it with unpaid bloggers
• hit and miss coverage as unpaid bloggers have to earn a living and miss their posts, decide they don't need to subsidize the ADN with their blogs, and otherwise skip posts and/or drop out

I think the ADN has no choice but to figure out ways to create an electronic presence. Kathleen has been around the ADN many years and I think she's trying to make this work. So far their stance on monitoring the nastiness of some of the regular blog posters seems short sighted to me. I can't find the posts I was looking for, but here is a little after Andrew Halcro quit his ADN blog.I'll hold judgment, though I'm on the wrong side of neutral in my expectations at this point.


Quarterlife

One of the best television programs I ever saw was "My So-Called Life." One of the producers, Marshall Herskovitz, was on Fresh Air this morning, talking about the television industry (the effects of corporate consolitdation and the end of the ban on networks owning the programing) and his new effort - an internet tv program called Quarterlife that has been bought by NBC. Quarterlife has been on the periphery of my consciousness, but the interview brought it front and center. I watched the first two shows today. (You can watch it online at Quarterlife.com- there are 11 episodes so far, all available.)

The show is about a young woman who... you guessed it, has a blog named....did you figure it out yet? Quarterlife. It is very real, very unlike most television. And no commercials. And you won't have any late fees.

I suspect blogs are a transitional genre, and maybe corporate World will end up buying up or otherwise coopting the best - or at least most profitable - but something is happening here. Stay tuned.

[More recent posts at ADN Blogging Policy - 1 and ADN Blogging Policy - 2.]

Infamous Lake Otis and Tudor and the Moon

Worst intersection
in the city. Moon sliver
makes traffic ok.

Warm Anchorage Winter

The sun came out this afternoon, but it's cooler. Still, as you can see from the week's temperature chart, our daily lows have been above the normal average daily highs most of the week. And it's been like that most of the winter. [OK, I know for most of you winter starts Dec. 21. But here it begins when the snow starts to fall, usually some time in October. For us the solstice means it's starting to get lighter each day. That's all good.]











[Temp trend from ADN]

Blogger Law 101

Through the serendipity of the internet, I just found a site called Tubetorial, which has a series of videos on blogger law, or "What every blogger needs to know about the law." I've only looked at the first five minute video, which is just an overview. It says the series will cover:

• Trademark
• Copyright
• Defamation
• Marketing and Advertising
• Miscellaneous

This sounds a little ominous. Will you be sued? Does someone already own your domain name? My sense of the blogosphere is that it is pretty wide open and most of us little guys probably aren't in much danger - if our domain name gets taken away, well, we can make up a new one. But it also seems fairly smart to at least be aware of the law and not do unnecessarily stupid things that might make you liable.

So how did I find this site? I've been noticing in the last week that I'm getting a lot more hits from Google image search. But in sitemeter, unlike the regular Google searches which give you the search terms people put into Google, image searches don't do that. So I was looking around to see if someone knew why and if there was a way to get that. That got me to Pearsonified.com
where there was a post about how to write the code on your pictures so that Google search would find them easier. In the comments there were some other links to interesting sites - getting me further away from what I was looking for, but to things I didn't know I needed to know. Including the Tubetorial site that has the Blogging Law videos.

There were some interesting suggestions about how to put tag words into the code for the pictures. I looked at the code that blogspot automatically sets up for one of my pictures and in the alt section it just has a long number, but I put the name of the picture into the .jpg. [I really have no idea what the alt section is, but I could find it in the oode.] Since blogspot is owned - as I understand it - by Google, you'd think they would do the right thing for us blogspot users. Anyway, I am starting to see the image traffic pick up noticeably.

Oh, I learned a new acronym in all of this: SEO - Search Engine Optimization.

The Ethics and Rules of Surveillance

I started this post almost a month ago, but it didn’t feel right, so I’ve left it simmering. I picked it up about two weeks ago. I think I’ve finally got a way to talk about this, and why this undercover stuff feels wrong, but seems logically justified.

Private Life Values in Conflict with Public Life Values

When human society began changing from premodern to modern (as social scientists label these things,) we changed from societies in which family loyalty, group loyalty, fealty were the most important measure of a person. The modern world - the world in which scientific rationality replaced traditional authority - made merit the main measure of a person, and logic and rationality the path to truth and justice.

The point is that today we live in world with two major systems of rules. (Yes I know there are more than two, but for this situation, bear with me and accept two.) In our private lives, loyalty to family (and close friends and associates) is one of the most important standards. We accept parents standing up for their children even when the children did something terrible. We think that is normal and natural. In our public lives, rationality and merit are supposed to be the standard. The United States is a country based on the rule of law, not the rule of men. Everyone is supposed to be equal before the law.

But we can’t shut down our private value system when we go to work everyday. We make friendships with people at work and our relationships with them are both professional and personal. So these two value systems overlap in our lives. We have laws against nepotism because we recognize that it would be hard to use objective, rule of law, standards when a family member is involved. We have conflict of interest laws and require people recuse themselves when these two systems overlap.

As much as we like to believe in this separation, except for androids like Data, the separation doesn’t really exist. For most people when emotion and reason are in conflict, emotion wins. Professors Jules Lobel and George Loewenstein write,

Intense emotions can undermine a person's capacity for rational decision-making, even when the individual is aware of the need to make careful decisions.

Rule of Law versus Personal Loyalty

Where’s all this headed? Patience, I’m almost there. In our public world, we talk nobly about obeying the law, but in our private world we may go over the speed limit, we may pad our charitable contributions in our tax returns, and we may give preferential treatment to good friends when we deal with them professionally. We live with an inherent conflict between the rule of law and the rule of me and my friends.

I think this is hardwired into most of us. We learn about this early on. Telling the teacher about another student who broke a rule, makes us a tattletale. We have lots of other negative terms for being disloyal to the group. Should you ‘rat’ on your friend who cheats on his exam? College honor codes place students in a moral dilemma. Should you ‘betray’ your friend? Blowing the whistle is the positive term for someone who ‘squeals’ on his organization when it hides its illegal actions. A study for the International Association of Chiefs of Police found that

· 79% of respondents said that a law enforcement Code of Silence exists and is fairly common throughout the nation.
· 46% said they would not tell on another officer for having sex on duty.
· 23% said they wouldn’t tell on another cop for regularly smoking marijuana off duty.

I wonder what the response would be for FBI agents.


So when the FBI and the federal prosecutors offer (bribe) witnesses a chance to reduce their sentences if they do undercover work, if they rat on their partners, there is an inherent conflict of the personal and public systems of ethics. The part that I think has bothered me, but I haven’t been able to articulate until now, is that in the court of law, the private value system of loyalty is treated as if it didn’t exist. Only the rule of law matters. Yes, the legal code of the United States as an extension of the US Constitution is the backbone of our democracy. The Constitution is like a legal contract that the people of the United States agree to live by and it is the legal blueprint

... to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...

But the government that is formed based on the rule of law is merely a means to an end that is addressed more specifically in the Declaration of Independence. There we find that "Governments are instituted among Men" to secure "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

For most people I've ever met "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" includes the bonds of loyalty of family and friends. So, yes, the rule of law is important, but the value of loyalty is probably a more basic human characteristic. It is the reason we need the laws. And so when in court, the rule of law is the only important value, and humans are pressured into violating their loyalty to close friends with no acknowledgment that this is also an important value, we naturally feel uncomfortable, even violated and betrayed.


Use of Undercover agents

There's no question that in the Alaska political corruption trials of 2007 the surveillance tapes made all the difference with the juries and the public.

• Hearing a politician say in his own words he knew what was happening
• Listening to another politician slurring his four letter words and joking about getting a job from the drunk lobbyist
  FBI tape of Pete Kott 01 uploaded by AKRaven
  
  
• Seeing the money handed over from the lobbyist’s pocket to the politician's, followed by profuse thanks and promises to help in any way (the hand off is toward the end of the tape, first he's trying to get help for a $17,000 credit card problem.)
  

Without the tapes, it would be one person's word against another's.


The Pros and Cons of Surveillance Work

There are powerful arguments FOR doing the undercover work but also troubling arguments against.

Reasons For Undercover Surveillance:

• There's no other way to get the information. These are things not meant to be heard by others. There are no written contracts, just people verbally agreeing to break the law, often using code words (prison warden in Barbados for Kott.) Anchorage Daily News editor and reporter Rich Mauer told PBS:
  

  Journalists don't get to tap phones. Journalists don't get to—to place secret cameras. So, the FBI is listening in on conversations that we thought maybe were happening. But lo and behold they really were, and we're getting to—to hear these things.

• The victim often is 'the general public,' not a specific person who can file a complaint. So without the intervention of an investigatory agency with extraordinary powers, no one would be in a position to file a complaint.
  
• Without this sort of evidence, it is difficult for juries to determine where the truth lies. They hear different witnesses, but which one should they believe? Simply because one is a better actor doesn't mean that one is telling the truth.
  
• Hearing it directly from the person's mouth on tape allows the jury to hear the exact intonation - whether it is said in jest or in anger, whether one word is stressed or another. Reading the transcript allows the reader to interpret the words in many different ways. Prosecutor Nick Marsh, in his closing argument in the Kott trial, said that this case had unique evidence, that because of the hours of electronic surveillance
  
• 
  
• you the members of the jury have been able to sit in a ringside seat as they committed the crimes in the indictment.
• Playing the tapes can get the criminal to plead guilty and cooperate with the FBI and prosecutors. This certainly worked for Bill Allen and Rick Smith..
  

Reasons Against Undercover Surveillance

• Entrapment - would these people have committed a crime independent of this? The basis for Tom Anderson's conviction was the cooperating witness' offer to pay Anderson for helping out in ways consistent with Anderson's ideological beliefs.
  
• Motives of the cooperators - To get their own sentences reduced. There is a powerful incentive to paint the picture the prosecutor wants to hear in court, even if it isn't true.
  
• Invasion of privacy
• Surveillance involves listening to personal conversations. The hour or less of actual surveillance tape played at each of the three trials was a tiny fraction of the many hours of actual taping. Much, if not most of what was heard had nothing nothing to do with the investigation
• The FBI has a word - minimization - for deciding what they should not listen to and guidelines for turning off the recording device. At the end of this post I have my notes from court when one of the FBI agents discussed the procedures for surveillance tapes.
  
• The tapes also pick up the conversations of people who have nothing to do with the investigation
• Betrayal of associates - We live with overlapping values systems. As citizens we value the law. As members of families and of groups of friends, we value our loyalty to each other. In these cases, people who described their relationships as "like family" were now required to betray those relationships in order to save their own skin. The easy response is that "they were criminals," "they were breaking the law." But how easy would it be to turn in your child, your best friend? We have powerful social norms against betraying our friends and colleagues.
  

Tentative Conclusion includuing the need for better oversight

Just because some people drive badly when drunk, others shoot people with guns, and still others do a lousy job teaching third grade, doesn’t mean we should ban alcohol, guns, and third grade teachers. FBI surveillance can be abused too. Because some people do these things badly doesn't mean the activity itself is bad. Some things are more prone to abuse than others and thus we have restrictions, special oversight, and other measures to prevent abuse. Yet, FBI (and other) surveillance, by necessity is done in the shadows. Abuse is harder to discover. Therefore, I think it is necessary to design better oversight processes including more representive parties involved. Yes, I understand, the more who know, the harder to protect the investigation. But if they can trust the criminals who wear the wires, they can trust carefully, but representatively chosen monitors of the process.



Power

One other observation. At the trials, I was alarmed by the power of the US Government - represented by the FBI and the US Department of Justice - and the potential to abuse that power. The FBI and DOJ (Department of Justice) generally had, in court, close to a ten to one advantage over the number of defense people. When Kott’s attorney insisted that each tape introduced as evidence be verified by the agent who monitored it, the government had the budget to bring about 18 agents into court - most from outside Alaska. This doesn't count the thousands of hours of spent on the investigations and trial preparation. While the DOJ may complain about limited funding, their campaign chest is much bigger than any of the defendant's, and probably than all of them rolled together - including the $500,000 each that Allen and Smith got for legal defense as part of the sale of VECO.

I was alive when J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the FBI and used it as his own private investigation unit:

The committee staffs report shows that Hoover willingly complied with improper requests from Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. He gratuitously offered political intelligence to Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman, but both seemed unimpressed.

While everything I saw in court suggested a high level of integrity and professionalism on the part of the FBI and the DOJ, I have no idea of what went on outside of court. And if the Code of Silence cited above for police is part of the culture of the FBI, it would be hard to know when something did happen.

At this point, I don't have any strong recommendations one way or the other, but I wanted to record my observations based on the trials before I forget this all.

The Rules of Surveillance

Finally, a fair amount came out at the trials about the steps the FBI must go through before, during, and after the wiretaps and the use of the surveillance video recordings. Below are my notes from October 23, 2007 when Prosecutor Joe Bottini was interrogating FBI special agent Steve J. Dunphy, from Cincinnati Ohio about what it takes to get orders for a wire tap or video surveillance and then restrictions they have when taping. These are spell-checked notes that might be considered merely a sketch of what was all said. It gives you the basic outline, but some of the detail is lost.


First they have to get an application, then an order from a judge.

Bottini: All this in secret?
Dunphy: yes,
Bottini: purpose?
Dunphy: if it became known we were listening in it wouldn’t be fruitful
Bottini: Do phone company factor in this?
Dunphy: Yes, they are served with order and they would assist in getting it technically set up.
Bottini: Order cut to the phone company?
Dunphy: Redacted order
Bottini: Ordered not to disclose?
Dunphy: yeah
Bottini: How actually recorded?
Dunphy: When I started reel to reel. Now digitally onto portable hard drive then to other media, cd.
Bottini: Perfect or tech flaws?
Dunphy: You can bet on it [technical flaws]
Bottini: You have served as a monitor. Someone has to actually be listening real time?
Dunphy: yes/
Bottini: Purpose?
Dunphy: If only can record pertinent information, not about going back and listening.
Bottini: Required for minimization?
Dunphy: yes. if conversation not pertinent, personal, not related. the monitor will stop recording and stop listening. Back in a minute or whatever is reasonable to see if it changed.
Bottini: Is there a general rule of thumb on what you described? about how long go down ?
Dunphy: Generally told to go down a minute , but you learn what is appropriate as you go along. A learning curve as you learn the voices of the people. Minimization becomes more efficient as time goes on.
Bottini: Other kinds you can’t listen to?
Dunphy: Privileged, A lawyer. Those would be minimized right away and not turned on. Spouse, priest. Attorney client is the big one.
Bottini: If you are the monitor, is there a process to familiarize your self?
Dunphy: Have to read the affidavit with the case, meeting with one of the Asst US attorneys to brief on the case and minimization requirements
Bottini: Does monitor sit and take notes while calls intercepted?
Dunphy: Yes, record times, parties speaking, brief synopsis..
Bottini: Today’s tech also record date and time? [I think this means the tech for the recordings to be listened to in court that day.]
Dunphy: yes
Bottini: End of 30 day period what happens to original recordings intercepted. Dunphy: Original sealed and given to the court.
Bottini: Other types of electronic surveillance. You know about bug?
Dunphy: Yes, open type mic in a room.
Bottini: Video too?
Dunphy: yes.
Bottini: Authorization the same for intercepting phone conversation?
Dunphy: Yes, application process the same,
Bottini: application to court with affidavit. probably cause, all that?
When sought, G also has to request authorization to install?
Dunphy: Yes, sometimes to get mic into location, need to surreptitiously enter, then have to apply for that authority too.
Bottini: Same process with bug same as with phone, real time monitors?
Dunphy: Yes
Bottini: Same minimization with bug? Dunphy: yes
Same with privileged conversations? Dunphy: yes
Bottini: [Ever?] Just record it all and look later?
Dunphy: No, listen, if not pertinent stop it and on and on we go.
Bottini: Telephone intercept, Monitors real time take notes. Same with bugged monitor?
Dunphy: Yes, A little more because listening and watching, a little more awkward.
Bottini: Interception orders good for 30 days. Possible might not go the whole 30-days?
Dunphy: yes. Bottini: Examples?
Dunphy: Not getting any worthwhile activity, might change phone number, or something happens where you have to take down case, life in jeopardy.
Bottini: Were you asked to come to Alaska to assist?
Dunphy: Yes, March 2006.
Bottini: Specifically asked to do?
Dunphy: Monitor bug in hotel room in Juneau
Suite 604 in Baranof? Yes

Bottini: When installed? Dunphy: Jan
Bottini: Did you familiarize yourself with investigation. Dunphy: Yes, best I could

What did you do? REad the affidavit, with the agents monitoring before us, the agent, etc.
Aware or made aware that wire taps had been authorized? yes
What did you know? Yes Cell phone in SEpt for RS, couple months later November on BA’s cell, home phone.
While served as monitor, what is your day like?
…..
Two months, over time familiar with voices of people in suite.
BA? yes
RS? He lived here, so, obviously
VK? one time - March 30, 2006.
VK here today? Yes he is seated there in the red tie.
Original portable hard drive recorded to is sealed.
But recorded video and audio. yes. when we thought activity ceased, dubbed from hard drive to dvd, and could make multiple dvd’s from that. original sealed.
While monitoring bug, are you able to see and hear what is going on? Yes, within the camera view of the camera.

Ask.com Privacy Eraser

The NY Times today has a story saying that ask.com is adding a privacy eraser to its search engine. You can just click it on with each search.

Ask.com and other major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft typically keep track of search terms typed by users and link them to a computer’s Internet address, and sometimes to the user. However, when AskEraser is turned on, Ask.com discards all that information, the company said.

So I checked out Ask.com. And there's the privacy eraser button in the corner and when I clicked it I got this window:



(You can click on it to enlarge it.)


But is ask.com good enough to find what you are looking for? I searched for:

what do I know Alaska blog steve

And this blog didn't show up until the second page.

When I did the same with google, What Do I Know? showed up in the first four spots. Of course, this is a blogspot blog closely tied to Google.

Anyway, I'd suggest people start trying ask.com so that the other big browswers realize that people do want privacy options. Even if that means when I check out the hits on my blog, I'll get less information about the visitors from sitemeter.

Here's what ask.com's FAQ's say about what will be erased:

What is search activity data?
Search activity data includes information about the pages you visit on Ask.com, including the terms you search for, the links you click, your IP address, and any user or session identifier. When AskEraser is enabled, Ask.com will delete from our servers all references containing any single element of search activity data; query (what you searched for, clicked on, etc.), IP address (where you searched from), and user/sessions IDs (who you are in relation to previous searches).

Return to Top

Is my search activity deleted immediately?
When AskEraser is enabled, your search activity will be deleted from Ask.com servers within a number of hours. In some instances, it may take a longer period of time for your search activity to be deleted for example when we need to run automated systems to detect and block users or automatic bots that are abusing our site (see Is there any reason Ask.com will stop deleting my search activity?)

If Yahoo had this policy in China, the government there couldn't track down who visited what sites. And this may become more important in the US too.

Not Consuming isn't just about Being Cheap

Our first VW van lasted 24+ years. We still have the TV my mom gave us when our son was a year old. And you may have read my post about replacing our Maytag washer this year, which we got when he was born. (Now he's older than I was when his little sister was born.) My mother was certainly an influence on this sort of behavior. She grew up in Germany where, even today in many places, you have to turn on the lights in the stairwell and they go off in two minutes. I was raised with a no wasting household, lights out when you leave the room, don't leave the water running while you're brushing your teeth, etc. - well at least that was the dominant mantra if not always practiced.

Living for two years in rural Thailand added to that earlier training. I lived in a house up on stilts. There was electricity and I could fill my large earthen jug with water with a hose from a tap outside. But basically I saw that life without all the things I took for granted was quite possible, even enjoyable. No telephone, no tv, no car. (This was the late 60s, everyone with a decent job has a cell phone in Thailand now.) I learned that most of the stuff just isn't necessary. That doesn't mean I don't use technology today, but I use the stuff that I need to do what I want to do. So I have my macbook and my Canon digital camera, but no cell phone.

The whole logic of capitalism has seemed to me to be a giant ponzi scheme. It works as long as you keep people buying and using up stuff. So you have to develop planned obsolescence, products that will break down so you have to keep buying new ones. So when I saw this video, I realized it voiced my reasoning pretty well. The whole video is at storyofstuff.com




I know there are people who will scream and yell things like socialism, communism, radical freak, etc. But their ancestors were the last to give up the flat earth theory, argued Hitler was Germany's future, and still think global warming is an environmentalist plot.

Here's a quote from the film attributed to Victor Lebow, The Journal of Retailing, Spring 1955, p. 7, as quoted in Michael Jacobson Marketing Madness,1995, pg."191. I can't find the article right now to confirm it because the UAA library on line data bases don't go back that far. But they do have copies - probably microfiche (awful stuff) - going back to 1955. And just because he wrote it, did anyone read it before this Michael Jacobson found it? Was it an important influence on American business? I just don't know. But it sure sounds like the philosophy that has been followed.


Maybe this quote sounded too good to be true. And the only people quoting it on the internet were anti-consumption people. Well, it was a 1955 reference, but something wasn't right. I looked up Vicor Lebow again. He wrote a book in 1972 called "Free Enterprise: The Opium of the American People." Did this man go through some great conversion between 1955 and 1972? Or was the original quote a critique rather than a prescription? I'll try to read the original article tomorrow. It doesn't change the point being made, but if this was a critique, it is hard to argue as they do in the film that this was the blueprint for planned obsolescence.

[follow up post with the complete original 1955 article posted here.]

AIFF - Their Picks for Best Films, My Criteria

From the AIFF official blog:
Best Feature
The Clown and the Fuhrer

Best Short
Its a tie for first: Anonymous and Demain la Veille
Runner up: Dear Lemon Lima

Best Documentary
The Prize of the Pole

Best Short Documentary
Labeled


We were pretty close. My picks were

Clown and Führer
Anonymous
Taxi to the Dark Side (It wasn't clear, except for the shorts, which films were and weren't actually in competition for awards. If Taxi wasn't in competition, then the Prize or maybe Autism the Musical would have been my pick)
Labeled
I Have Seen the Future was my pick for animated, but that seems to have been rolled into shorts.


[December 28 - I just saw "A summer in the cage" and it would challenge the Prize of the Pole for the documentary award. It turns out that Taxi to the Dark Side was in the competition. I don't see how Prize beat it, and I think Summer in the Cage was a strong contender. Taxi wins on current political currency, but I think Cage was - cinematically a more interesting movie. Also, there were two other winners -

• Joseph Henry - Best Super Short

• La Flor Mas Grande Del Mundo - Best Animation

I haven't seen Joseph Henry, but I have since seen the La Flor. I still prefer I Have Seen the Future just for its technical innovativeness, though Flor does have more appealing content.
Based on Summer in the Cage I've added a new AIFF post.]

So what were my criteria? There are several factors.

• Technical Quality A continuum from.. shaky...no problems..very good..innovative. Some might have a combination of more than one of these which makes it harder to judge. Clearly Anonymous and I Have Seen the Future impressed me with their innovative technical styles.
  

• Content - There's a vague continuum from:
• Negative/disrespectful ...Boring...good story....originality...currency...impact
• I gave my only really negative review to The Dalai Lama's Cat because I thought it was a very negative and disrespectful portrayal. That doesn't mean a film can't be critical - I gave Taxi to the Dark Side lots of credit for being critical of the Defense Department's use of torture. But they provided lots of evidence. The Cat filmmakers began with what appears to be a bogus story about a cat, knew apparently little or nothing about the Dalai Lama or the Tibetan people, and then used Tibet, its people, and its holy shrines as the props for their ethnocentric humor. They used the Dalai Lama's name to sell their picture. It was simply rude and disrespectful to get a laugh and sell their movie. This is not about being politically correct. If you drop a kid on his head for laughs (which they did in the movie) that's not acceptable in my value system. Most depressing was how many people did laugh.
• Content is probably the most variable issue, since what interests me may not interest you. I thought Prize of the Pole and Taxi to the Dark Side both covered important social/political issues well, but that Taxi's was focused on a more current issue and had potentially more impact.
• Friends thought No Place Like Home was awful. I thought it had some editing problems, but there were a lot of things in there that I enjoyed.

• Use of Medium. Movies combine sight and sound and movement. The best movies are those that take advantage of the medium and tell their stories in ways that you couldn't tell it orally, in a book, etc.

• Whole Package. Even with weaknesses here and there, a film could pull it off by doing some things so well that the problems don't really matter. Autism the Musical seemed to use pretty basic video technology, but the story it told and how it told that story made it an excellent film. Just like parts of a face, individually, might be a little off, all together the face can be beautiful. So the same is true for the movie.

Anyway, those are the things, roughly, that go into my assessment of a good movie.