September 19, 2011
Drugs cause more deaths than cars and guns, thanks in large part to prescription medications, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of government data. From 2000 to 2008, deaths caused by prescription drugs for anxiety and pain rose more than 200 per cent. Drugs exceeded motor vehicle accidents as a cause of death in 2009, killing at least 37,485 people nationwide, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While most major causes of preventable death are declining, drugs are an exception. The death toll has doubledin the last decade, now claiming a life every 14 minutes. By contrast, traffic accidents have been dropping for decades because of huge investments in auto safety. This is the first time that drugs have accounted for more fatalities than traffic accidents since the government started tracking drug-induced deaths in 1979. Fueling the surge in deaths are prescription pain and anxiety drugs that are potent, highly addictive and especially dangerous when combined with one another or with other drugs or alcohol. Among the most commonly abused are OxyContin, Vicodin, Xanax and Soma. One relative newcomer to the scene is Fentanyl, a painkiller that comes in the form of patches and lollipops and is 100 times more powerful than morphine. Courtesy of the LA Times

Drugs cause more deaths than cars and guns, thanks in large part to prescription medications, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of government data.

From 2000 to 2008, deaths caused by prescription drugs for anxiety and pain rose more than 200 per cent. Drugs exceeded motor vehicle accidents as a cause of death in 2009, killing at least 37,485 people nationwide, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While most major causes of preventable death are declining, drugs are an exception. The death toll has doubledin the last decade, now claiming a life every 14 minutes. By contrast, traffic accidents have been dropping for decades because of huge investments in auto safety.

This is the first time that drugs have accounted for more fatalities than traffic accidents since the government started tracking drug-induced deaths in 1979.

Fueling the surge in deaths are prescription pain and anxiety drugs that are potent, highly addictive and especially dangerous when combined with one another or with other drugs or alcohol. Among the most commonly abused are OxyContin, Vicodin, Xanax and Soma.

One relative newcomer to the scene is Fentanyl, a painkiller that comes in the form of patches and lollipops and is 100 times more powerful than morphine.

Courtesy of the LA Times

(via 08-23-47)

dailymeh: Head No. 13, 2000, Philip-Lorca diCorcia. For this series, diCorcia set up flashes hidden in a construction scaffolding on a New York street and photographed passersby from a distance, without their knowledge. This head belongs to Erno Nussenzweig, a retired diamond trader who sued diCorcia for selling a picture of him without his consent. The court ruled that the photograph, although sold for money, was a means of artistic expression, and thus protected as free speech, and that Nussenzweig was not entitled to any money from diCorcia. The photo is probably the most well-publicized of all the pictures from diCorcia’s Heads series, and seems like a perfect example of the Streisand effect — the harder you try to make a picture go away, the more publicity it gets.

dailymeh:

Head No. 13, 2000, Philip-Lorca diCorcia.

For this series, diCorcia set up flashes hidden in a construction scaffolding on a New York street and photographed passersby from a distance, without their knowledge. This head belongs to Erno Nussenzweig, a retired diamond trader who sued diCorcia for selling a picture of him without his consent.

The court ruled that the photograph, although sold for money, was a means of artistic expression, and thus protected as free speech, and that Nussenzweig was not entitled to any money from diCorcia.

The photo is probably the most well-publicized of all the pictures from diCorcia’s Heads series, and seems like a perfect example of the Streisand effect — the harder you try to make a picture go away, the more publicity it gets.

(via 08-23-47)

September 17, 2011
cavetocanvas: Self Portrait of the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States Frida Kahlo, 1932

cavetocanvas:

Self Portrait of the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States

Frida Kahlo, 1932

(Source: cavetocanvas, via 08-23-47)

“ Brandchannel, a website that tracks product placement in film, noted that movie branding was up in 2010, with an average of 17.9 products per film in the 33 films that reached the top of the box office. Apple topped the charts after getting its computers, iPads, iPods, and other items featured in 30 per cent of the top US box office hits, and Iron Man 2 won all the marbles with 64 company props. Say what you want about Avatar making audiences identify with the good guys, at least the blue monkeys from Pandora weren’t drinking Red Bulls.
Darren Fleet, Apple tops product placement charts, Adbusters 95. (via 08-23-47)
September 16, 2011
k-a-o: Lights

k-a-o:

Lights

(Source: , via 08-23-47)

“ So if we problematize the notion of ‘Canada’ through the introjection of the idea of belonging, we are left with the paradox of belonging and non-belonging simultaneously. As a population, we non-whites and women (in particular, non-white women) are living in a specific territory. We are part of its economy, subject to its laws, and members of its civil society. Yet we are not part of its self-definition as ‘Canada’ because we are not ‘Canadians.’ We are pasted over with labels that give us identities that are extraneous to us. And these labels originate in the ideology of the nation, in the Canadian state apparatus, in the media, in the education system, and in the commonsense world of common parlance. We ourselves use them. They are familiar, naturalized names: minorities, immigrants, newcomers, refugees, aliens, illegals, people of color, multicultural communities, and so on. We are sexed into immigrant women, women of color, visible minority women, black/South Asian/Chinese women, ESL (English as a second language) speakers, and many more. The names keep proliferating, as though there were a seething reality, unmanageable and uncontainable in any one name. Concomitant with this mania for naming of ‘others’ is one for the naming of that which is ‘Canadian.’ This ‘Canadian’ core community is defined through the same process that others us. We, with our named and ascribed otherness, face an undifferentiated notion of the ‘Canadian’ as the unwavering beacon of our assimilation.
Himani Bannerji. The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2000), p. 65. (via 08-23-47)
08-23-47: nevver: Downtown, Richard Hambleton & Basquiat

08-23-47:

nevver:

Downtown, Richard Hambleton & Basquiat

September 15, 2011
“ A new sense of the notion of information has been constructed around the photographic image. The photograph is a thin slice of space as well as time. In a world ruled by photographic images, all borders (‘framing’) seem arbitrary. Anything can be separated, can be made discontinuous, from anything else: all that is necessary is to frame the subject differently. (Conversely, anything can be made adjacent to anything else.) Photographing reinforces a nominalist view of reality as consisting of small units of an apparently infinite number — as the number of photographs that could be taken of anything is unlimited. Through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes and fait divers. The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery. Any photograph has multiple meanings; indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: ‘There is the surface. Now think — or rather feel, intuit — what is beyond, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.
Susan Sontag, On Photography (Anchor Books Doubleday, 1977), p. 22-23. (via 08-23-47)
audreyfrancis: Blinky Palermo Untitled 1968

audreyfrancis:

Blinky Palermo

Untitled

1968

(via 08-23-47)

08-23-47: minusmanhattan: Picasso draws a centaur in the air. One of the earliest examples of light painting in photography.

08-23-47:

minusmanhattan:

Picasso draws a centaur in the air. One of the earliest examples of light painting in photography.

September 14, 2011
08-23-47: secretrepublic: Poverty in the US has long been deemed an urban problem, distant from the wealth and prosperity of the suburbs. As the data indicates, however, this trend is quickly reversing. The economic stress of the past decade left suburbs with 1.5 million more poor than their primary cities.

08-23-47:

secretrepublic:

Poverty in the US has long been deemed an urban problem, distant from the wealth and prosperity of the suburbs. As the data indicates, however, this trend is quickly reversing. The economic stress of the past decade left suburbs with 1.5 million more poor than their primary cities.

08-23-47: nevver: The Curious Brain

08-23-47:

nevver:

The Curious Brain

“ A defining feature of capitalist societies is that the majority of people are systematically dispossessed from the means of producing wealth — from the land and its resources, mines, factories and so on. This is often done through conscious effort by the state and capital, in order to gain access to what was previously collectively or publicly controlled resources and to create a market in wage labor. In turn, in order to survive people must then enter the labor market and sell their ability to work to the people who have secured ownership over the means of producing wealth. The dispossession of the majority from their land confers a great deal of power to capitalists, including the ability to control conditions of work and thus maintain (from their perspective) a healthy degree of exploitation and profits.
Todd Gordon. Imperialist Canada (Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2010), p. 30. (via 08-23-47)
utnereader: Unlike some VH1 pop-doc, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 was created from archival footage discovered in a Swedish TV station. It blends beautifully shot vérité moments of urban life with intimate interviews with the era’s most famous icons, such as Stokely Carmichael talking side by side with his mom, as well as an impassioned prison one-on-one with Angela Davis. More …

utnereader:

Unlike some VH1 pop-doc, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 was created from archival footage discovered in a Swedish TV station. It blends beautifully shot vérité moments of urban life with intimate interviews with the era’s most famous icons, such as Stokely Carmichael talking side by side with his mom, as well as an impassioned prison one-on-one with Angela Davis.

More …

(via 08-23-47)

08-23-47: onaissues: In 2000, photographer Simone Lueck tagged along with a friend on a two-week trip to Cuba. “The first thing I noticed in Havana,” she writes, “was that the city was dark at night. There were no streetlights, porch lights or living-room lamps. It was pitch black except for the faint colorful glow spilling out of open doors everywhere, and it came from the TVs.” With a 35mm camera and some film, she floated from living room to living room, capturing that pervasive glow and the people in front of it. A recent book deal allowed her to revisit those homes in Havana in 2010. More…

08-23-47:

onaissues:

In 2000, photographer Simone Lueck tagged along with a friend on a two-week trip to Cuba. “The first thing I noticed in Havana,” she writes, “was that the city was dark at night. There were no streetlights, porch lights or living-room lamps. It was pitch black except for the faint colorful glow spilling out of open doors everywhere, and it came from the TVs.”

With a 35mm camera and some film, she floated from living room to living room, capturing that pervasive glow and the people in front of it. A recent book deal allowed her to revisit those homes in Havana in 2010.

More…