The Breaking Time

The Rundown: bodies on the highway

The body of a man killed execution style and wrapped in bin liners lies by the side of the Acapulco-Mexico highway November 16, 2006. REUTERS/Stringer

*Drug Wars A stunning set of pictures inside Mexico's drug war. Fair warning, the picture above is one of the least graphic in the set, which includes everything from blinged-out .45s and narco-saints to headless bodies hanging from a bridge. A harrowing look inside how ugly a drug-fueled civil war is.

*New Haven uses SWAT team to crack down on nightlife New Haven, Conn. has apparently decided people drinking and attending strip clubs is such a dire threat that it needs to use the SWAT team — with masks and assault rifles, no less — to round up the patrons, on a search warrant that produced a single, unrelated charge. This comes on the heels of Operation Nightlife where police started rounding up clubgoers and were widely reported to have attacked and tased a Yale student. Bunny Colvin's rant from The Wire — "call something a war, and pretty soon everyone starts acting like warriors" — comes to mind.

*LGBTIQQAA Yes, that's now the going abbreviation. I remember when it was gay and lesbian, then, around the time I was in college, LGBT became popular, and that was fine. But at this point, the acronym's stretching to the point of uselessness.

There is a term, however, that covers all those groups and their struggle for rights without resorting to a ludicrous degree of political correctness or tongue-twistingly garbled abbreviations: human.

*Catholics in US overwhelmingly support homosexual unions Many do this in direct defiance of their official hierarchy, and in percentages greater, in some cases, than the rest of the mainstream populace. A reassuring sign and a reminder that adherents to a creed don't always follow the attendant hierarchy. Again, the lesson is to be careful lumping traditions into too-neat boxes. There is No They.

*Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? A surprisingly decent series on the rise, hybridization and collapse of a subculture(s?) by Steven Hyden over at The Onion's AV Club. A good look at the way grunge and alt music linked into culture trends in one of the last eras before rock n' roll (along with mass music in general) splintered or become totally retro. Particular kudos for the way Hyden manages to balance enthusiasm with a realistic look at the limits of art.

*Experimentation, orgasms and the rise of anal sex Slate journalist William Saletan looks at changing sexual trends. Interesting material here on a social revolution steadily continuing in the background, though some of the "whoa" tone in Saletan's is a little puerile.

*'39 Queen doing an acoustic (what? yes!) presentation of one of the peppiest, saddest songs ever written about space travel:

NoCon

$6,000 a head, just to listen and talk. Disconnected doesn't even begin to cover it.

Wading back into the mental fray after my much-needed vacation, brain brimming with ideas, I end up stumbling on this dispatch, about of all things, events based around ideas. In this case, Paul Carr gets a barb in at TED as a "celeb-filled mutual handjob" and (kind of) endorses PopTech as a (kind of) more egalitarian alternative.

After all, TED costs $6,000 a ticket while PopTech costs...

A mere $3,000.

Yes. For those of us who don't quite make that much in a month, this might, however brilliant the attendees or atmosphere, seem like one group of the gentry are grousing about how another group just simply isn't in touch with reality anymore, because they're lining their mansions with platinum instead of common gold.

Yeah, there are a fair number of brilliant speakers at TED and similar conferences. I enjoy the talks and I've posted several here before on topics that struck my fancy. The local TEDx events (because they're often cheap or free), can be a great venue to get local innovators together and promote public dialogue, provided they don't descend into the same circular onanism as their forebear.

Call me crazy, but I'd love to see more catcalls, boos and arguments at TED-style events. Ideas aren't always pretty and the important ones, horror of horrors, tend to actually get people upset.

It also tends increases the perception that world-changing ideas are exclusively the province of the rich, due to the fact that paying $3-6,000 to eat, drink and talk to people is not exactly something most people will ever be able to afford. Sarah Lacy has a good rant on how TED's class structure goes even further than that. Gawker, not exactly fans of the event, managed to get ahold of the secret 2008 guest list, which is a pretty revealing document.

But what I've thought about most recently is the conference price tag. PopTech had 600 attendees, at $3,000 a pop, totaling $1.8 million in ticket sales alone. That's a lot of money, and it got me thinking about what such funds might do if applied more to action than socializing. I wondered what $1.8 million could do for the starving or under-educated. How many people could get a full scholarship to a good college on that money? How many families could get their heating bills paid, needed medical care, or access to technology to help bridge the digital divide just a bit? It could provide no small amount of clean water or vaccines and a staggering number of microloans. If you want to get more aggressive, it would provide a sizable bounty for a war criminal that's escaped justice.

So, let me propose something, we'll call it NoCon. Forget fancy dinners or parties. Forget big-name talks. Use that internet TED-style luminaries are talking about all the time and communicate that way, throwing in some old-fashioned phone conversations if need be.

Everyone who would otherwise chuck $3,000 just for a damn ticket can instead invest that money (hell, let's go lower and say $2,000) into a fund to "attend" NoCon. Over the course of a month or so, the "attendees" share their presentations for how this money should be spent and why. NoCon decides, by vote, which project gets the funds and set some verifiable metric for "success" in that area (x number of people provided with food, said war criminal dead or captured).

NoCon could hold just enough funds aside to pay for a drink for every attendee, wherever they are in the world, if the year's project meets that measure of success. It would probably taste pretty damn delicious, because some definite good had been accomplished with money that — I'll say it — would otherwise go to waste.

That's an approach which would put teeth into some good ideas and all it would require is some of the higher-priced con attendees willing to forgo over-priced events in favor of putting their money where their mouths are. I won't hold my breath.

P.S.- Full disclosure: I went to Gov 2.0, where elites were out in force, in 2009 on a steeply discounted invite. While I had my gripes (and the need for more diversity was a big one), there were vying audience reactions and genuine criticism. O'Reilly Media, to their credit, actually had the guts to put a live Twitter feed up behind the speakers and responded to the critiques to a degree that pleasantly surprised me.

Poems for Friday: the Approaching Hour

Full moon over Los Angeles, by Marcio Watanabe

Hello there, readers. I know we've been on hiatus here for some time, as I was first writing every waking moment and then romping around the Los Angeles area for a long-awaited break. Contrary to popular reports, I was not engaged in journalistic derring-do or running gun battles in the Bradbury Building. Really.

However, Along with some much-needed de-stressing time, I got to geek out on art deco era civic architecture and the irreplaceable thrill of exploring a new area. I got to meet Zoetica and the famed Vivacious G in person, finally see an old friend and push my own boundaries a bit. Of course, by the end I wanted more time and there were things I wanted to do that I didn't get to, but at its core, except for a bout with nasty illness at the very end, it was everything I could have asked for and more. Thank you to everyone for your amazing hospitality and general awesomeness.

After that much-needed mental cleansing, I've returned looking forward to more writing and no longer quite as frustrated about a number of stalled pieces. More here, and soon. In the meantime, it is Friday, and so you lovely, patient people get a poem. Here's a classic from William Carlos Williams:

You Communists and Republicans!

all you Germans and Frenchmen!

you corpses and quickeners!

The stars are about to melt

and fall on you in tears.

 

Get ready! Get ready!

you Papists and Protestants!

you whores and you virtuous!

The moon will be bread

and drop presently into your baskets.

 

Friends and those who despise

and detest us!

Adventists and those who believe

nothing!

Get ready for the awakening.

 

Intermission, with f'ing Muppets

Occasionally, when my workload gets to frenetic proportions, I start to get grumpy. I love writing, deeply, but every once in awhile I polish off the day's pieces, shamble home and the last thing I want to do is yet more writing, even if it's something I really want to finish. 

Then I remember that I am extremely lucky and fortunate beyond anything I ever imagined just a few years ago: I write for a living.

So if you happen to encounter me in my grumpy state, please just take it in stride. The work-load induced intermission here ends soon, and please believe that it will be worth the wait. In the meantime, have some Queen-singing Muppets, something that never fails to cheer me up.

Poems for Friday: Personality

I stumbled upon this old favorite from Carl Sandburg while reading about biometrics and other attempts to physically break down identity into an easy set of parameters. Like the best poems, Sandburg's words here are ever-prescient, because what lies behind them never goes away:

Musings of a Police Reporter in the Identification Bureau

YOU have loved forty women, but you have only one thumb.

You have led a hundred secret lives, but you mark only

    one thumb.

You go round the world and fight in a thousand wars and

    win all the world's honors, but when you come back

    home the print of the one thumb your mother gave

    you is the same print of thumb you had in the old

    home when your mother kissed you and said good-by.

Out of the whirling womb of time come millions of men

and their feet crowd the earth and they cut one anothers'

    throats for room to stand and among them all

    are not two thumbs alike.

Somewhere is a Great God of Thumbs who can tell the

    inside story of this.