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nebris

02:08 pm - The US President's Hit List or "Death by PowerPoint"

via Global Guerrillas
Tuesday, 29 May 2012
John Robb

Current Mood: cranky

crookedfingers

03:07 pm - Jesus knew that he had been sent to take the sins of the world upon himself

It is 2:51 PM Saturday afternoon in the flow of existence. Life is one long joy ride! I had a normal time at the library book nook today. I had a steady flow of customers at the used book store today. When not helping folks with used books I read "Oracle Night" a novel by Paul Auster. I also wrote in my paper diary and wandered the used book store. I bought home one used book from the book nook today titled, "Nothing But Wodehouse" by P. G. Wodehouse Edited By Ogden Nash. When I got home from the book nook this afternoon it was 1:15 PM. I found my wife doing paper work when I got home.

In the mail today I received the new The Walkmen CD "Heaven" and two paperbacks from Dr. Joel R. Beeke-

"Friends And Lovers: Cultivating Companionship And Intimacy In Marriage" by Joel R. Beeke

"In The Race: The Cure For Backsliding" by Joel R. Beeke

Since coming home from the book nook I have really done nothing exciting. I wrote some more in my private diary. I watered the flower gardens in our backyard. I ate food and made a fresh pot of coffee.

This afternoon my wife goes to an Open House for one of her nephews. I plan to drift into the evening hours this afternoon. I will read some more of the book "God Is Love" by Bray today for evening worship. I remember the words of the Lord Jesus recorded in the Gospel of Luke, "Nevertheless do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven" Luke 10:20.

Well I will close to drift. My coffee is getting cold and I need to wake up before the end comes.

Current Mood: contemplative

nebris

12:01 pm - Random [redux]

~Regarding my last post, one may wonder why I do not stay in said 'improved mood'? The reason is three-fold.

First, and most obvious, is our present 'state of siege'. While our long term financial outlook is quite positive – Le-Le will get a nice piece of change from her 100% VA Disability back payment and our monthly income will double – right now That Woman is 'running a clock' on us, with all the attendant stress and worry. This is a Core Survival Issue. It is profoundly wearing.

Second, the 'general state of human affairs' is fucking depressing...and no, I'm not going to stop reading about all that. It's part and parcel of what I do; Study and Observe. Much of that is 'bad news'. I wouldn't be on this Path if it wasn't.

Third, and likely the most Important, none of you, my Sisters, has yet joined us in this Work. That is very disheartening, very. Without you not only is this Work impossible, it is totally without meaning. I'm not doing this for myself, no matter what the various idiots say. As I've said before, The Temple is tough sell.

If I was really gonna run a practical 'cult scam', I'd have picked some Jebus variation, and likely be very good at it. I seem to draw damaged young men who desperately need a father figure. I could pull together a core of 'acolyte/enforcers' fairly easily. Sweet young pussy would follow soon after, trust me. I'm just not fucked up enough to run such a scene, not for an extended period, at least. *sigh* It would probably all end in Blood and Fire I suspect.

Anyway, that's the name of that fucking tune...

Current Mood: thoughtful

nebris

12:00 pm - My tweets

• Fri, 18:32: rt @americablog: Chicago police: "Your First Amendment rights can be terminated" http://t.co/pnOnyqBV
• Fri, 18:59: I Can Relate http://t.co/usWe0rKl
• Fri, 19:18: Build an asteroid terrarium http://t.co/bjOutRIC #2312
• Fri, 19:55: Tipping iceberg captured on video by tourist | The Sideshow - Yahoo! News http://t.co/0izYyIAY via @YahooNews
• Fri, 20:23: Writer's Resource... http://t.co/oCOS2aBU
• Fri, 22:03: BBC News - Leon Panetta: US to move 60% of navy fleet to Pacific http://t.co/Jse8F53L
• Fri, 23:11: The Grim Meathook Future, Revisited http://t.co/6oTY7RE2
• Sat, 00:18: Today is 8th Sestia, 12AS...a Taraday http://t.co/gbsS0J3m
• Sat, 00:26: Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser Spacecraft Passes Flight Test Milestone | NASA...: http://t.co/6FRznLrt via @youtube
• Sat, 00:40: OK, I LOL'd Dead man eaten by bear was convicted murderer http://t.co/uwDfkejD

• Sat, 00:41: FOURTH pastor calls for death of LGBT people - says he "kind of likes that idea" http://t.co/cG0agGUC via @LexieCannes
• Sat, 09:16: http://t.co/7OmpVgPe - Female fighter wing commander breaking ground for her gender http://t.co/Uo7ZXPOK via @fayobserver
• Sat, 09:47: Poorly Dressed: Too Much FAIL, Cannot Compute http://t.co/FuOIRMyi
• Sat, 10:42: Random http://t.co/yoq58r1t
• Sat, 10:56: Death By Blonde http://t.co/zEduwDh1

Current Mood: calm

bookshare

inverarity

02:07 pm - Saturday Book Discussion: Reading books because they're popular

If everyone else read Harry Potter, would you jump off a bridge too? on bookish.

nebris

10:55 am - Death By Blonde

Current Mood: amused

politicartoons

red_pill

06:48 pm

nebris

10:42 am - Random

~Slept hard last night/this morning. I am more or less 'improved', in that I'm neither achy or depressed. All things considered, I'll have that state of being, thank you very much. And shit should stay chill at least until Monday.

For months now my dreams have been extremely vivid, complex and intense, so much so that they defy my meager skills at description...and they tend to get washed away by the shit in my Waking Life.

However, I was able to hold on to the primary Dreaming from early this morning. Note that these things seem to last for hours and bleed into each other.

I was at some sort of 'rally/event'. It was outdoors, at what seemed to be an urban baseball field. This guy, some sort of 'motivational/spiritual' leader type, was running this thing. It was very impressive, a dynamic mix of LGAT and Performance Art. While I personally was not buying what he was selling – not sure what it was anyway – I was very inspired by his work, how he staged and performed the thing.

That inspiration stayed with me when I woke up, hence my 'improved' mood. Even still sitting on the edge of my bed, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I felt that most wonderful thing; a Sense of Possibility. I started thinking about some of the specifics that can get The Temple going. It felt very good, believe me.

I suspect that these are all Lesson Dreamings. No wonder I've spent so much time sleeping. That has been a space for both Healing and Teaching. Of course, sooner or later, one must Awake and Do..and such shall happen in the Goddess' good time.

And so it is...

Current Mood: calm

ladysisyphus

01:23 pm - [ogmst] churches to contact

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

Current Mood: curious

ginmar

12:15 pm

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

ginmar

12:06 pm

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

politicartoons

lafinjack

10:44 am

linguaphiles

mamculuna

11:18 am - Translation from Japanese title?

I teach an online literature class that includes a section on Japanese Noh theater, and I'm trying to put together some videos online so that the students can see what it's like. I've found one that is titled only in Japanese, which I can't read: 仕舞 (能)「船弁慶」 国立能楽堂にて
Can someone tell me what that says?

And if anyone happens to know of any good Noh online, even brief scenes, I'd be delighted.

Thanks very much!

quicknews

specialrpt

09:58 am - Saturday, June 2, 2012 News Update

"I am not influenced by the expectation of promotion or pecuniary reward. I wish to be useful, and every kind of service necessary for the public good, become honorable by being necessary." --Nathan Hale, remark to Captain William Hull, who had attempted to dissuade him from volunteering for a spy mission for General Washington, 1776

Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak sentenced to life in prison

Retired Russian colonel convicted of spying for U.S.

Panetta says new Pentagon strategy to pivot focus to Asia not designed to contain China

NATO: 4 aid workers rescued from Afghan insurgents


Editorial Cartoon

Commentary: Church Is Still Not State Catholics are being told to substitute state belief for their religious belief.

Higher Education's Online Revolution - The substitution of technology (which is cheap) for labor (which is expensive) can vastly increase access to an elite-caliber education.

What's at Stake in Wisconsin Liberalism, oikophobia and public-sector unions.

Morning Bell: How Radical Were Wisconsin’s Reforms?

Promises, Promises Unemployment was supposed to be 5.7% now.

'Gafa Obamy' A presidential faux pas mangles World War II history and insults Poland.

"To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients, by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted." --Alexander Hamilton

Most quotes used on quicknews are H/T to The Patriot Post

quicknews updates will also be cross-posted at Another Voice

politicartoons

hardblue

08:55 am - "True Blues"

crookedfingers

09:19 am - a brief philosophical novel about predicting the future

It is 9:14 AM Saturday morning in the flow. Please stop the flow! I am tired of flowing. I can not escape the current. I am being pulled along with the flow. There is no way out of the flow. I will hang on to the Cross as I am being pulled down the flow.

I have to leave soon for the Herrick Public Library used bookstore. Right now I feel like going back to bed.

Outside this morning it is gray and 54 degrees. It feels like it is going to rain today.

Carol is out walking the dog around our neighborhood.

Last night I read "Oracle Night" a novel by Paul Auster and watched TV with my wife. Our son Josiah called last night. Josiah and his wife live in New Mexico.

Well I suppose I will close to swim in a state of dread in the flow. I remember the words of the apostle Paul, "all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ" 1 Corinth. 10:3,4.

Current Mood: contemplative

crookedfingers

08:51 am - breakfast

Current Mood: contemplative

nebris

12:18 am - Today is 8th Sestia, 12AS...a Taraday

"Taraday is The Third Day. Tara is both a Hindu Goddess and Buddhist Saint. The Hindu Tara is an Aspect of Kali. The Buddhist Tara reincarnates only as a woman. She is chosen because She symbolizes 'the End that is not the End'."

Addendum D [Calendar for A New Matriarchy]

Current Mood: calm

nebris

11:11 pm - The Grim Meathook Future, Revisited

From Grinding.be

Several years ago, I wrote this thing on a private message board run by the writer Warren “No Relation” Ellis. One of the other board members, Jamie Zawinski, liked it so much he posted it on his LiveJournal, and it took on a bit of life of its own, and a phrase from it, “the grim meathook future”, has kind of entered the futurist parlance. Bruce Sterling used it in a SxSW keynote, and most recently it showed up as a bit of a demented character’s inner monologue in Charlie Stross’s Rule 34. (There is nothing quite as odd, by the way, as reading a novel and coming across a phrase you coined.)

Part of what I wrote was this:

The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another.

Of course, nobody really wants to talk about that future, because it’s depressing and not fun and doesn’t have Fischerspooner doing the soundtrack. So everybody pretends they don’t know what the future holds, when the unfortunate fact is that — unless we start paying very serious attention — it holds what the past holds: a great deal of extreme boredom punctuated by occasional horror and the odd moment of grace.

What a lot of people seemed to miss, when they read this and ran with it, was that the Grim Meathook Future emphatically isn’t the Mad Max postapocalypse where everybody runs around shooting at each other in body armor made of tractor tires and Wilson’s Leather remaindered items. That future — envisioned by many as a sort of antidote to the gee-whiz chrome-plated futures of Star Trek and 1950s rock-ribbed science fiction — is, in point of fact, entirely as ridiculous and unlikely as any of the technofetishistic Rapture-of-the-nerds bullshit that the transhumanists come up with. It’s a macho fantasy invented by the sort of libertarians who secretly pray for the Poor People to rise up and start a civil war so their friends will stop laughing at them for keeping a cache of automatic weapons next to their Lexus in the garage of their suburban enclave.

Look: in the event of an actual global thermonuclear war, the likelihood is that pretty much all life on Earth would be wiped away, either in the firestorms or during the onset of the resulting nuclear winter, which would kill off the plants and the animals that ate the plants and the people who ate the animals and the plants. Nobody would have time to forget the old ways and revert to pre-civilizational Lord Of The Flies behavior; they’d be too busy dying of radiation poisoning or starvation. Poisoned and starving people don’t spend a lot of time waging tribal war on each other, because they’re too busy shitting out their own intestines or falling down unconscious every time they try to stand up too quickly.

But let’s assume, for a moment, some notional apocalypse that destroys civilization and maybe reduces the human population by 90%. There’s only one really possible scenario that could cause that, which is a fast-moving airborne pathogen with a high mortality rate. Not even global warming could kill that many of us off, because it doesn’t happen fast enough; humans are fast-moving adaptable primates. So imagine, if you like, that Ebola Zaire mutates and becomes airborne and most of the people on Earth die out very quicly, leaving the lion’s share of the remnants of civilization just lying around, a sort of mass version of the Roanoke Island colony, who left their food on their tables and their kitchen fires still burning.

Unless the survivors happened to be absolute drooling idiots, they’d have the power back on and at least the basic necessities of survival up and running in a matter of weeks or months. Why? Because every technological artifact on Earth, from toasters to plutonium power plants, comes with a fucking instruction manual.

Always wanted to learn basic engineering, or how to read a schematic, but never had the time? Well, guess what, homey? You now have absolutely nothing to do but find any one of the thousands of thousands of libraries dotting the Earth’s surface, load the entire 600 section into a wheelbarrow, and retire to some place with a shady spot for reading and a large supply of beer. Hell, armed only with a Boy’s Big Book Of Electrical Projects from the 1960s and the contents of a run-down mini-mall, you could probably build a two-way radio and a dynamo hooked up to an exercise bike to run it off of. Sure, if you weren’t a nerd or a maker, it might take you a while to figure it out…but if the world ends, it’s gonna take your inbox and your Getting Things Done list with it. You’ll have nothing but time.

So no, that’s not my Grim Meathook Future. (It actually sounds kind of lovely; now where did I leave those access codes for the biowarfare lab, again….) My Grim Meathook Future is the one that looks like the present.

Living in America — indeed, in any of the economically top-tier countries in the First World — is like living in a big room. It’s huge, this room, so big that you can’t see the walls, and it’s nice and cozy. To paraphrase Depeche Mode: all you ever wanted, all you ever needed is here in your arms. And you’ve never been outside the room. Intellectually, you know that there’s a world outside, maybe one that’s not quite as nice and cozy; you’ve seen it on TV, after all. But it doesn’t really affect you. When you think of the world, you think of the room; your idea of normality is based on what’s normal in the room.

There are nearly a billion Facebook users in the world, and half a billion Twitter users (though of course there’s probably nearly a 90% overlap between those two). Those are indeed astonishing numbers, but the problem is that sometime around March 12, 2012, we passed seven billion people living on Earth. That means that the vast majority of humans aren’t on Facebook or Twitter. The majority of people have mobile phones, but there are more people still who don’t have mobile phones than use Facebook.

Most of us never see these people, of course, except as faces briefly glimpsed in the background of news footage. They are outside our Big Room. Not because we’re intentionally keeping them out, you understand; at least, not really on any overt institutional level. Basically. We don’t do that any more, and we feel good about it.

It’s just that living in the Big Room is expensive, you see…and, well, these people can’t afford it. They don’t have Facebook because they can’t afford the technological artifacts that would allow them to be on Facebook. They don’t tweet about how much the new version of iOS sucks, because they don’t have any way to tweet and they damn sure don’t have a device that will run iOS, because these devices cost more than these people often make in a year.

But, hey, look, things are tough all over. I’m not saying this to make you feel guilty for having the basic economic and cultural capital to be able to read this essay. You probably had no more control over your circumstances than a boy-child growing up in the streets of Kibera did, and no reason to feel guilty. We are where we are.

But it’s important to understand that the capital-F Future where we become cyborgs permanently mind-melded with our technology is open only to people who can afford that technology in the first place…especially when technological innovation is driven by Silicon Valley-style venture capitalism.

I’ve been a coder for most of my life — not a very good one, necessarily, by the standards of any given hackathon, but I’ve made my living doing it for a long time, at least when I wasn’t making a living by writing. Consequently, I’ve worked with and been around Valley-style entrepreneurs and investors quite a bit. And it’s taken me fifteen years of hanging out in the tech industry and around tech industry people to fully realize that I can’t stand being in the same room with most of them.

“It’s no trick to make a lot of money,” says Everett Sloane in Citizen Kane, “if all you want to do is make a lot of money.” And it’s true. All you have to do is find a lot of people with disposable income, figure out what they’ll spend that income on, and sell it to them. At the heart of it, that’s what Steve Jobs did, to some extent with the personal computer and to a greater extent with the iPhone. Later, Mark Zuckerberg figured out a neat, if creepy, angle on this trick: find the people with the income, find out what they spend it on…and then sell that information to the people who sell the people the things they want to buy.

That’s what Silicon Valley is for: making shit for people with disposable incomes to buy. (And making shit for companies to buy so their workflow is more efficient, so the people who own the company and work for the company can buy more of the other shit.) If it was ever about trying to make the world a better place, that train left the station a long time ago.

It’s my experience that most venture capitalists and serial entrepreneur types are almost identical, personality-wise, to the street hustlers and drug dealers whose acquaintance I’ve made over the years. They may wear polo shirts instead of Fubu and spend their money on organic produce instead of custom hubcap rims, but they operate on the same principle: waking up every day figuring out new ways to get paid. Whether these ways are good for society as a whole, or even for the person who’s doing the paying, is a minor consideration next to the paycheck itself. And if you’re not a means to that end, well, fuck you. More than once, I’ve seen the exact same behavior in a Stanford-educated dot.com startup founder at a tech meetup and a smacked-out panhandler on the Las Vegas Strip: they’re all smiles and handshakes when they approach you, but as soon as they realize you’re not a potential mark with an open wallet you can watch their eyes go dead and look right through you, on to the next target.

I hate these people and wouldn’t piss on most of them if they were on fire, but that’s fine; I hate bankers and lawyers too, like every other blowhard bohemian iconoclast does, and I doubt any of them are losing any sleep over it. What bothers me is that we’ve effectively put these walking hardons in charge of building that capital-F Future, in every sector of the innovation industry, from genetically grown food to biotechnology to communications to spaceship-building.

And none of them, not a single one, is interested in any Future if they can’t sell it for a serious profit. Nor do they care if the process of selling and profiting leaves a swath of collateral damage the size of a Gulf Coast oil spill in its wake.

Which leaves those six billion other people, the people who don’t live in the Big Room with you and me and Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg, pretty well fucked.

The real Grim Meathook Future, the one I talked about back when I wrote that thing and the one I see now, is the future where a relatively small slice of our species lives in a sort of Edenic Eloi reality where the only problems are what we laughingly refer to as White People Problems, like being able to get four bars’ worth of 4G signal at that incredible pho joint that @ironicguy69 recommended on Twitter, or finding new ways to lifehack all the shit we own into our massive closets…while the rest of the world is reduced to maintaining our lifestyles via a complex process of economically-positioned indentured servitude and clinging with the very tips of their fingernails onto the ragged edge of our consumer leavings, like the dorky dude who shows up the first day of school with the cheap K-Mart knockoffs of the pumped-up kicks the cool kids are wearing this year. In other words, the Grim Meathook Future is the one that looks like the present, the one where nothing changes.

But don’t you know, people are talkin’ about a revolution, son? In the streets of Cairo and Tripoli, where they Twittered entire governments to their knees; in Zucotti Park and in the shadow of the Bay Bridge, where they’re Occupying anything and everything they can. Information wants to be free, didn’t you get the Facebook notification?

Yeah, I know that song, and I know who did the original version: Stewart Brand, at the first Hacker’s Conference. But what Stewart also said, that most of the cyberlibertarians forget to mention (or never knew in the first place) is that information wants to be expensive. Information — and the economy around it — wants to be sold to teenagers at the highest possible price point that their parents will tolerate. It wants to be unlimited, if by unlimited you mean two gigabytes per month, after which you get charged a dollar a megabyte. Information wants to be marketed to you, and if it could put a microphone in your bedroom to hear what you muttered about in the deepest darkest depths of your dreams, it would do it, and it would convince you to let it do it by allowing you to share your dreams with that dude you made out with one night at a party in college who, by virtue of the social networks, is still a part of your circle of interaction for no apparent goddamn reason at all. And then it would sell your dreams back to you, with free shipping if your order is over $25.

At least, that’s what all the evidence these days suggests. If Western companies are helping developing nations throw off the various yolks of tyranny, it’s only because they’ve identified potential future markets. A free society, after all, usually means a free market. The Occupy Movement is very good at identifying the problems with the world – shit’s fucked up real bad – but not so good at coming up with viable solutions that anybody with actual power pays much attention to. The social networks have been coopted by the activist movements, but only to the extent that you can now watch Iranian soldiers or NYPD thugs beat the shit out of teenage girls in real-time. The beatings haven’t stopped; no one has truly been held accountable; same as it ever was, same as it ever was. Knowing may be half the battle, as they used to tell us on the old G.I. Joe cartoon when I was a kid, but that’s just it: it’s only half the battle.

If I sound dismissive and cynical, it’s because I am. I’m deeply, irreconcilably cynical about the technology industry, especially when anybody in it starts mouthing off about human rights, as if they gave a shit. Of course tech lobbyists frame things like the file-sharing issue as a human rights issue, and tell you that it’s all about your right to have as many Dave Matthews MP3s as your hard drive can hold; they work for the people who make the software that shares the files and run the websites that link to the torrents, almost none of whom are doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. They don’t talk to you about musicians who can’t make money from album sales anymore or newspapers that lock their doors after decades or centuries of publication, simply because the people who run them can’t figure out how to instantiate an instant technological pivot — because, you know, they’re just stupid journalists, not social media gurus.

Is it good for humanity when these things happen? Is it good for individual communities, or the creative arts? It doesn’t matter. It’s good for the technology industry, for those hustling pricks in the polo shirts, whose job is to find new ways to sell shit to people. And that’s all that matters.

That’s the Grim Meathook Future I see lying before us, a long game of technological determinism where the only people who get their jetpacks or their self-driving cars or their anti-aging nanotech are the ones who can afford it, and everyone else can simply go fuck themselves and rot in whatever Third World toilet they were unlucky enough to be born into.

Is there a way around it? Man, I don’t know. I really don’t. And I actually think about this shit a lot, not just on my daily commute from my bedroom to the coffeeshop patio. I read Bruce Sterling’s blog and I watch TED talks and I sit around in the dark heat of the Las Vegas night and spend hours thinking about it…and I just don’t have an answer.

I’m afraid that avoiding the Grim Meathook Future might require the dismantling of American-style corporate capitalism. I’m not a Communist or anything, but it seems to me that corporate capitalism as it’s played in my country is a lot like throwing a hundred sharks and a hundred minnows into a small tank. Sharks are machines that eat minnows: they’re incapable of doing anything else, even of keeping a few minnows around to make more minnows to eat later. So they’ll eat and eat until there’s nothing to do except eat each other, and the last one left alive in the tank isn’t the winner: he’s just the shark who gets to die slowly and horribly of starvation. People can only buy so much shit until they run out of money or space to put it in, and then what?

I hope that we’ll wise up and take the sharks out of the pool, or at least muzzle them for a while. If we do — if we stop thinking entirely about the Benjamins and start thinking about the survival of our species as a whole — I think things will change, and some other future will open up, an even more radical future than any Singularity of social networks that might occur.

I hope so. I’d love to see a future I couldn’t predict.

Current Mood: cranky

politicartoons

badlydrawnjeff

11:49 pm

christianity

napoleonofnerds

11:05 pm - Moral Dicta

Christians vary wildly in terms of their willingness to formulate moral dicta (that is, concrete principles regarding what constitutes ethical behavior in specific instances, such as "Homosexual sex is morally blameworthy" or "alleviating poverty is morally praiseworthy" as opposed to moral principles, which are the basis upon which dicta are evaluated), as well as in terms of what sort of dicta they actually produce and how much they regard them as absolute. I thought it might be good to think through how we arrive at these specific moral claims. Thus, a few questions for the community:

How do you formulate specific moral prohibitions or commands, or do you even believe formulating them is possible? If you don't, why not? What do you base moral decision-making on instead of these mandates?

If you do formulate moral dicta, what role does Theology play in that process? Do you think the Bible is an exhaustive source of moral commands? What relationship does the Old Testament law have to Christian ethics?

Do you think modern secular ethical systems are compatible with Christian morality? Is there a moral system you identify with? As an example, do you think that a Christian can reasonably subscribe to the US Constitution's Bill of Rights, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or the UN Declaration on Human Rights?

nebris

08:23 pm - Writer's Resource...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/

...because you can't make these stories up. See Amedeo Guillet

Current Mood: chipper

nebris

06:59 pm - I Can Relate

Current Mood: amused

bookshare

inverarity

09:56 pm - Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer

The history of memory and how the invention of writing began to change our brains.

The Penguin Press, 2011, 307 pages

Foer's unlikely journey from chronically forgetful science journalist to U.S. Memory Champion frames a revelatory exploration of the vast, hidden impact of memory on every aspect of our lives.

On average, people squander 40 days annually compensating for things they've forgotten. Joshua Foer used to be one of those people. But after a year of memory training, he found himself in the finals of the U.S. Memory Championship. Even more important, Foer found a vital truth we too often forget: In every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories.

Moonwalking with Einstein draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of memory, and venerable tricks of the mentalist's trade to transform our understanding of human remembering. Under the tutelage of top "mental athletes", he learns ancient techniques once employed by Cicero to memorize his speeches and by Medieval scholars to memorize entire books. Using methods that have been largely forgotten, Foer discovers that we can all dramatically improve our memories.

Immersing himself obsessively in a quirky subculture of competitive memorizers, Foer learns to apply techniques that call on imagination as much as determination - showing that memorization can be anything but rote. From the PAO system, which converts numbers into lurid images, to the memory palace, in which memories are stored in the rooms of imaginary structures, Foer's experience shows that the World Memory Championships are less a test of memory than of perseverance and creativity.

At a time when electronic devices have all but rendered our individual memories obsolete, Foer's bid to resurrect the forgotten art of remembering becomes an urgent quest. Moonwalking with Einstein brings Joshua Foer to the apex of the U.S. Memory Championship and readers to a profound appreciation of a gift we all possess but that too often slips our minds.

philosophy

4inquiries

06:11 pm - Foucault on Sciences of Sex

From History of Sexuality vol. 1:

Foucault tells us that the very idea of sexuality comes on the heels of a spread in the practice of confession, which is a significant reorganization of bodies. What was the initial organization of bodies? Foucault explains that ars erotica societies like Ancient Greece handed down sexual knowledges from adult to child, such as in pederasty. This is the ‘top-down’ organization of bodies that models the ‘truth’ of sex as ‘from the adult above.’ So in terms of the content of the truth of sex, there are as many sexual truths as there are adults who make up sexual styles and pass them on. Confession, on the other hand, reverses this whole process to produce a single sexual truth that is formed before it is discursively styled, confessed ‘from the child below.’

( Precursor to some Agamben posts, probably. )

ladysisyphus

07:46 pm - [ogmst] Maskovsky

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

politicartoons

lafinjack

06:21 pm - Hunger Games 0.3b7

calvinandhobbes

monsterblossom

03:58 pm

ginmar

03:47 pm - It's worse than I thought

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

aefenglommung

04:40 pm - Oh the horror

I was taking Sassy for a walk past the neighbors' fenceline and all their dogs came out to greet us. One black dachshund was wearing a coat that looked like it was made of pink and purple spandex. That's a crime against nature, for sure.

nebris

12:00 pm - My tweets

• Thu, 14:18: BBC News - Detroit: the ruins left behind when city loses half its population http://t.co/ErMXC7RI
• Thu, 19:47: Breastaurant http://t.co/ujcLVPY7
• Thu, 19:47: RT @DefendWisconsin: In terms of healthcare, Walker’s kicked 65,000 people – including 32,000 children – off Badgercare in 2011: http:// ...
• Thu, 19:48: RT @NicholsUprising: Right-to-work? Walker ABSOLUTELY REFUSES to answer ? of whether he'd veto right-to-work law. Asked twice. Avoids twice ...
• Thu, 19:48: RT @Queen_Cersei: I drink wine every time I gotta deal with an idiot. I'm pretty much drunk 24/7.
• Thu, 19:51: A Vital If Unpopular LGBT Civil Right http://t.co/pQGYHXnp #lgbt
• Thu, 20:12: RT @PennyRed: Read this, by Dan Trilling, on Britain's forgotten anti-Jewish riots in 1947. Then tell me again 'why we fought Hitler' ht ...
• Thu, 20:12: RT @iowahawkblog: I believe in a woman's right to choose a 20 ounce soda. #Iowahawk2012
• Thu, 20:14: RT @WorkingAmerica: Of all the policies that came out of Walker's office, this is 1 of the worst – most under-reported. http://t.co/ynB4 ...

• Thu, 20:21: Arizona Pulls a “Scott Walker” With Funds Meant for Struggling Homeowners http://t.co/Jh5OfuPk
• Thu, 20:30: Military Moms Spark Breast-Feeding Controversy http://t.co/bnuSOpNX via @ExtraTV
• Thu, 22:47: Nebs Sez [Space Edition] http://t.co/TnjgZ66L
• Fri, 00:07: RT @NewYorker: In this week's issue, William Gibson writes about finding his own Golden Age of Science Fiction: http://t.co/g9JVLVjd
• Fri, 00:16: Olds Rocket 88, 1950 http://t.co/rKR6QHTp
• Fri, 00:23: Today is 7th Sestia, 12AS...a Oshunday http://t.co/lTIOZDue
• Fri, 00:42: Department Of Justice Tells Florida To Stop Purging Voter Rolls http://t.co/kmt53bmg via @HuffPostPol
• Fri, 00:46: FB is twelve types of screwed up tonight....
• Fri, 01:03: RT @ladygaga: #HappyBirthdayMarilyn They'll never take our blonde hair and lipstick. http://t.co/0suJ83Cv
• Fri, 02:50: Random http://t.co/cy3vChIQ

• Fri, 08:14: RT @CBSNews: "Gumby'" voice-over star Dick Beals dies at 85 http://t.co/4Cr0IOup
• Fri, 08:15: RT @jessedarling: "I feel like we need curators for our thoughts, hurk hurk." SAVE ME FROM THE NASCENT INTERNET ACADEMICS
• Fri, 08:39: So This Is Facebook's Genius Ad Strategy - Technology - The Atlantic Wire http://t.co/KBj7pLxc
• Fri, 08:59: The Austerity Agenda http://t.co/CSZuc3qU
• Fri, 09:12: yay fer intranetz http://t.co/YbdU4E38
• Fri, 09:15: RT @PennyRed: '“60 YEARS OF GIRLS ON TOP”–a tragic misunderstanding of the difference between The Queen and queening.' - @stavvers http: ...
• Fri, 09:23: A new imaging system produces 3-D models of monuments using unmanned aircraft http://t.co/q8xxTeMv
• Fri, 09:44: Tragic: Mary-Kate & Ashley Olsen Won’t Act Again http://t.co/txjLbhDH via @stylecaster
• Fri, 09:54: RT @madisonyoung: Excited to be back in SF directing radical porn&producing edgy mind blowing queer performance art events.Join me h ...
• Fri, 09:57: A Case Study in How the Poor Are Prosecuted for Being Poor http://t.co/trHBnV1o

• Fri, 10:04: I wish I could attend this shindig https://t.co/OTSBMldB
• Fri, 10:05: The chart that explains media’s addiction to print http://t.co/yDsShFU2
• Fri, 10:11: RT @dailydot: YouTubers ask: Why did Google kill Curse Network? http://t.co/JG3d6e7O (@thewillofdc)
• Fri, 10:14: Kill the Kill List - By Daphne Eviatar and Gabor Rona | Foreign Policy: http://t.co/hb29Vv9X
• Fri, 10:21: Old People Do Smell, But Not That Badly - Yahoo! News http://t.co/clkHskE3 via @YahooNews
• Fri, 10:44: Random http://t.co/mT78PQuG
• Fri, 10:50: Life in The Desert http://t.co/s6dBt0nQ
• Fri, 10:53: cats are cats http://t.co/aRnBCyAb
• Fri, 10:53: RT @WomenOfHistory: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. It's the only thing that ever does." Margaret Mead
• Fri, 10:57: RT @allisonkilkenny: lol, America: "In a letter sent to a Huffington Post reporter, the CDC formally denied that a zombie apocalypse mig ...

• Fri, 11:08: How 'The Wire' Found Its Omar: 'The Omars of the World are Warriors' - Entertainment - The Atlantic Wire http://t.co/2w7hTc0J
• Fri, 11:08: RT @FP_Magazine: Is David Cameron an extraterrestrial? Probably: http://t.co/vmQGBLsk
• Fri, 11:12: 1 in 10 Brits think David Cameron could be an alien | FP Passport: http://t.co/V6patZtS
• Fri, 11:25: Oh Good.... http://t.co/g7wLw6B4
• Fri, 11:31: RT @brainjunk: God, I feel so much better. I need a few weeks to not be juggling ten thousand balls. That's what she said.
• Fri, 11:39: Most humans are vile ignorant scum. http://t.co/NHiY7Y6T via @VICE
• Fri, 11:59: rt @americablog: GOP spokesman: "Let’s hurl some acid" at female Democratic senators http://t.co/XSQVGyQm

Current Mood: calm

nebris

11:25 am - Oh Good....

..new crime drama. Guess somebody has been paying attention to Justified.

Current Mood: cheerful

johncwright

02:06 pm - Happy Feast Day of Justin Martyr!

Today is my name-day, as well as my second son’s birthday.

“O God, who through the folly of the Cross wondrously taught Saint Justin the Martyr the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ, grant us, through his intercession, that, having rejected deception and error, we may become steadfast in the faith.”

For those of you unfamiliar with his works:

St Justin Martyr
- First Apology
- Second Apology
- Dialogue with Trypho
- Hortatory Address to the Greeks
- On the Sole Government of God
- Fragments of the Lost Work on the Resurrection
- Miscellaneous Fragments from Lost Writings
- Martyrdom of Justin, Chariton, and other Roman Martyrs
- Discourse to the Greeks

It was because he penned sentences like the following that I added his name to mine when I entered the communion of the Church, both to honor him, to ask his guidance and to remind myself to follow the highest ideals of philosophy:

Reason directs those who are truly pious and philosophical to honour and love only what is true, declining to follow traditional opinions, if these be worthless. For not only does sound reason direct us to refuse the guidance of those who did or taught anything wrong, but it is incumbent on the lover of truth, by all means, and if death be threatened, even before his own life, to choose to do and say what is right.

To which I say, amen.

nebris

10:50 am - Life in The Desert

~It is presently 90° and 15% humidity...and it's not even 11am yet. Gonna be another cooker today.

EDIT: 96° and it's not even Noon!

Current Mood: calm

nebris

10:44 am - Random

~I am emotionally much improved today. Part of the meltdown was sheer exhaustion. I am however a physical wreck. Tired and achy and my glands are tender, though not 'swollen' per se. Drugs and sleep are on the menu for today, while the lawyers do their thing 'out there'.

However this works out, it should be noted that I do have a long memory and, as Mumsie once said, I'm “a vindictive little cunt.” Well, I did grow up in the Entertainment Industry. *smirk*

Current Mood: vindictive

crookedfingers

01:13 pm - photos of a neighbor's backyard garden

This morning on the way to a grocery store we stopped at garage sale near our house. While at this garage sale I wandered the back yard. I told the lady who own the house I really liked the way her backyard was arranged. I liked the flowers and the statues everywhere. I did tell Carol that the backyard was too crowded. I would take some of the statues out and make the backyard look less crowded. A backyard garden should look open and airy.

Current Mood: contemplative

crookedfingers

12:59 pm - the sincere delusions of doomed fanatics

It is 12:45 PM Friday afternoon in the flow of existence. I have been up since 5:55 AM early this morning. I should go down in the lower level and take a nap this afternoon. Outside today it is cold, rainy and gray.

So I got up early this morning, because I was sick of laying in bed and being attacked by intense weird dreams. I got up and made a pot of coffee and then messed with our main computer. I next wrote in my private diary and then wandered the house. Carol got up around 7 o'clock AM this morning.

This morning we stopped at a garage sale on the way to a grocery store. I picked up three used paperbacks at this garage sale-

"Blonde Faith" by Walter Mosley [The Tenth Easy Rawlins Thriller]

"Oracle Night" a novel by Paul Auster

"The Diviners" a novel by Rick Moody

We got home from our errands around 11:15 AM this morning. I fixed myself a big meal and then put in new lights down in the lower level. I then wrote some more crap in my paper diary and downloaded the pictures I took this morning of our house and of the backyard where the garage sale was held this morning.

The day keeps zooming by. Carol is once again going through old photo albums right now.

Last night I mainly listened to music, read the "Memoirs" by Andrei Sakharov and watched television. I went to bed around 11 o'clock PM and read till 11:30 PM. Now it is another day.

Well there is not much else to report. I will close to feel wasted.

a wet blurry rose

Current Mood: contemplative

crookedfingers

12:44 pm - Jonny

Current Mood: contemplative

politicartoons

dwer

11:29 am - And currency!

johncwright

11:46 am - Clowns in the Ruins

A reader with the electrifying name of Mr Sparks writes:

This is a rather strange article which I thought might interest or irritate you, I’m not sure which.

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/04/living-end-times

He seems to see sci-fi as a sort of terminally “them over there” sort   of thing, even though he sounds like he’s writing science fiction himself.  And his ruminations on 9/11 are decidedly tangled.

My comment: I confess at the outset that I cannot bring myself to read this article closely. If it is any comfort, I suspect the writer did not mean to have it read closely. It reads like loose ruminations. I will reciprocate by ruminating myself, making no attempt at a rigorous argument, merely listing my impressions.

At the risk of boring you — and the man is drearily boring — let me quote the opening and closing paragraphs of this rambling essay.

On a cold afternoon this winter I sat before a glass wall at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, fielding questions about Jewish dystopian literature. Outside was New York Harbour and the audience seemed distracted by the passing boats. My fellow panellist was Joshua Cohen, author of Witz, a novel about the last Jew on earth. My novel The Flame Alphabet concerns a poisonous language spoken by children and is set in a world of failed science where Jewish mysticism might offer the only clue to the language toxicity. Cohen and I were asked, with some impatience, why the future in our novels was so dour. Why write about the future at all when the present was, you know, so interesting? Doesn’t the real trump the unreal? And maybe most importantly: what was this attraction to dark visions of the last days, a burgeoning literary genre that might as well be called “end times porn”?

( Read the rest of this entry » ) View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

politicartoons

lafinjack

10:12 am - So says The Fist.

( Read more... )

seraphimsigrist

10:41 am - Pines. + TAS

Friends,
There is something about these pine trees as seen, and then in this image,
which I like--perhaps it tis the many branches to the right which seem like
a forest of their own standing sideways.

and do visit, and press like! and bookmark! TAS (Taste and See) a site based
in facebook started by some friends of mine and which I find delightful and
refreshing:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Taste-and-See/374623815918894

yours
+Seraphim
.

crookedfingers

06:26 am - June 2012 diary

Current Mood: contemplative

nebris

02:50 am - Random

~As my last post shows, I can be all 'adult' and 'competent' about handling these issues. But there is a price to be paid. There are significant parts of me that are not adult and these things terrorize and wound them. Those parts were born out of times when I had not yet become an actual adult, times when I was terrorized and wounded and was helpless and they bear the marks of that birth, carry that pain in their core.

Once all the 'adult business' has been attended to and I sit with myself in the quiet, then their fear and sadness comes to the surface. All I can do is let it flow outward and feel it. I do my best to comfort those parts of me, but there is only so much that I can do. My Damage is deep and profound....

Current Mood: quiet

nebris

12:23 am - Today is 7th Sestia, 12AS...a Oshunday

"Oshunday is The Second Day. Oshun is a Yaruban Goddess of Love and Sweet Waters, worshiped as a River Goddess in Nigeria and as a Orisha in Brazilian Candomblé. She is chosen chosen because She gets the week to 'flow with Her Love and Beauty'."

Addendum D [Calendar for A New Matriarchy]

Current Mood: calm

nebris

12:16 am - Olds Rocket 88, 1950

From The New Yorker
by William Gibson June 4, 2012

Some of my earliest memories are of science fiction. Not of prose fiction, or of film, but of the cultural and industrial semiotics of the American nineteen-fifties: the interplanetarily themed chrome trim on my father’s Oldsmobile Rocket 88; the sturdy injection-molded styrene spacemen on the counter at Woolworth’s (their mode of manufacture more predictive than their subject, as it turned out); the gloriously baroque Atomic Disintegrator cap pistol (Etsy currently has one on offer, in “decent vintage” condition, for two hundred and fifty dollars); Chesley Bonestell’s moodily thrilling illustrations for Willy Ley’s book “The Conquest of Space.” They were all special to me, these things, and I remember my mother remarking on this to her friends. Not that I was very unusual in my obsession. The zeitgeist was chewy with space-flavored nuggets, morsels of futuristic design, precursors of a Tomorrow whose confident glow was visible beyond the horizon of all that was less wonderful, provided one had eyes to see it.

When I was five, I was chastised for disagreeing with an Air Force man, a visitor to our home, who made mock of my Willy Ley book. I knew he was wrong when he said that space travel would never happen. And I was right, at least in the relatively short term, just a few years off from Sputnik. I was a native, I felt unquestioningly, of Tomorrow.

But somewhere along the way, during the decade after my argument with the Air Force man, Tomorrow went lowercase. By 1964, when I was negotiating puberty in the chill deeps of the Cold War, history itself had become the Atomic Disintegrator. In those years, I was drawn to science fiction (and mainly to its prose forms) for the evidence it offered of manifold possibilities of otherness. To a curious, anxious, white male child coming of age in an incurious and paranoid white monoculture, there was literally nothing like it—though a great deal of science fiction, possibly the majority of it, I was starting to notice, depicted futuristic monocultures that were dominated by white males. The rest, however, had as much to do with making me the person I am today as anything else did. Things might be different, science fiction told me, and different in literally any way you could imagine, however radical. Simply to know that people who thought that way existed was a game changer for me. Being able to directly access their minds, as a reader, was like discovering an abundant, perpetually replenished, and freely available source of mental oxygen. You bought it from a wire rack in the bus terminal, less than a dollar a shot, and took home Alfred Bester, Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Sheckley, and many others—and then you saw things differently, in extraordinary company.

Given the era in which this happened to me, I soon became acquainted, too, with J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Samuel Delany, and Ursula K. Le Guin, the otherness quotient actually climbing, nosebleed high. And, given my age at the time, and the ideological company that this second wave kept, I simultaneously found Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. There my own Golden Age of Science Fiction came, in some sense, to an end, the othernesses of my adolescence joining up with the wider tributary of literature, the mother of all otherness. Had science fiction not found me when it did, on the counter at Woolworth’s and in the iconography of the steering wheel in my father’s Olds, I suspect I might not have found that river. Or else, finding it, I might not have recognized it, and turned away. ♦

Current Mood: cheerful

nebris

10:47 pm - Nebs Sez [Space Edition]

"The key to humans becoming a spacefaring race starts at L-5. Build an industrial complex there, one with rotating platforms to create Earth normal gravity in the general living quarters, with it's industrial sectors mostly in zero-G, which would also allow for some significant technological innovation.

Keep operations on the Moon's surface as automated as possible, with regular crew rotation to and from the L-5 complex. Run near-Earth asteroid mining and such out of L-5. This would also be the perfect place from which to launch a Mars mission.

The caveat here is that I strongly suspect that 'baseline humans' e.g those not cybernetically and/or genetically enhanced will not do well in space long term. That is likely the exclusive province of our Cyborg descendants." ...comment on Could SpaceX land the first humans on Mars?

Current Mood: contemplative

ginmar

11:04 pm - Temprorary emergency foster needed in MA/RI area for low maintenance kitty

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

johncwright

11:17 pm - Guess about Gauss

Okay. Here is the anecdote that John C Wright, innumerate, found in MEN OF MATHEMATICS:

here’s a popular story that Gauss, mathematician extraordinaire, had a lazy teacher. The so-called educator wanted to keep the kids busy so he could take a nap; he asked the class to add the numbers 1 to 100.

Gauss approached with his answer: 5050. So soon? The teacher suspected a cheat, but no. Manual addition was for suckers, and Gauss found a formula to sidestep the problem:

Sum from 1 to n = {n(n+1)}/2

Sum from 1 to 100 = {100(100+1)}/2 = (50)(101) = 5050

Shamelessly stealing the anecdote from real life, and assuming my hero could figure out the same trick, here is the way I describe it in my book:

Menelaus had simply folded the number line in half in his mind, noticed that every one of the fifty pairs added up to one hundred one, and multiplied one hundred one by fifty.

But a reader said

Found mistake in sum 1-100. I’m probably the 5050′th person to mention that. The correct answer is 101×50 not 101×50 – 50.

So … is he simply wrong here? From the balance of his comments, I don’t have much faith in the gentleman’s reading comprehension, but I also know I am the worst student of mathematics the human race has ever produced, so I’d like a second opinion.

Some kind reader set me straight, please.

yes_justice

05:39 pm - Okay people, I do not like asking for money even when it's not for me, but...

Originally posted by auntiesiannan at Okay people, I do not like asking for money even when it's not for me, but...