Building a Bully Nation
Finding so many murderers among ordinary people had not proved difficult. Moreover these unconscionable activities were not the result of a long harsh military campaign and disappointing losses but were available for use the moment the war began, with its immediate, immoderate, and overwhelming victories.
From an article by William Gass posted on Harper's.
The Non-Socialist View of Us
From an article by Verena Dobnik and Angela Charlton posted here March 29, 2010.
"Welcome to the club of states who don't turn their back on the sick and the poor," Sarkozy said, referring to the U.S. health care overhaul signed by President Barack Obama last week.
From the European perspective, he said, "when we look at the American debate on reforming health care, it's difficult to believe."
"The very fact that there should have been such a violent debate simply on the fact that the poorest of Americans should not be left out in the streets without a cent to look after them ... is something astonishing to us."
Then to hearty applause, he added: "If you come to France and something happens to you, you won't be asked for your credit card before you're rushed to the hospital."
And this from Scott Horton, who cites the above on Harper's web site March 30, 2010.
The Obama healthcare reform is somewhat less aggressive that the one that Bismarck introduced in Germany in the early 1880s. And it’s being derided as “socialist”? Not from the perspective of the Europeans, including those, like Sarkozy, on the right. I have had to seek medical care on a visit to France in the past, and I can attest that Sarkozy is not exaggerating. After being examined and getting some drugs prescribed for a tenacious cold, I explained that I had U.S. health insurance. To which the doctor responded, “eh bien, tant pis,” or “let’s just not bother with that.” The encounter overall was friendlier than anything I’ve ever experienced stateside. Indeed, the freedom with which drugs were handed out was puzzling.
Health -- I'm Sick of It
From an article by Tara Parker-Pope posted on The New York Times web site January 4, 2010.
Dr. Love, a clinical professor of surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that failing to live by the various health rules is a major source of stress and guilt, particularly for women. For most of us, “pretty healthy” is healthy enough.
Couch Potatoes Lead Most Dangerous, Adventurous Lives
The Real Headline Science of Statistical Correlation
From an article by Ron Winslow posted on The Wall Street Journal web site January 12, 2010.
Australian researchers who tracked 8,800 people for an average of six years found that those who said they watched TV for more than four hours a day were 46% more likely to die of any cause . . .
So contrary to what you might think about being cozy, lazy and less risky, putting your head in the sand, staying in and watching TV actually puts you more in harm's way. You're more likely to be killed in combat, murdered, killed in rape, run over, thrown into a tank of man-eating sharks or crocodiles or fatally exposed in the arctic. You're more likely to die of a concussion than if you were playing in the NFL, so you're actually more badass than the football players you're laying there watching.
Even Wall Street Sees This Problem
From an article by Vanessa Furhmans posted on The Wall Street Journal web site September 2009.
In Massachusetts, rising health-care costs, already among the highest in the country, threaten the insurance mandate's long-term viability. The state's costs to expand coverage have swelled nearly 70% to an expected $1.75 billion in fiscal 2010 from a base of $1.04 billion in 2006, about half of which is supported by federal funds, according to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a nonprofit policy research group.
After All, We Are Not Communists
Private oligarchy: the best economics the Fed can buy
From an article by Ryan Grim posted October 2009 on The Huffington Post web site.
The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession . . .
This dominance helps explain how, even after the Fed failed to foresee the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, the central bank has largely escaped criticism from academic economists. In the Fed's thrall, the economists missed it, too.
Even the late Milton Friedman, whose monetary economic theories heavily influenced Greenspan, was concerned about the stifled nature of the debate. Friedman, in a 1993 letter to Auerbach that the author quotes in his book, argued that the Fed practice was harming objectivity: "I cannot disagree with you that having something like 500 economists is extremely unhealthy. As you say, it is not conducive to independent, objective research. You and I know there has been censorship of the material published. Equally important, the location of the economists in the Federal Reserve has had a significant influence on the kind of research they do, biasing that research toward noncontroversial technical papers on method as opposed to substantive papers on policy and results," Friedman wrote.
Progressives Aside
From Obama's health care speech of September 9, 2009:
To my progressive friends, I would remind you that for decades, the driving idea behind reform has been to end insurance company abuses and make coverage affordable for those without it. The public option is only a means to that end - and we should remain open to other ideas that accomplish our ultimate goal.
A Bush-like revisionist revisionism. "Progressive friends" are really the conservatives, the stubborn ones protecting the status quo of the non-actual, because they don't remain open to the idea of not changing anything.
Progress
From Robert Pear in The New York Times April 1, 2009.
Efforts to overhaul the health care system have moved ahead rapidly, with the insurance industry making several major concessions and the chairmen of five congressional committees reaching a consensus on the main ingredients of legislation. The chairmen, all Democrats, agree that everyone must carry insurance and that employers should be required to help pay for it. They also agree that the government should offer a public health insurance plan as an alternative to private insurance.
Oops, Captialism's Bad
From Martin Crutsinger of the Associated Press posted on the web October 23, 2008:
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says the current financial crisis has uncovered a flaw in how the free market system works and that has shocked him.
Greenspan told the House Oversight Committee on Thursday that his belief that banks would be more prudent in their lending practices because of the need to protect their stockholders had proven in the latest crisis to be wrong.
Greenspan said he had made a "mistake" in believing that banks in operating in their self-interest would be sufficient to protect their shareholders and the equity in their institutions.
Greenspan said that he had found "a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works."
Insuring Your Support
From the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform web site, October 15, 2008:
A draft Committee report circulated by Chairman Waxman finds that in the months before the 2006 elections, the White House Office of Political Affairs “enlisted agency heads across government in a coordinated effort to elect Republican candidates to Congress,” directing them “to make hundreds of trips – most at taxpayer expense – for the purpose of increasing the electability of Republicans.”
All that taxpayer money for naught.
More Bush in the White House?
From Bob Herbert in The New York Times on line, September 26, 2008:
“We have trade missions back and forth,” said Ms. Palin. “We do. It’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to our state.”
It was surreal, the kind of performance that would generate a hearty laugh if it were part of a Monty Python sketch.
But shouldn't when it's been in the White House already for eight years.
MTV Ghost Town: The Go Down On and Up Into
With his assgobbling face, his ass-inhaling sensibility and his ass-vacuuming persistence, Turd Loder -- the hackman and ass-puppet of the original MTV version of shit for content -- seems an unlikely candidate for a movie reviewer that anyone would look into the toilet for. And yet, on Google's so-called objective algorhythm round-up, being an ass-dog and absolutely crawling into the intestines of megamedia pimps becomes neither oddly, nor quirkily, nor maverickly, nor coolly, now suavely, but only plausible. This picture is as programmatic as you'd expect; it's no real surprise. But the incomparably ass-seeking Loder, buoyed by pneumatic tubes of hot air up his ass from the supporting cast of a goliath media daddy shitrim for the lickin', lends this already grotesquely cloying story his own shitty tang.
Heaven in the Details
For we die every day; oblivion thrives
Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,
And our best yesterdays are now foul piles
Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.
I’m ready to become a floweret
Or a fat fly, but never, to forget.
And I’ll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;
The claret taillight of that dwindling plane
Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay
On running out of cigarettes; the way
You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime
Snails leave or flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme,
This index card, this slender rubber band
Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand,
Are found in Heaven by the newlydead
Stored in its strongholds through the years.
-- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Period Pearls
There are also ladies and gentlemen of another fashion, not so new, but very elegant, who have agreed to put a smooth glaze on the world and to keep down all its realities. For whom everything must be languid and pretty. Who have found out the perpetual stoppage. Who are to rejoice at nothing, and be sorry for nothing. Who are not to be disturbed by ideas. On whom even the Fine Arts, attending in powder and walking backward like the Lord Chamberlain, must array themselves in the milliners’ and tailors’ patterns of past generations, and be particularly careful not to be in earnest, or to receive any impress from the moving age.
-- Charles Dickens, Bleak House
The Baby Drinks the Bath Water
Thus, either the entire financial services industry was busy defrauding . . . retirees or . . . intrinsic alleged advice to opt for the lump sum payout was in fact valid advice.
There's your option. Practice makes valid.
Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better
The Sprung Bums Have It
WRONG LOGIC. Point one. Turn we now to consideration of nature's own machinery.
You yield to an illicit love, you're taken in adultery;
You're ruined for you've no defense -- unless, of course, you've been taught by me.
Indulge your nature, gambol and frisk, you've got a ready plea;
With Zeus as your pattern you can strike your accuser dumb:
Did he not to love's lure repeatedly succumb?
And can a mortal cultivate ways too high for a god?
RIGHT LOGIC. But what if your backside's singed and rammed with the adulterer's rod?
How will argument then prevail to void the stretching of your bum?
WRONG LOGIC. And what's the harm of a bottom stretched? Tell me even one.
RIGHT LOGIC. What greater harm than a bung that's strung?
WRONG LOGIC. What will you say if I prove you wrong?
RIGHT LOGIC. I'll hold my peace. What else?
WRONG LOGIC. Answer then. Lawyers: whence do they come?
RIGHT LOGIC. I must acknowledge, from a sprung bum.
WRONG LOGIC. And whence the tragic poets fetched?
RIGHT LOGIC. From a bottom that's been stretched.
WRONG LOGIC. And politicians old or young?
RIGHT LOGIC. All from bums that have been sprung.
WRONG LOGIC. You realize your ignorance.
And what of yonder audience?
Look at them, do.
RIGHT LOGIC. I'm looking.
WRONG LOGIC. And the majority?
RIGHT LOGIC. The sprung bums have it, without question;
Dozens I see in every section.
Ah, there's my neighbor in yonder seat.
WRONG LOGIC. Will you acknowledge you've been beat?
RIGHT LOGIC. Now we've had it, ye catamite folk;
To you I desert; take now my cloak.
-- Aristophanes, Clouds, tr. Moses Hadas.
When Did It All Go Wrong
Neo-Cons, Old Tricks
Yet between 1783 and the end of the Cherokees' remarkable effort to become civilized and Christianized citizens fifty years later, something drastic happened to the self-image of white Americans. Scientists abandoned the Enlightenment view of the unity of the human race and concluded, with revisionist scientific backing, that there was a hierarchy of races. Not surprisingly, they found the new race of Americans (with their presumed Anglo-Saxon heritage) superior to all others.
This shift in the definition of what it meant to be an American has generally been described in terms of the transition in Western culture from the world view of the Enlightenment to the world view of Romanticism . . .
A tremendous cultural reorientation took place in America between 1783 and 1833. White Americans drastically revised their views of nature, the supernatural, and human nature. In the process a very different kind of national outlook developed. The removal of the Indians to the west was not simply an incident in this cultural transformation; it was an integral part of it. The changing attitude toward the Indian's place in the new nation was essentially a redefinition of what it meant to be an American; to study what happened to the Indians is to study what happened to white Americans in these years.
In redefining God during the Second Great Awakening (theologically described as the shift from Calvinism and deism to Evangelical Arminianism), Americans also redefined how He worked, which is to say how they thought about man's place in the universe and America's role in human history. The shift from Calvinistic or Enlightenment determinism included the belief that man had free will, that he and God were partners, and that God had chosen the Americans as a special people with a mission to save the world and bring on the millennium.
The nineteenth-century missionary impulse to perfect the world by converting everyone in it became so ethnocentric that it embodied a patriotic zeal to exclude lesser breeds from more than spiritual salvation. In popular thought, God had chosen the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Americans to save the world. As the voice of the people became the voice of God (a view the Founding Fathers doubted but that Jacksonian democrats voiced freely by 1833), it became important to define the "people" in terms particularly favorable to a romantic nationalism. Americans discovered who they were by deciding who they were not, and those who were deciding were not black Africans or red Indians; this was a white man's country led by special kinds of Europeans who had the innate potential to fit the mold now called "Americans." The republican ideology ceased to be universal and became exclusionary.
-- William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, Princeton University Press, 1986, pp. xv-xvii.
Oscar Finally Picks Best
HOLLYWOOD, MIND -- For the first time in 30 years, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bestowed its award for "best picture" on the film that actually was the best of the year. At the 80th Academy Awards ceremony Sunday night, "No Country for Old Men" was given the Oscar as the year's best film, marking a dramatic, even inexplicable break from practice, and in the overall history of the awards.
The Academy Awards, which, made up of those in the movie industry, amounts to a trade show, has been steadfast in its support of films overlooked by wider repute. While out-of-stream culturati have whittled away with their mysterious preferences for such quirky baubles as "Citizen Kane" or "Fargo," the Academy has supported those films in need of being taken seriously, the prestigious, inflated, overblown, bloated, groping, vanity, monied, fluffed up, vanity productions.
Dr. Tallulah Overhead, director of the National Institute for Cellulo-Ocular Observatory and Granuruptory Research, said that there is no need to fear a trend. "It was owing to rare circumstances that this movie, which showed a disregard for the conerns and conventions dear to Acadamy members, and really was alarmingly better than the last 30 consecutive Oscar winners, won. The movie industry just somehow failed to come up with a bona fide Academy movie this year, so that left the Academy members nothing to do but vote for what would normally be its token acknowledgement of what others thought worthy."
When asked why "Atonement," the sort of swooning mush taken for great art because it has British accents, wouldn't have served as an Academy best picture, Dr. Overhead said, "Not even the Academy would fall for that much crap."
Teet's Milk and Tea
Machiatto: A cup of frothy milk with some espresso in it.
Cappuccino: A soup bowl of soupy milk with some espresso.
Latte: A gallon of steamed milk. May contain coffee.
Cappomakalotto: A barrel of milk, served while the aroma of coffee is about.
Titigigante: A truck of milk. Coffee is mentioned during the process.
Fuchituppo: Special ritual where we steam milk for 20 minutes while making loud calls and invocations to each other.
Iviatto: Milk is transferred through tubes directly into your veins, while the aroma of coffee is suggested by music.
The Infinite Regress Meets Its End?
Some hold that, owing to the necessity of knowing the primary premisses, there is no scientific knowledge. Others think there is, but that all truths are demonstrable. Neither doctrine is either true or a necessary deduction from the premisses. The first school, assuming that there is no way of knowing other than by demonstration, maintain that an infinite regress is involved, on the ground that if behind the prior stands no primary, we could not know the posterior through the prior (wherein they are right, for one cannot traverse an infinite series): if on the other hand – they say – the series terminates and there are primary premisses, yet these are unknowable because incapable of demonstration, which according to them is the only form of knowledge. And since thus one cannot know the primary premisses, knowledge of the conclusions which follow from them is not pure scientific knowledge nor properly knowing at all, but rests on the mere supposition that the premisses are true. The other party agree with them as regards knowing, holding that it is only possible by demonstration, but they see no difficulty in holding that all truths are demonstrated, on the ground that demonstration may be circular and reciprocal.
Our own doctrine is that not all knowledge is demonstrative: on the contrary, knowledge of the immediate premisses is independent of demonstration. (The necessity of this is obvious; for since we must know the prior premisses from which the demonstration is drawn, and since the regress must end in immediate truths, those truths must be indemonstrable.) Such, then, is our doctrine, and in addition we maintain that besides scientific knowledge there is its originative source which enables us to recognize the definitions.
-- Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (Book 1, Part 3)
Another, Nietzsche
Suppose a demon sat on your shoulder and told you there was another Nietzsche. Bigger, better, faster, stronger, more "manly." But which would also mean, of course, more womanly, more pregnant with so many more possibilities, more subsuming of more possible values. More value for less. Because valueless is more value: the artist, the mime. The scintillation of shadows, the surgical sharpness of weakness. An eternal return which proposed to you the bifurcation of bifurcation, exponentialization of schemas, of "puerile oppositions," and that it was IRRESOLVABLE, that even in your Nietzschean feat of opposing all oppositions, no strength, no virture, no valuation would be sufficient to master such a tension: the desire to be other -- (the) desire (to be [other]). Desire/being/other.
This other return of the eternal return would tell you that you are doomed to "live" this suspension, that your very life is this "eternity," this indefinite extension of fate, loved and not loved, love "itself," prospect: the cast. You must love and hate this prospect, you must prospect this love and hate. You leap and say "yes" to this alternative, because you are pushed/pulled to it, you have no choice, it is fate/love: I love exactly what I persist in being, infinitely extrapolated, which is this wish to BE -- move, trans, gress, arrive, else -- thus nothing other than other. This (im)mortality -- life/doom/eternity/abyss -- is nothing but the perpetual ranging of this prospect, agitation "itself."
This prospect of another Nietzsche × CRM (the Christ replication mechanism). Nietzsche thus Christ like. For this prospect of this other Nietzsche must be the prospect of anyone, dead, alive, born (fallen) of gods, published or unpublished, even if not apparent to anyone else (e.g., restaurant workers, Freud). This prospect of another Nietzsche who, apart from Nietzsche, may be "more" than Nietzsche, whose more impressive suppleness might also even superachieve this will to superachievement, must also be a REAL prospect, for otherwise, what import would all this metaphorization, prospect and theoretical fiction have? Some fragile, womanly, incompetent, ineffectual other who never gives a thought to putting it down, who might remain, if it even mattered, devoted to (his? her?) obliteration.
Suppose a demon sat on your shoulder and told you there was another, Nietzsche, you.
-- Greg "Another Kafka" Macon
All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions . . .
Gödel showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiom system is involved . . .
How can you figure out if you are sane? . . . Once you begin to question your own sanity, you get trapped in an ever-tighter vortex of self-fulfilling prophecies, though the process is by no means inevitable. Everyone knows that the insane interpret the world via their own peculiarly consistent logic; how can you tell if your own logic is "peculiar' or not, given that you have only your own logic to judge itself? I don't see any answer. I am reminded of Gödel's second theorem, which implies that the only versions of formal number theory which assert their own consistency are inconsistent.
The other metaphorical analogue to Gödel's Theorem which I find provocative suggests that ultimately, we cannot understand our own mind/brains . . . Just as we cannot see our faces with our own eyes, is it not inconceivable to expect that we cannot mirror our complete mental structures in the symbols which carry them out? All the limitative theorems of mathematics and the theory of computation suggest that once the ability to represent your own structure has reached a certain critical point, that is the kiss of death: it guarantees that you can never represent yourself totally.
-- Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach.
I -- Diseases of the spirit (mental disorders [Geisteskrankheiten])
1 -- Weakness of imagination;
2 -- Liveliness of imagination;
3 -- Defect of attention (attentio volubilis);
4 -- Obstinate and persistant reflection (attentio acerrima et meditatio profunda);
5 -- Lack of memory (oblivio);
6 -- Defects of jugement (defectus judicii);
7 -- Stupidity, slowness of mind (defectus, tarditas ingenii);
8 -- Extravagant vivacity and instability of spirit (ingenium velox, praecox, vividissimum);
9 -- Delirium (insania)
II -- Diseases of feeling (mind diseases [Gemütskrankheiten])
1 -- Excitation: pride, anger, fanaticism, erotomania, etc.
2 -- Depression: sadness, envy, despair, suicide, "disease of the heart", etc.
-- Weickhard, Der philosophische Arzt, 1790, cited in Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique.