Culture

Over the last few days stories have circulated regarding the scopes used by overseas personel during our crusade (I mean war) in the middle east. Interesting part is the bible verses the manufacturer is adding to the scopes for a little extra help with targeting.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/us-military-weapons-inscribed-secret-jesus-bible-codes/story?id=9575794

http://www.navytimes.com/news/2010/01/military_biblical_optics_011910w/

God bless.

Well, I guess it’s about time I stopped lurking and started contributing.

So without further ado, here I am.  Blogging.  Fucking crazy.  How do I change my pw on this thing?  Surely I don’t have to remember the made up one they emailed to me.  If I do, you can consider this both my first and last contribution to the cooperative blog.

Now, this might come as a surprise, but I love street performers.  While in NYC recently I didn’t see any of the human statues who don’t move until you give them money, but we did see lots of musicians.  My friend Jessica explained none of them even came close to this guy.  This guy has serious skills.

But this was my question:  do you think his parents are extremely proud of what he’s done after thousands of dollars and hours spent on flute lessons or completely mortified?

Here it is….

The beatboxing flutist

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXmeayaHh4U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crfrKqFp0Zg

There are a lot of dog people in Denver, of which I am one. And yet, our lack of interpersonnal communication baffles me. Perhaps the sociologists on the blog can help me understand.

I’m walking the dog, we meet someone walking the other way… I say “Hey, how’s it going.” They reply, “Oh, you are such a cute little boy.” It used to catch me off guard, but now I expect it. Why do dog people avoid/ignore communication with the walker, and jump straight to the walkee. Honestly, I get a little pissed. Passer-bys will have entire conversations with my dog, without ever looking at me, and his breath stinks. And then I feel obligated to reply to the person as if I were the dog, because he can’t talk back… “Oh, he’d like to smell your ass…”

For several people at the park whom I see regularly, I’ve had multiple/lengthy conversations as if our dogs were talking to one another, without having ever mentioned that we are actually humans and have human names.

“Oh, what’s your name.”
“He’s Finn, how about you.”
“Oh, she’s Princess. What kind of puppy are you.”
“He’s a mutt, and you are?”
“She’s a lab mix, enjoy your walk.”
“He will, you too.”

These converations occur without ever looking each other in the eyes. Has anyone else experienced this or gets annoyed by this? Why do people do this?

Just looking at random stuff tonight, but this is sad.

Poor girl doesn’t have a chance, 14 and wearing hot pants on Letterman. We all have a good sense of how this ends.

The Genetic Protection in Insurance Coverage Act of 2007 basically says that insurance companies can not discriminate based on genetic information.

I find this concept amazing.

For a second think about insurance companies.

one mississippi.

Insurance companies are a simple exercise. They take individual risk, weigh it against the pool of insured or likely insured and make a decision on how much a person is worth. They figure when a person is most likely to die and how much they need to charge that person in order for them to profi over the life of the policy.

If I were to apply for a new insurance policy they would weigh (no pun intended) all of the negative factors and balance against their pool and give me a monthly payment. This is why actuaries exist, think ‘About Schmidt.’

So, insurance companies have a good baseline of study. A 29 year-old white male with my height and weight with my socio-economic-status should live to be about 70 (give or take 50 years based on modern medicine).

What amazes me is that we have decided the point at which insurance companies can stop gathering information and must start making guesses. Basically, Math (actuarial science) is ok, genetics is not.

How can we possibly make some sort of arbitrary decision on how much knowledge is ok? Why not assail the actual algorithms altogether (that sentence took some work, but it is fun). How can we allow for insurance companies to compile one list of happenings and base a payment but not another?

How can we possibly not agree that more information is better?

It’s a tricky-deal. Should we punish those, by having higher premiums, who are weak? Now I am entering Darwinian zone here, but why shouldn’t the most healthy of our species be rewarded for their superior genes? We’ve been playing that game for, well, a long time. Then, there is that whole euthanasia thing.

Now, what if I were to argue that we don’t really make any decisions? My ability to be fat is a direct result of how I was raised within my genetic disposition. Nature and nurture. If it is a choice, then it is ok for insurance companies to gouge me–ask smokers (and actuaries usually live within these lifestyle factors). But what if I can’t control my weight? By that I mean any disposition or symptom that we show may not be a choice, but in fact may programmed. What if that is really true? (This goes for any kind of disorder in which people make ‘choice’. I am simply picking on myself for expediency.)

I don’t know, it really fascinated me tonight. There was a dude on Colbert who was talking about this. 2 things struck me.

1) He decided he didn’t want to know if he was disposed toward Alzheimer’s.
2) He had a gene that would say he would be bald by an 80% certainty. He has a beautiful healthy swatch of hair.

Anyway, I was amazed that this guy wouldn’t want to know, and, in the context of his argument, it seemed amazingly disarming. He too was drawing a line of should-be-known-knowledge.

This is what I am saying. Either you want to know or you don’t.

The march of rationalism has and will continue to run against an ethics that was born in a previous era (thank you David Harvey). Every time we run from that we rob ourselves of understanding. How can ever knowing more be a bad thing? It might mess up how we look at the world, but there is no value in pretending that known knowledge doesn’t exist.

Like I said, half-formed.

Two final thoughts.

1) Look at how many tags this topic invokes.
2) I looked up the decay/decadence idea from my last post. It comes from the Latin root–as M-W online states (but won’t let me copy and paste off their website [this is particulary interesing in light on the post, why not let me copy from a definition--how is this sacred knowledge?]) from Late Latin decadere to fall, sink.

sorry for not posting for a while, this is a random post, but, did you hear our president tonight?

I have heard him more in the last two weeks than the last in the past four.

In his press conference tonight he opened talking about the economy and finished his opening remarks; “last month our economy lost 598,000 jobs, which is nearly the equivalent of losing every single job in the state of Maine. And if there is anyone out there who still doesn’t believe this constitutes a full-blown crisis, I suggest speaking to one of the millions Americans whose lives have been turned upside-down b/c they don’t know where their next paycheck is coming from.

“That is why the single most important part of this economic recovery and reinvestment plan is the fact that it will save or create up to four million jobs. Because that’s what America needs most right now.

“It is absolutely true that we can’t depend on gov’t alone to create jobs or economic growth. That is and must be the role of the private sector. But at this particular moment, with the private sector so weakened by this recessions the federal gov’t is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life. It is only gov’t that can break the viscous cycle where lost jobs lead to people spending less money which leads to even more layoffs. And breaking that cycle is exactly what the plan that’s moving through congress is designed to do.”

I came into this thinking that Obama would be a pragmatist, but he is a good ole style liberal. WOW. Look at how many times he says government. It is a central factor in this recovery. What I really liked was that initially he talked about “the federal government,” by the end he said, “It is only government…” It is only government? Rush is having a fucking aneurysm. Can you believe that our president is saying that gov’t is the only answer?

I think the dude is right, fine. But, I can’t believe how quickly our heuristic(?), paradigm(?), or normative behaviour can change. For purely sociological reasons it is incredible to me that Obama can talk about government in such a different way simply b/c of a silly ceremony in January.

This guy is selling the whole fucking story. He is going to push this New Deal/Ee-conomic recovery, American people, no plan is perfect fun ’til the very end.

They are pushing in.

We are so in debt on a national and individual level that something is coming due. The very simple question over the next couple of decades is this: can the US balance its debt? If Obama can leverage our remaining good-standing credit into balancing our debt he has done yeoman’s work.

It is very simple.

We need to borrow less, and in order to borrow less, American consumers must demand less.

Decadence comes from the same root as decay.

It is the mad consumption of the rabble which drives this whole thing.

I hate that people are serving lengthy prison sentences for petty, drug-related crimes. Yet they are. In some cases, such as a person being caught with magic mushrooms, they are serving longer sentences than people who commit murder. But now they may get a reprieve. Governors and state legislatures are considering releasing and de-paroling (?) thousands of inmates convicted of non-violent drug-related crimes due to state budget woes.

This really says something about our society. To me, it speaks of our misguided morality. Our morals are only as strong as our fiduciary means. If we can’t house “criminals” in times of budget constraints, then we really need to think about if we should be housing them at all. I can only hope that this act, if it happens, makes people really think about we are treating our non-violent “criminals.”

No causation is implicated in the article; just correlation:

What Happy People Don’t Do

Hello! I should have posted this on Wednesday. That was the day I was out boosting the economy with the strategic disbursement of greenbacks at chain stores, listening to some discs while my internal combustion engine killed the earth, taking me from here to there. Funny how my fiduciary responsibility as a red-blooded American is so evil in so many ways.

Jeez, that reminds me of these Cake lyrics. And if you go read those lyrics, the site will even play you the song. Amazing.

But those aren’t even the lyrics I wanted to highlight.

So, I put in a Flaming Lips album I don’t normally listen to, the newest one. And this one song really stands out as the best song, so I listen to it again. And again. And again. And did I mention it was the day after the election? Yeah, so these lyrics really made me happy:

The W.A.N.D. (The Will Always Negates Defeat)

(You’ve got the power in there)
(Waving your wand in the air)

Time after time those fanatical minds try to rule all the world
Telling us all it’s them who’s in charge of it all
I’ve got a trick, a magic stick, that will make them all fall
We’ve got the power now, motherfuckers; that’s where it belongs

You’ve got that right!
(Power in there)
You know that it is!
(Wand in the air)

They’ve got their weapons to solve all their questions
They don’t know what it’s for
(Because they don’t know what it’s for)
Why can’t they see that’s not power, that’s greed
To just want more and more?
(Just want more and more)
I got a plan and it’s here in my hand; a baton made of light
We’re the enforcers, the sorcerer’s orphans
And we know why we fight
(And we know why we fight)

You can listen to the song or even download it here. Btw, he gets that vocal effect by singing through a megaphone. Most excellent use of a megaphone.

I can’t sleep. So this post will probably just make you crinkle your nose, particularly if you’re sober. No worries.

This is a chapter of a book, Sound Unbound, edited by DJ Spooky (who besides being a most interesting musician working with the broadest imaginable range of artists, majored in French lit and philo and is a long-time friend of Shepard Fairey). I recommend that you read the chapter; don’t be a-skeerd of it even though it looks dense. That just means you’ll get through more coolness in less time.

The essay’s like a series of TED talks on speed for people who are in to technology and art and architecture and geography and music and film and the all-consuming fastness of the speed of life in which all of these things articulate … it pulls together a plethora of things, people, and ideas I’m interested in at absolute warp speed.

But that’s the point. He’s sampling history and books and philosophers and programmer-speak and art exhibits. He’s filtering them, finding the patterns, trying to decipher a system that makes sense in his (and, since I know who’s reading this, it’s safe to say our) world. And the common denominator for him is the archive as the dominant form. The web as an archive, his music collection as archive, ftp having the potential to be the ultimate communication tool so far.

He tells a story of how a clock maker invented the modern system of latitute (as in longitude and latitude), and the moral of the story is that time is the archival system for the measurement (and thus understanding) of space, and that time is also the archival system for the measurement (and thus the understanding) of music (rhythm). Presence and absence of material. Well … I take it back. It may not have a moral. That’s okay, though. It gets me worked up, and that’s about all anyone can ask for from ideas.