Brassai – document.no:

Brassai (Gyula Halasz) Open Gutter From “Paris by Night” (1933)

I stumbled on the img, and thought it would look right in this blog. I have art – my own oand other peoples here: http://walterlogeman.com/art There is no reason not to put a bit here occasionally.

Brassaï – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Gyula Halász’s job and his love of the city, whose streets he often wandered late at night, led to photography while he was tutored by the fellow Hungarian master Andre Kertesz. He later wrote that photography allowed him to seize the Paris night and the beauty of the streets and gardens, in rain and mist. Using the name of his birthplace, Gyula Halász went by the pseudonym “Brassaï,” which means “from Brasso.” As Brassaï, he captured the essence of the city in his photographs, publishing his first book of photographs in 1933 titled “Paris de nuit” (“Paris by Night”). His efforts met with great success, resulting in his being called “the eye of Paris” in an essay by his friend Henry Miller. In addition to photos of the seedier side of Paris, he also provided scenes from the life of the city’s high society, its intellectuals, its ballet, and the grand operas. He photographed many of his great artist friends, including Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, plus many of the prominent writers of his time such as Jean Genet, Henri Michaux and others.

Richard’s book on his site, and on Amazon:

about rkm:

From a systems perspective I was intrigued by a certain oddity: the USA, the world’s leading power, seemed always to be bungling. American foreign and domestic policies frequently resulted in the opposite of their stated objectives. I began to notice that other, unstated objectives were being accomplished instead. These unstated objectives in many cases made perfect geopolitical and economic sense from a Machiavellian perspective—but a sense that would not be publicly defensible. Increasingly, I discounted the interpretive aspects of news reporting, and focused instead on the raw underlying events being chronicled.

I began to perceive a degree of consistency in the behavior of governments, politicians, and institutions, that was far greater than what one would sense from news reports, pundits, and official statements. The rough contours of underlying strategies and goals emerged which made seemingly chaotic phenomenon—such as US foreign policy—not only understandable but rather predictable.

1. Find the RSS feed http://www.democracynow.org/democracynow.rss
2. Subscribe in Google Reader. http://www.google.com/reader/view/#overview-page
3. Have a filter in Google Reader to get all the podcasts subscriptions into a Podcast folder, easy to review!
4. Slide *episodes* over into the Firefox download box if I think I’ll like them, or will have time to listen.
5. From the Download Folder slide all those mp3s into iTunes as music. Give them the Podcast Genre. That means they go into a smart playlist, and onto the iPhone.
6. Walk! Listen. Rate. Once they are rated they leave the Podcast playlist. Soft reboot to clear the list.

I call that my Tuned In Podcast System TIPS. Cumbersome? Tell me a better way.

I get exactly what I want. They stay in the Playlist till I’m done & then they go.

I can’t get that control with the built in Podcast folder, or the iTunes subscription system.

I made a post about this system before, has some more details.

I listen to Democracy Now more than any other news or current affair program. I find it gives me a better picture of the world than I can get from any NZ source. Left, not liberal, not sectarian. Amy Goodman – a hero!

I wish more people would listen to it. I found myself chatting casually about the plight of Haiti over the years because US interference and people though I was espousing conspiracy theory. Ordinary left thinking New Zealanders!

I’ll post up how I listen to Podcasts. The great thing is I walk & listen, good for my body. Good for the dog. Multitasking.

Bicameralism (psychology) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

In psychology, bicameralism is a hypothesis which argues that the human brain once assumed a state known as a bicameral mind in which cognitive functions are divided between one part of the brain which appears to be “speaking”, and a second part which listens and obeys.

The term was coined by psychologist Julian Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality, that is to say a mental state in which there are two distinct sections of consciousness, was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3000 years ago. He used governmental bicameralism to metaphorically describe such a state, in which the experiences and memories of the right hemisphere of the brain are transmitted to the left hemisphere via auditory hallucinations. This mental model was replaced by the conscious mode of thought, which Jaynes argues is grounded in the acquisition of metaphorical language. The idea that language is a necessary component of subjective consciousness and more abstract forms of thinking has been gaining acceptance in recent years, with proponents such as Daniel Dennett, William H. Calvin, Merlin Donald, John Limber, Howard Margolis, Peter Carruthers, and Jose Luis Bermudez.[1]

There are several stories in this hour long program, one about earthquakes, one about race in a Californian university, and one about depression. The last one tells me what I know as a psychotherapy to be true. Not that antidepressants don’t always work, but that why they work is a big muddle, it could be the placebo effect or just time. And the price for this dubious result is to pathologise millions of people, to get them thinking about the psyche in a medical & unhelpful way.

All for huge profit.

The DSM 5 is a scandal and will make the problem worse!

All part of a 150 year trend… that bit was new to me.

Video of the Depression story on Democracy Now

Every health professional should watch this video, listen to this last story in this episode of Democracy Now, or read the book by Gary Greenberg, Amazon:

Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease

Manufacturing Depression?:

The primary point that Greenberg expressed in the interview is that we are taking a normal human experience and turning it into a disease. He makes it clear that he has no problem with relieving the suffering of depression with drugs, but he questions whether we have turned normal blue moods into a disease in order to justify medicating away sadness.

A satisfying read online is where Greenberg is interviewed on the Well. Quote follows.

The WELL: Gary Greenberg, Manufacturing Depression:

So all of this adds up, at least in common sense, to the possibility that this form of depression is a classic disease.

But there are two problems with this. One is that common sense has been known to be wrong. In 1850 in England, for instance, common sense told doctors that cholera was caused by bad air. The places in the London with the worst cholera, after all, were the places with the worst stink. As we know now, the stink was only an indication of the problem, which lay elsewhere–in the shit-infested water. Waht was missing at that time, in addition to the open-mindedness that John Snow possessed and which allowed him to look at the water supply, was any knowledge of microbes. Obviously, we can’t yet know what is missing from our account of the chemical origins of depression, although we can say that if they exist, they’re mighty difficult to pin down. The evidence remains largely circumstantial, and there may be no way of finally knowing if the chemical findings are the cause or the effect of the condition. So we need to be very careful about connecting the dots here.

The second problem is worse. It is that people with this kind of depression are a very small percentage of the people who can be diagnosed with depression. My book is largely about how these categories came to be conflated, so that we’ve come to think of demoralization as a disease. The result is a diagnostic scheme that effectively pathologizes something like twenty percent of us. But if you stick with that strain of depression that seems to be a disease in the classic sense, the numbers are much lower, probably lower than ten percent. Which is not an insubstantial number, but hardly the epidemic that various interests would like you to think it is.

I quite like what Cheryl Rofer has to say here, I’d like to read more!

For all that for no good reason at all I think the Empire is doomed. Or maybe a good reason is that there is opposition to it, it is crumbling from within, its addiction to oil is leading it to rock bottom.

Can it complexly adapt? It has a long history of doing just that. But like us all it will die one day.

Phronesisaical: Complexly Adapting Commentators:

Sunday, February 28, 2010 Complexly Adapting Commentators I read Niall Ferguson’s article in Foreign Affairs (subscription required) the other night in dead-tree version, after I had turned my computer off. It looked like shooting fish in a barrel, so I thought about blogging it, but a number of things intervened, and my general feeling of bummed-outness at the level of Ferguson’s argument kept me from doing it.

But Ferguson has a short version of the article in today’s Los Angeles Times, and David Ignatius likes it. DougJ and the Balloon Juice crowd have said most of what I would have. I’d like to add one thing, though. When we physical scientists work up a hypothesis, one of the things we have to show is that it’s the best hypothesis. We have to look around to see if other hypotheses fit the evidence. And there’s another hypothesis beyond Ferguson’s extremely flawed one that predicts societal crashes. If you have a finite amount of investment to support yourself, say your savings for retirement, and if you spend faster than the investment produces income, things will look pretty good for a while, and then will rapidly crash. It’s the inverse of the compound interest effect: you’re using mostly interest for a while, but as you start using capital, you get less interest, and you use more capital, and you fall off a cliff. The money disappears in no time at all. That model implies different causes and remedies than does Ferguson’s, so it would be useful to test both of them against the facts and against whatever they are supposed to be. And, as the Balloon Juice crowd shows, Ferguson doesn’t know what he’s talking about. We’re bound, unfortunately, to hear more stuff like this on complex adaptive systems; they’re part of today’s intellectual hit parade and can be made to explain or support pretty much anything. As we see, the phrase and the excitement Ferguson produces from it appeal to Ignatius. Several of the spot-on BJ comments:

This is an interesting take on an interesting article.

http://semanticrestructuring.com/lookma.pdf

http://mashable.com/2010/02/25/dont-friend-your-boss-on-facebook/