Pakistan’s Military Faces New Questions After Raid

Speak geek: The world of made-up language

Adam Curtis: The Rise of the Machines

Liquid Splashes

Explosion

Basic Splash #4

By Maianer (Markus Reugels)
MORE @'Flickr'

Noam Chomsky: There is Much More to Say

Do Psychopaths Misrule Our World?

Simon Sellars: Postcards from the Edgelands (for Marion Shoard)

37° 37′ 54S, 144° 55′ 22E
In the built environment, the ‘edgelands’ describes the interfacial interzone between urban and rural, a mix of rubbish tips, superstores, office parks, rough-hewn farmland, gas towers, electricity pylons, wildlife and service stations. The term was coined by the environmentalist Marion Shoard, who has uncovered the hidden dynamics at work in this ‘apparently unplanned, certainly uncelebrated and largely incomprehensible territory’.[1] She maps a symbiotic relationship between the waste product, both physical and psychological, of the human world, and its co-dependency with an emergent version of the natural realm that defies all preconceived, ‘rational’ notions of sustainability and environmental care. As such, her work can serve as an instructive metaphor for architects who are willing to approach the question of infrastructure as a crucial new phase in the development of their profession.
In the edgelands, the functionalism of warehouse sheds, sewage farms and switching stations is at the same time an interlocking network of essential services. Architecture and infrastructure are inseparable, a special relationship that moves beyond what the architect Sam Jacob has described as ‘the way in which infrastructure is perceived as inert structure which exists outside of cultural significance’.[2] For Jacob, infrastructure, held within the complexity of the 21st century, must take on a new role as the ‘architecture of the global age’, a physical manifestation of the networked reality that increasingly underscores and dictates our lives. He makes the McLuhanesque suggestion that if electronic media can be thought of as an extension of our senses, then infrastructure can be seen as the projection of our corporeal reality onto physical coordinates. If Jacob is right, then architecture, traditionally at a remove from this corporeal projection (that is, removed from infrastructure’s ‘inertness’), must radically reassess its relationship to the natural world if it is to engage with the problem of infrastructure as a viable extension of architectural practice.
It is here that the ‘problem’ of the edgelands, as defined by Shoard, can help. For in the edgelands, to make such a move as Jacob’s is really just a matter of perception...

Continue reading

@'Simon Sellars'

All about Melbourne...

Also if you are on Twitter, do follow Simon @Ballardian

Junger says he’s done covering wars after Hetherington’s death

Famed author of “War,” Sebastian Junger told “Morning Joe” on Monday that he was supposed to go to Libya with photojournalist Tim Hetherington, who was killed there last month along with Chris Hondros.
Junger did not go to Libya because of “some family issues, and Vanity Fair got cold feet because it looked so dangerous. Tim came back, then decided he wanted to do it anyway. He went back again with his own money,” he told the Globe and Mail.
On MSNBC Monday morning, Junger told co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, “I’m out.” He won’t cover any more wars.

“I’m pretty okay taking risks with my own life, but having seen the aftermath of Tim’s death among many people he loved very deeply, and the incredible pain they’re still going through, you can’t love someone and subject them to that.”

In the June issue of Vanity Fair, Junger wrote about Hetherington: “You and I were always talking about risk because she was the beautiful woman we were both in love with, right? … And in the end, you were the one she chose.”
Julie Moos @'Poynter'

If I Take Down Fox, Is All Forgiven?

There may be no greater testament to David Brock’s central role in the vast left-wing conspiracy than the lengths to which Rupert Murdoch will go to avoid him.
In November, a researcher at Media Matters for America, the liberal press-watchdog group that Brock founded seven years ago, noticed that the website Charitybuzz was auctioning a “friendly lunch” with Murdoch to benefit the Global Poverty Project. That one of Brock’s worker bees would be keeping tabs on the News Corp. chairman’s calendar should not be terribly surprising. At Media Matters’ headquarters in Washington, D.C., scores of headphone-wearing staffers spend their days (and nights) staring into their television screens and computer monitors, waiting for the latest bits of “conservative misinformation” to emerge from the Fox News Channel and other corners of the right-wing media landscape, all of which are saved on “the big TiVo”—270 terabytes’ worth of hard drive that store over 300,000 hours of TV shows—so that the offending clips can be uploaded to Media Matters’ website. Are you in need of a compendium of the “50 Worst Things Glenn Beck Said on Fox News”? Fear not, Media Matters’ site has one.
But in the past few months, the group has begun to do more than merely monitor Fox’s programming. “What happened after the Obama election, I think, is that Fox morphed into something that isn’t even recognizable as a form of media,” Brock recently told me. “It looks more like a political committee than what it looked like pre-Obama, which was essentially talk radio on television. It’s more dangerous now; it’s more lethal. And so as Fox has doubled down, we’ve doubled down.” In practice, that means no longer just pointing out inaccuracies. Instead, Media Matters is going on the offensive...