October 20, 2011
We are the 99% is a political solidarity slogan and implicit economic claim that emerged from the ‘Occupy’ protests in 2011. It is a reference to the difference in wealth between the top 1% and all the remaining citizens of the United States. It started as a tumblr blog and became an Internet meme that went viral, showing a picture of a person holding a piece of paper with their story on it, ending with the phrase, ‘We are the 99%.’ New York times columnist Anne-Marie Slaughter described pictures on the ‘We are the 99’ website as as ‘page after page of testimonials from members of the middle class who took out loans to pay for education, took out mortgages to buy their houses and a piece of the American dream, worked hard at the jobs they could find, and ended up unemployed or radically underemployed and on the precipice of financial and social ruin.’
In 2006, filmmaker and Johnson & Johnson heir Jamie Johnson filmed a documentary called ‘The One Percent’ about the growing wealth gap between America’s wealthy elite compared to the overall citizenry. The film’s title referred to the top one percent of Americans in terms of wealth, who controlled 38% of the nation’s wealth in 2001. The 1% percent in the United States starts with household annual incomes of greater than $593,000.
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October 20, 2011
Corporatocracy [kawr-prit-tok-ruh-see], in social theories that focus on conflicts and opposing interests within society, denotes a system of government that serves the interest of, and may be run by, corporations and involves ties between government and business. Where corporations, conglomerates, and/or government entities with private components, control the direction and governance of a country, including carrying out economic planning (notwithstanding the ‘free market’ label).
The concept of corporatocracy is that corporations, to a significant extent, have power over governments, including those governments nominally elected by the people. They exercise their power via corporate monopolies and mergers, and through their subsequent capacity to leverage broad economic interests, which allows them the luxury of being declared ‘too big to fail’; this is accomplished by legal mechanisms (i.e., lobbyists, campaign contributions to office holders and candidates, threats to leave the state or country for another with less oversight and/or more personally beneficial subsidies, etc.), which renders them immune to vague accusations and prosecution.
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October 18, 2011
Cool “Disco” Dan is the pseudonym of graffiti artist Dan Hogg (b. 1969). His standard mark, a particularly styled rendering of his name, has proliferated in the Washington metropolitan area, notably on surfaces along the route of the Washington Metro Red Line.
He has been spraying his tag since 1984. Part of the Go-Go scene of the 80’s in Washington; he managed to avoid being jailed or killed unlike a lot of his contemporaries by devoting himself to graffiti rather than becoming involved with drugs or gangs. The pervasiveness of his mark was reported frequently in the local press.
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October 18, 2011
Borf was a graffiti campaign seen in and around Washington, D.C. during 2004 and 2005, carried out by John Tsombikos while studying at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. This four letter word was ubiquitous around the Northwest quadrant of Washington, and ranged from simple tagging to complete sentences to two-color stencils to the massive defacement on an overhead exit sign from the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge to Constitution Avenue. Tsombikos was arrested after tips led police to his latest tag.
The campaign attracted widespread attention without first explaining its motivations. According to Tsombikos and subsequent Borf communiqués, both the nickname ‘Borf’ and the Borf face belonged to Bobby Fisher, a close friend of Tsombikos’ who had committed suicide. In a video shown in 2006, the Borf Brigade – the group claiming responsibility for the graffiti spree – asserted that capitalism and the culture of aesthetics created alienation and feelings of worthlessness that contributed to the 16-year-old’s suicide. The group said that they used other peoples’ property to commemorate and pay homage to their deceased friend. The graffiti usually had overtones of anti-authority sentiments and youth liberation.
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October 17, 2011
The Spamhaus Project is an international organization (founded by Steve Linford in 1998) to track e-mail spammers and spam-related activity. It is named for the anti-spam jargon term coined by Linford, ‘spamhaus,’ a pseudo-German expression for an ISP or other firm which spams or willingly provides service to spammers.
Spamhaus is responsible for a number of very widely used anti-spam DNS-based Blocklists (DNSBLs) and Whitelists (DNSWLs). Many internet service providers and Internet networks use these services to reduce the amount of spam they take on. The Spamhaus blocks 80 billion spam emails per day globally on the internet (almost 1 million spams per second). Like all DNSBLs, their use is considered controversial by some.
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October 16, 2011
The Tinkerbell effect is a term describing things that are thought to exist only because people believe in them. The effect is named for Tinker Bell, the fairy in the play Peter Pan who is revived from near death by the belief of the audience.
Claimed cases include: private property; the value of a nation’s money in a fiat system; the value of gold; civil society; and the ‘rule of law.’
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October 15, 2011
The Chewbacca defense is a fictional legal strategy used in an episode of ‘South Park’ in1998. The aim of the argument is to deliberately confuse the jury by making use of the fallacy known as ignoratio elenchi, or a red herring. It starts by stating that Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor (doubly incorrect: No longer sedentary, he used to live on a different planet, Kashyyyk.). The argument continues from there, the false premise leading to a series of nonsense conclusions. The concept satirized attorney Johnnie Cochran’s closing argument defending O. J. Simpson in his murder trial. The Associated Press noted it as an example of Cochran’s position in popular culture. The concept has become a minor Internet phenomenon, used frequently as a running gag on satirical sites and in forums as a form of rhetoric.
‘Why would a Wookiee, an 8-foot-tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of 2-foot-tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I’m a lawyer defending a major record company, and I’m talkin’ about Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you’re in that jury room deliberatin’ and conjugatin’ the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.’
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October 15, 2011
A facial composite is a graphical representation of an eyewitness’s memory of a face, as recorded by a composite artist. Facial composites are used mainly by police in their investigation of (usually serious) crimes. Construction of the composite was originally performed by a trained artist, through drawing, sketching, or painting, in consultation with a witness or crime victim. In the 1960s techniques were devised for use by those less artistically skilled, employing interchangeable templates of separate facial features, such as ‘Photofit’ in the UK and Smith & Wesson’s ‘Identi-Kit’ in the US. In the last two decades, a number of computer based facial composite systems have been introduced, amongst the most widely used systems are ‘Identi-Kit 2000,’ ‘FACES,’ and ‘E-FIT.’ In the U.S. the FBI maintains that hand-drawing is its preferred method for constructing a facial composite. Many other police agencies, however, use software, since suitable artistic talent is often not available.
Until quite recently, the facial composite systems used by international police forces were exclusively based on a construction methodology in which individual facial features (eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows, etc.) are selected one at a time from a large database and then electronically ’overlaid’ to make the composite image. Such systems are often referred to as feature-based since they essentially rely on the selection of individual features in isolation. However, after a long period of research and development work conducted largely within British Universities, systems based on a rather different principle are finding increasing use by police forces. These systems may be broadly described as holistic or global in that they primarily attempt to create a likeness to the suspect through an evolutionary mechanism in which a witness’s response to groups of complete faces (not just features) converges towards an increasingly accurate image.
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October 15, 2011
The ring of steel is the popular name for the security and surveillance cordon surrounding the City of London, installed to deter the IRA and other threats. The term was borrowed from an earlier stage of the Troubles when the centre of Belfast was fortified against attacks, the perimeter of which was known as the ring of steel. Roads entering the City are narrowed and have small chicanes to force drivers to slow down and be recorded by CCTV cameras. These roads typically have a concrete median with a sentry box where police can stand guard and monitor traffic. City planners call these types of precautions ‘fortress urbanism.’
Initially the ring of steel consisted of plastic cones and on duty policemen which the locals described as the ‘ring of plastic.’ It served the purpose of providing a visible sign to the public that the City authorities were taking the threats of more attacks by the IRA seriously. This was replaced by more permanent structures consisting of concrete barriers, checkpoints and thousands of video cameras. Following IRA ceasefires the police presence was curtailed. However, following the September 11 attacks, and a reported increased terrorist threat to the United Kingdom, security was stepped up again somewhat, with occasional spot checks on vehicles entering the cordon, although not to previous levels.
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October 15, 2011
Violent crime in New York City has decreased in the last fifteen years, and the murder rate in 2007 was at its lowest since at least 1963 when reliable statistics were first kept. Crime rates spiked in the 1980s and early 1990s as the crack epidemic hit the city. During the 1990s the NYPD adopted CompStat, broken windows policing and other strategies in a major effort to reduce crime. The city’s dramatic drop in crime has been attributed by criminologists to these policing tactics, the end of the crack epidemic and demographic changes. Most of the crime remaining occurs in poor areas, which tend to be outlying.
Organized crime has long been associated with New York City, beginning with the Forty Thieves and the Roach Guards in the Five Points in the 1820s. The 20th century saw a rise in the Mafia dominated by the Five Families. Gangs including the Black Spades and Supreme Team also grew in the late 20th century. Numerous major riots have occurred in New York City since the mid 19th century, including the Draft Riots in 1863, the Stonewall riots, multiple riots at Tompkins Square Park, and in Harlem. The serial killings by the ‘Son of Sam,’ which began in 1976 and terrorized the city for the next year.
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October 14, 2011
Future Shock is a book written by the futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970. In the book, Toffler defines the term ‘future shock’ as a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies. His shortest definition for the term is a personal perception of ‘too much change in too short a period of time.’ The book, which became an international bestseller, grew out of an article ‘The Future as a Way of Life’ in ‘Horizon’ magazine in 1965.
Toffler argues that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a ‘super-industrial society.’ This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaving them disconnected and suffering from ‘shattering stress and disorientation’ – future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of the future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock, he also popularized the term ‘information overload.’
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October 13, 2011
The Zihuatanejo Project was an intentional community created during the summers of 1962 and 1963 by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert under the umbrella of their nonprofit group, the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). The community was located in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and took up residence at the Catalina Hotel. The idea for the community was based on the fictional story from Aldous Huxley’s 1962 novel, ‘Island.’ Immigration officials were tipped off to the project when the Mexican media began reporting stories about an ‘LSD Paradise.’ In the summer of 1963, after only six weeks the Mexican authorities shut the community down.
More than 5,000 people applied to the IFIF in the hopes of joining the project in Zihuatanejo. Out of this pool of applicants, a small, select group of people were chosen. Amenities cost $200 a month per person, including food and lodging in bungalows near a secluded beach. Fishermen supplied a bounty of fresh fish from the bay. Leary and 35 guests rented the Catalina Hotel for a month using the ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’ as a guide book for LSD sessions, while Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert helped manage the group. Group LSD sessions began in the morning with the consumption of liquid LSD, with a dosage of 100 to 500 micrograms ingested by participating individuals; the experience would usually last until late afternoon.
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