Roast beef run at 60C

I’ve been keeping track of the average power for my control loop, which has been coming out at 22%. So i modified the code to have a bias of 22%, and here’s the result:

Test run at 55C

Overall much more stable. The occasional hiccups are probably caused by the remote socket failing to receive off commands. There’s a 3C overshoot at the start, which I hope to have fixed by entering the control loop from initial warm up 3C earlier. Here’s the new code (also available at GitHub):

import os
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE, call
from optparse import OptionParser
from time import sleep

def tempdata():
    # Replace 28-000003ae0350 with the address of your DS18B20
    pipe = Popen(["cat","/sys/bus/w1/devices/w1_bus_master1/28-000003ea0350/w1_slave"], stdout=PIPE)
    result = pipe.communicate()[0]
    result_list = result.split("=")
    temp_mC = int(result_list[-1]) # temp in milliCelcius
    return temp_mC

def setup_1wire():
  os.system("sudo modprobe w1-gpio && sudo modprobe w1-therm")

def turn_on():
  os.system("sudo ./strogonanoff_sender.py --channel 4 --button 1 --gpio 0 on")

def turn_off():
  os.system("sudo ./strogonanoff_sender.py --channel 4 --button 1 --gpio 0 off")
#Get command line options
parser = OptionParser()
parser.add_option("-t", "--target", type = int, default = 55)
parser.add_option("-p", "--prop", type = int, default = 6)
parser.add_option("-i", "--integral", type = int, default = 2)
parser.add_option("-b", "--bias", type = int, default = 22)
(options, args) = parser.parse_args()
target = options.target * 1000
print ('Target temp is %d' % (options.target))
P = options.prop
I = options.integral
B = options.bias
# Initialise some variables for the control loop
interror = 0
pwr_cnt=1
pwr_tot=0
# Setup 1Wire for DS18B20
setup_1wire()
# Turn on for initial ramp up
state="on"
turn_on()

temperature=tempdata()
print("Initial temperature ramp up")
while (target - temperature > 6000):
    sleep(15)
    temperature=tempdata()
    print(temperature)

print("Entering control loop")
while True:
    temperature=tempdata()
    print(temperature)
    error = target - temperature
    interror = interror + error
    power = B + ((P * error) + ((I * interror)/100))/100
    print power
    # Make sure that if we should be off then we are
    if (state=="off"):
        turn_off()
    # Long duration pulse width modulation
    for x in range (1, 100):
        if (power > x):
            if (state=="off"):
                state="on"
                print("On")
                turn_on()
        else:
            if (state=="on"):
                state="off"
                print("Off")
                turn_off()
        sleep(1)

Ah, she got it. But it took her a minute. I was impressed actually. Most people would not think that the reason I wasn’t leaning back in my chair is because my feet didn’t hit the ground comfortably. But people are very affected by body language (some would say it accounts for more than 70% of communication). That something as simple as being shorter than average can affect the way people perceive your energy in a room is very profound. It is true that being on the edge of your seat has all kinds of connotations of being overly alert, anxious or expectant. I wasn’t intending to give off that kind of energy, but apparently, through no fault of my own, I was.

This is a fairly benign example of how factors beyond our control affect how other people see us. We all come within finite physical bodies and don’t always realize that because something is true for us, it might not be true for someone else. How you move through the world, may be a little different from how someone else in a different body moves through the world.

As a recent communications and public relations graduate and someone who has just started working in the area of diversity policy and awareness, I’ve been thinking a lot about bias lately. In public relations, image is important. It is a profession concerned with reputation management, branding and putting the best face of an organization or its products in the public eye. Where image is important, judgment is not far behind, and where there is judgment, there is likely bias. But bias is not a topic we talk much about. And it’s a hard topic to talk about without sounding preachy, pedantic or even trite. We’ve all heard the expressions “don’t judge a book by its cover,” and “don’t judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes,” but short of wearing the adage on a button or T-shirt, how can we actually confront our own biases?

It’s a question of how we can make the unconscious conscious. Bias is the tendency to draw conclusions on the basis of implicit associations or subconscious factors automatically or without thinking about it. As Gregory Berns discusses in Iconcolast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How To Think Differently, our brain is literally designed to be lazy and take shortcuts in the form of making best guesses or assumptions in order to function quickly and efficiently:

“Evolution has resulted in a human brain that can accomplish amazing perceptual tasks, all the while saving energy. The need to distinguish friend from foe, or predator from prey, and to do it quickly enough to decide whether to run or fight, meant that the brain had to take shortcuts and make assumptions about what it was seeing. From the earliest levels of processing in the visual system, the brain extracts useful pieces of information and discards others.”

As a result, the human brain often sees what it wants to see based on what it is used to seeing or expects to see, not necessarily what is actually there. So we are biologically programmed to form biases based on our previous experience.

Source: webdesignerdepot.com

So what can we do? We have to accept that we do have biases and when we notice ourselves judging someone to try and take a step back and ask why.

Example: Don’t Panic, But Carbon Dioxide Levels Are the Highest They’ve Been in Human History
May 11, 2013 by Andri Antoniades
[UPDATE: it turns out CO2 levels are NOT the highest they've been in human history]

In the above takepart.com article you’ll notice a data point and an assumption treated as one and the same. The data point is about a measured (and confirm-able) degree of CO2 emissions. The assumption, one often repeated with the assertion of proof, but none-the-less lacks it, is that CO2 emissions cause a rise in global temperatures. As in this article, the assumption is enough to pass for fact because the idea has been so ingrained in our psyche.

For decades we been inundated with claims that CO2 cause a greenhouse effect. Study after study has been produced to show this. Unfortunately it seems, time and again, with just a little effort devoted to actually checking the facts, these studies fail to stand up to scientific scrutiny. How can that be if the global warming deniers are a bunch of lying ignoramuses?

So what do the so-called deniers say?

The effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas becomes ever more marginal with greater concentration

The curious case of rising CO2 and falling temperatures

Russian Scientists say period of global cooling ahead due to changes in the sun

WSJ op-ed by Schmitt and Happer: In Defense of Carbon Dioxide

‘The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science’ – Dr. William Happer:

The demonized chemical compound is a boon to plant life and has little correlation with global temperature.

To make the case for climate alarmism more believable, we must avoid paying any attention to the claims of the deniers. Don’t think of it as malfeasance, or intellectual dishonesty, or fraud. Cherry picking convenient data is a time honored tradition in any scientific field. And this is what an open mind looks like:

San Jose State University Meteorology decides burning books they don’t agree with is better than reading them

And as we all know, the sun heating the Earth is just big oil propaganda. Human activity is obviously the only possible explanation of something that has been a natural phenomenon for as long as the Earth has existed.

environment, global warming, greenhouse, indoctrination, pandering, political correctness, propaganda, science, scientists

By John W. Lillpop

Conservatives have long known that right-wing organizations have been singled out for extra scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) based on ideological profiling.

Of course, the left-wing media and political cabal have denied that any such bias exists, and have ridiculed conservatives for even suggesting such an outrage.

Imagine the shock in liberal news rooms and Democrat conclaves this day when the IRS actually admitted their profiling naughtiness and apologized for same.

As reported at the reference:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Internal Revenue Service apologized Friday for what it acknowledged was “inappropriate” targeting of conservative political groups during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status.

IRS agents singled out dozens of organizations for additional reviews because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their exemption applications, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups. In some cases, groups were asked for lists of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.

The agency — led at the time by a Bush administration appointee — blamed low-level employees, saying no high-level officials were aware. But that wasn’t good enough for Republicans in Congress, who are conducting several investigations and asked for more.

“I call on the White House to conduct a transparent, government-wide review aimed at assuring the American people that these thuggish practices are not under way at the IRS or elsewhere in the administration against anyone, regardless of their political views,” said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
“The admission by the Obama administration that the Internal Revenue Service targeted political opponents echoes some of the most shameful abuses of government power in 20th century American history,” said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
Many conservative groups complained during the campaign that they were being harassed by the IRS. They accused the agency of frustrating their attempts to become tax exempt by sending them lengthy, intrusive questionnaires.

The forms, which the groups have made available, sought information about group members’ political activities, including details of their postings on social networking websites and about family members.

IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told Congress in March 2012 that the IRS was not targeting groups based on politics.

“There’s absolutely no targeting. This is the kind of back and forth that happens to people” who apply for tax-exempt status, Shulman told a House Ways and Means subcommittee.

The IRS said senior leaders were not aware that specific groups were being targeted at the time of the hearing.

“While we acknowledged centralization of these applications last year, the IRS did not acknowledge the use of names as part of the process earlier because the details were not initially known to senior leadership and (the inspector general) has been reviewing the situation,” the IRS said in a statement. “Their work is now far enough along that it was appropriate to address the issue when it came up during (Friday’s) tax conference.”
The IRS apology is worthy of emulation, from, say, the liberal media?

Ref: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/irs-apologizes-targeting-conservative-groups

‘I had long had the impression,’ he writes,

that blacks were over-represented in photographs…in the newspaper by comparison with people from the Indian subcontinent or with…Chinese, and I tested…my impression by counting the photographs in the edition of 19th September….There was only one photograph of an Indian, and that was in [an] advertisement….There were 26 photographs of blacks….This…is systematic bias amounting to racism….There are more people of South Asian descent in Britain than of African and West Indian descent, yet Indians were the subjects of fewer than 4 per cent of the photographs of ethnic minorities to appear.

Dalrymple explains why.

The people who run and write the Guardian have deep, suppressed and subliminal doubts about the equality of human races. To prove to themselves that they do not have such doubts, they overcompensate by publishing as many photographs of blacks as possible….They don’t have any such doubts with regard to Indians and Chinese. These two groups have a…fatal vice: grosso modo, [they] can shift for themselves, and require no help from the coalition of intellectuals, moral entrepreneurs and bureaucrats….they are well on the way to outstripping the white population in achievement, demonstrating the redundancy of that coalition. By contrast, blacks are regarded in the pages of the Guardian much as conservationists regard endangered species.

The idea that differentials in achievement

are attributable only to bias, illicit discrimination and prejudice is a primitive one, like the Azande idea that everyone dies of malevolent witchcraft, but it serves the ends of those who want to politicise the whole of life and control all social developments. Such people do not believe…societies can reach…accommodations and equilibria spontaneously and piecemeal, without central direction and an overall plan, usually their own, of course.

(2005)

But it’s even worse than that, at least for me. Not only can I create a goal, for as little as a few hours in the future, and then fail, but I can be certain at the time I’m setting the goal that I’ll succeed–and still fail. While I’m sometimes cynical of myself (which usually leads to giving up completely), normally I really believe that it’ll be different this time.

I’ve gotten some insight into this problem by looking at a different circumstance–the one where it’s someone else’s goal. When a friend or family member tells me an intention of theirs, at which they are certain they’ll succeed, I’m often more skeptical, and don’t give them the credit I would give myself. It’s not that I’m necessarily wrong about other people; psychologists who have examined this sort of thing have found that people are actually very accurate in predicting others’ behavior. The problem is that they’re awful at predicting their own.

Perhaps the deeper problem is that none of us really make the effort of predicting our own behavior at all. I find that while I take into account a great deal of information in guessing the future actions of those around me, my conception of my own future decisions seems to be a function of nothing more than my current intent.

I think my model of myself as a person is broken. I tend to think of myself as an independent agent, whose choices are practically causeless. Rarely do I consider that my behavior is influenced, or even caused, by things outside my control. Furthermore, I tend to assume that I’ll be the same person in a few hours as I am now. In an important sense, I won’t be. My frame of mind, and by extension my actions, will be (usually predictably) different from what they are at the moment of goal-setting. If I step back and look at myself the way I look at everyone else, the things I do become quite predictable. I think most of us are the same way.

The good news is that our predictability does not rob us of our free will. While our predictions about other people aren’t very useful to us, because we can’t control those people, the foresight we apply to ourselves can be used constructively. If our predictions don’t match our intentions, it’s within our power to manipulate ourselves now into doing the right thing in the future.

Predicting also seems to make us act more in the interest of the long-term than the short-term. A web search for “predict yourself” turned this up:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/09/predict-yourself.html

And with that, I leave this post feeling a whole lot better than I started off. Look at what 10 minutes could do! I knew having a blog would be a good thing and maybe I’ll even go out for a run later. And why not include a cute picture of a puppy? (This is not by dog. It is an Australian Labradoodle.) Pets reduce physiological stress! How could you stay angry looking at a picture like this?

However, instead of trying to change and manipulate the story, the MSM is simply ignoring it. There is no possible way they could spin this event to make it seem like the good men and women of the Golden Dawn are “Neo-Nazis” or anything of the like. And like Alduos Huxley said in his introduction to Brave New World, the best form of propaganda is silence about the truth. I mean the real truth, not the sugar-coated version spoon fed to you by the news.

Now, I really want to feature this article for two reasons: One, to highlight the achievements of a young and accomplished Nationalist from across the pond; and two, to highlight how the Golden Dawn wins over the hearts and minds of the Greek people. They don’t do it through fear, like they are portrayed as doing: they help their neighbors. They give them food, water, medicine and shelter. And they do it because they love their homeland, their heritage, their culture, and their people.

You can’t win over a populace who thinks you are some psychopathic group through simple methods such as advertising your cause, or spamming your little slogans (I’m speaking to you, “Anti-Rascist is codeword for Anti-White” people). What seems like a good idea to you and your organization may not win over any supporters, and may in fact deter a larger percentage of the populace. Help them. Be the good men and women you continually label yourselves as.

Check out Mr. Allan’s article here!

Also, for first-hand news from the Golden Dawn themselves, check out this and this!

The wife/mother/female can say whatever she likes, can give the judge whatever she likes, has no evidence to her claims, nothing tangable, however he believes them.

The husband/father/male is not able to complete a thought, is cut off, can not offer anything as evidence and no matter what he says… does not believe them.

I’m do not know exactly what he is trying to give the judge, but I have some evidence to show I am telling the truth, plus I have about 9 months of text messages between rose and I, and I am nothing but polite, never cuss, ask to put our daughter first, I am harassed, cussed at, called names, ignored when asking to discuss issues regarding Alyssa, refused contact with my daughter, and during one exchange rose states she wants nothing to do with Alyssa ever again…  But he doesn’t want to see it.

I don’t know, Can a judge really be biased about such things in this day and age when father take such active rolls in the lives of there children???

I am not a member of the TEA-Party..

Yeah, I have to put that first. Why You ask? Is it because they are a bunch of racist, bigot homophobe, hate mongering spawns of Evil?(Which they aren’t anyway.) I mean that’s what they say in the Media right? So I certainly don’t want to be associated  with that cause that’s what they ALL are..?(That’s what I am being told..)

No I am not a member of the Tea party, because I define my beliefs. And what are they you might ask?

Well That’s the kicker isn’t it. Before you can listen to them, I first need to prove by associations that my bias is the matching bias.. That I have the right skew as I am askew, before my words matter.

Truth isn’t what is important, just whether what I say supports one side or the other.

And right here, yep, you guessed it, I call Bullshit.

And here is the reason why.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/irs-apologizes-targeting-conservative-groups

(when I last checked the AP was not in fact part of the vast right wing conspiracy, but I will check later with the media to make sure I update that based on what they tell me what to think)

UPDATE!http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/05/12/irs-targeted-groups-that-criticized-the-government-ig-report-says/
Whether or not you are a tea party supporter (which I in fact am not) should not change an expectation of fairness, justice, and liberty, for you and those you associate with.

Unless of course you disagree with that due to one Bias, or another. 

Lois G. Lerner, the IRS official who oversees tax-exempt groups, said the “absolutely inappropriate” actions by “front-line people” were not driven by partisan motives.

(Face Palm) .. Help me here.. so those responsible for singling out those 501(c) (4) organizations which “seemed” by name to be associated with the Tea party Movement, for additional scrutiny and was deemed “absolutely inappropriate” for them to do so, where not… in fact, partisan…
Lets See what old Man Webster Says..
Profiling: : the act or process of extrapolating information about a person based on known traits or tendencies ; specifically : the act of suspecting or targeting a person on the basis of observed characteristics or behavior
Bias: 3b : an inclination of temperament or outlook; especially : a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment : prejudice
Prejudice: c : an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a group, a race, or their supposed characteristics
Partisan: a firm adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person; especially : one exhibiting blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance.

What in the 9 hells was the motivation, a utter hatred of anti-oxidants..

I think that our class was pretty good about critical tolerance, since no one really seemed to want to attack another religion with malice, but with doubt. That’s about it for good things. I’m pretty cynical about the others.

I know our class wasn’t open at all. Certain people were holding back opinions that I think would’ve been really interesting for in class discussion,  but instead they were really passive aggressive about it and complained outside of class instead of bringing it into class. Which also ties into honesty, which not everyone had.

I really don’t know what I’m supposed to say about critical intelligence, because I’m not exactly sure what that means. I guess people in the class were pretty intelligent. So that’s an ok.

before you know it

you closed the doors, put blinds over the windows

and 

got dressed without a mirror. 

The difference is like

A vision as opposed to reactions. 

actions toward a goal and not contemplations. 

writing with few mistakes and wise, 

as opposed to creatively guiding your words as they arise. 

Either way its style, 

Minds work differently. 

Don’t push, no pushy. 

Don’t force, no forcey. 

Welcome, all poetry. 

JLA ©

Carol Marin is biased. She is a hypocrite. She slams and unfairly attacks people she dislikes and yet is silent on her own hypocrisies and failings in the news media. This Media Video Commentary from veteran Chicago City Hall reporter, journalist and columnist Ray Hanania.

Ray Hanania calls out Carol Marin’s hypocrisy from Ray Hanania on Vimeo.

Let me set the scene. Dr Masaru Emoto is a Japanese scientist who claims that water’s molecular structure is affected by the ‘energy’ in thoughts and emotions. Positive, touchy feely thoughts make for positive changes; negative, naughty, coveting thy neighbour’s ox type thoughts have an adverse effect.

As you’d expect, there’s a YouTube post about this. Actually there’s quite a lot of them from persons living on the ragged edge of reality, but this is one of the best because it’s the official video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAvzsjcBtx8

Now if you watch and listen, you’ll find that in order to illustrate the changes, the revered Dr Emoto (dodgy name, that, considering his field of research) has to ‘crystallise’ the water. In grown up English, he freezes it. What the good Doctor is doing is making snowflakes. I think I told you I was fairly certain someone must have been making snowflakes in a lab, and there you go, I was right. He’s making snowflakes.

What he then does is choose to present a photograph of just one of the snowflakes made from water exposed to good or bad energy. Pretty convincing, eh? It’s not as if there may be more than one snowflake in his collection, is it? Maybe he really does use iggywiggy sample sizes. It could happen.

As a random example, let’s take the Mother Theresa snowflake. It’s up there on YouTube, don’t take my word for it. This snowflake, made from water exposed to the words ‘Mother Theresa,’ is apparently especially interesting because it has a heart in the centre. Really, it does, I’m not kidding you. A heart. You can see it on the screen. Amazing!

I do wonder though why Mother Theresa wants to create flaws in the structure of snowflakes, as the heart is a flaw in the normal structure of a snowflake. You’d think she’d be having a good rest now. She did quite a lot when she walked this Earth, and deserves a break. I’m pretty sure she’s got better things to be doing in her afterlife than support the ravings of a Japanese lunatic.

By the way, the heart shape is asymmetrical. So’s the human heart, yes, I accept that. But this looks like a ‘broken-hearted’ emoticon. You might expect the shade of Mother Theresa to like things a bit more neat and tidy. Maybe not though. It might just be me being cynical. Who knows?

The switched on urban warriors among you will have spotted the flaws in his arguments right out of the trap. He’s not photographing at a molecular level. These are macrostructures. No evidence at all that the underlying molecular structure has been altered in any way, shape, or form. As for the ‘polluted’ water notsnowflakes, we have no idea of the scale of the photos. Indeed we have no idea at all of the scale of any of them, but they must be biggish, since you can’t photograph molecules. Trust me, you can’t. You can infer their structure from X-ray diffraction crystallography, but this is a pretty high energy process that would melt the crystals anyway, even if they didn’t sublime in the high vacuum required for this technique.

So all in all this is what we scientists refer to as a right load of old socks. It would be funny were it not for so many people of easy susceptibility actually believing the old fraud.

It’s amazingly easy to fool the gullible. I’m still beavering away on my website about the health benefits of a common, nay ubiquitous substance. I’m having second thoughts about this. Because I reckon some dimwits are going to take it seriously.

If you have been thumbing through this resource centre for the past few months you will be aware of the discussion that has been going on about bias, balance and freedom of the Press, and speech, in and about the Australian news media.

Recently, the Right has focussed on the apparent absence of any Conservatives in the lead position of the mainline public affairs programs of ABC TV, in particular.

The long-running debate has been warming up on the back burner and may just have boiled over with a frank, precise and scathing article on the ABC’s online commentary site, The Drum, by its former editor Jonathan Green. He makes points like the following:

“… if journalism were a polemic, if it became a cynical exercise in the promotion of any or various propositions, then it would cease to fill any laudable social function. At best it would be entertainment. At worst, propaganda. In either case, it would hardly merit the range of privileges we accord the worthier work of the fourth estate”.

Mr Green goes on to describe a bleak future, including perhaps the disappearance of journalism, but he does not say what might replace it. That exact possibility has been exercising my own mind lately. My solution (Stop the Press! Long live the Press!) is an appeal to journalists to get back to sticking to their Code of Ethics.

Jonathan Green (@GreenJ) hosts Sunday Extra on ABC Radio National and is the former editor of the The Drum, an online offshoot of the ABC TV program of the same name. ABC picture

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Read what Mr Green has to say, and the 691 comments that followed before comments were closed.

There’s a fiery response to Mr Green’s article in two separate articles by mother and daughter writing team Kay and Victoria Rollison in Australian Independent Media Network.

In a piece entitled Tainted Journalism, Victoria argues the case for “conviction” in journalism. In The Journalism of Conviction, Kay challenges the concepts of objectivity and impartiality.

I am sure you have all heard what the CEO of the clothing store “Abercrombie and Fitch” said in a 2006 interview. If not… take a read:

“In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” he told the site. “Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”

He went on to state:

“That’s why we hire good-looking people in our stores, because good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. We don’t market to anyone other than that.”

His views have NOT changed according to Robin Lewis, who is a retail industry analyst and co-author of a new book, “The New Rules of Retail”. Robin Lewis says that “Jeffries doesn’t want larger people shopping in his store, he wants thin and beautiful people.” Robin Lewis also said in an interview that Jeffries “doesn’t want his core customers to see people who aren’t as hot as them wearing his clothing. People who wear his clothing should feel like they’re one of the ‘cool kids. Abercrombie is only interested in people with washboard stomachs who look like they’re about to jump on a surfboard.” 

I am going to break down these comments sentence by sentence and tell you EXACTLY what I think. 

“In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids. Candidly, we go after the cool kids”

Oh, really? How about we stop and think about how this way of thinking had lead to not only bullying and fighting in schools, but child suicides? People have been fighting to have stricter laws for bullying and we have the CEO of a company freely stating that he only wants the company to go after the “cool kids”? Okay. Fine. Let’s chalk that up to it being his opinion. Moving on…. 

“We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends.”

Who is he to make the judgement on what an “all-American” kid is? Again, moving on….

“A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong.”

Um…. can you say RUDE? Are people supposed to feel privileged if they are able to fit into a shirt that whores out the company? I am sorry, but I can’t see paying money to be a walking advertisement for a company. Especially a company who’s CEO has marbles for brains. And who exactly decides which people “belong” in their clothing? I think if a person who is a 2XL wants to squeeze themselves into a size Medium Abercrombie and Fitch shirt, they have every right to, and they have every right to feel like they belong. 

“Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”

And they are proud of that? They are proud that they exclude people from their store and clothing? 

“That’s why we hire good-looking people in our stores, because good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. We don’t market to anyone other than that.”

So they don’t want to market to a hard working college student? Or a hard working mom? Or a teenager who is shopping in the mall with some extra babysitting cash? And if I may add, I truly believe they are not hiring people legally as far as bias and discrimination. Clearly when they are hiring people, they are hiring based on what they LOOK like, not what the person can do or bring to the company. 

Is everyone entitled to their opinion? Yes. Does every store have their own image? Yes. Is it right for a store to try and belittle others and make others feel like they “don’t belong”? Absolutely not. We are living in a day and age where more and more people are fighting for acceptance. We have children killing themselves because they feel they “don’t belong”, and teenagers harassing each other because they don’t think some people are “cool kids”. Sure, Abercrombie and Fitch may be great for the popular cheerleader in school, or the star quarterback of the football team in school…. but what about the really smart Science student? Or the ambitious Math wiz? Or the eccentric English class lover? What about the slightly larger teenager who has interest in fashion and design? Or the overweight teenager who has a health problem and can’t control their weight? What about the hard working mom who has some extra baby weight, but just wants to feel beautiful? Do you see just how many people Abercrombie and Fitch are discriminating against by allowing their CEO to voice these views? 

I realize there are other stores out there that cater to people of all shapes and sizes. Personally, I have never shopped at Abercrombie and Fitch (guess I am not “cool enough” or “thin enough”) and I certainly will never now, but I find it disgusting that a store would hold these standards. How can employees work for a company with these ethics? 

Next time you pass that obnoxiously big, loud, and dark store and hold your nose from the ridiculous amount of perfume and cologne coming out of it, remember what that company stands by and what they believe. Next time I pass it I’ll make sure to stop inside, maybe they will kick me out for not being “cool enough”, “thin enough” or “attractive enough”. Because Lord knows, Abercrombie and Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries (who, by the way, is 68 and looks like he has had WAY to much botox) is the expert on who is “cool, thin, and attractive.” 

Disgusting. 

Peace, Love, and Pug Hugs,

Maryann

His photographs have a unique style, they contain very subtle and intelligent connections, you feel like a spectator of action within his images, they are brittle and enclosing. Unlike many similar photographs which tend to project a raw essence of solitude and hopelessness. Perhaps here in the Western world we have become so desensitised by image we no longer take in what we see, criticise, question and examine our reality and existence. In many ways the people we see in these images are inexplicable to us, is it right to frame them in this manner? Should we feel guilty, should we feel sad? Would it make any difference if we did? Possibly not, as important as it is to capture how other people live, the way they are represented can often be misleading, do these people want to represented like so? It’s difficult to tell exactly, what i can say with some confidence is that representing people as victims of the circumstances they were brought into this world as, has ultimately lost it’s effect on us. In many respects shock tactics have failed to force action upon humanity collectively, we are still far behind where we need to be in ensuring a fair and equal life for everyone. Different approaches are needed when documenting people in poverty, this is something i hope to explore further when i travel to Honduras this July.

(Photographers Gallery) http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/sebastiaosalgado