NEVER SORRY

BEIJING (AP).- Artist Ai Weiwei has again criticized China's leaders as lacking vision and refusing to permit dissenting voices, saying the government's mantra of maintaining stability is merely a ruse to protect illicit benefits and special interests. The country's best known international artist said he would continue to fight for human rights and freedom of expression in a videotaped message posted Monday on YouTube, which is blocked in China. He said that the form of limited house arrest under which he has lived for months is punishment for his activism. "Freedom of expression is a very essential condition for me to make any art. Also, it is an essential value for my life. I have to protect this right and also to fight for the possibility," Ai said in the message that was shown at an event in Basel, Switzerland, late Sunday. The event was organized by Germany-based Cinema for Peace Foundation and also saw the screening of Alison Klayman's documentary "Ai Weiwei Never Sorry." 

Chinese authorities view Ai as a troublemaker. They detained him for three months last year and his design company was ordered to pay 15 million yuan ($2.4 million) in back taxes and fines. He is appealing. Since then, he has been refused permission to travel and is under constant surveillance, although he still frequently criticizes the government on Twitter, another website that is blocked in China but accessible to tech-savvy citizens. 

Ai said self-interest is China's only political ideology and the "people in office just try to maintain so-called stability to protect their own profit, or their own interest. They have to crush other voices. There's no real communication or discussion." The Internet can help boost transparency, while art can stir critical thinking, he said. "I think art is a very important weapon to achieve human freedom," Ai said. Ai's detention has only burnished his fame and his handmade porcelain "Sunflower Seeds" sold at auction last month for $782,500, a record for the artist.  

NOTE:  Although I remain of two minds about Ai Weiwei's art, which sometimes seems derivative, decorative (not necessarily a bad thing; not necessarily a good thing) and overly decorous, reading his words in defense of art and and artistic and human freedom is uplifting and makes me admire the man enormously.  I believe I'm beginning to warm to the "Sunflower Seeds,” although I'm not usually inspired by allegory or one-note explanation-key symbolism.  

Still, Ralph Shikes' The Indignant Eye, The Artist As Social Critic In Prints And Drawings From The Fifteenth Century To Picasso, has always been a touchstone for me and I think Ai Weiwei's work would deserve to be included what would be a long-overdue new edition of that classic study of political and socially conscious art.   

I hope I have an opportunity to see Alison Klayman's documentary "Ai Weiwei Never Sorry" very soon and that Ai Weiwei's words and art-actions have a salutary effect on China and the rest of the world.

Le Meilleur Ouvrier (Felix Urbain Dubois)

"There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?"



Robert F. Kennedy

  

Veal Prince Orloff, Angels on Horseback, Service à la russe (serving meals in separate courses on individual plates), Savoy Cake with Oranges -- all inventions and innovations attributable to Félix Urbain Dubois (b. Trets 1818 - d. Nice 1901).


Influential chef, gifted multi-media artist, "out of the box" thinker, honest worker.


Watching Gasbags gassing on all day/all night cable tv (simultaneously tweeting their mediocre, irrelevant pronouncements to the farthest corners of an I-hope-not-too-hostile universe), I wish we had more people like meilleur ouvrier Dubois willing just to do the work and bring their gifts -- the best of themselves -- to their fellow Earthlings.  

Illustrations from Felix Urbain Dubois, Cuisine Artistique, 1870.

The Vengeful Librarians

CIA actively monitors 5 million tweets every day

Updated: Nov 04, 2011 2:32 PM EDT

  
By Andrew Couts
Provided by

          As if we needed any further confirmation that Big Brother is, in fact, watching, the Associated Press reports today that the Central Intelligence Agency has an entire department devoted to monitoring Twitter and Facebook posts. In addition, the CIA briefs President Obama daily on top tweets and popular Facebook posts and trends.

     The arduous task, carried out by a team known as the "Vengeful Librarians," includes sifting through more than 5 million tweets a day. (In total, Twitter's 100 million users publish approximately 140 million tweets every day.) Doing so has enabled the CIA to view how events in the US are being received overseas — like, say, the assassination of Osama bin Laden — as well as allowing the agency to keep tabs on international events, like the uprising in Egypt this spring.

        The CIA's social media monitoring, which is carried out by "several hundred" analysts at a facility in McLean, Virginia, and elsewhere around the US, was started on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission as a way to bolster the agency's counterterrorism and counterproliferation initiatives.

        Monitored sources include traditional newspapers and television broadcasts, as well as social media. The focus on Twitter began in 2009 after the micro-blogging platform played a key role in the Iranian Green Revolution.

         Because tweets do not always have location data tied to them, the Vengeful Librarians cannot track where exactly the majority of tweets originate. Instead, the intelligence team keeps track of what language tweets are published in. For instance, the team wanted to find out the world reaction to the death of Osama bin Laden. It found that the majority of tweets published in either Urdu (the language of Pakistan), or Chinese were mostly negative. Arabic and Turkic tweets accused Obama of being pro-Israel. Tweets in Hebrew thought Obama's speech was too pro-Arab.

        The CIA team has also used Twitter to monitor reports of real-time events, and can focus on a few Tweeters who are publishing accurate reports. The team found that, in these situations, other Twitter users actively stamp out erroneous information when it is reported, which proves the usefulness of Twitter as a primary source for breaking news.

          So, for those of you out there who forget that what you say online can often be seen by anyone, remember: in some windowless office building in Northeast Virginia, a CIA agent may be watching.

NOTE:  I read this very interesting story, which naturally brings to mind the 1975 motion picture Three Days Of The Condor, featuring Robert Redford, Max von Sydow and Faye Dunaway, on the WTVM- News Leader 9 -- Columbus, Georgia news site, which we follow because our cousin Eudora Linde works there as a producer.  We are all extremely proud of Eudora.