Friday, March 24th, 2006,
by Fred (,
art, Australia, crime, graffiti, vandalism
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“Street artists” are up in arms in Melbourne over the city’s attempts to eradicate graffiti.
Young was commissioned by the city council to draw up a draft graffiti strategy last March in which she recommended tolerance zones be set up where street art and graffiti be allowed a small space within the city, where writers and artists would be at a lower risk of being arrested. “This was rejected by the city council, despite it generating lots of public support and despite evidence being presented that zero tolerance, for lots of reasons, wouldn’t work.”Instead, the council doubled its anti-graffiti budget. “The clean-up is an imposition of a supposedly mainstream, or dominant, cultural view,” says Young, “in denial of the diversity of cultural styles that actually exist within a city space.”
Imposition of a dominant cultural view? I don’t think so. How about attempt to clean up vandalism? Calling it “street art” doesn’t change the fact that the “artists” have defaced private property without the permission of the property owner, and that is (and should be) criminal.
The idea of “tolerance zones” actually makes some sense, if the affected property owners consent to allowing access to their property. But looking the other way while vandals destroy property is wrong, even in the name of “art”.
[via Boing Boing]
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Friday, March 17th, 2006,
by Fred (,
art, government, military, spending
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Boing Boing has a post linking to a pretty graphic of federal spending on discretionary programs in 2004. Pretty, but incredibly misleading. The image exists first and foremost to make a political point:
Most people are unaware of how much of their taxes fund our military, and those aware are often misinformed. Well here it is. Laid out, easy to read and compare. With data straight from the White House. I hope this makes people think and ask questions. Why do we spend more on jets than we do on public housing? Why is the Endowment for the Arts so small? Whats with all this foreign military financing?
To make this political point, the artist conveniently ignores entitlement spending to argue that half of federal spending is devoted to the military. But ignoring entitlement spending makes no sense, given the significant portion of the total budget made up by such spending.
According to the spreadsheets available at the Office of Management and Budget site, total spending in the President’s FY2007 budget is about $2.7 trillion. The Department of Defense accounts for $504 billion of the total. The Department of Health and Human Services gets $699.5 billion. The Social Security Administration is allocated $623 billion. The Department of Education gets $64.4 billion. HUD gets $44.6 billion. Include mandatory spending, which accounts for $1.5 trillion of the budget (56%) and the analysis is much different.
Why do we spend more on jets than on public housing? Because jets are expensive. Any budget that spent more on public housing than jets would be (rightly) laughed out of Congress. Why is the Endowment for the Arts so small? Because the arts should support themselves - why isn’t the allocation zero? How about this question - why have we spent so much on social programs and received so little benefit in return?
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Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006,
by Fred (,
art, Athanasius Kircher, cats
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Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, has decided not to deploy ubiquitious WiFi on campus, on the grounds that researchers have not proven that the technology is safe.
“All I’m saying is while the jury’s out on this one, I’m not going to put in place what is potential chronic exposure for our students,†he said. “Admittedly that’s highest around the locations of the antenna sites and the wireless hotspots, but those are the places people tend to gravitate to because they get the best reception.â€
Note that the university is not claiming that there is any evidence that WiFi is unsafe - the studies referred to by the school merely state that while there is no evidence exposure to WiFi signals is unsafe, further study is suggested. This is a growth industry, banning technologies not because they are shown to be a danger, but because they have not been proven to be safe (or not been proven to not be unsafe). As always, proving this negative is extremely difficult, so useful technologies sit on the shelf. It’s the same tired old horse brought out to argue against genetically modified crops.
Not to mention that Lakehead presumably still allows cordless phones (many of which operate on the same band as 802.11b), microwaves, cellular phones, TV remotes, radio transmission, X-rays, and all sorts of other radiation.
[via Boing Boing]
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