Mental Distortion

Andrew Sullivan writes:

This Christianist president has a hard time with actual Christianity. He is of the fundamentalist psyche that holds that since he is on the side of the angels, he cannot do evil. And so even when presented with indisputable evidence of his own acts, his own memos, his own staff’s decisions, he cannot own the consequences. He asked for memos from apparatchiks saying it wasn’t torture, as if this guaranteed it wasn’t torture. He reacted to the tangible consequences of his own decisions as if someone else had been president, or someone else’s signature was on those memos, or someone else’s vice-president had publicly embraced torture as a “no-brainer.”

Even a president should be held accountable for his biggest lies.  Didn’t Richard Nixon teach us that? How easily history is forgotten or simply ignored.

In the summer of 1990 I spent a couple of months backpacking around Europe with a good friend of mine from school. As most backpackers do, we visited the usual countries in Western and Central Europe, such as England, West Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and even Sweden. But what was slightly unusual for that time was to have the ability to travel rather easily around Eastern Europe, unusual in the sense that it was possible to enter these countries without a visa or with ones that were more or less easy to acquire. This was just six months after the Berlin Wall opened up and other Communist countries of the former Warsaw Pact began falling like dominos and transforming into young democratic countries, some for the very first time and others again after many decades of Communist rule. With people now suddenly given the gift of traveling wherever they wanted to, they were streaming both west (to live and work) and east (out of curiosity), making it much easier for Americans to visit these countries, with or without a visa. To most young people today, the events of 1989 and 1990 are ancient history, and to them it’s no different than the events surrounding the Treaty of Westphalia or the Franco-Prussian War, just another batch of dates and events to learn for their high school history tests.

But by the time I visited Europe in the summer of 1990, these events were still very vivid in the minds of people around the world. One of the countries we visited in Eastern Europe at that time was Czechoslovakia, a country still recovering from its peaceful Velvet Revolution of a few months earlier led by Václav Havel and Alexander Dubček. Just a few weeks before, a ban from Communist times on playing music in the streets of Prague had been lifted by the new government led by Mr. Havel, making the center of Prague a very festive place to be at that time. Musicians of all sorts were performing throughout the city, whether it be on the Charles Bridge or in Wenceslas and  Old Town Squares. Music ranging from gypsy, the Beatles, klezmer and more could be heard everywhere.  Prague of 1990 was quite different than the tourist trap the city has become since then, without the hordes of hand crafts stores and portrait painters that can be found all over the city today. In addition to the music groups, other forms of art were on display such as painters, theater groups and more. One particular item stuck out for me, a Trabant car stuck atop what looked like four elephant legs (see picture above). It was difficult to imagine such a scene just a few months earlier under the Communist government, but times had quickly changed and people were enjoying a life that wasn’t available to them just a few months earlier. In fact, it felt as if the scenes of musical and artistic groups as well as the giant walking Trabant were a sort of collective middle finger to their former Communist overlords now that they were suddenly tossed into the ash heaps of history.

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Below is an East German Trabant TV commercial from the 1960s with the cinematography quality of a Monty Python sketch, not to mention having the feeling that John Cleese might pop up somewhere sitting at a table saying “And now for something completely different…”

Additional Reading:

• Trabant car listed at number 27 on Time’s 50 Worst Cars of All Time.

Well, this is certainly inspiring.  The composer Elliot Carter celebrated his 100th birthday yesterday at Carnegie Hall with James Levine conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Daniel Barenboim performing on piano. On the program was Carter’s Interventions for piano and orchestra, a piece commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Staatskapelle Berlin, the German orchestra led by Mr. Barenboim.

The piece was a New York City premiere and was written two years ago when Mr. Carter was just 98. I find it inspiring that someone so late in life is more prolific than ever, and not allowing himself to slow down and rest on his laurels.

As the Times article writes:

Mr. Carter wrote the 17-minute piece, for piano and orchestra, just last year, at 98. In fact, since he turned 90, Mr. Carter has poured out more than 40 published works, an extraordinary burst of creativity at a stage when most people would be making peace with mortality.

His first opera had its premiere in 1999. He produced 10 works in 2007 and six more this year. “I don’t know how I did it,” Mr. Carter said on Tuesday in the cluttered but homey Greenwich Village apartment where he has lived since 1945. “The earlier part of my life I felt I was more or less exploring what I would like to write. Now I’ve found it out, and I don’t have to think so much about it.”

I’ve always felt that a great many of history’s colorful personalities have had their greatest success early on in life, giving them the burden of a lifetime to look back on perhaps their greatest and most inspired bursts of creativity and success. Einstein was just 36 when he published the last of his monumental papers, the general theory of relativity, Napoleon was crowned Emperor at the age of 35, the Beatles broke up in their late 20s to early 30s and Noah was a mere 600 when he piled a bunch of animals into the ark during the Great Flood. Okay, I’m pulling your leg on that last one, but the list goes on and on.  Such achievements tend to overshadow later accomplishments, or perhaps it is just that most people want to remember only the earliest and most successful moments of a individual’s career.

To see Carter still hard at work at 100 is certainly inspiring. Perhaps his earlier work will stand the test of time more than his later works. Nevertheless, Carter’s continued composition in his second century is amazing and sets an example for those content to rest on their laurels later in life.

A team of Japanese scientists at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have been able to transmit images directly from a human brain while the subject viewed individual letters on a computer screen. The images viewed by the subject were simple block letters (ie. N-E-U-R-O-N) displayed in black and white and reconstructed by a computer crunching data from an fMRI machine that observed the subject’s brain activity while viewing the letters.  The results of this first test are somewhat grainy, but the results are amazing nevertheless.  The hope in the not-to-distant future is that this technology will reconstruct images in color and eventually scan one’s dreams as they sleep.

While such technology certainly blows the mind, one can only wonder where and how it could be used. The most obvious application would be in the study and treatment of psychological disorders and diseases, but I am certain there would be military and national security interest in such technology as well.  And it goes without saying that the porn industry could make a hefty buck with such a colorful gadget at their disposal … !  Who knows, maybe one day this gadget will transmit your dreams onto the family holodeck to provide  endless hours of family fun and entertainment.

Perhaps this may end up being a hoax, but if it is true, it’s certainly an amazing achievement. In fact, I am surprised it has not been reported on in more mainstream news publications.  So far only one major publication, the Telegraph, has reported on it, and so far, only a smattering of articles have shown up in Google News search results. Leave it to the blogosphere and sites such as Boing Boing to report about news stories such as this.

I suppose that since I lived in Munich for a good 5 years AND am a fan of Apple products, I should post something about Apple opening a new store in the heart of Munich at Marienplatz.  When my wife and I were in Munich last summer, we walked past the construction site of the new store, a short minute’s walk to the old City Hall and a two minute walk to the Hofbrauhaus.  There wasn’t much to see then, just a giant crane and a big empty gap between two neighboring stores where the store would soon stand.  The fact that they opened the store just five months later is pretty impressive, especially considering the fancy glass architecture that’s required in this particular store design.

But the store is indeed open, and the video below shows the enthusiasm of those in attendance, with most of the enthusiasm coming from employees of the store itself. Besides six or seven people eagerly showing off their iPhones, the crowd outside simply watched the celebratory antics of those employees inside, all in freezing temperatures.  I can’t help but think that while I’m sure a large amount of Apple faithful showed up at the grand opening that day, a larger group of people came as curious onlookers.  Apple’s share of the computer market in Europe is much smaller than in the United States, with market share in Europe hovering somewhere around 3% as of late 2007, compared to Apple’s nearly 8% share of the US market.

My impression during five years of living in Munich was that there was a lack of enthusiasm towards the Mac in general.  Only a few of my friends “converted” over to the Mac before I moved back to the United States at the beginning of 2006, and I can think of several cases where these same friends fought tooth and nail to convince their bosses on getting them a Mac for work, with their pleas always falling on deaf ears.  With this in mind, I can’t help but feel that Apple is banking on a few things in deciding to open a flag ship store in conservative Bavaria. Perhaps fatigue with Windows Vista and Microsoft’s ongoing battle with European Union anti-trust cases make some people want to try something different.  Or perhaps the fabled iPod/iPhone halo effect will cause people to crack their wallets in buying a new Mac.  And maybe a growing market share for a browser such as Mozilla Firefox shows European instincts in wanting to try something different.  This desire for change may not necessarily lead the masses to flock to the Mac, but I certainly hold hope in Apple succeeding at convincing some to Think Different.

Mark Pinsky over at The New Republic definitely has a great idea for the incoming president:

Barack Obama sounds like he wants to reach back to the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration to jump start the economy with an economic stimulus proposal featuring infrastructure repair. If so, it may be time for the man who would be FDR to take a look at another successful–but largely forgotten–jobs program from the Depression era: the Federal Writers Project.

This time, the FWP could begin by documenting the ground-level impact of the Great Recession; chronicling the transition to a green economy; or capturing the experiences of the thousands of immigrants who are changing the American complexion. Like the original FWP, the new version would focus in particular on those segments of society largely ignored by commercial and even public media. At the same time, the multimedia fruits of this research would be open-sourced to all media, as well as to academics. As an example, oral history as a discipline has made great strides in the past 70 years, and with the development of video techniques, the forum of the Internet could make these multi-media interviews widely available to schools and scholars, as well as to average Americans.

How would it work? Administering the new FWP as an individual grant program through community colleges and universities could minimize bureaucracy and overhead. In consultation with the Obama administration–perhaps through the National Endowment for the Humanities–and Congress, guidelines could be established and a small staff assembled in Washington to oversee the projects, in the form of grants, rather than hourly wages. Projects could be pitched locally to colleges, or suggested and posted by them, vetted preliminarily and then approved or rejected by the national staff.

I think the benefits of such a program would be tremendous, especially considering the technology available to tell these stories.  In a world where people are reading less and less, it would seem to be a great way at getting people to learn more about our less visible areas of society and culture, and also as a way to keep a large set of very talented writers and journalists occupied until they are ready to make the necessary transitions into other professions or retirement, or back into the journalistic profession, whatever that may be.

I consider myself pretty lucky to have visited Venice, Italy on many, many occasions. During my years of living in Germany, and before then, I was a frequent visitor to the city, as a good friend of mine lives and works in Venice as an art restorer. To those who are looking for a place to visit to simply wile away the time in thought and on foot, Venice is the perfect place to do so. Sure, Venice is a tourist trap and in some ways seems like a glorified Disneyland, but there is a side to the city that can be seen if you have the right connections there to show it to you.

Venice is also a rather warm city, especially when compared to the rest of Europe on the other side of the Alps, although snow storms are known to come along every now and then. And for those who have visited Venice in the summer months of June to August, the city can be extremely hot! But Venice has an other important feature in the life of the city: floods.

Floods are a big part of Venice’s history and some huge floods have literally left their mark on the city’s walls.  This past week has been no exception with the worst floods since 1872 hitting the city in lightening fashion, leaving no time for city officials to erect elevated walkways for residents and tourists to traverse the cities many narrow streets. Only once when I’ve been to Venice, in October of 1999, did I experience “Acqua Alta“, the term for Venice’s annual floods. As you are walking through Venice’s narrow streets and ally ways, the water begins to rush in, and city shops and dwellers respond immediately by putting up walls and barricades to protect their shops, hotels and apartments, and simply waiting out the floods until they recede.

Some people on occasions such as this become rather creative in their ways of dealing with the flood.  The man in the video below decided to surf the water in St. Mark’s Square, the heart of Venice.  Floods in this part of the city tend to be higher than areas closer to the train station, allowing him the water he needs to pull this off.  Of course, as the waters continued to climb, making it the worst flood since 1872, he probably could have scuba dived in St. Mark’s.

Update:

Well, it turns out that I shouldn’t believe everything I read.  While the floods in Venice were truly big and unusual, turns out that the 1966 floods are still the worst on record and not as the title of this article would suggest.  This was confirmed by my good friend who lives in Venice and who nicely hinted that I shouldn’t believe everything I read…

Related links:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/12/venice_under_water.html

A few weeks ago, writer, actor, radio personality and unabashed liberal Studs Terkel passed away in Chicago, Illinois at the age of 96. I had always been aware of Terkel, but had never read any of his books, seen any of his movies or seen many interviews that I could recall. But now in death, I’ve been learning more about this remarkable man through television and radio retrospectives and in material that can now be found online about his long and fascinating life as well as his famous oral histories. It makes me wonder why it takes one’s death for one to be illuminated and lionized in the public eye that could not be said as strongly and clearly before his passing.

Perhaps his time had passed a few decades earlier, for Terkel was a remarkably honest individual who never wavered in his liberalism and social beliefs. In an era of Reagan, Clinton and Bush 41 and 43, when the L-word has taken on such negative connotation among people in many quarters of political life, it has been refreshing to hear such an unabashed liberal such as Terkel speak out so strongly about his political and social beliefs, regardless of the times.  He will be missed.

Here are some materials to peruse:

1.  Bob Edwards retrospective on Studs Terkel, XM Satellite Radio

2.  The Studs Terkel Program (radio)