Deducing Nouns

Collective nouns for animals are interesting. For example, tigers ambush and rhinos bust things up, therefore, we have an ambush of tigers or a crash of rhinos. We have lots of bird feeders, thus we have drays of squirrels in the yard, dray referring the nests they build, although I’m not quite sure of the etymology in the sense of dray and nest.

There’s a deductive poetics to the practice. I always felt that all you needed was a decent eye.

We have a shadow (not a murder) of crows. The grackles have visited the feeders. And they certainly arrived and left like a storm, hence storm of grackles.

There is practicality to this.

“So, what did you see?”

“Lots of grackles.”

“A storm then.”

“No, not a cloud in the sky.”

On the Subject of Reality

Since we’re on the subject of reality, here’s a way of putting it together. From Juan Cole:

I personally find the controversy about Iraq in Washington to be bizarre. Are they really arguing about whether the situation is improving? I mean, you have the Night of the Living Dead over there. People lack potable water, cholera has broken out even in the good areas, a third of people are hungry, a doubling of the internally displaced to at least 1.1 million, and a million pilgrims dispersed just this week by militia infighting in a supposedly safe all-Shiite area. The government has all but collapsed, with even the formerly cooperative sections of the Sunni Arab political class withdrawing in a snit (much less more Sunni Arabs being brought in from the cold). The parliament hasn’t actually passed any legislation to speak of and often cannot get a quorum. Corruption is endemic. The weapons we give the Iraqi army are often sold off to the insurgency. Some of our development aid goes to them, too.

The average number of Iraqis killed in 2007 per day exceeds those killed in 2006. Independent counts by news organizations do not agree with Pentagon estimates about drops in civilian deaths over-all. Nation-wide attacks in June reached a daily all-time high of 177.5. True, violence in Baghdad has been wrestled back down to the levels of summer, 2006 (hint: it wasn’t paradise), but violence levels are up in the rest of the country. If you compare each month in 2006 with each month in 2007 with regard to US military deaths, the 2007 picture is dreadful.

There are numerous important links at the source. He has an important factual repeat:

Repeat: US troop deaths in Iraq have not fallen and that is not a reason to support the troop escalation. And, violence in Iraq has not fallen because of the surge. Violence is way up this year.

1/4 Life Crisis

In this response Neha tells me about the quarter-life crisis, which I know only from John Meyer. I also know of Abby Wilner’s work on the issue.

We talk about liminality, spatial and temporal transition a lot (and yet never enough). But new spaces and transitions do not constitute “reality.” When we ask the question, “Then where was I ten years ago” (a question that Ham Sandoval would ask), we verify the validity of Tomorrow as Reality? Transitions and our experiences of them merely indicate continuum. Indeed, it could be argued that our definitions and descriptions of reality add up to the problem of completion in phases. “I’m entering reality now.” What this means is that period of development in my life is “over” and now I can start living, a common phenomenon. This is my essential and benign disagreement with Neha. I can’t fight the narrative of contemporary life (the one sold as The (current) Way), at least the linear narrative that persists, by asserting the abundant alternatives.

This is tricky business. We all buy into some sort of narrative, a structured image we hold as valid against perceived reality: what we see either validates the image or we take what we can get. This image becomes a powerful structure for plot. In my professional position, I have absolutely no long term goals or aspirations because getting the position was immensely difficult and not something easily tossed off (it was a 12 to 15 year process just to get the job. Some do it in less time, other more). I now have short-term issues that need completion to satisfy a question: will this or that work or be interesting to try out? This does not delegitimize any other person’s goal, short or long. Neither does it make for “reality” or a “real world,” merely a now in which we all must act. It is difficult to remain still.

Okay, this is fun.

As to cushion. I partly agree with Neha. But at the moment, I can’t see how one can negate the balance of learning in a “choice-driven” environment and at the same time “experience” the world one hopes to enter in terms of a career.

Help?

An Entry Sad to Make

One of the joys of the 06 summer came with working with students from Farmington in a collaboration between Tunxis Community College and what we called The China Institute. John Timmons and I, along with Ren Tong, provided opportunities in digital storytelling and Mandarin Chinese study for the students, who generated wonderful work in video and other software.

These young men and women were charming, smart, conscientious, and tech savvy. One of the standouts was Alyssa Roy, whose gregariousness and work ethic made the digital storytelling sessions a pleasure, not just for the instructors but for her peers.

Alas, we must report losing her to an automobile accident.

This is very sad news.

Immigration and Hypertextuality

My thoughts on borders come from my experience growing up in the US/Mexico region. The facts are that neither Ciudad Juarez nor El Paso could flourish without each other; they’re linked territory where the idea of “country” and “state” has always been blurred. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t aware of difference, boundary, and color. On the border, color and difference can be striking. When push comes to shove, however, most people realize that tensions are real but that symbiosis is also a reality.

The nearest city to El Paso is Juarez, Mexico and most people that I know in El Paso have a pretty wide territory that circles into New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Chihuahua, Mexico, a very different regional sense than in New England. This spatial sense makes immigration policy difficult normalize. We shouldn’t come at international relations from a “policy” perspective. We should, indeed, avoid policy altogether.

Protect (Fool) America Act

The title of this writing is the alternative title of the recent FISA update, which redraws the terms of surveillance to fit the needs of the curent “administration.” Definitions, rather than logic, form the bricks of rhetoric. Logic isn’t necessarily required to convince a reader or listener that an action is or is not sound, but both logic and definitions can be manipulated to convince. or persuade. Congress can certainly bound the definition of or supply example of actions that must not be construed as illegal surveillance. S.1927 puts it this way:

`Sec. 105A. Nothing in the definition of electronic surveillance under section 101(f) shall be construed to encompass surveillance directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States.

101(f) of the US Code defines electronic surveillance like this:

(f) “Electronic surveillance” means—
(1) the acquisition by an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device of the contents of any wire or radio communication sent by or intended to be received by a particular, known United States person who is in the United States, if the contents are acquired by intentionally targeting that United States person, under circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes;
(2) the acquisition by an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device of the contents of any wire communication to or from a person in the United States, without the consent of any party thereto, if such acquisition occurs in the United States, but does not include the acquisition of those communications of computer trespassers that would be permissible under section 2511 (2)(i) of title 18;
(3) the intentional acquisition by an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device of the contents of any radio communication, under circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes, and if both the sender and all intended recipients are located within the United States; or
(4) the installation or use of an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device in the United States for monitoring to acquire information, other than from a wire or radio communication, under circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes.

Real back-door stuff because it introduces ways of circumventing the older definition (how does the definition of “reasonable expectation of privacy” change now if the receiver or sender is outside the US). Communication in this sense is between networked people. We now live in a world of government controlled listening and we can’t even build schools. We already know that the neighbors are watching. (Seen the commercials?)

All this is too much like Babylon 5’s Earth Watch.

In the context of government rigged congressional performances, such as those put on by Joe Lieberman, the new wildlands of bill writing is bad news for all of us.

What to say about the City

Nicolas Retsinas writes:

The United Nations estimates that, today, 2.8 billion people live on less than $2 a day. And it is this huge, desperate underclass that is filling these mega-cities. Children are more likely to roam in gangs than attend school. Cholera and typhoid – listed as “rare” in Western textbooks – are endemic.

Parts of these cities are modern, with the familiar skyscrapers, highways and BlackBerry-toting workers. Yet they are surrounded by rings of shocking poverty where millions live in paper-covered hovels.

Without some concerted action from nations and international institutions, these mega-cities will grow larger and more desperate. Philanthropy helps, but these developing countries need public policies that promote property ownership, increase access to credit and enhance government transparency.

It took more than 50 years to address the slums of the 19th century. But there is an urgency to today’s task. The slum dwellers of Lagos and Manila and Karachi are part of the global economy, bound to the rest of the world. Their misery will spill beyond their borders, and if that happens, our urban age risks becoming a global nightmare.

Not much new is being said here. The argument is?

Research Question

How do catastrophes, natural disasters, and other major shifts, such as climate change, that affect human movement, thinking, and survival change planning, building, and the administering of collective necessity and the commonweal. Human civ’s spread is a part of this contextual question. Why did villages grow? Why would domestication happen?