world's greatest Ph.D.

from here to there

every tuesday, i receive the harper's weekly review email which offers me a collection of the top news stories of the week in paragraph format and with sometimes questionable mis-emphasis on what is really important or not. for example, one week, it stated something like, "the war in iraq escalated and george h.w. bush jumped out of an airplane on his birthday." related, probably not, but then again.

this week is not the best time to start reading the weekly review because due to a computer malfunction, it was lost. in any case, the review's writer roger hodge suggested we read an article about dan rather getting beaten up by bizzare assailants who asked him repeatedly, "kenneth, what is the frequency?" the author, after criticizing conspiracy theories, spins one of his own that has to do with houston. an especially interesting note because i actually read the essay several years ago after chris kelty told me all about it and because dan rather is either retiring or has been forced to retire, it is really unclear and up for conspiratorial interpretation.

what are you thankful for?

oh, i almost forgot. please post a comment stating what you are thankful for on this thanksgiving.

my standard thanksgiving response: fast cars and fast women

sorry mom.

let's go away for a while

oh, you. what are you doing here? no-no, i'm on vacation. it's almost thanksgiving and i just can't be bothered. shoo, go away. there's football to be bored, turkey to be stuffed, and wild turkey to be drunk.

too much information, but not on this site

it is no mystery and there is no hype about it, everyone is on the internet posting their own thing. just like this site. everyone has a blog. for good reason, of course. it's fun to make stuff and i enjoy getting some feedback to what i'm up to.

but on a related note, i read this strange nytimes article about blogger romance relationships and how the possibility that you could read about someone you are only casually dating turns into strange opportunities for surveillance. bizzare. could this seriously change everything?

i got an email from the rice university "human adaptation bloggers" . does that mean they're going to teach us how to grow a third arm? because i could get more done that way.

and who else reads blogs for insider information buzz? if it's politics, have you read abc news' the note? or, for the more adolescent takes on the hill, there's wonkette.

going through some other common blogs today, i came across something that everyone should link to, something very near the core of what this is all about. the grey video takes the grey album a step further, splicing beatles video with jay-z video. brilliant.

call it a shake-up

the news about the c.i.a. today has centered on something that's being called a shake-up in places like this article in the nytimes. but if you really take a look at it, there's not much here. the c.i.a. hasn't even publicly announced the resignations and no one really knows what's going on. john mccain has called it housecleaning and rep. jane harman (D) called it a potential implosion of the cia, but other than that, we know nothing. and even legislators are known to be largely in the dark about what goes on at that agency. one interesting insight in the times article, they claim sources who said that the cia was leaking information damaging to the bush campaign. if that's the case, then they really do have an intelligence deficiency and are in serious need of overhaul - either that, or the information was so unbelievably true that no one could believe it. in any case, it just goes to show how the news can make a big story on something they actually know very little about, and still manage to sound really authoritative about it.

when in houston

i can't stand it when blogs tell you what to do. but if you live in houston and you haven't seen it already, my friend davy and his found magazine tour are in houston this weekend.

the big show is friday night at 8 p.m. at diverseworks. then, on saturday & sunday there are two special shows at the aurora picture show: saturday at 8 p.m. and sunday at 1 p.m. it's called "found vs. the aurora picture show," and they will have a special presentation of found video tapes [including random home video, t.v. recordings, surveillance, etc.] submitted by readers and aurora worshipers, selected by davy & his colleagues at found!

if you don't know what in the hell found is, then you can check out their site.

"toward an anthropology of ethics"

jim wrote a great essay called "toward an anthropology of ethics: foucault and the pedagogies of autopoiesis" in representations 74, spring 2001: 83-104. if you want a copy, i have it on .pdf

ana commented: "I'll give fifty bucks...okay, well, fifty cents to anyone who can adequately summarize it. It starts with Aristotle and ends with Foucault. There. I'll give myself fifty cents."

so, here's my fifty cents - please feel free to correct or criticize me:

the essay confronts two big problems in social theory. first, the bigger, is that we lack a good way to balance the micro- and macro- scales of practice or agency and structure. most social theorists fall too strongly on the side of either free will (i.e. sartre) or determinism. secondly, theorists mistake and misappropriate michel foucault, arguing either with or against him and saying that (in reference to his early work esp) he is all determinism and domination or (in reference to his later work esp) he is all about individual freedom. jim says these represent obtuse and clumsy interpretations of foucault. foucault's ethics can give us an insight into the ways that subjects either elect or feel obliged to choose models for themselves (this is one place where jim and foucault lean on aristotle's work on ethics). there is choice here, but one does not consitute one's self in an entirely private manner (as in a wittgenstein private language). furthermore, subjects have some choice in picking which models suit them. similar to the bricoleur, modern subjects are like a modernist work of art that focuses more on the process than the end product. and finally, there are a large number of different ways to relate to the model. its not always mimesis. different groups of people will relate in different ways. so, for example, jim claims that the ancient greeks favored metalepsis .

so, that's my 18 line nutshell. is the check in the mail or what?

"the free flow of information, the circulatory system of any democracy"

is this true?

Nicholas Kristof of NYTimes wrote an editorial today decrying the recent trend of fining and jailing reporters for refusing to reveal their secret sources. to do so, argues kristof, would break "a sacred ethical precept in publishing," though i really think he means journalism.

who or what's to blame? the courts more than the bush administration, but Kristof uses the editorial as an opportunity to lambast the white house anyway, "it's probably not a coincidence that we're seeing an offensive against press freedoms during an administration that has a Brezhnevian fondness for secrecy." ( a brief Brezhnev bio). Evil evil secrecy, is it contagious?

backing out quietly

after w. won re-election, there's been alot of talk about expatriation, defecting, or renouncing citizenship. well, unfortunate or not, it's not as easy as it sounds. this harper's article explains how it's done and offers a few success and failure stories. here's a note of rice anthropology relevance/interest regarding our chief's former fieldsite tonga:

The boldest approach is to start a nation of your own. Sadly, these days it is essentially impossible to buy an uninhabitedisland and declare it a sovereign nation: virtually every rock above the waterline is now under the jurisdiction of one principality or another. But efforts have been made to build nations on man-made structures or on reefs lying just below the waterline.

A less fortunate attempt was made in 1972, when Michael Oliver, a Nevada businessman, built an island on a reef 260 miles southwest of Tonga. Hiring a dredger, he piled up sand and mud until he had enough landmass to declare independence for his “Republic of Minerva.” Unfortunately, the Republic of Minerva was soon invaded by a Tongan force, whose number is said to have included a work detail of prisoners, a brass band, and Tonga’s 350-pound king himself. The reef was later officially annexed by the kingdom.

policy

okay, i realize everyone in grad school must be sick of the definition game, but where better to start my investigation of policy than the basics?

2 a : a definite course or method of action selected from among alternatives and in light of given conditions to guide and determine present and future decisions b : a high-level overall plan embracing the general goals and acceptable procedures especially of a governmental body

this reminded me of a jim article i've procrastinated on reading about ethics, which i thought related more so to my first chapter on anticorruption, but it might also work here. if anyone can sum it up for us (aimee??? maybe???), that would be sweet. but as i recall, jim was interested in a way to move past conflicts between theories of practice that strongly differentiate agency/structure, micro-/macro- levels. in my dissertation story, i'm writing about the history of the passage of a FOI law. essentially, a number of organizations and actors attempt to create/set policy to which other institutions will then be bound to (minor digression: does anyone "create" policy? or is it better to say "set" policy?).

heartbreaker

well, we spent all day working, but we came up just short in ohio. however, hamilton county, where i was at, did better than expected. we got about 75% of the voters out voting, better than the state or national averages. and in an area that in 2000 was strongly bush, we only lost 53-47.

GOTV

me and about 10 million other people in ohio are currently calling and knocking on doors asking everyone to vote, especially if they're going to vote for john kerry. it's kind of cool to see this much effort and interest in the political process, no matter the political position. my brother's neighborhood in cincinnati, where i am currently at, is literally carpeted with 'vote' signs on doorknobs, fences, cars, sidewalks. i swear they even threw them around the necks of squirrels and pigeons.

massive change

this just in from the creators of eye candy design advertisement: design is now one of the most powerful forces on earth.

(who here is thinking kroeber? design is the new "superorganic"!)

seriously, check out this site, come back, and tell me and others what you think. it's a new project by bruce mau called massive change.

the idea that a global-scale design of things is possible and powerful is not particularly new to social scientists. one of mau's basic conceptual differences is his optimism, as opposed to an enlightenment sense of natural progress. mau suggests that through good design, we can minimize unintended consequences and maximize positive outcomes.

sure, we could all yell 'naive, dumb artist.' design systems inevitably run into contradictions and situations in which some large groups get screwed over big time. so does mau have a critical eye in any way, shape, or design?

is it inevitable that design schemes will take over anyways, despite any of our critical objections? and if so, should we join them?

that's the big end of the question. i, for one, am interested in the design economy of information. it seems to me that the preoccupation with possibility tends to overlook the problem of secrecy. if design is that invisible order behind what we see, the information we consume, then secrecy is the invisible order behind the invisible order.