I have created a dynamic timeline that covers my father's life, actually starting with his parents birth in the late 19th Century. Click below to open the timeline application.
Harald Sandberg (1912-1983)
I have also written a biography that is available both as a print book through Lulu.com and as an ebook for Kindle (and iPad or Android tablets with the Kindle app).
Funny how you run into things, how you discover things. It was Friday night and we were laying in bed trying to find something to watch. For all the thousands of channels and video-on-demand, there was nothing but garbage and junk. I took the control and flipped over to PBS, where there was a show about the American painter George Bellows, narrated by Ethan Hawke, who we both like from the Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight movies. As we were watching the film about Bellow's life and his interest in boxing, I suddenly found myself staring at a painting depicting a Jack Dempsey falling out of the ring and just about to land among the reporters. Standing in the ring is the challenger, Luis Ángel Firpo.
The thing is that my dad told me about the match when Dempsey got knocked out of the ring in an interview I did with him in 1983, 60 years after the match in New York 1923. I used it in my book about dad -- I’m Adding Sunshine to My Paint -- Harald Sandberg’s Path to the Arts.
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| Firpo's mausoleum at the Recoleta, in Buenos Aires. Copyright: Hans Sandberg, 2018 |
Cyborg pioneer Steve Mann claims to have been attacked in Paris. Blogger John Biggs writes:
"Upon ordering, McDonald’s employees at 140, Avenue Champs Elysees, Paris accosted Mann and tried to tear the glasses out of his head."
"In short, these McDonald’s employees harassed, intimidated, and damaged Mann nearly irrevocably. Ray Kurzweil, a well known futurist, calls this the first attack on a cyborg in history and Mann’s importances to the field of human-computer interaction can’t be measured. That a pioneer like Mann would be accosted – in Paris, of all places – is a travesty," Biggs continues. (Augmented Reality Explorer Steve Mann Assaulted At Parisian McDonald’s)To me the whole things seems rather silly, and it is not the first time Steve Mann has been in similar situations. He is a prophet, and prophets need attention.
"On that day, Feb. 16, he said, he followed the routine he has used on previous flights. He told the security guards in Toronto that he had already notified the airline about his equipment. He showed them documentation, some of it signed by his doctor, that described the wires and glasses, which he wears every waking minute as part of his internationally renowned research on wearable computers.
On his return flight, he did however run into trouble as Airport security wanted to run his wearable computer through the X-ray machine. He refused and spent two days arguing his Cyborg rights.
“When he was finally allowed to go home, some pieces of equipment were not returned to him, he said, and his glasses were put in the plane's baggage compartment although he warned that cold temperatures there could ruin them.
Without a fully functional system, he said, he found it difficult to navigate normally. He said he fell at least twice in the airport, once passing out after hitting his head on what he described as a pile of fire extinguishers in his way. He boarded the plane in a wheelchair.
‘I felt dizzy and disoriented and went downhill from there,’ he said.”
(....)
“Since losing the use of his vision system and computer memory several weeks ago, he said, he cannot concentrate and is behaving differently. He is now undergoing tests to determine whether his brain has been affected by the sudden detachment from the technology.” At Airport Gate, a Cyborg Unplugged, Lisa Guersney, New York Times, March 14, 2002.)
Robert Kuttner reviews Worldly Philosopher, Jeremy Adelman’s biography of A. O. Hirschman, in Rediscovering Albert Hirschman.
The origin of totalitarianism is right here and now. Fear and loathing is always easier than brave and caring.
Robert Reich: Global Capital and the Nation State
Here is the English version of my book about my father's struggle to become an artist.
Like in China after Mao, economic and political reforms will come to North Korea not because of external pressure or political insights among the elites, but because once the political legitimacy of the regime has evaporated, there are only two alternatives to reintegrate the society: War or markets. The former solutions is still possible, but looks rather suicidal. The other solution offers a way forward, but the risk to the elite is immense.
Deng Xiaoping realized that only by decentralizing economic power could the party preserve enough centralized political power to control the country's political future. Young Kim Jong-un probably knows that, but he lacks real stature in the political elite, which is why he is fighting so desperately and erratically to raise his military profile. If he fails, I would expect a military intervention led by a general that can muster enough charisma to control the situation while beginning to adapt the political and economic system to the reality on the ground, which seems to be a more or less market driven society.
Jang Jin-sung, a former North Korean state official and poet laureate, gives a very interesting analysis of the current state of the North Korean society in today's New York Times.
The Market Shall Set North Korea Free
"All North Koreans depended for their very survival on a state rationing system until it collapsed in the mid-1990s. Its demise was due in part to the regime’s concentrated investment of funds in a “party economy” that maintained the cult of the Kims and lavished luxuries on an elite instead of developing a normal economy based on domestic production and trade. Desperate people began to barter household goods for rice on the streets — and the underground economy was born. With thousands of people starving to death, the authorities had no option but to turn a blind eye to all the illegal markets that began to pop up.
Around this time, the nation’s workplaces were made responsible for feeding their employees. The only way they could do so was by setting up “trading companies,” which sold raw materials to China in exchange for rice. These businesses became part of the foundation of the underground economy, acting as import-export hubs that in time began to import from China consumer goods like refrigerators and radios."
