Simian Design

Ran across this from Make.  The GeoEye-1 (Google’s satellite) took pictures of President Obama’s inauguration the other day. Luckily it was a clear day, and the pictures, taken from 423 miles up, look great.

(via Make)

Keith Olbermann gets it right, again. Here he is talking about Habeus Corpus.

“Today, 135 years to the day after the last American President suspended habeus corpus, President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006. At it’s worst, the legislation allows President Bush or Donald Rumsfeld to declare anyone — US citizen or not — an enemy combatant, lock them up and throw away the key without a chance to prove their innocence in a court of law. In other words, every thing the founding fathers fought the British empire to free themselves of was reversed today with the stroke of a pen.”

“We Have Not Forgotten, Mr. President.”  Last night, broadcasting live from above a desolate and still demolished Ground Zero, Olbermann delivered a stirring eight minute commentary indicting the Bush Administration’s shameful and tragic response to 9/11. The entire speech is worth watching and reading.  The entire speech is transcribed in the link above.

I recommend reading it.  It’s pretty great.   It had the ring of truth to me.

The National Design Awards are a serious deal. The program “celebrates design in various disciplines as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement.” It’s a big enough deal that the winners are invited to the White House.

This year, however, five Communication Design honorees decided to decline the invitation.

That’s right, they turned down going to the White House. In a letter they sent to the White House, they stated (emphasis mine):

Graphic designers are intimately engaged in the construction of language, both visual and verbal. And while our work often dissects, rearranges, rethinks, questions and plays with language, it is our fundamental belief, and a central tenet of “good” design, that words and images must be used responsibly, especially when the matters articulated are of vital importance to the life of our nation.

We understand that politics often involves high rhetoric and the shading of language for political ends. However it is our belief that the current administration of George W. Bush has used the mass communication of words and images in ways that have seriously harmed the political discourse in America. We therefore feel it would be inconsistent with those values previously stated to accept an award celebrating language and communication, from a representative of an administration that has engaged in a prolonged assault on meaning.

While we have diverse political beliefs, we are united in our rejection of these policies. Through the wide-scale distortion of words (from “Healthy Forests” to “Mission Accomplished”) and both the manipulation of media (the photo op) and its suppression (the hidden war casualties), the Bush administration has demonstrated disdain for the responsible use of mass media, language and the intelligence of the American people.

Chipp Kidd was also invited to sign this document. His response, via email: “…But as graphic designers, we rightly complain that those talents are too often uncredited and taken for granted. Personally, in this case, I think it accomplishes more to stand up and be counted than to stay away.”

I’m somewhat on the fence here. I agree strongly with what these designers (Michael Rock, Susan Sellers, Georgie Stout, Paula Scher and Stefan Sagmeister) are saying.
Design does have power, and Good Design should be used responsibly.  Propaganda is an example of this gone wrong. (and yet I still adore propaganda.  Maybe for this reason alone.)  But Chipp is dead on in saying that it’s important for design to be recognized, because people just don’t realize how important design can be.

Maybe the thing to have done is publish this letter condoning the design actions, and yet still go accept the award.  Use it as a soapbox?

The entire legislative package of cuts had largely been agreed upon behind closed doors, without any Democrats present – now standard procedure in the GOP controlled Congress — and the vote in the House had been taken after midnight, which is another ploy frequently relied upon by the GOP leaders. But this added injury to insult: The legislation that had gone to the President, was materially different from the legislation upon which they had voted!

http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/50081

Peace activist Cindy Sheehan was arrested Tuesday in the House gallery after refusing to cover up a T-shirt bearing an anti-war slogan before President Bush’s State of the Union address.

“She expressed her opinion; I disagree with it,” Bush said in August. Great. She was arrested for expressing her opinion. Nice.

Rutherford Birchard Hayes’ victory over Samuel J. Tilden in the election of 1876 was the closest in our history. We’re talking closer than the Hanging Chad’s. And about as honest it looks like.

Kern County, Calif., home of powerful House Ways and Means Chairman Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R), snagged $722 million in projects, or nearly $1,000 per person. Los Angeles County, with clogged highways and 10 million people, will receive barely $60 per resident. Doncha just admire our politicians sense of the greater good?

Right of Search and Seizure Regulated.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

O’Connor to Retire From Supreme Court. The fight over the replacement should be something else.